Friday, November 27, 2009
Welcome Home: Space shuttle Atlantis lands safely at Kennedy Space Center
Space shuttle Atlantis lands safely at Kennedy Space Center
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The White House shows off place settings and silverware for the big fete.
The White House shows off place settings and silverware for the big fete.
'Success Story': Rep. Weiner says Medicare is holding down costs better than private plan
'Success Story': Rep. Weiner says Medicare is holding down costs better than private plan
Rep. Weiner says Medicare is holding down costs better than private plans
Tax havens & currency speculation Pt.4
November 24, 2009
Tax havens & currency speculation Pt.4
Sony Kapoor on the rise of Goldman Sachs and the need to democratize the economy
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And we're talking to Sony Kapoor. Sony is the managing director of Re-Define, Rethinking Development, Finance & Environment, international think tank. Used to work for Lehman Brothers and some of the other institutions on Wall Street. Thanks for joining us again, Sony.
SONY KAPOOR, MANAGING DIRECTOR, RE-DEFINE: Thank you for having me.
JAY: Our conversation has brought us to the big G, Goldman Sachs, which is becoming such a massive entity unto itself. It's really, especially out of this most recent crisis, emerged no longer one of many financial institutions but clearly more than the gorilla on the block. Goldman not only controls—or its people are allies, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve. But it's a ridiculous thing even to talk about insider trading when you talk to Goldman. They have people connected to them, probably, on every important board of most of the major companies in the world. They have board-level information when they decide what to trade and not to trade. Talk about the rise of Goldman and what that means in terms of the democratization of the economy.
KAPOOR: Well, there are two aspects to this. One, there was this perception, even before the crisis actually happened, that Goldman was somehow first amongst equals. One reason behind that was, unlike most of its other competitors, such as Lehman, etc., Goldman stayed having a partnership structure for much longer. It was only recently—I think it's in the past decade or so—that the partnership was dissolved and it became a public holding company. What that meant was that it was much more closely knit than other financial institutions. What it also probably did was it helped Goldman weather the crisis better than the other financial institutions, because if you're a partnership, your capital and money's tied up with everybody else's, and you stand to lose personally, which employees of Lehman and some of the other banks didn't. The worst that would happen to them would be that they wouldn't get their salary or bonus—they didn't actually actively lose any money. And what that meant was that the risk-management practices within Goldman, where everybody was peeking over everybody else's shoulder, still had some residual footprint from those partnership days, even though the structure had changed. And I think it helped Goldman be more vigilant going into the crisis. The second aspect is—.
JAY: Let me just interrupt for a sec. But that vigilance also meant they were betting against their own advice to their own clients. As we know, they were insuring with AIG on investment properties on the downside that they were selling to their clients without disclosing this, so that risk management had very little to do with any kind of responsibility other than their own quick profit.
KAPOOR: That is true. And I think there's shades of gray between what is legally permissible and what is ethical or not. And to my judgment, this was all above board and legal, but not necessarily ethical. The important thing is that in many of these big banks—there were parts of Lehman Brothers which seriously recognized the gravity of the situation and which were asking the management of the firm to get out of this real estate business and to try and reduce their exposure and to try and buy insurance the way Goldman did. But there were other parts of Lehman Brothers which were making so much money out of this that they wanted the party to continue. And we know which side won. And I think that this aspect of thinking of these big financial institutions as one cohesive-whole entity is a little bit mistaken. So it is quite possible, actually, that different parts of Goldman were pulling in different directions. And it's not to say that the people dealing with the customers and selling them those products were not aware of what the other side was doing.
JAY: Sony, you worked with these people on Wall Street. This idea of "too big to fail", that if this whole house of cards comes falling down, that the state is going to have to come in and bail us out, were they betting on that all along?
KAPOOR: Not explicitly, especially if you look at the institutions that failed. The two institutions, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, they were actually out of the big Wall Street banks, the institutions which had the highest amount of employee ownership. So if you look at it from the incentive perspective, that these are the people who are running the bank who actually own 50 percent or 40 percent of the bank, they knew that in the event of any failure it's the bondholders who mostly get bailed out, but the shareholders mostly were going to lose a lot of money, and they were aware of that.
JAY: But Lehman must have been in shock that they didn't get bailed out. I mean, Paulson and others were trying to get the Brits to bail out Lehman. They must have been a little surprised, in fact. But it's an ex-Goldman guy that kind of decides whether they live or die. I mean, Goldman must have been betting they weren't going to go down.
KAPOOR: At one level, perhaps. But, again, if you look at the individual employees, the calculations they make are very simple. So if you're an employee of Lehman Brothers and you own maybe, you know, 0.5 percent of Lehman Brothers or something, if you're a senior employee, but the amount of bonuses that you can get by betting the bank every year, year after year, are probably significantly higher than the amount you would lose if the whole bank failed. So, from an individual perspective, it is still rational to bet the bank without counting on government bailouts. But collectively it's disastrous, and what you had is a failure of this decision-making. So, yes, the awareness that these banks would be bailed out was really important. And the way it works is that these banks would not have been able to raise the financing through bonds that they did at fairly cheap rates if the bondholders who were investing in these banks, who were lending these banks money, did not think that these banks would be bailed out. So it's not within the institution that this decision-making happens, but it's the awareness of the possibility or the likelihood of bailout means that these institutions can take much more risks than they would otherwise be able to do, 'cause otherwise bondholders would penalize them.
JAY: Right. Now, there's two kind of proposals that have been talked about as possible reforms. One is, if it's too big to fail, break it up into something smaller. Is breaking up of Goldman—I know it's not being seriously talked about, but is it something that should be being talked about?
KAPOOR: I think absolutely, yes. If you look back in the United States to when, for example, Standard Oil was broken up, there was a lot of controversy at that point of time about whether this was the right thing to do, and this was a successful business, etc. But in retrospect it proved to be a good decision, and the sum of parts was greater than the whole. And I think that if Goldman and some of the other big, large, too-big-to-fail banks were broken down, either by geography or, more likely, by function, what you would have is a sounder financial system, a financial system where the society will not be forced to bear the risks of profits being privatized by these institutions, where they would be politically less powerful. And even investors in these institutions would benefit, because the sum of parts would be bigger than the whole.
JAY: Now, the other option, or maybe an option that goes with this, is—the logic goes like this: if the public option is necessary and useful for keeping the health-insurance business in line, then why not the public option for the finance sector?
KAPOOR: There is a possible role for the public sector. And in the United States, what you have is already a significant public-sector presence, for example Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And in many developing countries, you have development banks. And there was a tradition for that here: you had banks dedicated to agriculture lending, dedicated to small and medium sector. The most important thing we need to think about is to build up a diverse financial system and a competitive financial system. What we had was increasing uniformity in the financial system, where every bank was chasing the exact same kind of investments, lending to the exact same people, and not lending to the exact same group. A good bank is one which lends to someone that nobody else lends to, but does not lend to someone that everybody else is lending to. And what we've had over the years is exact reversal of this doctrine, where those who have a good credit score, for example, get twenty envelopes through their door offering them credit, and those who actually need the credit are not able to access it. What you need to do is integrate this social goal of providing credit, enabling financial services which allow people to participate in society and grow, and combine that with the idea of having diverse financial institutions fulfilling real sector needs. And this combination is more stable.
