Kristina Gjerde: Making law on the high seas

About this talk

Kristina Gjerde studies the law of the high seas -- the 64 percent of our ocean that isn't protected by any national law at all. Gorgeous photos show the hidden worlds that Gjerde and other lawyers are working to protect from trawling and trash-dumping, through smart policymaking and a healthy dose of PR.







Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as "Here be monsters." It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep.

We are talking about the high seas. The high seas is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stake holders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.

So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above -- that area in the darker blue. To me as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems we have to confront are that the current international laws -- for example, shipping -- provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simple goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the farther you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches twice the size of Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case.

So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: you can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify.

What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing on the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals -- scientists, conservationists, photographers and states -- were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed.

So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of go anywhere, do anything you want, we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 20009 when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection, but what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas age governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access, to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas.

Today we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm. And five showed up in the U.K. just recently.

But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer now floating on the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction -- but the vast majority is beyond -- to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area.

Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now, the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims, so anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, til recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately CAMLAR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime.

Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area -- potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round.

Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That's, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these world heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half the World Heritage Convention. But we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch.

So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 km in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators, it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hot spots. At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward."

But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space -- and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know -- someone needs to know -- where you are and what you're doing.

So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of caution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table -- if you will -- to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean basin-wide management. Out species are ocean basin-wide. Many of the deep sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean basin-wide. We need to understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean basin management regimes. That's, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so their like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization.

So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote.

So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas, one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all.

Thank you.

(Applause)

John Hardy: My green school dream

I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. I had a really hard time in school. In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. I ran away. I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali. And there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. It ruined my life -- (Laughter) "An Inconvenient Truth" and Mr. Gore. I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. It's a tiny, little island -- 60 miles by 90 miles. It has an intact Hindu culture. Cynthia and I were there. We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. We decided to give back locally.

And here it is; it's called the Green School. I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. The classrooms have no walls. The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. The desks are not square. At Green School, the children are smiling -- an unusual thing for school, especially for me. And we practice holism. And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world -- a whole world -- to live on. Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. So if this gentleman had have had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? Would he have had more possibilities in his life?

The classrooms have natural light. They're beautiful. They're bamboo. The breeze passes through them. And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. So we basically turned the box into a bubble. And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. The first one was called sanding, and the second one was called re-waxing. But since that happened, they own those desks. They know they can control their world.

We're on the grid; we're not proud of it. but an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two and a half meter drop on a river. When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. And you know what these are. There's nowhere to flush. And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water -- you're all really smart, just do the math. How many people times how much water. There isn't enough water. These are compost toilets. And nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. And they work; people use them. People are okay. It's something you should think about doing. Not many things didn't work. The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms, so we had some good ideas. We took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard.

Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. I met a father the other day, he looked a little crazed. I said, "Welcome to Green School." He said, "I've been on an airplane for 24 hours." I asked him, "Why?" He said, "I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. In August I'm bringing my sons." This was a great thing. But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. It's becoming a community. It's becoming a green model. We had to look at everything. No petrochemicals in the pavement. No pavement. These are volcanic stones laid by hand. There are no sidewalks. The sidewalks are gravel, they flood when it rains, but they're green.

This is the school buffalo. He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. All the fences at Green School are green. And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. Landscaping. We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. We dropped them gently in. We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field.

These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. They're part of the rice cycle. and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. This young man is picking organic vegetables. We feed 400 people lunch every day. And it's not a normal lunch; there's no gas. Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. The food is incredible.

Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. It's a school where you do learn reading -- one of my favorites -- writing -- I was bad at it -- arithmetic. But you also learn other things. You learn bamboo building. You practice ancient Balinese arts. This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. The kids love it. The mothers aren't quite convinced.

(Laughter)

We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local. What does local mean? Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese. And this was a really big commitment. And we were right. And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. The teachers are as diverse as the student body. And the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. A woman came from Africa with music. And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. The Green School effect -- we don't know what it is. We need someone to come and study it. But what's happening, our learning-different kids -- dyslexic -- we've renamed them prolexic -- are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. And all the kids are thriving.

