Tim Birkhead
Author of ‘The Wisdom of Birds‘
Tim Birkhead is a professor of behaviour and evolution at the University of Sheffield. His research on promiscuity and sperm competition in birds helped to re-shape current understanding of bird mating systems. His undergraduate teaching (for which he has two awards) includes courses in animal behaviour and the history and philosophy of science. He hates administration.
Tim's research has taken him to Canadian High Arctic, Labrador, California, Australia, Africa and Europe. Since 1972 he has maintained a long-term study of guillemots on Skomer Island, Wales which is where he did his PhD. Tim has been president of the International Society for Behavioural Ecology and currently serves on the management committee of the Darwin Correspondence Project. Tim initiated the biennial Biology of Spermatozoa (BoS) meetings at Losehill Hall, Derbyshire in 1992. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004.
As well as a passion for research, Tim is committed to undergraduate teaching and the public understanding of science and. He has given talks to non-scientists at book festivals, the Royal Institution, at Café Scientifique and elsewhere. He has written for New Scientist, BBC Wildlife, Natural History magazine and the Independent and has a regular column in the Times Higher Education. He has written or edited 10 books, including Promiscuity (2000 Faber & Faber). His popular science books have gained widespread recognition and The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Ornithology was awarded the McColvin medal for best reference book (1991), and The Red Canary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2003) was awarded the Consul Cremer Prize. His most recent book The Wisdom of Birds is an illustrated account of how we know what we know about birds.
He is married and has three (recently fledged) children and a dog, enjoys walking, playing guitar and painting in his spare time.
About this talk
Birds, a perennial human fascination, entertained medieval homes long before science took them for serious study. "Wisdom of Birds" author Tim Birkhead tours some intriguing birdwatcher lore (dug up in old field journals) -- and talks about the role it plays in ornithology today.
Friday, October 01, 2010
TALKS - Julian Treasure: Shh! Sound health in 8 steps
About this talk
Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health -- even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.
The Hindus say, "Nada brahma," one translation of which is, "The world is sound." And, in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. So you are, in fact, a chord, each of you an individual chord. One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. Your ears can't hear that chord. They can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. Incidentally, we see just one octave. Your ears are always on. You have no earlids. They work even when you sleep. The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that.
Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. Listening is an active skill. Whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at. It's a relationship with sound. And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? Here are two of them. Reductive listening is listening "for." It reduces everything down to what's relevant, and it discards everything that's not relevant. Men typically listen reductively. So he's saying, "I've got this problem." He's saying, "Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next." That's the way we talk, right guys?
Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening "with," not listening "for." It's got no destination in mind. It's just enjoying the journey. Women typically listen expansively. If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. (Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships.
The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. Two percent of the population of Europe -- that's 16 million people -- are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. It's a really big problem.
Now, when you were little, if you had noise, and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. It looks a bit like this. The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: "schizophonia." It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia.
The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. We squash music to fit it into our pocket. and there is a cost attached to this. Listen to this. This is an uncompressed piece of music. (Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. There is a cost of compression. It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. You're having to imagine it. It's not good for you in the long run.
The third problem with headphones is this: deafness -- noise-induced hearing disorder. 10 million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent, roughly one in six, of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. Now that's a really serious problem.
I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears, and pass these on to your children, please. professional hearing protectors are great; I use them all the time. If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford, because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. Protect you ears in that way.
Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. WWB: Wind, water, birds -- stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. Seek those sounds out; they're good for you, and so it this. Silence is beautiful. The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. It's fun to get into designing with sound. If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds.
I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy. It's also now being used to treat cancer. Lithotripsy -- saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. Sound healing is a wonderful modality. It's been around for thousands of years. I do urge you to explore this. There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. Devotional music, good. Mozart, good. There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy.
And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. First of all, listen consciously. I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. It's a whole new dimension to your life, and it's wonderful to have that dimension. Secondly, get in touch with making some sound. Create sound. The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained. Learn to sing. Learn to play an instrument. Musicians have bigger brains -- it's true. You can do this is groups as well. It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia, to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on.
So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful, and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. So I urge you to take that path.
I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. I wish you sound health.
(Applause)
Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health -- even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.
The Hindus say, "Nada brahma," one translation of which is, "The world is sound." And, in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. So you are, in fact, a chord, each of you an individual chord. One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. Your ears can't hear that chord. They can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. Incidentally, we see just one octave. Your ears are always on. You have no earlids. They work even when you sleep. The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that.
Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. Listening is an active skill. Whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at. It's a relationship with sound. And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? Here are two of them. Reductive listening is listening "for." It reduces everything down to what's relevant, and it discards everything that's not relevant. Men typically listen reductively. So he's saying, "I've got this problem." He's saying, "Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next." That's the way we talk, right guys?
Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening "with," not listening "for." It's got no destination in mind. It's just enjoying the journey. Women typically listen expansively. If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. (Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships.
The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. Two percent of the population of Europe -- that's 16 million people -- are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. It's a really big problem.
Now, when you were little, if you had noise, and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. It looks a bit like this. The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: "schizophonia." It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia.
The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. We squash music to fit it into our pocket. and there is a cost attached to this. Listen to this. This is an uncompressed piece of music. (Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. There is a cost of compression. It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. You're having to imagine it. It's not good for you in the long run.
The third problem with headphones is this: deafness -- noise-induced hearing disorder. 10 million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent, roughly one in six, of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. Now that's a really serious problem.
I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears, and pass these on to your children, please. professional hearing protectors are great; I use them all the time. If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford, because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. Protect you ears in that way.
Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. WWB: Wind, water, birds -- stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. Seek those sounds out; they're good for you, and so it this. Silence is beautiful. The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. It's fun to get into designing with sound. If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds.
I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy. It's also now being used to treat cancer. Lithotripsy -- saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. Sound healing is a wonderful modality. It's been around for thousands of years. I do urge you to explore this. There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. Devotional music, good. Mozart, good. There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy.
