Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Cut the Rope! An Addictive New Puzzle Game for iOS
Meet "Cut the Rope" a cute, simple, and challenging puzzle game for the iPhone that is taking the App Store by storm. Look out, Angry Birds! In the game you meet a mysterious green monster named "Om Nom" who absolutely loves candy. Your job is to strategically cut the different lengths of rope, collect stars, and feed this little monster's sugar addiction!
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Introduction to Acquired Brain Injury in Children and Adolescents Favorite
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Kim Gorgens: Protecting the brain against concussion
About this talk
In a lively talk from TEDxDU, neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens makes the case for better protecting our brains against the risk of concussion -- with a compelling pitch for putting helmets on kids.
So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby. And that's not to say I ever went on to become a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist. Sorry TED. But I did go on to be a reasonably astute, arguably world-class worrier. One of my girlfriends in graduate school, Marie, said, "Kim, I figured it out. It's not that you're more neurotic than everyone else, it's just that you're more honest about how neurotic you are."
So in the spirit of full disclosure, I brought some pictures to share. Awwww. I'll just say, July. (Laughter) Zzzzzzip for safety. Water wings -- an inch of water. And then, finally, all suited up for the 90-minute drive to Copper Mountain. So you can get kind of a feel for this. So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now. And, despite being cursed with my athletic inability, he plays soccer. He's interested in playing football. He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle.
So why would I worry? Because this is what I do. This is what I teach. It's what I study. It's what I treat. And I know that kids get concussed every year. In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms. And so when kids sustain a concussion, we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung, but what is it that we're really talking about? Let's take a look.
All right. "Starsky and Hutch" arguably. Yes. So a car accident. 40 miles an hour into a fixed barrier -- 35 G's. A heavy weight boxer punches you straight in the face -- 58 G's. In case you missed it, we'll look again. So look to the right-hand side of the screen. What would you say? How many G's? Close. 72. Would it be crazy to know, 103 G's. The average concussive impact is 95 G's. Now, when the kid on the right doesn't get up, we know they've had a concussion.
But how about the kid on the left, or the athlete that leaves the field of play? How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion? How do we know that legislation that would require that they be pulled from play, cleared for return to play, applies to them? The definition of concussion doesn't actually require a loss of consciousness. It requires only a change in consciousness, and that can be any one or a number of symptoms, including feeling foggy, feeling dizzy, hearing a ringing in your ear, being more impulsive or hostile than usual.
So given all of that and given how darn neurotic I am, how do I get any sleep at all? Because I know our brains are resilient. They're designed to recover from an injury. If, God forbid, any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks. But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury. In fact, high school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline. After that first injury, their risk for second injury is exponentially greater. From there, their risk for a third injury, greater still and so on.
And here's the really alarming part: we don't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries. You guys may be familiar with this research that's coming out of the NFL. In a nutshell, this research suggests that among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions, the incidents of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population. So you've all seen that -- New York Times, you've seen it. What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, "Isn't it weird that my 46 year-old husband is forever losing his keys? Isn't it weird that my 47 year-old husband is forever losing the car? Isn't it weird that my 48 year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car, from the driveway?" So I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child. So it's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around some day.
So how do we guarantee the safety of our kids? How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids? Let me tell you what I've come up with. (Laughter) If only. My little boy's right there, and he's like, "She's not kidding. She's totally not kidding." So in all seriousness, should my kid play football? Should your kid play football? I don't know. But I do know there are three things you can do. The first, study up. You have to be familiar with the issues we're talking about today. There are some great resources out there.
The CDC has a program, Heads Up. It's at CDC.gov. Heads Up is specific to concussion in kids. The second is a resource I'm personally really proud of. We've just rolled this out in the last couple months -- CO Kids With Brain Injury. This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff. It's a great place to start if you have questions. The second thing is speak up. Just two weeks ago, a bill introduced by Senator Kefalas that would have required athletes, kids, under 18 to wear a helmet when they're riding their bike died in committee. It died in large part because it lacked constituent buy-in, it lacked stakeholder traction. Now I'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should, or shouldn't, support, but I am going to tell you that, if it matters to you, your legislators need to know that.