And how did we do all this? On giant grass. It's bamboo. It comes out of the ground like a train. It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months. And three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. It's as strong and dense as teak. And it will hold up any roof. When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. The yellow box was called the administration complex. (Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it -- the heart of school. And that changed everything forever. It's a double helix. It has administrators in it and many, many other things.

And the problem of building it -- when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "What's this?" So we built big models. We had them engineered by the engineers. And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. It was chaos. And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building. And when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral green education. The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful.

Is this doable in your community? We believe it is. Green School is a model we built for the world. It's a model we built for Bali. And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build.

So, Mr. Gore, thank you. You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us.

Thank you.

Shimon Schocken's rides of hope

TALKS | TEDX
Shimon Schocken's rides of hope

About this talk

Computer science professor Shimon Schocken is also an avid mountain biker. To share the life lessons he learned while riding, he began an outdoor program with Israel's juvenile inmates and was touched by both their intense difficulties and profound successes.



Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. You can see fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. And here is another picture of them. Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders, spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes ride from here. Well, like everything in Israel. And I been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years. And by now, they've become a very big part of my life.

This story began four years ago. The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. And I told him, "Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country." And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut. And he told me, "This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. They are supposed to by locked up. They aren't supposed to be out at large." And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. And so two months later, we found ourselves at large -- myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project.

And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these -- Everything you see here is obviously in Israel -- as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. So we had a lot of this going on. I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties -- not because they were physically unfit. But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there, not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team. And I didn't know what to do.

Now let me give you an example. We're going down hill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jump up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. The he throws his helmet in the air. His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. They happened in places like this in the Judean Desert, 20 km away from the nearest road. And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "I'm not moving from here. Forget it. I've had it." Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous.

It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. At the beginning it was a disaster. I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. That's what they had all their lives. And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. So I would say, "Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on." "Go away you maniac, psychopath. Why would you bring us to this goddamn place?" And I would say, "Relax, Alex. Here's a piece of chocolate." And Alex would go, "Arrrrggg!" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry -- and after the rides also.

And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? He's a 17 year-old. When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and shipped him to Israel on his own. And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only -- the slums and the state prison, where he spend the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had.

I want to say a few words about vision. When I started this program four years ago. I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. It all of a sudden dawned on me in this project that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love, love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us -- the animals, the plants, the insects, love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss.

Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. Now I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

And one of these principles is focus. Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. So these are words like teamwork or endurance or even complicated concepts like resource allocation or perspective, a word that they don't understand. You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. It literally propels you upwards. That's what perspective is all about. Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. And that's how they develop self-esteem.

Now let me give you an example of how it works. You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. And you look up at the sky and through the clouds. You see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka -- that's where you're supposed to climb now -- and you say, "There's no way that I could possibly get there." And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. And you look down at Yokneam, everything is so small and tiny. And you say, 'Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. It's that big. I can't believe that I did it. And that's the point when you start loving yourself.

And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference. And these discussions can be extremely inspiring. In one of them, one of the kids once said, "When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea -- and he's talking about this spot here -- I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. We walked 120 km until we reached Sudan. This was the first place where we got some water and supplies." And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. And he says -- because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him. And he says, "And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. And only now," he says, I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it." Now remember when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.

And so perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements -- three, four, 5,000 years old. And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.

I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. Here's a picture I took last Tuesday -- less than a week ago -- and I ride with them tomorrow also. In everyone of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking this incredible landscape around me. And I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday and actually every Friday also, I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge.

Thank you.

(Applause)

How Technology is Distracting Students

TECHNOLOGY
Fast Times at Woodside High
How Technology is Distracting Students

The Price of a Smile

The Price of a Smile
Radiation Concerns With Dental Scan

Jean-Georges's Fried Rice

Jean-Georges's Fried Rice
Mark Bittman recreates the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten's fried rice, topped with crisp ginger and a fried egg.

Pop hits performed on PVC pipe organ

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/pop-hits-performed-on-pvc-pipe-organ/202zor39?from=sharepermalink


Pop hits performed on PVC pipe organ
This isn't your standard organ; it's played by slapping an open end of a pipe to produce the desired pitch.