And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. First of all, listen consciously. I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. It's a whole new dimension to your life, and it's wonderful to have that dimension. Secondly, get in touch with making some sound. Create sound. The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained. Learn to sing. Learn to play an instrument. Musicians have bigger brains -- it's true. You can do this is groups as well. It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia, to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on.
So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful, and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. So I urge you to take that path.
I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. I wish you sound health.
(Applause)
TALKS - Sebastian Seung: I am my connectome
About this talk
Sebastian Seung is mapping a massively ambitious new model of the brain that focuses on the connections between each neuron. He calls it our "connectome," and it's as individual as our genome -- and understanding it could open a new way to understand our brains and our minds.
We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That's why we look different. I've got brown eyes. You might have blue or gray. But it's not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. What do you guys think? Are you more than your genes? (Audience: Yes.) Yes? I think some people agree with me. I think we should make a statement. I think we should say it all together. All right: "I'm more than my genes" -- all together. Everybody: I am more than my genes. (Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? (Laughter) I am my connectome. Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. (Laughter) Right. All together now. Everybody: I am my connectome. SS: That sounded great. You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. I could just go home now.
Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. Your connectome is far more complex than this, because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. That's a lot of information.
What's in that information? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories -- the information that makes you you -- maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity -- maybe your personality and your intellect -- maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true, I just want you to remember it. And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators.
Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. But this is just a single neuron. In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions.
If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. And still, you may not see the branches. So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, And we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. And we can do that for another neuron in green. And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses.
Let's zoom in on one synapse. And keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. You should see small circles. These are called vesicles. They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone.
So you see how to find a synapse. How can we find an entire connectome? Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. We color every neuron in in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome.
Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? (Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. Girls brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. (Laughter) You guys are laughing, but, you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) But seriously, what's wrong with this? You already know enough to tell me. What's wrong with this statement? It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is.
And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. I'll show you. This is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. And that's just a mouse brain. It's a lot smaller than a human brain. So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, "You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. Neuroscience is hopeless." Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally, the hidden complexity is revealed.
In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings. Too much information, professor. (Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) (Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? It's absurd. How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this?
And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. Some day, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day. Because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. It will take the work of generations to succeed. At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest -- just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously.
As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kinds of changes happen? Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. Second question: what causes these changes? Well, it's true. To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change. And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome -- an idea that you may find empowering.
What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream. But the metaphor is richer than that. Because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis -- or so neuroscientists think -- of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed.
So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. How will we go about testing the hypothesis "I am my connectome"? Well, I propose a direct test. Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements.
So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. They're going to be scrambled up. So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome.
(Laughter)
What a mess. Have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? I hope not. But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. (Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles. All packed in your skull. And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, "Anorexic brains are wired differently," or, "Autistic brains are wired differently." These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes.
Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. Philosophers know this game very well. If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you.
Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they some day chuckle over our graves? I don't know. I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily.
I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Sebastian Seung is mapping a massively ambitious new model of the brain that focuses on the connections between each neuron. He calls it our "connectome," and it's as individual as our genome -- and understanding it could open a new way to understand our brains and our minds.
We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That's why we look different. I've got brown eyes. You might have blue or gray. But it's not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. What do you guys think? Are you more than your genes? (Audience: Yes.) Yes? I think some people agree with me. I think we should make a statement. I think we should say it all together. All right: "I'm more than my genes" -- all together. Everybody: I am more than my genes. (Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? (Laughter) I am my connectome. Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. (Laughter) Right. All together now. Everybody: I am my connectome. SS: That sounded great. You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. I could just go home now.
Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. Your connectome is far more complex than this, because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. That's a lot of information.
What's in that information? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories -- the information that makes you you -- maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity -- maybe your personality and your intellect -- maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true, I just want you to remember it. And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators.
Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. But this is just a single neuron. In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions.
If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. And still, you may not see the branches. So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, And we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. And we can do that for another neuron in green. And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses.
Let's zoom in on one synapse. And keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. You should see small circles. These are called vesicles. They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone.
So you see how to find a synapse. How can we find an entire connectome? Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. We color every neuron in in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome.
Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? (Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. Girls brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. (Laughter) You guys are laughing, but, you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) But seriously, what's wrong with this? You already know enough to tell me. What's wrong with this statement? It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is.
And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. I'll show you. This is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. And that's just a mouse brain. It's a lot smaller than a human brain. So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, "You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. Neuroscience is hopeless." Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally, the hidden complexity is revealed.
In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings. Too much information, professor. (Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) (Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? It's absurd. How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this?
And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. Some day, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day. Because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. It will take the work of generations to succeed. At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest -- just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously.
As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kinds of changes happen? Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. Second question: what causes these changes? Well, it's true. To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change. And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome -- an idea that you may find empowering.
What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream. But the metaphor is richer than that. Because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis -- or so neuroscientists think -- of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed.
So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. How will we go about testing the hypothesis "I am my connectome"? Well, I propose a direct test. Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements.
So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. They're going to be scrambled up. So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome.
(Laughter)
What a mess. Have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? I hope not. But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. (Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles. All packed in your skull. And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, "Anorexic brains are wired differently," or, "Autistic brains are wired differently." These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes.
Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. Philosophers know this game very well. If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you.
Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they some day chuckle over our graves? I don't know. I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily.
I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Gary Wolf: The quantified self
About this talk
At TED@Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in gloriously geeky detail.
I got up this morning at 6:10am after going to sleep at 12:45am. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute. My blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31.
We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember, and want to improve. A few year ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments.
Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle -- the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. It tracks your movement through space. It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device -- among early adopters at the moment -- the Fitbit. This tracks your activity and also your sleep. It has just that sensor in it.
You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system. I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. And Nike knows how to get your pace and and distance from just that sensor. This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system.
This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep -- deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. The rest of it is the bedside console. Just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago -- I mean, really until now. And this is the sleep tracking system of today.