JAY: And what we're seeing is probably the opposite. We're seeing increased concentration of ownership on Wall Street, the rise of the monolith, Goldman, and in the public sector we're seeing the strengthening of the role of the Federal Reserve, which also strengthens the hand of the big banks. So we're not seeing more diversity; we're seeing more concentration of control.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. And this is why when we're discussing the changes we need to do. We need to not just reverse what has happened in the past one or two years of this increasing concentration, but go much further than that, in actively fostering diversity, in actively imposing a more competitive landscape. And that is why breaking up these too-big-to-fail institutions is extremely crucial to this idea of building up a stable financial system and a prosperous society.
JAY: So maybe one thing people watching might do when they choose who they're going to vote for is vote for people who aren't getting any money from the finance sector. They might be a little more likely to have a little backbone on these issues, 'cause most people in Congress are getting some kind of money from the finance sector, and certainly President Obama was one of the more bigger recipients of that.
KAPOOR: I'm not familiar enough with the landscape, but I think that the whole concept of lobbying and of campaign contributions from the sector that you are being elected to regulate and oversee is a flawed concept, and there might need to be a broader governance reform around public funding of election campaigns on much smaller budgets.
JAY: And you also might want to have some rules about people stepping out of Goldman right into public office. There could at least be, like, a five-year moratorium or something between going back and forth between so-called private sector and public sector.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. This whole revolving-door concept is—you know, it begs questions around possible conflicts of interest. That's a very serious problem.
JAY: So I guess what we're really saying, to all of us, we'd better understand this stuff—it isn't that complicated—because we're being taken to the cleaners in the name—this looks so complicated you can't really take a stand on it. But once you dig into it, it isn't rocket science. It's fairly Ponzi scheme-ish.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. The whole concept where, throughout the years, the banks, the bankers, and the regulators, everybody said this is too complicated and this is rocket science, you won't understand it, don't tinker with it or the whole system, the whole financial system, will go bust. And the fact of the matter is we actually haven't touched it, and it's gone bust anyways. And it's really, really, really not complicated. And this complexity was used as an example to reduce accountability. What we need to do as individual citizens, as unions, as consumer associations, as civil society, is to understand that this is not rocket science, make an effort to participate in the reforms and try and get our voice heard. The only voices you're hearing in the financial regulation discussion are the big investment banks, the big commercial banks, some hedge funds, and some private equity voices. It's not just that the individuals, the consumers, are missing from the debate and the taxpayers are missing from the debate, but also the big pension funds, the big reinsurance firms, the savings banks, the community banks, all these parts of the financial sector.
JAY: Well, that's a whole 'nother story, because why the union pension funds, which are enormous and big, big players in the economy, why the unions don't use the clout of their pension funds is beyond me, but they don't.
KAPOOR: This is one of those problems we've revisited this interview series of collective action. Now, if you're an individual pension fund, CalPERS [California Public Employees' Retirement System] or one of the others, you need to make a decision: okay, how much realistic return can I expect on my investment? Most US pension funds have been factoring in returns of 9 or 10 percent. Now, if you're a small investor in a big economy growing at 2 percent, you can generate 9 or 10 percent year after year. But if you're the whole financial system, if you're a big pension fund, if you are the financial system, you cannot generate returns of 10 percent or 9 percent. And we need to recognize that that is not a sustainable thing to do. And the way these pension funds have been thinking is that, well, we think we're smarter than the others and we will be able to choose the right hedge fund investments, the right private equity investments, the right derivatives or commodity investments which will earn us a higher return. Individually everybody is thinking this, but collectively it's impossible. That is why there is a very important need for the unions and the pension funds and the bigger investment community and the government to start this honest discussion of what is possible and what isn't. We actually have a massive pension black hole, and it's time to recognize that and take that into account in the discussions on reforming the financial system.
JAY: Thank you again, Sony, for joining us. Sony Kapoor from Re-Define. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. And don't forget our financial reform, which is the donate button. It's here. I'm pointing here. Or there. Somewhere on this page is a donate button. And if you want us to keep doing economic news—and, I think, uncompromisingly—then you got to hit "donate". Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.
Tax havens & currency speculation Pt.4
Sony Kapoor on the rise of Goldman Sachs and the need to democratize the economy
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And we're talking to Sony Kapoor. Sony is the managing director of Re-Define, Rethinking Development, Finance & Environment, international think tank. Used to work for Lehman Brothers and some of the other institutions on Wall Street. Thanks for joining us again, Sony.
SONY KAPOOR, MANAGING DIRECTOR, RE-DEFINE: Thank you for having me.
JAY: Our conversation has brought us to the big G, Goldman Sachs, which is becoming such a massive entity unto itself. It's really, especially out of this most recent crisis, emerged no longer one of many financial institutions but clearly more than the gorilla on the block. Goldman not only controls—or its people are allies, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve. But it's a ridiculous thing even to talk about insider trading when you talk to Goldman. They have people connected to them, probably, on every important board of most of the major companies in the world. They have board-level information when they decide what to trade and not to trade. Talk about the rise of Goldman and what that means in terms of the democratization of the economy.
KAPOOR: Well, there are two aspects to this. One, there was this perception, even before the crisis actually happened, that Goldman was somehow first amongst equals. One reason behind that was, unlike most of its other competitors, such as Lehman, etc., Goldman stayed having a partnership structure for much longer. It was only recently—I think it's in the past decade or so—that the partnership was dissolved and it became a public holding company. What that meant was that it was much more closely knit than other financial institutions. What it also probably did was it helped Goldman weather the crisis better than the other financial institutions, because if you're a partnership, your capital and money's tied up with everybody else's, and you stand to lose personally, which employees of Lehman and some of the other banks didn't. The worst that would happen to them would be that they wouldn't get their salary or bonus—they didn't actually actively lose any money. And what that meant was that the risk-management practices within Goldman, where everybody was peeking over everybody else's shoulder, still had some residual footprint from those partnership days, even though the structure had changed. And I think it helped Goldman be more vigilant going into the crisis. The second aspect is—.
JAY: Let me just interrupt for a sec. But that vigilance also meant they were betting against their own advice to their own clients. As we know, they were insuring with AIG on investment properties on the downside that they were selling to their clients without disclosing this, so that risk management had very little to do with any kind of responsibility other than their own quick profit.