Glitch Alpha Trailer

This game will be rather good: http://glitch.com

Credits: Editing by Kristel Schmidt, Music by Danny Simmons and everything else by the team at Tiny Speck.

100% Cellulosic Diesel Fuel from Algae

Cellulosic Diesel Fuel from Algae from Solazyme, Inc. on Vimeo.

Solazyme is proud to have created and now test-driven the world's first 100% cellulosic-derived diesel fuel from algae. Please join us as we celebrate this momentous occasion.

Angry Birds Peace Treaty

A historic moment for birds and pigs everywhere.
Taken from the Israeli comedy show 'Eretz Nehederet' ( A Wonderful Country).

Uncle Jay Explains - Outraged: Nov. 22, 2010

Audible recording interviewed............

Audible.com : METAtropolis: Cascadia Stars on Acting vs. Narrating




Audible.com : METAtropolis: Cascadia Stars on Creating Distinctive Voices




Audible.com : METAtropolis: Cascadia Stars on Environmental Themes





Audible.com : Thandie Newton For Colored Girls Interview

Esquire 雜誌

The story behind Storify, new real-time curation service

Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.

Let's say there's a news event, maybe an earthquake, and you want to collect all the interesting tweets for your friends or blog readers, how would you do it? Or, let's say all your family and friends were using Facebook and Twitter plus a bunch of other sites like Flickr and YouTube to capture your kids' first birthday party. How would you keep those all together?

Storify has the answer. Its system lets you curate, or tell stories, about what's going on in the real-time web. You can join tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook messages, YouTube videos, and more together into a "story" on Storify. Here the company's founders tell you why that's significant.
The story behind Storify, new real-time curation service

Hologram in Concert

Introductions…

The Tyranny of Soy Agribusiness in Paraguay

The Tyranny of Soy Agribusiness in Paraguay

Ben Dangl: President Lugo hasn't delivered on promises to the farmers who brought him to power, while transgenic soy farms expand



Transcript

JESSE FREESTON, PRODUCER, TRNN: In part one of our interview with author and journalist Ben Dangl, we discussed the conflicts between left-wing governments in South America and the social movements that helped bring them to power in the first place. One of these governments is that of the Patriotic Alliance for Change in Paraguay, an alliance of eight political parties whose leader, Fernando Lugo, won the presidency in 2008.