This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors.
Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world -- these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows, and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. So when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge.
Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it's for biometric security. Some people will say it's for public health research. Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
Thank you.
At TED@Cannes, Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime: using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body, mood, diet, spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in gloriously geeky detail.
I got up this morning at 6:10am after going to sleep at 12:45am. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute. My blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31.
We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember, and want to improve. A few year ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments.
Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle -- the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. It tracks your movement through space. It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device -- among early adopters at the moment -- the Fitbit. This tracks your activity and also your sleep. It has just that sensor in it.
You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system. I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. And Nike knows how to get your pace and and distance from just that sensor. This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system.
This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep -- deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. The rest of it is the bedside console. Just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago -- I mean, really until now. And this is the sleep tracking system of today.
This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors.
Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world -- these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows, and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. So when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge.
Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it's for biometric security. Some people will say it's for public health research. Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.
Thank you.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Isaac Mizrahi on fashion and creativity
About this talk
Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi spins through a dizzying array of inspirations -- from '50s pinups to a fleeting glimpse of a woman on the street who makes him shout "Stop the cab!" Inside this rambling talk are real clues to living a happy, creative life.
I have, like, a thing about sleeping. I don't sleep that much, and I've come to this thing about, like, not sleeping much as being a great virtue, after years of kind of battling it as being a terrible detriment, or something. And now I really like sort of sitting up, you know. But for years I've been sitting up and I think that, like, my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake. I think thoughts. I walk aimlessly. Sometimes I used to walk more at night. I walk during the day and I follow people who I think look interesting. (Laughter)
And sometimes -- actually, once it was on Page Six in The Post, that I was cruising this guy, like, sort of, whatever, but I was actually just following because he had these really great shoes on. And so I was following this guy. And I took a picture of his shoes, and we thanked each other and just went on our way. But I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of my design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye. Because I feel like, you know, there are so many images out there, so many clothes out there. And the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken, of course, or very, very surprising. And often, I'm driving in a taxi and I see a hole in a shirt, or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that I'd never seen happen before. And so I'd make the car stop, and I'd get out of the car and walk, and see that in fact there wasn't a hole, but it was trick of my eye, it was a shadow, you know. Or if there was a hole I'd think like, oh damn, there was actually someone thought of that thought already. Someone made that mistake already so I can't do it anymore.
I don't know where inspiration comes from. It does not come for me from research. I don't get necessarily inspired by research. As a matter of fact, one of the most fun things I've ever, ever done in my whole life, was this Christmas season at the Guggenheim in New York. I read Peter and the Wolf with this beautiful band from Juilliard. And I did like, you know, the narrator, and I read it. And I saw this really smart critic who I love. This woman, Joan Acocella, who's a friend of mine, and she came backstage and she said, oh, you know, Isaac, did you know that, talking about Stalinism, and talking about, you know, like the '30s in Russia. And I said, how do I know about Stalinism? I know about a wolf and a bird and, you know, he ate the bird, and then in the end you hear, you know, you hear the bird squeaking, or something, you know?
So I don't really know that. I don't really -- actually I do my own kind of research, you know. If I'm commissioned to do the costumes for an 18th-century opera, or something like that, I will do a lot of research, because it's interesting, not because it's because what I'm supposed to do. I'm very, very, very inspired by movies. The color of movies and the way light makes the colors, light from behind the projection, or light from the projection, makes the colors look so impossible. And anyway, roll this little clip, I'll just show you. I sit up at night and I watch movies and I watch women in movies a lot. And I think about, you know, their roles, and about you have to like watch what your daughters look at. Because I look at the way women are portrayed all the time. Whether they're kind of glorified in this way, or whether they're kind of, you know, ironically glorified. or whether they're, you know, sort of denigrated, or ironically denigrated.
I go back to color all the time. Color is something that motivates me a lot It's rarely color that I find in nature, although, you know, juxtaposed next to artificial color natural color is so beautiful. So that's what I do. I study color a lot. But for the most part, I think, like, how can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as that image of Natalie Wood? How can I ever make anything as beautiful as Greta Garbo? I mean, that's just not possible, you know. And so that's what makes me lie awake at night, I guess, you know. I want to show you -- I'm also like a big -- I go to astrologers and tarot card readers often, and that's another thing that motivates me a lot. People say, oh, do that. And astrologer tells me to do something. So I do it. (Laughter)
When I was about 21, an astrologer told me that I was going to meet the man of my dreams, and that his name was going to be Eric, right? So, you know, for years I would go to bars and sort of anyone I met who's name was Eric I was humping immediately, or something. (Laughter) And there were times when I was actually so desparate I would just, you know, walk into a room and just go like, Eric. And anybody who would turn around I would, sort of, make a beeline for. (Laughter) And I had this really interesting tarot reading a long time ago. The last card he pulled, which was representing my destiny was this guy on like a straw boater with a cane and you know, sort of spats and this, you know, a minstrel singer, right? I want to show you this clip because I do this kind of crazy thing where I do a cabaret act. So actually, check this out. Very embarrassing. (Video): Thank you. We can do anything you ask.
The name of the show is based on this story that I have to tell you about my mother. It's sort of an excerpt from a quote of hers. I was dating this guy, right? And this has to do with being happy, I swear. I was dating this guy and it was going on for about a year, right. And we were getting serious, so we decided to invite them all to dinner, our parents. And we, you know, sort of introduced them to each other. My mother was, sort of, very sensitive to his mother, who it seemed was a little bit skeptical about whole alternative lifestyle thing. You know, homosexuality, right? So my mother was a little offended. She turned to her and she said, "Are you kidding? They have the greatest life together. They eat out, they see shows." They eat out, they see shows. (Laughter) That's the name of the show, they eat out, they -- that's on my tombstone when I die. "He ate out, he saw shows," right?