Speak up also with coaching staff. Ask what kind of protective equipment is available. What's the budget for protective equipment? How old it is? Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear. Which brings us to suit up; wear a helmet. The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening. Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, Tom said, "Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class." And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the G-force of impact by half. Now I thought that it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade, right, this epiphany of Tom's. As it turns out, it occurred to Tom that a 20-dollar helmet is a good way to protect 100,000-dollar graduate education.
(Laughter)
So, should Vander play football? I can't say no, but I can guarantee that every time he leaves the house that kid's wearing a helmet -- like to the car, or at school. So whether athlete, scholar, over-protected kid, neurotic mom, or otherwise, here's my baby, Vander, reminding you to mind your matter.
Thank you.
(Applause)
In a lively talk from TEDxDU, neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens makes the case for better protecting our brains against the risk of concussion -- with a compelling pitch for putting helmets on kids.
So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby. And that's not to say I ever went on to become a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist. Sorry TED. But I did go on to be a reasonably astute, arguably world-class worrier. One of my girlfriends in graduate school, Marie, said, "Kim, I figured it out. It's not that you're more neurotic than everyone else, it's just that you're more honest about how neurotic you are."
So in the spirit of full disclosure, I brought some pictures to share. Awwww. I'll just say, July. (Laughter) Zzzzzzip for safety. Water wings -- an inch of water. And then, finally, all suited up for the 90-minute drive to Copper Mountain. So you can get kind of a feel for this. So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now. And, despite being cursed with my athletic inability, he plays soccer. He's interested in playing football. He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle.
So why would I worry? Because this is what I do. This is what I teach. It's what I study. It's what I treat. And I know that kids get concussed every year. In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms. And so when kids sustain a concussion, we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung, but what is it that we're really talking about? Let's take a look.
All right. "Starsky and Hutch" arguably. Yes. So a car accident. 40 miles an hour into a fixed barrier -- 35 G's. A heavy weight boxer punches you straight in the face -- 58 G's. In case you missed it, we'll look again. So look to the right-hand side of the screen. What would you say? How many G's? Close. 72. Would it be crazy to know, 103 G's. The average concussive impact is 95 G's. Now, when the kid on the right doesn't get up, we know they've had a concussion.
But how about the kid on the left, or the athlete that leaves the field of play? How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion? How do we know that legislation that would require that they be pulled from play, cleared for return to play, applies to them? The definition of concussion doesn't actually require a loss of consciousness. It requires only a change in consciousness, and that can be any one or a number of symptoms, including feeling foggy, feeling dizzy, hearing a ringing in your ear, being more impulsive or hostile than usual.
So given all of that and given how darn neurotic I am, how do I get any sleep at all? Because I know our brains are resilient. They're designed to recover from an injury. If, God forbid, any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks. But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury. In fact, high school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline. After that first injury, their risk for second injury is exponentially greater. From there, their risk for a third injury, greater still and so on.
And here's the really alarming part: we don't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries. You guys may be familiar with this research that's coming out of the NFL. In a nutshell, this research suggests that among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions, the incidents of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population. So you've all seen that -- New York Times, you've seen it. What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, "Isn't it weird that my 46 year-old husband is forever losing his keys? Isn't it weird that my 47 year-old husband is forever losing the car? Isn't it weird that my 48 year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car, from the driveway?" So I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child. So it's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around some day.
So how do we guarantee the safety of our kids? How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids? Let me tell you what I've come up with. (Laughter) If only. My little boy's right there, and he's like, "She's not kidding. She's totally not kidding." So in all seriousness, should my kid play football? Should your kid play football? I don't know. But I do know there are three things you can do. The first, study up. You have to be familiar with the issues we're talking about today. There are some great resources out there.
The CDC has a program, Heads Up. It's at CDC.gov. Heads Up is specific to concussion in kids. The second is a resource I'm personally really proud of. We've just rolled this out in the last couple months -- CO Kids With Brain Injury. This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff. It's a great place to start if you have questions. The second thing is speak up. Just two weeks ago, a bill introduced by Senator Kefalas that would have required athletes, kids, under 18 to wear a helmet when they're riding their bike died in committee. It died in large part because it lacked constituent buy-in, it lacked stakeholder traction. Now I'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should, or shouldn't, support, but I am going to tell you that, if it matters to you, your legislators need to know that.