BENJAMIN DANGL, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: He's a former bishop. And he was elected on a platform to confront the country's soy-agro industry, military human rights violators from the dictatorship, and the right-wing infrastructure and institutions of the Colorado Party. The Colorado Party had been in power for 60 years. It was part of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship, which was one of many dictatorships around the region during the Cold War, and collaborated with each other to torture, kidnap, and murder political dissidents and maintain their power over the region. So when Lugo was elected, it was largely a victory against this nightmare of a dictatorship and the shadow the Colorado Party had over the country.
FREESTON: In a country of farmers, the Colorado Party had maintained one of the most unequal land distributions in the world. The BBC reported that when Lugo came to power in 2008, 2 percent of landowners controlled 70 percent of the land.
PRES. FERNANDO LUGO (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): In my first month as president, I will get comprehensive land reform.
DANGL: Many people were hopeful that he would transform the country and confront these institutions, but he hasn't shown the political will to do this. In Paraguay, one of the most powerful aspects of the economy is the soy industry. Soy in Paraguay largely goes to feed farm animals in Europe. And this industry is rapidly expanding. It's largely powered by Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Monsanto, and various Brazilian companies. Small farming communities, small farmers are having to migrate to the cities in a massive exodus from the countryside. They're doing this because of the repression they face from thugs hired by the soy owners, the terrible pesticides that are used in soy production that poison water sources, that kill livestock, that kill anything else but soy, and that create cancer, blindness, birth deformities among campesino farmers that are living side by side next to these seas of soy.
NICOLASA TRINIDAD, PEASANT FARMER (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): We've lost our health to the pesticides, and there are no hospitals, nothing.
ILSA CASTRO, PEASANT FARMER (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Women are the ones who suffer the most from extreme poverty. Women are without access to health care or education, and every day the poverty and discrimination is getting worse.
FREESTON: As it stands, more than 25 percent of Paraguay's arable land is taken up by genetically modified soy farms. Peasant farmers, or campesinos, have organized to oppose this lucrative industry.
DANGL: Dozens of campesinos has been murdered outright by paramilitaries hired by soy companies, in collusion with the police and the military of Paraguay. And campesinos have fought against this heroically, with direct action, blockading roads, occupying land, cutting down soy crops, defending their communities with machetes, and in solidarity with other communities. In spite of this, the expansion continues, the pollution continues. And Lugo has not only allowed for this expansion to continue, but he's repressed campesino sectors, like, for example, last spring calling a state of emergency in the Paraguayan countryside in the most socially powerful departments, where there's the most organizing happening. And in this state of emergency, which hasn't been called since the Stroessner dictatorship, this outlawed any kind of political meeting of any kind and prevented any of the kind of building blocks that make up the campesino movement from working.
FREESTON: This kind of repression isn't new in Paraguay. It was here in 1992 where lawyer and former political prisoner Martín Almada uncovered the famous terror files of the Stroessner dictatorship. The files revealed the extent of Operation Condor, the CIA's program of installing, supporting, and organizing a whole series of South American military dictatorships. The files documented the level of coordination amongst the dictatorships themselves that were responsible for the overthrow of numerous elected presidents, and thousands of murders, tortures, and kidnappings. The US government position is that it was necessary in order to stop the spread of communism. Others point to the benefits that accrued to US corporations in the form of the land, low taxes, and low wages that were guaranteed by military rule. At the same time, the US military was training many of the offending military leaders and a total of 60,000 Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas. That program remains operational today in Fort Benning, Georgia. But the US isn't the only foreign power that the region has to contend with.
DANGL: The analysis of campesinos largely looks to Brazil as the imperialism in their neighborhoods and their communities, the Brazilian soy farmers coming into the country and working against the self-determination of Paraguayan farmers. So when speaking about imperialism, they're usually talking about Brazil, not just—you know, instead of Washington. And this is a reality in Uruguay, in Bolivia, in Argentina, where the most powerful government in the region, the most powerful companies in the regions often come from Brazil.
FREESTON: Despite the relatively minor nature of his reform projects, President Lugo has been targeted for removal by the traditional elite and the Congress, which the opposition controls. He is currently facing demands for his resignation after he fired the commanders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force amidst fears of an impending military coup.
DANGL: Since Lugo's time in office, there have been many different rumors of coup attempts against him. None of them have played out. Lugo is also, unfortunately, sick with cancer right now. So there have been these various serious challenges that have faced his administration, both from the right, his health situation, and from the protests from the campesino sector. And I think that all these factors will contribute to the fact that he probably won't be reelected and may not even finish his term.
FREESTON: With so many farmers feeling abandoned, Dangl says that many have organized alternatives to the government.
DANGL: Families who are displaced by the pesticides, by the paramilitary violence, by the poverty of trying to work a small farm, arrive in cities penniless without any kinds of allies, often, and end up recycling cardboard from the streets to survive, and enter an oftentimes inescapable cycle of poverty and police criminalization, which is hard to escape. The Bañados, a poor neighborhood between the capital city and the river in Asunción, Paraguay, this has been expanding rapidly as more and more families leave the countryside. And one hopeful example in Paraguay of resistance to this poverty and exclusion is a certain neighborhood of the Bañados that has organized against the criminalization of their community, has worked to create their own health clinic, has worked as a kind of popular mayor's office to meet the needs of the community through years of organizing, and has—in spite of the negligence and repression of the Lugo administration, has worked to support small farmers there in the settlement, in the community, has worked to build trees to prevent flooding, because it's right next to the river, and has essentially worked, in the absence of the state and in the absence of a benevolent president, have worked to create a better society within this nightmarish scenario in Paraguay, and they've been successful. And there are many other examples around Paraguay and Latin America of people, when faced with these kind of challenges, working autonomously among neighbors, building close relationships over generations, and because of that, successfully building a better tomorrow and more opportunities for their kids and various generations.