So in editing these clips, I didn't have the audacity to edit a clip of me singing at Joe's Pub. So you'll have to, like, go check it out and come see me or something. Because it's mortifying, and yet it feels ... I don't know how to put this. I feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing, you know. And at least, you know, in my case, because if I just do one thing all the time, I don't know, I get very, very bored. I bore very easily. And you know, I don't say that I do everything well, I just say that I do a lot of things, that's all. And I kind of try not to look back, you know. Except, I guess, that's what staying up every night is about. Like, looking back and thinking, what a fool you made of yourself, you know. But I guess that's okay. Right? Because if you do many things you get to feel lousy about everything, and not just one, you know. You don't master feeling lousy about one thing. Yeah, exactly.
I will show you this next thing, speaking of costumes for operas. I do work with different choreographers. I work with Twyla Tharp a lot, and I work with Mark Morris a lot, who is one of my best friends. And I designed three operas with him. And the most recent one, "King Arthur." I'd been very ingrained in the dance world since I was a teenager. I went to performing arts high school, where I was an actor. And many of my friends were ballet dancers. Again, I don't know where inspiration comes from. I don't know where it comes from. I started making puppets when I was a kid. Maybe that's where the whole inspiration thing started from, puppets, right. And then performing arts high school. There I was in high school, meeting dancers and acting.
And somehow, from there, I got interested in design. I went to Parsons School of Design and then I began my career as a designer. I don't really think of myself as a designer, I don't really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer. And frankly, I don't really know what to call myself. I think of myself as a ... I don't know what I think of myself as. It's just that. (Laughter) But I must say, this whole thing about being slightly bored all the time that is what -- I think that is a very important thing for a fashion designer. You always have to be slightly bored with everything. And if you're not you have to pretend to be slightly bored with everything. (Laughter)
But I am really a little bored with everything. I always say to my partner, Marissa Gardini, who books everything -- she books everything and she makes everything happen. And she makes all the deals. And I always tell her that I find myself with a lot of time on the computer bridge program. Too much time on computer bridge, which is, you know, like that's so ... somehow, like, about ten years ago I thought that the most unboring place in the world would be like a TV studio, like for a day show. Some kind of day talk show. Because it's all of these things that I love all kind of in one place. And if you ever get bored you can look at another thing, and do another thing and talk about it, right?
And so I had this TV show. And that was a very, very, very big part of my process. Actually, could you roll the clip, please? This is one of my favorite clips of Rosie.
(Video) Isaac Mizrahi: We're back on the set. Hi there.
Rosie O'Donnell: Hello Ben.
IM: Look how cute she looks with this, just a slick back.
Man: Her mother says, "Delish!"
IM: Ah, wow, delish. All right. So now where should I position myself? I want to stay out of the way. I don't want to be -- okay. Here we go. Do you get nervous, Ashleigh?
Ashleigh: Doing what? Cutting hair.
A: Cutting hair? Never, never. I don't think there was ever a day where I cut hair I was nervous. You look so cute already, by the way. You like it? All right. Do you have a problem with looking cute? You want to look cute.
ROD: Of course I want to look cute. IM: Just checking, because some people want to look, you know, aggressively ugly.
ROD: No, not me, no.
IM: You read about all these people who have a lot of money and they have kids and the kids always end up somehow, like, really messed up, you know what I mean? And there's got to be some way to do that, Rosie. Because just because if you're fabulously rich, and fabulously famous, does that mean you shouldn't have kids, because you know they're going to end up getting messed up?
ROD: No, but it means that your priority has to be their well-being first, I think. But you have to make the decision for yourself. My kids are seven, who the hell knows. They're going to be like 14 and in rehab. And they're going to be playing this clip: "I'm such a good mother." My God, this is the shortest I've ever had.
IM: It looks good, yeah?
A: I was going to ask you, you hair --
ROD: No! It's all right -- go crazy.
IM: I feel like it needs to be a little closer down here.
A: Oh no, we're just staging,
ROD: We're just staging it.
IM: Are you freaking out? You look so cute.
ROD: No, I love it. It's the new me.
IM: Oh, it's so fabulous!
ROD: Flock of Rosie. Wooo!
So by the way. Of all the most unboring things in the world, right. I mean, like making someone who's already cute look terrible like that. That is not boring. That is nothing if it's not boring Actually, I read this great quote the other day, which was, "Style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you're going to die." Right? And then I realized, that was on my website, and then it said, like, you know, the quote was attributed to me and I thought, oh, I said something, you know, in an interview. I forgot that I said that. But it's really true.
I want to show you this last clip because it's going to my last goodbye. I'll tell you that I cook a lot also. I love to cook. And I often look at things as though they're food. Like I say, oh, you know, would you serve a rotten chicken? Then how could you serve, you know, a beat up old dress or something. How could you show a beat up old dress? I always relate things to kitchen-ry. And so I think that's what it all boils down to. Everything boils down to that.
So check this out. This is what I've been doing because I think it's the most fun thing in the world. It's, like, this website. It's got a lot of different things on it. It's a polymathematical website. We actually shoot segments like TV show segments. And it's kind of my favorite thing in the world. And it just began like in the beginning of February. So who knows. And again, I don't say it's good, I just say it's not boring, right? And here is the last bit.
Video: IM: I have to tell you, I make buttermilk pancakes or buttermilk waffles all the time.
Chef: Do you?
IM: Yeah, but I can never find buttermilk, ever.
Chef: Oh.
IM: You can't find buttermilk at Citarella; you can't find buttermilk.
Chef: You can't? IM: It's always low-fat buttermilk.
Chef: No, but that's all it is. IM: Is that all it is?
Chef: Oh, you don't know? Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something interesting.
IM: You know what? Stop laughing. It's not funny. Just because I don't know that whole -- that there's no such thing as whole buttermilk. Sorry, what?
Chef: Well, here's the deal. Let me tell you the deal. In the old days when they used to make butter, you know how you make butter?
IM: Churns?
Chef: For cream?