KAPOOR: That is true. And I think there's shades of gray between what is legally permissible and what is ethical or not. And to my judgment, this was all above board and legal, but not necessarily ethical. The important thing is that in many of these big banks—there were parts of Lehman Brothers which seriously recognized the gravity of the situation and which were asking the management of the firm to get out of this real estate business and to try and reduce their exposure and to try and buy insurance the way Goldman did. But there were other parts of Lehman Brothers which were making so much money out of this that they wanted the party to continue. And we know which side won. And I think that this aspect of thinking of these big financial institutions as one cohesive-whole entity is a little bit mistaken. So it is quite possible, actually, that different parts of Goldman were pulling in different directions. And it's not to say that the people dealing with the customers and selling them those products were not aware of what the other side was doing.
JAY: Sony, you worked with these people on Wall Street. This idea of "too big to fail", that if this whole house of cards comes falling down, that the state is going to have to come in and bail us out, were they betting on that all along?
KAPOOR: Not explicitly, especially if you look at the institutions that failed. The two institutions, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, they were actually out of the big Wall Street banks, the institutions which had the highest amount of employee ownership. So if you look at it from the incentive perspective, that these are the people who are running the bank who actually own 50 percent or 40 percent of the bank, they knew that in the event of any failure it's the bondholders who mostly get bailed out, but the shareholders mostly were going to lose a lot of money, and they were aware of that.
JAY: But Lehman must have been in shock that they didn't get bailed out. I mean, Paulson and others were trying to get the Brits to bail out Lehman. They must have been a little surprised, in fact. But it's an ex-Goldman guy that kind of decides whether they live or die. I mean, Goldman must have been betting they weren't going to go down.
KAPOOR: At one level, perhaps. But, again, if you look at the individual employees, the calculations they make are very simple. So if you're an employee of Lehman Brothers and you own maybe, you know, 0.5 percent of Lehman Brothers or something, if you're a senior employee, but the amount of bonuses that you can get by betting the bank every year, year after year, are probably significantly higher than the amount you would lose if the whole bank failed. So, from an individual perspective, it is still rational to bet the bank without counting on government bailouts. But collectively it's disastrous, and what you had is a failure of this decision-making. So, yes, the awareness that these banks would be bailed out was really important. And the way it works is that these banks would not have been able to raise the financing through bonds that they did at fairly cheap rates if the bondholders who were investing in these banks, who were lending these banks money, did not think that these banks would be bailed out. So it's not within the institution that this decision-making happens, but it's the awareness of the possibility or the likelihood of bailout means that these institutions can take much more risks than they would otherwise be able to do, 'cause otherwise bondholders would penalize them.
JAY: Right. Now, there's two kind of proposals that have been talked about as possible reforms. One is, if it's too big to fail, break it up into something smaller. Is breaking up of Goldman—I know it's not being seriously talked about, but is it something that should be being talked about?
KAPOOR: I think absolutely, yes. If you look back in the United States to when, for example, Standard Oil was broken up, there was a lot of controversy at that point of time about whether this was the right thing to do, and this was a successful business, etc. But in retrospect it proved to be a good decision, and the sum of parts was greater than the whole. And I think that if Goldman and some of the other big, large, too-big-to-fail banks were broken down, either by geography or, more likely, by function, what you would have is a sounder financial system, a financial system where the society will not be forced to bear the risks of profits being privatized by these institutions, where they would be politically less powerful. And even investors in these institutions would benefit, because the sum of parts would be bigger than the whole.
JAY: Now, the other option, or maybe an option that goes with this, is—the logic goes like this: if the public option is necessary and useful for keeping the health-insurance business in line, then why not the public option for the finance sector?
KAPOOR: There is a possible role for the public sector. And in the United States, what you have is already a significant public-sector presence, for example Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. And in many developing countries, you have development banks. And there was a tradition for that here: you had banks dedicated to agriculture lending, dedicated to small and medium sector. The most important thing we need to think about is to build up a diverse financial system and a competitive financial system. What we had was increasing uniformity in the financial system, where every bank was chasing the exact same kind of investments, lending to the exact same people, and not lending to the exact same group. A good bank is one which lends to someone that nobody else lends to, but does not lend to someone that everybody else is lending to. And what we've had over the years is exact reversal of this doctrine, where those who have a good credit score, for example, get twenty envelopes through their door offering them credit, and those who actually need the credit are not able to access it. What you need to do is integrate this social goal of providing credit, enabling financial services which allow people to participate in society and grow, and combine that with the idea of having diverse financial institutions fulfilling real sector needs. And this combination is more stable.
JAY: And what we're seeing is probably the opposite. We're seeing increased concentration of ownership on Wall Street, the rise of the monolith, Goldman, and in the public sector we're seeing the strengthening of the role of the Federal Reserve, which also strengthens the hand of the big banks. So we're not seeing more diversity; we're seeing more concentration of control.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. And this is why when we're discussing the changes we need to do. We need to not just reverse what has happened in the past one or two years of this increasing concentration, but go much further than that, in actively fostering diversity, in actively imposing a more competitive landscape. And that is why breaking up these too-big-to-fail institutions is extremely crucial to this idea of building up a stable financial system and a prosperous society.
JAY: So maybe one thing people watching might do when they choose who they're going to vote for is vote for people who aren't getting any money from the finance sector. They might be a little more likely to have a little backbone on these issues, 'cause most people in Congress are getting some kind of money from the finance sector, and certainly President Obama was one of the more bigger recipients of that.
KAPOOR: I'm not familiar enough with the landscape, but I think that the whole concept of lobbying and of campaign contributions from the sector that you are being elected to regulate and oversee is a flawed concept, and there might need to be a broader governance reform around public funding of election campaigns on much smaller budgets.
JAY: And you also might want to have some rules about people stepping out of Goldman right into public office. There could at least be, like, a five-year moratorium or something between going back and forth between so-called private sector and public sector.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. This whole revolving-door concept is—you know, it begs questions around possible conflicts of interest. That's a very serious problem.
JAY: So I guess what we're really saying, to all of us, we'd better understand this stuff—it isn't that complicated—because we're being taken to the cleaners in the name—this looks so complicated you can't really take a stand on it. But once you dig into it, it isn't rocket science. It's fairly Ponzi scheme-ish.
KAPOOR: Absolutely. The whole concept where, throughout the years, the banks, the bankers, and the regulators, everybody said this is too complicated and this is rocket science, you won't understand it, don't tinker with it or the whole system, the whole financial system, will go bust. And the fact of the matter is we actually haven't touched it, and it's gone bust anyways. And it's really, really, really not complicated. And this complexity was used as an example to reduce accountability. What we need to do as individual citizens, as unions, as consumer associations, as civil society, is to understand that this is not rocket science, make an effort to participate in the reforms and try and get our voice heard. The only voices you're hearing in the financial regulation discussion are the big investment banks, the big commercial banks, some hedge funds, and some private equity voices. It's not just that the individuals, the consumers, are missing from the debate and the taxpayers are missing from the debate, but also the big pension funds, the big reinsurance firms, the savings banks, the community banks, all these parts of the financial sector.