Web 2.0 Summit 09: Sheryl Sandberg and John Battelle, "A Co

Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
"A Conversation with Sheryl Sandberg"

Web 2.0 Summit 09: Sergey Brin and John Battelle, "A Conversation with Sergey Brin"

Sergey Brin (Google, Inc.),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), "A Conversation with Sergey Brin"

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Pincus, "Playing for High Stakes in the New App Economy"

Mark Pincus (Zynga),
"Playing for High Stakes in the New App Economy"

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Evan Williams, "A Conversation with Evan Williams"

Evan Williams (Twitter, Inc.),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
"A Conversation with Evan Williams"

State of cloud from Citrix CTO of cloud

Simon Crosby is the CTO for Citrix’ cloud business. Don’t know what he runs? Citrix’ Xenserver is underneath Rackspace Cloud, OpenStack, as well as Amazon’s S3. In other words, Crosby sees the infrastructure that runs the most important cloud infrastructures. Here Robert Scoble sits down with him for a long talk about what he’s seeing. Some things that come out in this 37-minute talk?
1. Enterprises live on apps, and those apps need to run both as apps on desktops, but increasingly as SaaS apps running on cloud.
2. iPads and iPhones are really hammering at IT departments to get them to change their practices.
3. The importance of open source and open approaches, compared to VMware and other approaches.
4. How businesses will get into the API world, which enables more apps like Siri.
5. The enterprise’s biggest challenge? Security.
6. 3.5 million desktops have been virtualized in past few quarters, which lets IT departments be more secure, even with laptops that can get stolen and/or lost.
7. He lashes out at VMWare, saying it’s a “factor of 10″ more expensive than Citrix-based clouds.
8. Why Citrix is working with OpenStack and NASA to support opensource-based clouds.
9. How Citrix sells via different channels, direct to enterprise for some, through service providers, for others.
10. What he expects in 2011 in enterprise adoption of cloud technologies and how Apple is disrupting the enterprise. 40% of Citrix’ employees are bringing their own devices to work “incredible savings.”
11. What should developers pay attention to.
12. What mistakes enterprises are making when they get into cloud.
13. How OpenStack changes the world.

poll - apps

Post Web 2.0 Summit reaction from Appbistro

Make better Facebook pages with Appbistro's app store

If you are running a business, or celebrity site on Facebook you probably are familiar with Facebook Pages: the public pages that are different from most people's Facebook Profiles.

Tokyo Sky Tree [Tōkyō Sukai Tsurī - 東京スカイツリー]

Tokyo Sky Tree [Tōkyō Sukai Tsurī - 東京スカイツリー]: Tokyo Sky Tree -- a broadcasting, restaurant, and observation tower under construction Tokyo's Sumida ward -- will stand 634 meters (2,080 ft) tall when completed in late 2011, making it the tallest artificial structure in Japan.

I love stop motion by chloe fleury

I love stop motion from chloe fleury on Vimeo.

美國量化政策 讓我的鈔票越變越薄！

商業周刊1199期：再見，鈔票！

See more presentations by bwnet | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

這是美國聯準會主席柏南奇的一場豪賭，賭注則是你我手中的鈔票。

聯準會公布新一波量化寬鬆政策，以避免美國陷入通貨緊縮，並刺激消費和就業，把錢從債券市場趕到股市。但對身處於經濟成長相對快速的亞洲來說，柏南奇卻是為我們創造了極大的通膨壓力。

現在「現金不再為王」，如果不將財富做任何處理，通膨怪獸很可能會吃掉你的鈔票！在聯準會瘋狂向全世界吐出美元之際，唯一能給你手中鈔票上漲保護的，就是要找走勢與美元相反的投資標的。