Speak up also with coaching staff. Ask what kind of protective equipment is available. What's the budget for protective equipment? How old it is? Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear. Which brings us to suit up; wear a helmet. The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening. Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, Tom said, "Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class." And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the G-force of impact by half. Now I thought that it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade, right, this epiphany of Tom's. As it turns out, it occurred to Tom that a 20-dollar helmet is a good way to protect 100,000-dollar graduate education.
(Laughter)
So, should Vander play football? I can't say no, but I can guarantee that every time he leaves the house that kid's wearing a helmet -- like to the car, or at school. So whether athlete, scholar, over-protected kid, neurotic mom, or otherwise, here's my baby, Vander, reminding you to mind your matter.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Kristina Gjerde: Making law on the high seas
About this talk
Kristina Gjerde studies the law of the high seas -- the 64 percent of our ocean that isn't protected by any national law at all. Gorgeous photos show the hidden worlds that Gjerde and other lawyers are working to protect from trawling and trash-dumping, through smart policymaking and a healthy dose of PR.
Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as "Here be monsters." It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep.
We are talking about the high seas. The high seas is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stake holders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.
So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above -- that area in the darker blue. To me as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems we have to confront are that the current international laws -- for example, shipping -- provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simple goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the farther you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches twice the size of Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case.
So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: you can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify.
What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing on the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals -- scientists, conservationists, photographers and states -- were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed.
So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of go anywhere, do anything you want, we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 20009 when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection, but what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas age governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access, to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas.
Today we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm. And five showed up in the U.K. just recently.
But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer now floating on the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction -- but the vast majority is beyond -- to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area.
Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now, the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims, so anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, til recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately CAMLAR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime.
Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round.
Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That's, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these world heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half the World Heritage Convention. But we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch.
So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 km in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators, it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hot spots. At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward."
But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space -- and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know -- someone needs to know -- where you are and what you're doing.
So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of caution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table -- if you will -- to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean basin-wide management. Out species are ocean basin-wide. Many of the deep sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean basin-wide. We need to understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean basin management regimes. That's, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so their like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization.
So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote.
So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas, one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Kristina Gjerde studies the law of the high seas -- the 64 percent of our ocean that isn't protected by any national law at all. Gorgeous photos show the hidden worlds that Gjerde and other lawyers are working to protect from trawling and trash-dumping, through smart policymaking and a healthy dose of PR.
Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as "Here be monsters." It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep.
We are talking about the high seas. The high seas is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stake holders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.
So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above -- that area in the darker blue. To me as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems we have to confront are that the current international laws -- for example, shipping -- provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simple goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the farther you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches twice the size of Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case.
So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: you can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify.
What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing on the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals -- scientists, conservationists, photographers and states -- were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed.
So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of go anywhere, do anything you want, we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 20009 when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection, but what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas age governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access, to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas.
Today we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm. And five showed up in the U.K. just recently.
But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer now floating on the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction -- but the vast majority is beyond -- to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area.
Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now, the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims, so anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, til recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately CAMLAR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime.
Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round.
Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That's, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these world heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half the World Heritage Convention. But we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch.
So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 km in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators, it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hot spots. At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward."
But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space -- and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know -- someone needs to know -- where you are and what you're doing.
So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of caution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table -- if you will -- to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean basin-wide management. Out species are ocean basin-wide. Many of the deep sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean basin-wide. We need to understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean basin management regimes. That's, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so their like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization.
So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote.
So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas, one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
John Hardy: My green school dream
I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. I had a really hard time in school. In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. I ran away. I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali. And there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. It ruined my life -- (Laughter) "An Inconvenient Truth" and Mr. Gore. I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. It's a tiny, little island -- 60 miles by 90 miles. It has an intact Hindu culture. Cynthia and I were there. We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. We decided to give back locally.