IM: Yeah, exactly.
Chef: So you take heavy, high-fat milk, which is cream, and you churn it until it separates into these curds and water. The liquid is actually that clear liquid. If you've ever overbeaten your whipped cream, it's actually buttermilk. And that's what it was in the early days. And that's what people used for baking and all sorts of things. Now, the buttermilk that you get is actually low-fat or skim milk.
IM: Excuse me, I didn't know. All right?
Chef: The reason he thought that is because buttermilk is so wonderfully thick and delicious.
IM: Yeah, it is, exactly. So who would think that it was low fat?
Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Happy TED. It's so wonderful here. I love it. I love it. I love it. Thanks. Bye.
Endgame: Challenging the Masters
Endgame: Challenging the Masters
This video describes the fifty-year quest to build a computer that can defeat the world chess champion. Keywords: Deep Blue, Kasparov, Computer History Museum, Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess, Artificial Intelligence, algorithm, heuristic, IBM, Ken Thompson, Murray Campbell, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, David Levy.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Ed Miliband: Time for Labour's New Genaration
Ed Miliband: Time for Labour's New Genaration
Chanel 4: Labour's new leader, Ed Miliband, pledges to lead a "new generation"
Transcript
Labour's new leader, Ed Miliband, pledges to lead a "new generation" which will "relish" the chance to take on David Cameron. Political editor Gary Gibbon says the speech did not sink - or fly.
In his speech to the party conference in Manchester, Mr Miliband said that - despite his similarity in age with Prime Minister David Cameron - he represented a new, optimistic political generation.
"A few days ago our contest came to an end and now the real contest has begun. I relish the chance to take on David Cameron," he said.
"We may be of a similar age but in my values and ideals I am of a different and new generation. The new generation is not simply defined by age but by attitude and ideals, and there is a definite difference between us and David Cameron. And that is optimism...
"We are the optimists in politics today, so let’s be humble about the past, understand the need to change, inspire people with the vision of a good society. Let the message go out - a new generation has taken charge of Labour which is optimistic about our country, optimistic about our world, optimistic about the power of politics. We are optimistic and together we will change Britain."
'Why are you clapping?'
He used the hour-long speech - coming just three days after he beat his brother to become the Labour leader - to distance himself from some of the policies of his party when in government - most notably declaring that the invasion of Iraq was "wrong".
The criticism caused some consternation in the conference hall.
In a moment captured by ITN cameras, Harriet Harman clapped Ed Miliband's criticism of the war, his brother David Miliband asked her: "You voted for it. Why are you clapping?"
Channel 4 News Political Editor Gary Gibbon said: "David Miliband's hands stayed firmly apart. His face tenses as Ed Miliband says the words then he looks down at Harriet Harman's hands and then says the words. Harriet Harman's remarks back to David Miliband aren't audible on the tape. But his words are. He doesn't look like a man who is going to hang around in the Shadow Cabinet to me."
Tonight the elder Miliband brother left Manchester to head back to London, further fuelling speculation that he would not throw his hat into the ring for the Shadow Cabinet elections before nominations close tomorrow.
Channel 4 News FactCheck probes Ed Miliband's speech: how did he do?
He didn't sink, he didn't fly
There were some tick-box lists of policies he feared omitting, there was
no rhetorical zest but that probably wouldn’t have worked with his more
conversational style. The jokes weren’t terrific but weren’t awful either.
He didn’t sink, he didn’t fly, writes Channel 4 News Political Editor Gary
Gibbon.
But given that most of the peope in the hall didn’t vote for him and
were gasping on Saturday as the results came up on the screen, he
turned some opinion in the room. The country will have to watch and
see what he really means to do (if anything) about top salaries being
too high. He thinks the Coalition will last 5 years and he has time to
explain … but first impressions can be powerful and hard to shift.
He’ll hope he’s done enough today to combat some attempts to
paint him as an extremist and keep voters’ minds open.
Read more from Gary Gibbon's blog on Ed Miliband's speech
Cheers for future
Ed Miliband won cheers when he pledged to pursue a living wage, but fewer when he said he supported voting reform and would vote "yes" in the referendum on the Alternative Vote.
He condemned the Coalition government's approach to cutting the deficit, but said he would not oppose the Coalition for the sake of it. He said he was prepared to take difficult decisions as Labour leader.
"When I disagree with the government, as on the deficit, I will say so loud clear and take the argument to them," he said.
"But when Ken Clarke says he will look at short sentences, I will not say he is soft on crime. When Theresa May says she will review stop and search, I will not say she is soft on terrorism. Our generation must find a new way of conducting politics."
Warning shot to trade unions
He also fired a warning shot to the trade unions whose votes propelled him to victory in the leadership contest, saying he would have "no truck" with irresponsible strikes.
But Len McCluskey - the man tipped as the next leader of the Unite union, which backed Ed Miliband in the leadership contest - was caught on camera mouthing "rubbish" at this comment.
He said his aim as leader was to make the Coalition a "one-term government".
"This will require strong leadership and it won't always be easy, you won’t always like what I have got to say, but you have elected me leader and lead I will," he said.
His speech - which began with tributes to the former Labour leaders, his family, and his brother - also tackled the "Red Ed' moniker he has attracted since his election.
"Come off it," he said, to cheers from the conference hall. "Let’s start to have a grown up debate in this country about who we are, what we believe and what kind of country we want to build."
Read our special report on the Labour leadership contest in full.
At best half an answer on what kind of leader Ed Miliband will be
Ed Miliband made a confident start to his leadership here in Manchester
but those who wonder quite what kind of leader he's going to turn out to
be got at best half an answer, former Labour party communications
director Lance Price writes for Channel 4 News.
It will be remembered as the optimism speech, one that offered
confidence and faith promises in a better future. For now he has
given little detail about how that future would look if he ever
became prime minister but there is time for that. He made a lot
of use of the "new generation" – too much in my view. Not just
because a lot of voters may feel excluded from it but because
it suggests he can do without the wisdom of more experienced heads.