暴雪總裁麥克．默罕：學會說「不」，才能磨亮點子

默罕強調，因為不可能做所有的事，「你必須要找出真正重要的事情，排出順序，讓事情持續簡單，越久越好。」







暴雪娛樂總裁麥克．默罕回憶創業初期，「我們的開發人員很少，不可能做所有的事，我們必須說很多『不』。」然而，「我們發現，那些我們說不的決定，讓我們能聚焦在其他事情上，提升了整個遊戲的品質。」

對大部分的點子說不，只專注在很少的點子上，並把點子磨到最亮才出手，讓暴雪得以用最好的遊戲品質，擄獲全球玩家的心。

Coachelletta

Coachelletta from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, 2010. This is the vocal cut - check out coachella.com for the original. Please view in HD and full screen for best effect. I talk a little more about the project here: bit.ly/​d5d4yk

Original music by Human (humanworldwide.com)
Composer: Matthew O'Malley
Lead Vocal: Alexx Calise
Music Producer/CD: Mike Jurasits
EP: Marc Altshuler

Copy of Compensation by Charlene

Copy of Compensation on Prezi

Playbook

Ron Paul Blasts TSA and Introduces Legislation

I’d like to see who does not support this Bill. They should be targets to be voted out of office.

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: "Point of Control: Finance"

John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers),
Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) ,
John Heilemann (New York Magazine),
"Point of Control: Finance"

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Eric Schmidt, "A Conversation with Eric Schmidt"

Eric Schmidt (Google),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.),

"A Conversation with Eric Schmidt"

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, "A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook),
Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.),
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing),
"A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg"

Katherine Savitt Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010

Katherine Savitt is the Chief Executive Officer and a director of Lockerz, LLC, a website offering social network, entertainment and commerce for 13-30 year olds. Formed in 2009 with 50 members, the invitation-only site has rapidly grown to 14 million members in 195 countries. Before founding Lockerz, Savitt was Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. from March 2006 to January 2009, where she led both the global marketing efforts of the company's four brands as well as the digital and ecommerce businesses for the Corporation. Prior to joining American Eagle Outfitters, Kathy served as Vice President of Strategic Communications, Content and Entertainment Initiatives of Amazon.com from 2002 to February 2006, and also served on Jeff Bezos' S-team (senior management committee). From 1993 to 2002, Kathy served as President and co-Founder of MWW/Savitt, an integrated marketing communications and public relations firm. Kathy has extensive senior leadership experience with retail, e-commerce, content and social media businesses and, in addition to being a Lockerz director, currently is a member of the Board of Directors of Vitamin Shoppe, Inc. and Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Adam Lashinsky Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010

Adam Lashinsky covers Silicon Valley and Wall Street for FORTUNE. He has been on the magazine's staff since 2001, and for two years before that was a contributing columnist. In addition, he is a weekly panelist on the Fox News Channel's "Cavuto on Business" program on Saturday mornings, and he appears frequently on other Fox News and Fox Business Network programs. He also co-chairs FORTUNE's annual technology conference, Fortune Brainstorm Tech, and is a seasoned speaker and panel moderator.

Lashinsky's articles focus on finance and technology. Recent cover-story subjects have included Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Google. He also has written in-depth articles on Wells Fargo, Intel, Oracle, eBay, Twitter, the venture-capital industry, and the post-Katrina economic recovery of New Orleans.

Prior to joining FORTUNE, Lashinsky was a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News and TheStreet.com. Before moving to California, he was a reporter and editor for Crain's Chicago Business. As a Henry Luce Scholar, he also worked for a year in Tokyo as a reporter for the Nikkei Weekly, the English-language version of Japan's main economic daily. He began his career in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Crain Communications.