And here it is; it's called the Green School. I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. The classrooms have no walls. The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. The desks are not square. At Green School, the children are smiling -- an unusual thing for school, especially for me. And we practice holism. And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world -- a whole world -- to live on. Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. So if this gentleman had have had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? Would he have had more possibilities in his life?
The classrooms have natural light. They're beautiful. They're bamboo. The breeze passes through them. And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. So we basically turned the box into a bubble. And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. The first one was called sanding, and the second one was called re-waxing. But since that happened, they own those desks. They know they can control their world.
We're on the grid; we're not proud of it. but an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two and a half meter drop on a river. When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. And you know what these are. There's nowhere to flush. And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water -- you're all really smart, just do the math. How many people times how much water. There isn't enough water. These are compost toilets. And nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. And they work; people use them. People are okay. It's something you should think about doing. Not many things didn't work. The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms, so we had some good ideas. We took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard.
Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. I met a father the other day, he looked a little crazed. I said, "Welcome to Green School." He said, "I've been on an airplane for 24 hours." I asked him, "Why?" He said, "I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. In August I'm bringing my sons." This was a great thing. But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. It's becoming a community. It's becoming a green model. We had to look at everything. No petrochemicals in the pavement. No pavement. These are volcanic stones laid by hand. There are no sidewalks. The sidewalks are gravel, they flood when it rains, but they're green.
This is the school buffalo. He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. All the fences at Green School are green. And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. Landscaping. We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. We dropped them gently in. We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field.
These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. They're part of the rice cycle. and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. This young man is picking organic vegetables. We feed 400 people lunch every day. And it's not a normal lunch; there's no gas. Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. The food is incredible.
Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. It's a school where you do learn reading -- one of my favorites -- writing -- I was bad at it -- arithmetic. But you also learn other things. You learn bamboo building. You practice ancient Balinese arts. This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. The kids love it. The mothers aren't quite convinced.
(Laughter)
We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local. What does local mean? Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese. And this was a really big commitment. And we were right. And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. The teachers are as diverse as the student body. And the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. A woman came from Africa with music. And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. The Green School effect -- we don't know what it is. We need someone to come and study it. But what's happening, our learning-different kids -- dyslexic -- we've renamed them prolexic -- are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. And all the kids are thriving.
And how did we do all this? On giant grass. It's bamboo. It comes out of the ground like a train. It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months. And three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. It's as strong and dense as teak. And it will hold up any roof. When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. The yellow box was called the administration complex. (Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it -- the heart of school. And that changed everything forever. It's a double helix. It has administrators in it and many, many other things.
And the problem of building it -- when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "What's this?" So we built big models. We had them engineered by the engineers. And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. It was chaos. And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building. And when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral green education. The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful.
Is this doable in your community? We believe it is. Green School is a model we built for the world. It's a model we built for Bali. And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build.
So, Mr. Gore, thank you. You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us.
Thank you.
Shimon Schocken's rides of hope
TALKS | TEDX
Shimon Schocken's rides of hope
About this talk
Computer science professor Shimon Schocken is also an avid mountain biker. To share the life lessons he learned while riding, he began an outdoor program with Israel's juvenile inmates and was touched by both their intense difficulties and profound successes.
Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. You can see fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. And here is another picture of them. Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders, spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes ride from here. Well, like everything in Israel. And I been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years. And by now, they've become a very big part of my life.
This story began four years ago. The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. And I told him, "Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country." And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut. And he told me, "This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. They are supposed to by locked up. They aren't supposed to be out at large." And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. And so two months later, we found ourselves at large -- myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project.
And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these -- Everything you see here is obviously in Israel -- as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. So we had a lot of this going on. I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties -- not because they were physically unfit. But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there, not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team. And I didn't know what to do.
Now let me give you an example. We're going down hill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jump up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. The he throws his helmet in the air. His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. They happened in places like this in the Judean Desert, 20 km away from the nearest road. And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "I'm not moving from here. Forget it. I've had it." Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous.
It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. At the beginning it was a disaster. I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. That's what they had all their lives. And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. So I would say, "Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on." "Go away you maniac, psychopath. Why would you bring us to this goddamn place?" And I would say, "Relax, Alex. Here's a piece of chocolate." And Alex would go, "Arrrrggg!" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry -- and after the rides also.