JAY: Well, that's a whole 'nother story, because why the union pension funds, which are enormous and big, big players in the economy, why the unions don't use the clout of their pension funds is beyond me, but they don't.
KAPOOR: This is one of those problems we've revisited this interview series of collective action. Now, if you're an individual pension fund, CalPERS [California Public Employees' Retirement System] or one of the others, you need to make a decision: okay, how much realistic return can I expect on my investment? Most US pension funds have been factoring in returns of 9 or 10 percent. Now, if you're a small investor in a big economy growing at 2 percent, you can generate 9 or 10 percent year after year. But if you're the whole financial system, if you're a big pension fund, if you are the financial system, you cannot generate returns of 10 percent or 9 percent. And we need to recognize that that is not a sustainable thing to do. And the way these pension funds have been thinking is that, well, we think we're smarter than the others and we will be able to choose the right hedge fund investments, the right private equity investments, the right derivatives or commodity investments which will earn us a higher return. Individually everybody is thinking this, but collectively it's impossible. That is why there is a very important need for the unions and the pension funds and the bigger investment community and the government to start this honest discussion of what is possible and what isn't. We actually have a massive pension black hole, and it's time to recognize that and take that into account in the discussions on reforming the financial system.
JAY: Thank you again, Sony, for joining us. Sony Kapoor from Re-Define. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. And don't forget our financial reform, which is the donate button. It's here. I'm pointing here. Or there. Somewhere on this page is a donate button. And if you want us to keep doing economic news—and, I think, uncompromisingly—then you got to hit "donate". Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Talks Josh Silver demos adjustable liquid-filled eyeglasses
Josh Silver delivers his brilliantly simple solution for correcting vision at the lowest cost possible -- adjustable, liquid-filled lenses. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020.
I'm going to tell you about one of the world's largest problems and how it can be solved.
I'd like to start with a little experiment. Could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses, or you've had laser refractive surgery? Now, unfortunately, there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly. But it looks like -- I'm guessing -- that it'll be about 60 percent of the room because that's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction.
The World Health Organization estimates -- well, they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses -- the lowest estimate is 150 million people. They also have an estimate of around a billion. But in fact, I would argue that we've just done an experiment here and now, which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population. And the problem of poor vision, is actually not just a health problem, it's also an educational problem, and it's an economic problem, and it's a quality of life problem.
Glasses are not very expensive. They're quite plentiful. The problem is, there aren't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world. There are just way too few eye care professionals.
So this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that's the ratio in the U.K. This is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, there are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there's one optometrist for eight million of the population.
How do you do this? How do you solve this problem? I came up with a solution to this problem, and I came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this. And the idea is you make eye glasses, and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem.
What I want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses. I shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses. I shall put this in my pocket. I'm short sighted. I look at the signs at the end, I can hardly see them. So -- okay, I can now see that man running out there, and I can see that guy running out there. I've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription. Next step in my process. So, I've now made eye glasses to my prescription. Okay, so I've made these glasses and ... Okay, I've made the glasses to my prescription and ... ... I've just ... And I've now made some glasses. That's it.
(Applause)
Now, these aren't the only pair in the world. In fact, this technology's been evolving. I started working on it in 1985, and it's been evolving very slowly. There are about 30,000 in use now. And they're in fifteen countries. They're spread around the world.
And I have a vision, which I'll share with you. I have a global vision for vision. And that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020. To do that -- this is an early example of the technology. The technology is being further developed -- the cost has to be brought down. This pair, in fact, these currently cost about 19 dollars. But the cost has to be brought right down. It has to be brought down because we're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day.
How do you solve this problem? You start to get into detail. And on this slide, I'm basically explaining all the problems you have. How do you distribute? How do you work out how to fit the thing? How do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem? How do you deal with the industry? And the answer to that is research.
What we've done is to set up the Center for Vision in the Developing World here in the university. If you want to know more, just come have a look at our website. Thank you.
(Applause)
Je vais vous parler d’un des plus grands problèmes au monde et de comment le résoudre.
Je voudrais commencer avec une petite expérience. Levez la main s’il vous plaît ceux qui ont des lunettes ou des lentilles de contact, ou qui se sont fait opérer par laser. Là, malheureusement, vous être trop nombreux pour que je fasse les statistiques correctement. Mais il semble -- je suppose -- qu’il doit y en avoir environ 60% parmi vous parce que c’est grosso modo la fraction de la population du monde développé qui ont une quelconque correction visuelle.
L’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (OMS) estime -- en fait, ils font diverses estimations du nombre de gens qui ont besoin de lunettes -- l’estimation la plus basse est de 150 millions de personnes. Il y a aussi une estimation d’un milliard. Mais en fait, je dirais que nous venons de faire une expérience à l’instant, qui nous montre que le besoin global en matière de correction visuelle se chiffre à la moitié de toute population. Le problème d’une mauvaise vue n'est pas juste un problème de santé, c’est aussi un problème pour l’éducation, pour l’économie, pour la qualité de vie.
Les lunettes ne sont pas très chères. Elles sont disponibles en quantité. Le problème est que, il n’y a pas assez de spécialistes dans le monde pour reproduire le modèle de distribution de corrections visuelles que nous avons dans le monde développé. Il y a bien trop peu de spécialistes.
Cette diapositive vous montre un optométriste et le petit personnage bleu représente 10 000 personnes, c’est le ratio au Royaume-Uni. Voici le ratio d'optométristes en Afrique sub-saharienne. En fait, il y a certains pays d'Afrique sub-saharienne où ce rapport est de 1 optométriste pour 8 millions de personnes.
Comment faire? Comment résoudre ce problème? J’ai trouvé une solution à ce problème (sur l’écran : faites le vous-même), et j’en suis arrivé à la conclusion d’une solution optique adaptative. L’idée est de fabriquer des lunettes, ensuite de les régler vous-même et le problème est résolu.
Je vais vous montrer que l’on peut fabriquer une paire de lunettes. Je vais vous montrer comment vous pouvez fabriquer une paire de lunettes. Je mets ça dans ma poche. Je suis myope. Je regarde les symboles au fond, je peux à peine les voir. Donc -- ok, maintenant je peux voir cet homme qui court de ce côté, et je peux voir cet homme qui court de ce côté. J’ai désormais des lunettes à ma vue. Prochaine étape de mon processus. Bon, maintenant j’ai des lunettes à ma vue. Ok, donc j’ai fait ces lunettes et ... Ok, j’ai fait ces lunettes à ma vue et ... ... J’ai juste ... Et maintenant j’ai fabriqué des lunettes. C’est tout.
(Applaudissements)
Maintenant, ce n’est pas la seule paire au monde. En fait, cette technologie évolue. J’ai commencé à y travailler en 1985, avec une évolution très lente. Il y en a environ 30 000 en usage à l’heure actuelle. Et ce dans 15 pays. Le tout réparti dans le monde entier.