A native of Chicago, Lashinsky earned a degree in history and political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Cyriac Roeding Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2010

Cyriac Roeding is the Co-Founder and CEO of shopkick Inc., focused on bridging the mobile and the physical retail worlds. shopkick's first mobile application CauseWorld turned into the fastest-growing and one of the largest mobile retail applications on the iPhone App Store and on Google Android within weeks after launch. shopkick was funded in 2009 by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), as part of its "iFund," in cooperation with Apple, and by Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn and investor in Facebook. Previously, Roeding spent a year at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence to identify next-generation cross-platform mobile and online venture concepts. Prior, Cyriac was Founder and EVP of CBS Mobile. He launched CBS Corporation's (NYSE: CBS) mobile businesses across CBS Entertainment, CBS Sports, CBS News and the CW Network. In partnerships with technology start-ups, he created U.S. industry firsts such as location-based mobile advertising, mobile video breaking news and sports alerts, and avatar-based mobile games tied to major TV shows. He grew CBS Sports Mobile into one of the Top Ten highest traffic ad-supported mobile websites in the U.S.; created the first virtual reality video gaming experience across TV, online and mobile with "CSI: NY"; and launched the first Alternate Reality Game with full primetime TV drama episode (Numb3rs) and outdoor billboard integration.

Prior to CBS, Cyriac was the Co-Founder of 12snap, a European mobile marketing and entertainment company with clients such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, L'Oreal, adidas and MTV Europe. Before that, he developed growth strategies at McKinsey & Company for global media, software and high-tech players in Europe and in Silicon Valley.

Cyriac has received several industry honors, including the first Lion Awards for mobile concepts at the Cannes Lion Festival in France (in 2003 and 2004). In 2007 and 2008, Cyriac and his team received the only Emmy Award nominations for Mobile. For 2007, he was elected as Global and North American Chairman of the MMA, with 600 member companies worldwide. Cyriac received a master's degree summa cum laude in engineering and business administration from Germany's Technical University of Karlsruhe, and studied Japanese management at Sophia University in Tokyo.

A Conversation with Robin Li, Chairman & CEO, Baidu

A Conversation with Robin Li, Chairman & CEO, Baidu

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(4.40, 5 ratings)
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Moderated by:
John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing)
Panelists:
Robin Li (Baidu, Inc.)
5:00pm Monday, 11/15/2010
Location: Grand Ballroom




John Battelle
Federated Media Publishing
John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, 2005).

Web site

Robin Li
Baidu, Inc.
Robin Li is the co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu, Inc., and oversees the company’s overall strategy and business operations.

In the nine years since founding Baidu in January 2000, Robin has turned the company into the largest Chinese search engine, with over 70% market share, and the third largest independent search engine in the world. In 2005, Baidu completed its successful IPO on NASDAQ, and in 2007 became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 Index.

Prior to Baidu, Robin was already regarded as one of the world’s top search engine experts. His hyperlink analysis, patented in 1996, is among the inventions that shaped today’s search engine technology. Robin worked as a staff engineer for Infoseek, a pioneer internet search engine company, from July 1997 to December 1999, and as a senior consultant for IDD Information Services from May 1994 to June 1997.

Robin received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Management from Peking University in 1991, and a Master of Science Degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994.

ART - friendship & art

CCTV-【新闻1+1】"可怜"的孩子！～"我爸是李刚！"

Gravity introduces system that studies your social interests

We built Gravity to help the right information find you.

Today, we live in a world in which we’re constantly bombarded by information: 90 million tweets per day, 35 hours of video uploaded per minute, 1.6 million blog posts per day and an average of 130 friends demanding our attention. With so much information being created on a daily basis, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for and impossible to know what you’ve missed.

Our answer is the Interest Graph: an online representation of your real world interests and a new lens through which to view the internet. Your Interest Graph is your own personal electromagnet. It pulls the best stuff to you based on your interests and leaves all the noise at a safe distance where it can’t distract you. We build your Interest Graph by analyzing social data (like tweets, retweets, status updates, likes and shares) to create a holistic picture of who you are and what you’re interested in. When you click personalize on a site that uses Gravity, your electromagnet gets activated and the right information starts flowing your way. We connect you with content, people and advertising based on the probability that you’ll love it. It’s about helping the right information find you.

With our platform, any website will be able to tap into Gravity's Interest Graph and enable personalized experiences for their users.


Technology
Overview

If you want to geek out on the inner workings of Gravity, read on. If you’re looking for a more simple description of what Gravity is, head to About Gravity.

Your experience on the web should reflect who you are. We call this the personalized web and we’re developing technology to make it happen.