He didn't take many risks in what he said, although it was the
first speech from a Labour leader in a very long time to praise
"the workers".
Read more from former Labour party communications director Lance Price on Ed Miliband's speech
New UK Wind Farm to Cost newlook
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New UK Wind Farm to Cost newlook.php.3B
Newsy coverage of UK offshore wind farm installation
Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
New UK Wind Farm to Cost newlook.php.3B
Newsy coverage of UK offshore wind farm installation
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Plannr is the up-to-the-minute, simple way to make plans with your friends.
Plannr is the up-to-the-minute, simple way to make plans with your friends.
LinkedIn Takes Groups To The Next Level With Likes, Follows And More
On the heels of reaching the 70 million member mark, professional social network LinkedIn is adding new functionality to its Groups feature on the site. Launched last August, Groups essentially allows anyone on the network to create an open forum around a specific subject or profession where users can comment and share news and information. Currently there are over 650,000 groups on LinkedIn, with the largest amassing 200,000 members (for an E-Marketing Association).
Today, Groups has undergone a bit of a facelift. LinkedIn has improved the look and feel of the Groups feature, making threaded conversations within groups similar to face-to-face professional interactions by removing the wall between original remarks and off-site content such as news articles. You can share links on Groups the same way you would on the homepage. And your profile picture will now be attached to any comment you make on a group, personalizing the experience.
You can also now roll over the images of the last three participants on any thread to see comment previews and click their profile pictures to jump to their part of the conversation. If you are new to the thread, you can easily view an entire discussion by clicking the discussion headline or “See all comments” link, which will tale you to the beginning of the discussion.
One of the significant changes in the the groups experience is the ability to curate new content and vote on shared content by liking and commenting on discussions with a “like” button. Content that is “liked” will be highlighted. You can also see who has liked a conversation to get a sense for topics that group members are gravitating toward.
Group members can now get email alerts when select members of a group participate by simply following a member within the group. The following feature was originally added to LinkedIn a few months ago. And LinkedIn will begin to highlight active group participants as “top influencers,” which designate the the member whose contributions stimulate the most participation from other group members.
LinkedIn’s principal product manager Ian McCarthy says that overall, Groups has been upgraded to be more engaging with users and a place where people can have conversations on the platform. The interface looks almost like a Facebook or FriendFeed, which isn’t surprising considering that LinkedIn has taken inspiration from other social networks for some of its features.
The network has been adding social features continuously over the past six months to broaden LinkedIn’s reach across the web, including adding a deeper Twitter integration, adding the ability to follow, and enhancing sharing options.
Terry Pratchett Lecture about Alzheimer's and assisted dying.
Richard Dimbleby Lecture from the Royal College of Physicians
Sir Terry Pratchett - Shaking Hands With Death
Orator: Tony Robinson
Category:
Education
Want to keep jobs in USA? Bridgelux' new LED light factory shows how
Here Bill Watkins, CEO of Bridgelux, celebrates the opening of its new fab, the first new fab to open in the San Francisco Bay Area in 25 years, he says. But listen to his other comments of how government can work to keep high-tech jobs in the US instead of letting them move to China.
open_house
Monday, September 27, 2010
Yapper: Your App Maker (for mobile)
There are a bunch of companies coming along that let you make mobile apps. Here's Yapper. What does it do differently from the others? Watch the video or visit http://yapper.sachmanya.com/ For one, they make apps for more platforms than their competitors.
Remarkable young entrepreneur helps small businesses manage their money: Indinero
When you meet Jessica Mah you are struck by a few things. For one, she's young. For two, she's smart and she's business astute. Where did that come from, I asked her, soon learning her parents were entrepreneurs. She talks to me about entrepreneurship (her company was one of 36 that were birthed by YCombinator this summer) as well as explains why she developed her company. http://indinero.com
WiseDame Wins The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, A Black Box For Real Life
This weekend, 450 or so developers descended upon the San Francisco Design Center to hack. The result? Some really cool/interesting/crazy stuff being made at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. On Sunday, it was time to present before our selection of judges: Cyan Bannister, Brett Bullington, Rebekah Cox, Chris Dixon, Bradley Horowitz, Dean Hovey, Michael Marquez, Christopher Poole, Joshua Schachter, and Mike Schroepfer.
After 86 60-second presentations on stage, the judges went backstage to pick the ones they felt put their time to best use last night (and/or gave the best presentation on little or no sleep).
The overall winner was WiseDame, an app that allows you to easily let people you care about know where you are. For example, perhaps you told your parents that you would be home at a certain time, but you’re going to be late for some reason, you’ll get a notification to let them know why. Perhaps your phone battery is dying and you’ll be forced off the grid — you can also send out a message to let someone know this so they don’t freak out when they can’t reach you.
This app was developed with women in mind — specifically, J’aime Ohm, the sole developer, viewed it as a “black box” recorder like they have in planes, but for real life. But you can easily see this idea being applicable in a lot of ways. (See our video with J’aime above.)
Congrats to WiseDame — they’ll get some time to present during TechCrunch Disrupt, which begins tomorrow.
Galapagos: Sharp Announces 5.5-Inch And 10.8-Inch Android Tablets (Video)
Galapagos: Sharp Announces 5.5-Inch And 10.8-Inch Android Tablets (Video)
by Serkan Toto on September 27, 2010
It took them a while, but now it seems Sharp is serious about entering the e-book and tablet business. The company announced “Galapagos”in Tokyo today [press release in English], with Galapagos being the (terrible) name both for Sharp’s cloud-based e-book service and two new Android devices supporting that service.
The smaller one, the “mobile type”, has a 5.5-inch LCD screen (1,024 × 600 resolution) that’s optimized for displaying paperback books (it will be available in red and black). It also comes with a trackball to scroll through pages.