Et j’ai une vision, et je vais la partager avec vous. J’ai une vision globale pour la vision. Et cette vision est d’essayer de parvenir à avoir un milliard de personnes portant les lunettes dont ils ont besoin d’ici à 2020. Pour ce faire -- ceci est un exemple primaire de la technologie. La technologie est développée plus avant -- le coût doit être réduit. Cette paire, en fait, coûte actuellement environ 19 dollars. Mais le coût doit être réduit. Il doit être réduit parce que nous nous adressons à des populations qui vivent avec un dollar par jour.
Comment résoudre ce problème? Vous commencez à rentrer dans le détail. Sur cette diapositive, j’explique brièvement tous les problèmes que nous avons. Comment les distribuer? Comment les ajuster? Comment faire que les gens se rendent compte qu’ils ont un problème de vue? Commet s'organiser avec l’industrie? La réponse à tout ça s’appelle la recherche.
Nous avons créé le «Center for Vision in the Developing World» (Centre pour la Vision dans le Monde en Développement) ici à l’université d’Oxford. Si vous voulez en savoir plus, allez faire un tour sur notre site. Merci.
(Applaudissements)
Talks Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
Talks Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.
How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group.
More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor -- and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination -- there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system without regard to institutional models. So that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes.
So I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade, people come from all over the city, people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr.
Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Del.icio.us and Joshua Schachter. Del.icio.us is a social book-marking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "Mermaid Parade." There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow.
Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some pre-arranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route.
First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees. You also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade or whatever else they're sent out to photograph.
When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems.
Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, I'll call you when I get there. Call me when you get off work. Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do.
So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged "Iraq." And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters.
What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each.
This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like, this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the 100th most prolific photographer to have contributed only about 100 as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail.
And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily. If you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken -- just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to 5 percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to 1 percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all.
This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources -- this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires -- great. That's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people, build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount.
So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "Iraq." And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "Bad Day at Work." Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or No. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee?
And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution as enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle.
Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to 2 through n. Right? So when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages -- (Laughter) -- of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase.
Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining.
The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. Right? We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing. Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter)
The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some -- several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing,
of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what-have-you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers -- classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13 year-old boys -- pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy.
I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources -- she's a reporter for the New York Times -- her sources in a very abstract and hard to follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws -- pretty much a patchwork of state laws -- that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it -- we want a professional class of truth-tellers -- it is becoming increasingly incoherent because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background -- the institution to which they were attached is becoming incoherent.