And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? He's a 17 year-old. When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and shipped him to Israel on his own. And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only -- the slums and the state prison, where he spend the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had.
I want to say a few words about vision. When I started this program four years ago. I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. It all of a sudden dawned on me in this project that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love, love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us -- the animals, the plants, the insects, love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss.
Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. Now I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And one of these principles is focus. Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. So these are words like teamwork or endurance or even complicated concepts like resource allocation or perspective, a word that they don't understand. You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. It literally propels you upwards. That's what perspective is all about. Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. And that's how they develop self-esteem.
Now let me give you an example of how it works. You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. And you look up at the sky and through the clouds. You see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka -- that's where you're supposed to climb now -- and you say, "There's no way that I could possibly get there." And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. And you look down at Yokneam, everything is so small and tiny. And you say, 'Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. It's that big. I can't believe that I did it. And that's the point when you start loving yourself.
And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference. And these discussions can be extremely inspiring. In one of them, one of the kids once said, "When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea -- and he's talking about this spot here -- I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. We walked 120 km until we reached Sudan. This was the first place where we got some water and supplies." And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. And he says -- because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him. And he says, "And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. And only now," he says, I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it." Now remember when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.
And so perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements -- three, four, 5,000 years old. And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.
I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. Here's a picture I took last Tuesday -- less than a week ago -- and I ride with them tomorrow also. In everyone of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking this incredible landscape around me. And I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday and actually every Friday also, I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Shimon Schocken's rides of hope
About this talk
Computer science professor Shimon Schocken is also an avid mountain biker. To share the life lessons he learned while riding, he began an outdoor program with Israel's juvenile inmates and was touched by both their intense difficulties and profound successes.
Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. You can see fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. And here is another picture of them. Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders, spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes ride from here. Well, like everything in Israel. And I been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years. And by now, they've become a very big part of my life.
This story began four years ago. The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. And I told him, "Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country." And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut. And he told me, "This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. They are supposed to by locked up. They aren't supposed to be out at large." And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. And so two months later, we found ourselves at large -- myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project.
And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these -- Everything you see here is obviously in Israel -- as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. So we had a lot of this going on. I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties -- not because they were physically unfit. But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there, not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team. And I didn't know what to do.
Now let me give you an example. We're going down hill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jump up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. The he throws his helmet in the air. His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. They happened in places like this in the Judean Desert, 20 km away from the nearest road. And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "I'm not moving from here. Forget it. I've had it." Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous.
It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. At the beginning it was a disaster. I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. That's what they had all their lives. And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. So I would say, "Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on." "Go away you maniac, psychopath. Why would you bring us to this goddamn place?" And I would say, "Relax, Alex. Here's a piece of chocolate." And Alex would go, "Arrrrggg!" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry -- and after the rides also.
And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? He's a 17 year-old. When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and shipped him to Israel on his own. And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only -- the slums and the state prison, where he spend the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had.
I want to say a few words about vision. When I started this program four years ago. I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. It all of a sudden dawned on me in this project that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love, love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us -- the animals, the plants, the insects, love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss.
Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. Now I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And one of these principles is focus. Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. So these are words like teamwork or endurance or even complicated concepts like resource allocation or perspective, a word that they don't understand. You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. It literally propels you upwards. That's what perspective is all about. Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. And that's how they develop self-esteem.
Now let me give you an example of how it works. You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. And you look up at the sky and through the clouds. You see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka -- that's where you're supposed to climb now -- and you say, "There's no way that I could possibly get there." And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. And you look down at Yokneam, everything is so small and tiny. And you say, 'Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. It's that big. I can't believe that I did it. And that's the point when you start loving yourself.
And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference. And these discussions can be extremely inspiring. In one of them, one of the kids once said, "When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea -- and he's talking about this spot here -- I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. We walked 120 km until we reached Sudan. This was the first place where we got some water and supplies." And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. And he says -- because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him. And he says, "And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. And only now," he says, I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it." Now remember when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.
And so perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements -- three, four, 5,000 years old. And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.
I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. Here's a picture I took last Tuesday -- less than a week ago -- and I ride with them tomorrow also. In everyone of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking this incredible landscape around me. And I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday and actually every Friday also, I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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