The other model, the Galapagos “home type”, misses said track ball (you’ll turn pages just like you do on the iPad). It has a 10.8-inch LCD screen (1,366 × 800) for magazine content formatted across a two-page spread. By way of comparison: The iPad has a 9.7-inch LCD screen featuring 1,024×768 resolution.
Both Galapagos devices will have Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b/g) on board. Buyers will be able to surf the web, view “PC documents”, play games (via apps), and share comments and recommendations with other owners via a pre-installed “social app”. That’s the reason why Sharp, on its Japanese website, advertises the devices as “media tablets” – not just e-book readers.
The Galapagos e-bookstore service is scheduled to start in Japan in December. Sharp says that buyers of the reader can expect a total of 30,000 newspapers, magazines, and books at time of launch.
The company has yet to announce further details (more specs (which Android version?), prices, exact release dates, international availability). It expects to move about 1 million units next year. We’ll keep you posted.
Here is Sharp’s official promo video (it’s in Japanese, but that doesn’t matter that much in this case):
Getting my Mac pimped out with SSD, more RAM, big hard drive
I uploaded a YouTube video - Getting my Mac pimped out with SSD, more RAM, big hard drive
If you go down to Los Angeles, you can get EVERYTHING pimped out. Some people get pimped out cars, or motorcycles. Others get plastic surgery. But, if you are a geek, you'll want to visit MCE Technologies and get your Mac pimped out with a new SSD...
Getting my Mac pimped out with SSD, more RAM, big hard drive
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Jim Henson on Arsenio Hall
This is one of Jim Hensons last interviews. I finally found it after poring through hours of tape! Nice little visit by Kevin Clash and Clifford as well. That's CLIFF. ORD. You'll see.
Rove interviews Kevin Clash - Elmo
Obama Gets Blindsided
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Meet the Depressed | ||||
| ||||
So much for the screeners doing their job. Har.
Video – Unedited John Stewart Interview on the O’Reilly Factor
I found the interview to be a complete waste of time, nothing was said, nothing was learned , 20 min of one's life will never get back if you dare to watch.
The Disrupt Hackathon Movie (And Slideshow) TCTV
Picture this: late night coding, new and tenuous liaisons, the driving desire to create something great and just a dash of booze. No, I’m not talking about that movie, I’m talking about the pressure cooker that is TechCrunch Disrupt’s Hackathon.
With less than 4 hours until show time, the programmers, designers and entrepreneurs have been slaving away (or at least that’s the expectation) all night to make something stage-worthy and coherent. Starting at Sunday 11:00am EST, you can watch the frenzy as the teams deliver 60-second presentations in rapid-fire succession to our panel of expert judges. However, before we hurtle to the triumphant, disoriented end, let’s savor the blood, sweat and Redbull: please enjoy this trailer (sorry, I didn’t have time to find a creepy soundtrack). See video
If Stimulus Works, Why is Unemployment So High?
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. One of the big debates in the coming November elections is about the stimulus plan. Did it have any real effect? Was it just a waste of money? According to certain forces, the Republicans and libertarians and other economists, stimulus just doesn't work. The multiplier effect, they say, is a myth. And their proof? Well, just look at the unemployment numbers. The Obama administration thought or said that unemployment would be down around 7 percent by now. And we actually haven't seen much of a change. It's still hovering around 10 percent, the official rate. Unofficially, or at least if you include all the people who have given up looking for work, it could be as high as 20 percent. So does all that mean stimulus just doesn't work, and leave it to the private sector? Joining us now to talk about this idea is Bob Pollin. He's the codirector of the PERI institute, Amherst, Massachusetts. And he teaches there. Thanks for joining us, Bob.
ROBERT POLLIN, CODIRECTOR, POLITICAL ECONOMY RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Thank you. Happy to be on again.
JAY: So, again, you've written a paper called Austerity Is Not the Solution, and in that, if I understand correctly, you think stimulus is part of a solution. So what do you make of this argument, the proof is in the pudding, stimulus just didn't do anything?
POLLIN: First of all, you're obviously correct that the Obama administration did say that, okay, you guys, let's pass this stimulus, and by mid-2010, around now, unemployment's going to be around 7.5 percent. So that is the single strongest piece of evidence that the stimulus program failed. Obviously, the people that said that on behalf of Obama were engaging in a bit of happy talk. They of course didn't know that unemployment would really be down at 7.5 percent, and it was a mistake for them to have said it. But, anyway, that's that. Now, why hasn't the stimulus brought unemployment down? There's a bunch of factors, but let me just point to the two biggest ones. The first one is the magnitude of the recession and the financial collapse is so severe that basically we saw the evaporation of about $13 trillion in household wealth over the course of two years, over the course of the recession. And that was a loss of about 20 percent—households on average lost 20 percent of their wealth. Now, when you experience that level of wealth decline, you also then tend to stop spending money to the same extent. And some of the research tells us that, okay, for every $1.00 of wealth that you lose, you're going to spend about $0.03 to $0.05 less every year. And so, as a result of that $13 trillion evaporation in wealth, we would expect that households are going to spend about $300-400 billion less money. So that's almost half the size of the stimulus right there. So that's step one. Now, step two, okay, we can say, okay, that's ancient history; the wealth was just part of a bubble anyway, and now people are adjusting. Let's say that's true. Now, the second part is that the financial markets are completely locked up. Now, people say, okay, yes, but monetary policy's very, very loose. Yes, monetary policy is loose, in this sense that the Federal Reserve has set the interest rate, its policy interest rate (called the federal funds rate), at essentially zero. That means, though, that's a rate only at which private banks borrow among each other. So private banks can borrow and lend at basically free money back and forth, and they can get it from the Fed, basically, for free. The problem is that they're sitting on that money. The problem is they're now sitting on this unprecedented $1.1 trillion in cash reserves. That money isn't being injected into the economy.
JAY: Why?