Here's another example. Pro-ana, the Pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call Thinspiration. They have little slogans, like Salvation through Starvation, they even have Lance Armstrong style bracelets, these red bracelets which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass.
We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kind of goals.
So there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week.
Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state.
Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives -- like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive -- the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific.
And so the point here is not, "this is wonderful," or "we're going to see a transition from only institutions to only-cooperative framework." It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)
グループが何かを実現するのはどうやってでしょうか? 人の集団が 混沌に陥ることなく 持続する価値あるものを 一貫して作り出せるようにするには どうすればいいのでしょう? この問題を経済学では 協調コストと呼んでいます 協調コストには グループの仕事の段取りに関わる― 金銭的 組織的な問題すべてが含まれます 協調コストに対する伝統的な解決法は 人のグループの作業を協調させるには組織を作れ というものです リソースを集める 何かを設立する 私的なもの 公的なもの 営利 非営利 大きいもの 小さいもの 様々ですが リソースを集約する点は共通しています 組織を作り その組織を使って グループの活動を 協調させるのです
最近になって グループの人々が互いにコミュニケーションを取るコストが 劇的に下がりました コミュニケーションのコストというのは 協調コストの中で大きな部分を占めています そして第2の解決法が現れました 組織を構成することなく インフラで協力を可能にし システムの働きの副産物として グループの作業が協調するようなシステムを デザインする というものです それが今日 私のお話したいことです ごく具体的な例を使って説明しますが 見据えているのは 常により広い主題です
あなた方が いつか 自らに問うだろう疑問 インターネットが作られた目的とも言える疑問に 回答を試みるところから始めましょう その疑問とは ― ローラースケートする人魚の写真をいかにして集めるか? ニューヨークでは 毎年夏の最初の土曜日に 地元の古びた遊園地であるコニーアイランドで 「マーメイドパレード」が行われます これには一般の人たちが 街中から 着飾って集まってきます そんなに着飾らない人もいます 若い人にお年寄り 通りで踊る人 色とりどりの人物 みんながこの一時を楽しみます 魅力的ではありますが 注目してほしいのは マーメイドパレード自体ではなく 写真の方です これは私が撮ったものではないのです ではどこから? 答えはFlickr です
Flickr というのは写真共有サービスで 人々が撮った写真をアップロードし Web で公開できます 最近 Flickr はタグという新機能を追加しました タグは ソーシャルブックマークのDel.icio.us と ジョシュア シャクターが先鞭を付けました タグというのは 分類の問題に対する 協力のインフラを使った解法です この講演を去年やっていたとしたら 今のをお見せすることはできませんでした 写真を探せなかったからです 司書の一団を雇い アップロードされた写真を 整理させる代わりに Flickr は写真の特徴付けという仕事を ユーザにゆだねることにしたのです それで私はFlickr で"Mermaid Parade"とタグ付けされた 写真を集めることができました 118人が撮った計3,100枚の写真です このすてきな名前の元 日時の新しい順に並んでいます それを落としてきて この小さなスライドショーを作りました
ここで解決されている難しい問題は何でしょう? すごく抽象的な言い方をすると 協調の問題です インターネット上には膨大な数の人がおり マーメイドパレードの写真を持っているのは ごくわずかの割合の人だけです 彼らに貢献してもらうには どうすればいいのでしょう? 伝統的なやり方は 組織を構成する というものです それらの人々を 明示的な目的を持ち よく整理された組織に 集めるということです この組織化という方法には 副作用があることに注意してください
第1に 組織を作ると マネジメントの問題が生じます スタッフを雇うだけではだめで それらのスタッフを管理し 組織の目的に沿って 働かせるための人をも 雇う必要があります 第2に 構造を作る必要があります 経済的な構造が必要です 法的な構造が必要です 物理的な構造が必要です そのため余計にコストがかかることになります 第3に 組織の構築というのは 本質的に排他的だということです 写真を持つすべての人を集められはしません 1つの会社で全員雇うのは無理です 1つの政府機関で全員雇うこともできません ある人々は 取り落とすことになります 第4に この選り分けの結果として プロの集団が形成されることになります ここで生じた変化に注意してください 写真を持っている人から 写真家へと 変わっているのです マーメイドパレードなり なんなりの写真を 撮ることを目的とした 写真のプロの集団が 作られたのです
インフラに協力を組み込むなら これはFlickr の方法だったわけですが 人々のあり方を変えることなく 問題を人の方に引き寄せることができます 人の方を動かすのではなく グループ内で協調し 組織化に伴う問題は抜きに 同じ結果を得ることができるのです 組織の持つ命令系統は失われます 人々が自発的に行う作業を取り仕切る権利はありません しかし同時に組織化のコストもなくすことができ それによって大きな自由度が得られます Flickr がしたのは 計画を協調に置き換えるということです これは協力的なシステムに一般的に見られる側面です
あなた方自身も 携帯電話を手にしたときに 同じことを経験しているはずです 予定を決めずに ただこう言うのです 「着いたら電話するよ」 「仕事が終わったら電話して」 これは個人対個人における 計画の協調への置き換えです 私たちは今や これをグループの中で行うことができます 「前もって計画を立てる必要がある」 「Wikipediaの― 5カ年計画を策定しよう」 などと言う代わりに 単にこう言えるのです 「グループの作業を協調させて 進みながら舵取りしていこう 十分協調できてるし 何をするか あらかじめ決めなくてもいいよね」
別な例を挙げましょう もう少し陰気な話です Flickr で“Iraq”とタグ付けされた写真です マーメイドパレードで難しかった協調コストの問題は いっそう難しくなります より多くの写真があり より多くの撮影者がおり 地理的により広い範囲で より長い期間にわたって 写真が撮られています そして何より このスライドにある数字 1人あたり10枚というのは嘘だということです 数学的には正しいのですが それには大した意味はありません このようなシステムにおいては 平均にはあまり意味がないのです
意味があるのはこれです これはIraq とタグ付けされた 5,445枚の写真を撮った529人をグラフにしたものです 撮った写真の枚数の順に並べてあります この端っこの 一番多く撮っている人は 約350枚撮っており 100枚以上撮っている人が数人います それから何十枚か撮っている人が数十人 この辺にくると 10枚以下の人たちで それから平たくて長いしっぽがあります 真ん中あたりより先では 1枚しか写真のない人が 何百人も続いています
これは冪乗則と呼ばれるものです 制約のない社会的システムにおいてよく見られます 人々が好きなだけ多くも少なくも貢献できる場合 このようなことになります 冪乗則の数学的な性質は n 番目の位置では値が 1 番目のn 分の1 になるということです だから10 番目にたくさん撮っている人は 1 番の人の10 分の1 100 番目の人は 1 番の人の100 分の1 ということになります 曲線の先頭部分の傾き具合は多少変わるにしても この性質によって 急な傾斜と 平たくて長いしっぽができることになります
面白いのは このようなシステムは 大きくなっても 収束しないということです もっと発散することになります 大きなシステムでは 頭はより大きく しっぽはより長く アンバランスの度合いが大きくなるのです この曲線は見ての通り 左に大きく偏っています どれくらい偏っているかというと 上位10 パーセントの人が 全体の4 分の3 の写真を撮っています 上位10 パーセント人だけでです 上位5 パーセントの人だけでも 60 パーセントになります 上位1 パーセントの人だけを取って あとの99 パーセントを捨てたとしても 4 分の1 近くの写真が残ります この左側への偏りのため 平均は実際この辺 ずっと左の方になります これは変に思えるかもしれませんが しかし実際 8 割の人が 平均未満なのです これが奇妙に思えるのは 私たちは 平均は真ん中あたりにあるものだと思っているからです
これが80/20 の法則の裏にある数学なのです 80/20 の法則について耳にしたら それはこういうことなのです 20% の商品が80% の収入をもたらしている 20% のユーザが80% のリソースを使っている 彼らが話しているのは このグラフの形なのです 組織が持つツールは2 つだけ アメとムチです そして80 パーセントの部分には アメもムチも使えません 組織を運営するためのコストは これらの人たちの貢献が 組織という枠組みにおいては 容易に手にできないことを意味します 組織のモデルは いつでも左側の人たちを スタッフにするという形を取ります 組織の考え方は 10 パーセントを雇えば 75 パーセントの結果は得られる というものです 私でもそうするでしょう 一方 協力のインフラのモデルでは どうして25 パーセントを捨ててしまうの? と問います 価値の4 分の1 を あきらめなければならないようなシステムなら 作り替えるべきだと それらの人々の貢献を得る 妨げとなるコストを避けて 誰もが好きなだけ貢献できるシステムを作ろう