In theory, it’s a simple idea. In practice it’s challenging to implement, a pain in the neck to collect the right data, and near-impossible to do something useful and fun with the data… but that’s our plan. Why embark on such a challenging endeavor? We think personalizing the web will make user experiences more interesting and more fun.

Two big things are needed to deliver a personalized web experience. First, you need to index the web and tag everything. You need to know what websites, content, media, products, ads, etc. are out there and what topics and interests they cover. Second, you need to create an interest graph for each person. You need to understand what people are interested in and how interested they are. Combine a rich web index and an interest graph and you can do some pretty interesting things, like filter the web based on a person’s interest.

At the heart of Gravity is a semantic engine that extracts interests from any source of information. The engine is used to understand the web and the people interacting with it. It enables us to classify information with our web ontology, to build interest graphs and to deliver a variety of personalized web experiences. We’ve filed several patents related to our technology and its application to building interest graphs and enabling the personalized web.
Semantic Engine

The basic function of the semantic engine is to take a blob of text and figure out what it’s about — like what you’re brain does when you read a newspaper article.

The first step to is to analyze the blob. We use natural language processing (NLP) extensively. Instead of simply identifying keywords, our semantic engine analyzes a variety of linguistic and statistical factors. The output of our analysis is highly structured data that contain the key characteristics of the blob — sort of like a sample of the blob’s DNA.

The next step is to compare the blob’s DNA to a DNA database; our DNA database is our dynamic web ontology. The goal is to match the DNA of the blob to DNA signatures of topics in our ontology. Your standard blob of text (a sentence) will typically generate several matches. A paragraph or page of content may generate hundreds of topic matches.

Finally, we use a modified convergence algorithm to convert a list of topic matches to a handful of interests. Our algorithm prioritizes interests based on the number of topics related to an interest and the average distance and the strength of the relationship between each topic and the interests.

That’s it. Like we said, the engine takes a blob of text and figures our what it’s about.
Web Ontology

The web ontology is our DNA database. It’s actually a data graph (not a database), which does an excellent job at representing relationships between data and lends itself to graph traversal algorithms. Our ontology has 7+ million topical nodes, further augmented by metadata we’ve created or sourced from other web services. Gravity’s semantic engine uses the dynamic web ontology to match the signature of unidentified text blobs to the signatures of known topics.

Our web ontology is built on top of Wikipedia, DBpedia, Yago and OpenCyc. These resources give our ontology its basic structure, including relationships between topics. Next, we mine the open web for topical content and related social data and map this content to the ontology — thus creating a web ontology. The web ontology is different from a normal ontology in that it’s augmented with linguistic, statistical and other metadata extracted from the web. This metadata provides the basis for the DNA signatures of topics in our database. We’ve crawled terabytes of data from major publishers, blogs, forums and other public sources of information to create the most accurate DNA signatures possible.

We built our web ontology to be adaptive over time. One of the most powerful aspects of open sources resources like Wikipedia is crowd-sourced human curation. We used a combination of human and algorithmic curation to enable our ontology to grow and adapt as the world evolves.
The Theory Behind the Interest Graph

The interest graph is an online representation of your real-world interests and a new lens through which you can play with the web. We want your interest graph to become your personal filter for the web and to help you to discover content, ideas, people, events, products and services that you’ll like.

Building an interest graph is an iterative process. Instead of just asking you what your interested in, we start by pull in information about you from the web (this might include your tweets, status updates, things you’ve liked or shared, blog articles you’ve written, or information form your profile on social networks). We use our semantic engine and dynamic web ontology to comb through your information and to identify potential interests. Our convergence algorithms reduce all your potential interests to the most meaningful ones and enable us to establish preliminary interest intensity.

Once we’ve created your initial interest graph, we give it a life of its own. Your interest graph changes dynamically over time as you interact with Gravity powered services, change your presence on the web, or makes changes to your interest graph directly. For example, we might add legos to your interest graph because of several recent tweets related, but maybe you don’t really like legos. You’ll always have an opportunity to remove interests or reduce your level of attachment.