POLLIN: Why? Well, because both on the parts of borrowers and lenders, they don't see the advantage, because the markets are so weak, so they don't see—well, why should I gamble, why should I risk my money in this lousy economy? So what—the notion that we have of very loose monetary policy is extremely misleading, because while we have a zero percent interest rate for banks, we have relatively high interest rates for business borrowers, especially small business borrowers. And so they don't see any advantage in borrowing money to put it into investments and hiring people. So the real thing that we need in addition to a fiscal stimulus is—I won't even call it monetary policy. Let's call it credit policy. It very aggressively lowers the risks for borrowers and lenders to get the money out there, and then taxes these what we could call excess reserves of the banks so they stop sitting on the money and start doing their job, which is to go out and find productive activities to lend money and to support people that want to invest and create jobs.
JAY: Well, if I was sitting on a several trillion dollar pile of cash, maybe another strategy would be, let's have austerity and let the economy crash and burn, and then I'll buy everything up for a song. So, in other words, stay liquid and preach austerity.
POLLIN: Well, yes. That is another option. That doesn't look like a very rosy option to me.
JAY: Well, it's pretty rosy if you're sitting on the three-quarters or a trillion dollars.
POLLIN: Yeah, yeah, but it's also a very high-risk option because, as we were discussing earlier, the austerity—. Look, nobody really knows, if we really go through austerity, like they're going through in Greece, that likely means deflation. Deflation means that the value of debts go up. That means it's harder for people to pay off their debts. That means we could spin into another financial crisis as a result of austerity. That is a very real possibility. Chairman of the Fed, Bernanke, is aware of that possibility—not that he necessarily knows what to do about it, but he's aware of it. So what you say is true. It's possible. But it carries extreme risks, and beside which it certainly doesn't benefit hundreds of millions of ordinary people that aren't sitting on $1 trillion.
JAY: I'm only speaking on behalf of my investment bank, 'cause we're sitting on so much dough. So let's break down the stimulus just a little bit more. A big piece of the stimulus went to state governments. And one of the arguments is is that maybe unemployment didn't come down further, but it would have been much worse, 'cause there would have been much bigger layoffs in the state governments and municipalities. I mean, is that true? But also the stimulus running out—aren't we about to then see that?
POLLIN: Yeah, absolutely true. Again I can cite my own employer right here, the University of Massachusetts. I was sitting on our university budget committee, and we were about to start layoffs. Then we got a $50 million check from the federal government, and that allowed us to prevent layoffs. Now, there wasn't any new hiring that was done. So you can say, well, wait a minute, the stimulus didn't do anything; where are all the jobs? Well, the jobs are this term that's become kind of a term of derision, jobs preserved, not jobs created. But those jobs that are preserved are real. Again, I know it firsthand from what went on at UMass. I know about people who were afraid 'cause they were about to lose their jobs and didn't lose them. Now, what we faced at UMass, and at hundreds of other institutions around the country like UMass with the money running out, is to come right back to that conversation we had two years ago and say, well, now is when we have to start the layoffs. And that's what's being experienced in state and local governments, and not just in those institutions but in the communities where those institutions reside, like right here in Amherst, Massachusetts, in western Massachusetts. We will start to see a downspinning of the economy if there are significant layoffs, if there isn't another stimulus to help get us out of this recession.
JAY: Now, part of the other argument about stimulus is tax cuts versus direct spending. I think 24 percent of the Obama stimulus of, what, $787 billion, 24 percent was in tax cuts. What is the argument, tax cuts versus direct spending, on creating jobs?
POLLIN: Well, you know, the problem right now with tax cuts is that both businesses and households, again, they're hard up, so if you give them a tax cut, yes, they'll have more money, but they're using the money to pay off their debts, which is okay. They're using the money to keep their homes, as opposed to going underwater and losing their homes—very important. Businesses are keeping the money to try to build up their reserves. All okay. But none of those things add up to more spending in the economy. So the strength of direct spending measures is that it is actually injecting spending for businesses into the private economy. And until we see evidence of major increases in the level of spending in the economy, then it's going to be very difficult to convince businesses to invest on their own. And what you'd need is that positive momentum where the government's spending, gives opportunities for businesses, creates jobs, and then that creates this positive image. And then the investor says, look, actually, things seem to be getting better; it's time for us to invest, time for us to expand. That's how you get out of a recession, including a severe recession.
JAY: So you're arguing for a bigger stimulus.
POLLIN: Well, I definitely think we need to continue the stimulus, and I think we should scale the level of the stimulus relative to the problem so that, for example, state and local governments today face about $100 billion in budget shortfalls. Now, either they are going to get the money from the federal government or they're going to retrench by $100 billion. So rather than, like, scaling the stimulus relative to GDP, let's say we can't let those $100 billion in cuts to state and local governments go through. The federal government has to continue to support them. Obviously, the result is political posturing around unemployment insurance. You can't let people who are unemployed, the ones who are suffering the consequences of Wall Street hyperspeculation, you can't let them bear the brunt of the crisis. At the very least, we have to continue unemployment insurance. So, again, the number is the number that's needed so that the unemployed people don't lose their benefits. Those are the ways that I think we calculate the level of the stimulus.
JAY: So in the next segment of our interview, we'll talk about another piece of this argument. Peter Peterson, a well-known billionaire who is one of the prime or leading advocates for austerity and getting the debt-to-GDP ratio into what he calls a more manageable amount, says that it's only a matter of time until other countries simply lose faith in the dollar, starting with China and the rest of the global economy; US loses its position as the reserve currency, which is a big advantage; and the whole thing starts to unravel. So join us for the next segment of our interview with Bob Pollin on The Real News Network.
Russia Renews Claim in 'Race for the Arctic'
pp
Russia Renews Claim in 'Race for the Arctic'
Newsy: Russia is renewing its claim to the resource-rich arctic following a 2-day conference in Moscow
Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
Russia Renews Claim in 'Race for the Arctic'
Newsy: Russia is renewing its claim to the resource-rich arctic following a 2-day conference in Moscow
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