だから協調の文脈で問われるのは その人たちがスタッフとしてどうかではなく 彼らの貢献自体の価値なのです Psycho Milt というFlickr ユーザがいて Iraq というタグの写真を1 枚だけ撮っています その写真がこれです 「ひどい一日」というタイトルです 問うべきは この写真をほしいかどうかということです Psycho Milt は雇うべきか否か ということではありません
「実現するもの」としての組織と 「障害になるもの」としての組織の間に 緊張関係があります この分布の 左側の端だけ扱うなら こちらで望むものを たくさん作ろうと 多くの時間を費やす人々を相手にするなら 「実現するもの」としての組織です そういった人々をスタッフとして雇い 彼らの仕事を協調させ 結果を手にすることができます しかしPsycho Milt のいるあたり 1 枚の写真しか提供しない人たちのところでは 組織は障害になります
組織は障害呼ばわりされるのを嫌います 問題を組織化によって 解こうとするなら 名目上の目的が何だったのであれ 組織の第一の目的は自己保存へと 速やかに移行します そして組織の実際の目的は 2 番目以降 ということになります だから価値を巡って協調する方法は別にあり 組織は障害だと言われるとき 組織の反応はキューブラー＝ロスの段階をたどることになります (笑) 不治の病を宣告された人が示す 否認、怒り、取引、受容という反応です 企業システムの多くは 「受容」の段階に至るほど 長くは存続しないもののようです
多くの組織は「否認」の段階に留まります しかし最近は「怒り」や「取引」もよく見かけます 今まさに進行中の素晴らしい例があります フランスでは 自動車の相乗りをしている人たちを バス会社が訴えています 彼らが協力して価値を生み出すのが 会社の利益を損なっているというのです ガーディアン紙の サイトで詳しく読めます すごく楽しめますよ
より大きな問題は このしっぽの価値は どうしたらいいのかということです どうやって手に入れるか? 組織は それを手にすることができません Microsoft のCEO スティーブ バルマーは 何年か前Linux を批判して言っていました Linux に貢献する何千という プログラマがいるなんてまやかしだ Linux に貢献している人間を調べてみたら 多くのパッチは 貢献がそれ1 つしかない プログラマによって作られている 彼が不平を言っているのは この分布なのです 彼にはまずいアイデアに見えるのも 理解できます 雇った人間が 会社のコーラを飲み テーブルサッカーをするばかり 3年間に たった1つの仕事しかしていない (笑) 雇って損した (笑)
Psycho Milt について問うべきは その貢献が良いものかどうかということです それがセキュリティパッチなら? Windows にもある バッファオーバーフロー脆弱性への セキュリティパッチだとしたら? そのパッチを欲しいのでは? 1 人のプログラマが 組織と雇用関係を結ぶことなく Linux をただ1 度改善して 2 度と現れないとしたら それをバルマーは恐れるはずです そのような価値は 従来的な組織の枠組みでは得られないからです しかしオープンソースや ファイル共有や Wikipedia のような 協力的システムにおいては
可能なのです Flickr の例ばかり挙げましたが 実際このような話は 他にもいろいろあります Meetup というサービスがあります ユーザが同じ地域にいる 趣味や関心を共有する人を見つけ カフェやパブなどで実際に 会えるようにするサービスです スコット ハイファマンがMeetup を作ったときには 鉄道マニアや愛猫家のことを考えていました 昔からある趣味のグループです 発明家は自らの発明を知らないものです Meetup で 都市数 支部数 メンバー数が最大で 最も活発なグループが何か お分りになりますか? 専業主婦グループ(Stay At Home Moms)です 郊外化し共働きが一般的なアメリカにおいて 専業主婦は かつては大家族や ご近所といったものによって得られていた 社会的つながりを失っています だからこのツールを使って それを再生しているのです Meetup はプラットフォームですが ここで価値があるのは 社会的な基盤です 世界を変えるテクノロジーが何か知りたければ 13 歳の男の子に目を向けるのではなく 若い母親たちに目を向けることです あの人たちは実質的に生活を改善しないようなテクノロジーは ちっとも支持しませんから これは派手さはありませんが Xbox なんかよりずっと重要なのです
これは革命だと思います これは人間関係を調整する方法における 根本的な変化だと思います 私はこの言葉を十分考えた上で使っています これは均衡を破るであろう革命なのです これは物事をする全く新しい方法ですが 新たな欠点も持っています アメリカでは現在 ジュディス ミラーという女性が 連邦大陪審に情報源を明かさなかったかどで 投獄されています ニューヨークタイムズ紙の記者で とても難解で追跡困難な事件の情報源を隠しています ジャーナリストたちが 守秘権法を改善しようと路上で運動しています 守秘権法は 実際は州法の継ぎ合わせなのですが ジャーナリストが情報源の開示を避けられるようにする法律です しかしブログの興隆を背景として 今回のことが起きました ブログはマスアマチュア化の代表例であり 情報の発信を非プロ化しました 自分の考えを今日世界に発信したいと思ったらどうしますか? ボタン1 つで無料で行うことができます これは出版におけるプロ階級を マスアマチュア階級へと 引きずり下ろすことになりました そのため守秘権法は 我々が望むにもかかわらず 真実を語るプロ階級を望んでいるというのに ますます一貫性を欠くようになっており それは組織が一貫性を欠くためです アメリカには現在問題に取り組む人々 ブロガーはジャーナリストなのか 明らかにしようとする人々がいます そしてその答えは何かというと それは問題ではないということです 質問が正しくないのです ジャーナリズムはより重要な質問 いかにして社会に 情報を知らしめるかという問いへの 答えでした 社会はアイデアや意見をいかにして共有するのか? それに対する答えが ジャーナリズムのプロという 枠組みの外にあるなら この広く分布する階級がプロと言えるか 問うたところで 意味がありません だから私たちは守秘権法を求めていますが 彼らが結びついている組織の方は 一貫性をなくしていくのです
もう1 つの例を挙げましょう Pro-ana というグループです これはティーンの女の子のグループで ブログや掲示板やその他の 協力のインフラで活動しており 自らの意志で拒食症になろうとする人の 支援グループを そこに作り上げています 彼らは痩せたモデルの写真を投稿し それを“Thinspiration”と呼んでいます 「飢えこそ救い」のようなスローガンを掲げています ランス アームストロングみたいなブレスレットさえあって その赤いブレスレットは この小さなグループの中で 「摂食障害を維持しようと努めています」という宣言になります 彼らはまた コツを教えあっています たとえば 「何か食べたくなったら トイレや猫用トイレの掃除をするといいよ 食欲がなくなるから」
支援グループというのは良いものだと 私たちは思っていました 支援グループは本質的に良いものなのだと しかし支援グループそのものは 価値に関してニュートラルなのです 支援グループというのは 大きなグループの中にあって ある生き方を維持しようと望む小さなグループというにすぎません 大きなグループが酒飲みの集団で 小さなグループがしらふでいたい人々であるなら それは素晴らしい支援グループでしょう しかし自ら拒食症になろうとする ティーンの女の子たちにはショックを受けます 私たちが馴染んでいる かつての 支援グループの掲げる目的というのは それを支える組織が決めたものであって インフラからきたのではありません インフラが一般に利用可能となったとき 支援グループの仕組みは誰にでも あのような目的を追求する人々にも 手の届くものとなるのです
だからこれらの変化には良い面もれば 深刻な問題点もあるということです 現在の状況においては 国際関係に影響を与え 利用しようとする 反アメリカ活動家の行動については 軽くほのめかすに止める必要がありますが これは 9.11 テロ実行犯と関係者の ソーシャルマップです こういった多くのツールを使ったコミュニケーションのパターンを解析し 作られたものです 世界の諜報機関が先週のテロに関して― 同じ作業を今しているだろうことは 間違いありません
さて これらの結果として 何が起きるのか 語るべき部分まで来ましたが 時間がなくなってしまいました でもかまいません 私は答えを知らないからです (笑) 印刷機と同じように これがもし本当に革命であるなら ポイントA からポイントB へ というようには推移しません ポイントA から混乱状態へと推移するのです 印刷機は200 年に及ぶ混乱状態を引き起こしました カトリック教会によって― 政治的な力に秩序が与えられていたところから ウェストファリア条約が結ばれ 国家という新たな単位が見いだされるまでの間です
今度もまた200 年の混乱状態が起きるとは言いません 今後50 年の間 緩く協調したグループが より大きなレバレッジを得て 何が起こるか前もって捉えるとか 利益上の動機といった点で 伝統的組織の命令系統の上を行くようになり さらにレバレッジを得るでしょう 組織はますます大きな プレッシャーを受けるようになり 厳格に管理され 情報の独占に 依存したところほど 大きなプレッシャーを受けることになるでしょう そういうことが 1 つひとつの領域ごと 組織ごとに起きていきます 力は普遍的なものですが 結果は個別的に現れます
だから要は「これはすばらしい」ということでも 「組織だけの世界から協力だけの世界への移行を 目にするだろう」ということでもありません もっと込み入ったものになります しかし重要なのは それが大きな再編成になるということです それがやってくるだろうことが分かっているわけですから 備えておいてはいかがでしょうか ご静聴ありがとうございました (拍手)
Talks Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics
Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.
One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change. And so to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in New York City. And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today. By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing -- starting what was experienced as a mass--circulation daily paper -- would come to cost two and a half million dollars. 10,000, two and a half million, 15 years. That's the critical change that is being inverted by the net. And that's what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production.
Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers -- who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization -- and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce. Now, the term "information society," "information economy," for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the Industrial Revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. It's just been industrial. Which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars, and later, more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years.
Now, let me tell you a different story. Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had for the first time created the fastest supercomputer -- the NEC Earth Simulator -- taking the primary from the US, and about two years later -- this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating point operations per second that the computer's capable of running. Sigh of relief: IBM Gene Blue has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there's another supercomputer running in the world -- SETI@Home -- four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.
What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive -- that there's less money that's required -- but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these, or something rather like it -- a computer. They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person -- and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet.
What this means is that for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the most important means -- the most important components of the core economic activities -- remember, we are in an information economy -- of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the Industrial Revolution. So we've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we've got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience -- the other major experience, the other major input. Which unlike simple labor -- stand here turning this lever all day long -- is not something that's the same or fungible among people. Any one of you who has taken someone else's job or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. In that we're unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine.
What's the effect of this? So the story that most people know is the story of free or open-source software. This is market share of Apache Web server -- one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said, "Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!" One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what -- well, we're gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft.
Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people who didn't control anything that they produced acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right? But in fact, of course, the story is it's the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site -- 70 percent of a critical application on which web based communications and applications work is produced in this form in direct competition with Microsoft, not in a side issue -- in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the net. Software has done this in a way that's been very visible, because it's measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the web
So NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping. And they said instead of having three or four fully trained PhDs doing this all the time, let's break it up into small components, put it up on the web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend five minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After six months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, "practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained PhD," once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average.
Now if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to -- well, not so little, medium little -- tries to do research on Barbie. And she'll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias, this is what you'll find out about Barbie. This is it, there's nothing more to the definition, including "manufacturers" -- plural -- "now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie." Which is vastly better than what you'll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is Barbie, Klaus. (Laughter) On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they'll find a genuine article -- and I won't talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here -- but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she's a good role model, et cetera.
Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced. The claim to fame of Yahoo! was, we hire people to look -- originally, not anymore -- we hire people to look at websites and tell you -- if they're in the index, they're good. This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the Open Directory Project. Each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about, to say, this is good. So this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully-paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, it's free for anyone to use and it's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting.
This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing -- the decision about what's relevant -- to the community of the web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do. So -- page rank. The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers or our people saying which is the most relevant, we're going to go out there and count what you, people out there on the web, for whatever reason -- vanity, pleasure -- produced links, and tied to each other. We're going to count those, and count them up. And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won't find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based mechanism. Whoever pays the most is highest on the list.
So all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials -- our PCs, we share them together. We also see this in wireless. It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property. What we're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we're developing algorithms to let people own machines, like wi-fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I'm listening, when I'm not using, I can help you transfer your messages. And when you're not using, you'll help me transfer yours. And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security.
If in 1999 I told you, let's build a data and storage retrieval system. It's got to store terabytes. It's got to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's got to be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100,000,000 users at any given moment. It's got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You'd say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I'm describing is P2P filesharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it's a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something.
So essentially what we're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms if you wanted to be in the market -- or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society -- that was not about society itself. It was in fact economic.
But what we're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it's the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It's that it's the first time that it's having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don't have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It's open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it's not the only one.
Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market. Information flows to decide what are interesting problems, who's available and good for something, motivation structures -- remember, money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a 50 dollar check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter)
It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular, what we've seen is task organization. You have to hire people who know what they're doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I'll spend just because it's interesting. Just because it's fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations.
So a new social phenomenon is emerging. It's creating, and it's most visible when we see it, as a new form of competition. Peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry; free and open-source software taking market share from Microsoft; Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms; Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias. But it's also a new source of opportunities for businesses. As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. Instead of building well-behaved appliances -- things that you know what they'll do in advance -- you begin to build more open tools. There's a new set of values, a new set of things people value. You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Like Wikipedia, like the Open Directory Project, you're beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right?
You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings. That'll give me something I can use, and I'm going to contract with someone. I will deliver something based on what happens. It's very scary -- that's what Google does, essentially. That's what IBM does in software services, and they've done reasonably well.
So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long-term shift caused by the internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some contexts, it's even more efficient because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It's sustainable and growing fast.
But -- and this is the dark lining -- it is threatened by -- in the same way that it threatens -- the incumbent industrial systems. So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. it is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced. Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model, and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. Thank you.
Talks Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.
Talks Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off
I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.
I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know. And for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year.
Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning. Then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company, and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend, on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on. So Bali it was. It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.
I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter)
Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It's not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made piece with those dogs. (Laughter)
Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It's called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also start meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.
Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.
This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, elBulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.
If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M, since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.
Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That's about five percent of everybody. So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.
When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter)
In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. So I became my own intern. (Laughter)
And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday eight to nine: story writing. Nine to ten: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.
And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.
We were asked to design an identity for Casa de Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.
So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa de Musica Logo Generator. That's connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa de Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster, is exactly the same.
So it will always fits together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers who all performed there, get their own Casa de Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa de Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.
And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house, or a weekly program as well as educational services.
Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both sales people. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "Things I've Learned In My Life So Far". I'll just show two now.
This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, "Self confidence produces fine results." This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter)
And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250 thousand coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better."
And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, "Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?" While we built all this up during that week, with the hundred volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.
And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)
We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It's a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really get done properly.
That film we'll be working on for the next two years. So It's going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile, then you can of course always go and see this guy.
Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive.
Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)
Talks Kary Mullis' next-gen cure for killer infections
Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise. Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise.
So it was about four years ago, five years ago, I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was, with a bag similar to this. And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag. And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well. But your body knows it extremely well. And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time. Because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope. And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily.
Actually our body doesn't hate these. Our body loves these. It eats them. I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry. And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell, it means "that's food." Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff. But I said we can't get rid of it. Because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity.
And I said, why don't you use that? What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs? I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there. Where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it. It was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on. It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you, like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A., and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car, and then charges you for possession of marijuana. It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street.
(Laughter)
So you can take a bacteria that really doesn't make these things at all, and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street. And for certain bacteria we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore. Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now; Streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant, because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria.
So I started working with this thing, with a bunch of collaborators. And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones, bacteria that we don't like. And I feel now like George Bush. It's like "mission accomplished." So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time. But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work. And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them.
This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there, sort of symbolizing this right now. You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer. And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it. So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus. I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year. It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it. And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it. That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body, and will alert your immune system to go after it.
Here's what happened. See that line on the very top with the little dots? That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas, at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax. And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular, and direct your immune system to it. You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line. That's a 100 percent survival rate. And they actually lived another 14 days, or 28 when we finally killed them, and took them apart and figured out what went wrong. Why did they not die? And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore. So we did it. Okay?
(Applause)
Mission accomplished!
(Applause)
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