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TEDxLong Beach@Bondi Beach, part 2
Session Six: Knowledge Revolution
Bill Gates was the guest curator for this session. By this point everyone at Bondi was also a bit more awake - after each talk, people actually applauded, as opposed to the earlier talks where we sat there quietly and still half-asleep the whole time.
David Christian (member of the history faculty at Macquarie University in Sydney, known for his series called Big Science)
* To be honest, I found this guy kind of boring. Either that or I was suffering a lot from my lack of sleep. So my summary of this one is a bit lacking.
* History is a story lasting 13.9 (?) billion years starting from the Big Bang
* There have been 6 thresholds reached over time to get to where we are now. The first ones were things like energy cooling enough to form matter, and heavier elements being made in stars.
* The two last thresholds were more interesting: the 5th threshold was the development of DNA, which allowed information to be stored over time, so that complexity was gradually able to increase.
* The 6th was, essentially, memetics (although he didn't call it that): the capacity of humans to store information collectively between ourselves, which allows for much faster evolution than DNA.
* I'm not really sure what the point of this talk was, unless it was a broad 'look how great and complex humans are' or something like that. I remember thinking that the whole talk seemed somewhat anthropocentric, and that humans aren't actually great enough to warrant a talk implying that we're the pinnacle of evolution.
* Overall: If you haven't done much pop science reading about cosmology and chemistry and the like, there's probably a lot here to interest you. To me, it didn't feel particularly insightful or inspiring. But that could have also been the result of sleep deprivation.
Amina Az-Zubair (Nigerian development worker)
* Nigeria has a population of 150 million, of which 80 million live in poverty.
* Nigeria was surveyed on a whole lot of benchmarks around 2000 or so, and did extremely badly: only about 50% had access to fresh water, only 10-20% had access to mosquito nets (for malaria prevention), textbooks were one between every five school children, most girls weren't even finishing primary school... and some others. Basically, it sounded pretty bleak.
* So they drew up a set of Millennium Development Plans, which is basically a set of goals they wanted to hit within the next ten years.
* They also asked for, and received, debt relief, which essentially meant that they had 10 billion dollars to play with each year that would have otherwise gone to servicing their debt. This money was then allocated towards the MDP's.
* The way things used to work in Nigeria involved rampant corruption at all levels. This time, the government vowed, it would be different. They were going to hit those goals. The political will was there.
* To do this they set up 30 or 40 NGO's whose job it was to make sure the money was being spent properly: eg. that contractors were actually doing the work they were paid for, that if a state said that it had spent 3 million on mosquito netting then that netting had actually made it into the stores, and so forth.
* One of the unexpected benefits of this was that some people started caring rather than treating it as 'business as usual'. For example, they paid a contractor to go to a remote area and sink a well, so that the people there would have access to clean water. But when he got up there, he discovered that there were way too many people to service with one well. So he chose to sink a second well there before he returned, where before a contractor like him would probably have just taken the money and disappeared without leaving even a single well. A teacher in charge of 150 kids or so went from leaving the class alone and fleeing to the market to staying and teaching after they were provided proper training in how to manage classes of that size.
* The state governments were stopped from corruption by putting money into bonds before the federal government would release any funds to them. So if it turned out that they didn't want to report on what they'd spent their funds on, or they lied about their spending, they were required to pay that money back. After this happened two or three times the others fell into line.
* Nigeria is now on track to meet all its MDP's.
*Overall: Very inspiring stuff, showing that intelligent use of resources backed up with a good attitude can make a huge difference.
Bruce Aylward (guy in charge of eradicating polio worldwide, works for the WHO)
* lots of people, including Jon Stewart, think that polio is eradicated or might as well be. They're wrong. It's still entrenched in parts of India and Nigeria, and has spread from there to cause cases in Russia and other random countries.
* Polio is much harder than smallpox to eradicate for a lot of reasons: smallpox infection is always visible while lots of polio infectees are just carriers, the vaccine isn't particularly effective and is especially ineffective in the hot climates where polio is most entrenched.
* on the plus side, polio is terrible at surviving outside the human body, so at least there's no risk of missing it through transmission to other animals, and previous attempts to eradicate it led to the complete eradication of one type of polio, leaving only two other strains to be vaccinated against.
* So the situation was that to eradicate polio they needed to vaccinate every single person in the hot spots, several times a year, using vaccines that weren't even very effective. They needed to do better.
* Due to repeated failures to eradicate polio in the past, a lot of people thought that we should stop trying to eradicate polio and settle for trying to control it.
* Progress they've made since then: using GPS tracking to make sure that their volunteers are reaching all the residences, collaboration with a biotech company to make a vaccine that was actually effective and could last in hot climates, and a few other innovations that will hopefully make a huge difference and finally allow polio to be eradicated.
*Overall: Another inspiring talk which can be summarised as illustrating the importance of not giving up
Salman Khan (former hedge fund manager who started up the Khan Academy, a free series of online lectures)
* It all started when he was tutoring his two cousins in maths, and he started making some videos as supplemental material. He uploaded them to youtube, not thinking much of it.
* His cousins then told him that they liked him better on youtube than in person. Rather than take offense at this, he thought about what it meant - that they liked being able to stop the video, rewatch parts that they didn't understand without feeling like they were wasting his time, skip ahead if they wanted, and all the other things you can do with video that you can't easily do with a real person.
* Then something else happened - his youtube videos started getting lots and lots of views
* He realised he was onto something, and dropped out of his job as a hedge fund manager to start the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to producing these free lectures. Now the lectures cover many levels of many different subjects, with dependency paths suggesting the next module to cover in that topic area.
* More recently, some schools have started using the Khan Academy in their classrooms - inverting the traditional classroom structure by assigning Khan Academy lectures for homework and getting the kids to do the exercises in class.
* Even more recently, another school has taken this even further and contracted Khan Academy to produce tracking tools, so that each student can progress at their own pace through the lectures and associated online exercises. Salman Khan then showed a giant spreadsheet, with students along one axis, topics along the other, and colours indicating whether the student had done that module or not and whether they'd had any trouble with it.
* Overall: Pretty cool stuff, and gets my personal vote for Most Useful Talk.
Bill Gates was the guest curator for this session. By this point everyone at Bondi was also a bit more awake - after each talk, people actually applauded, as opposed to the earlier talks where we sat there quietly and still half-asleep the whole time.
David Christian (member of the history faculty at Macquarie University in Sydney, known for his series called Big Science)
* To be honest, I found this guy kind of boring. Either that or I was suffering a lot from my lack of sleep. So my summary of this one is a bit lacking.
* History is a story lasting 13.9 (?) billion years starting from the Big Bang
* There have been 6 thresholds reached over time to get to where we are now. The first ones were things like energy cooling enough to form matter, and heavier elements being made in stars.
* The two last thresholds were more interesting: the 5th threshold was the development of DNA, which allowed information to be stored over time, so that complexity was gradually able to increase.
* The 6th was, essentially, memetics (although he didn't call it that): the capacity of humans to store information collectively between ourselves, which allows for much faster evolution than DNA.
* I'm not really sure what the point of this talk was, unless it was a broad 'look how great and complex humans are' or something like that. I remember thinking that the whole talk seemed somewhat anthropocentric, and that humans aren't actually great enough to warrant a talk implying that we're the pinnacle of evolution.
* Overall: If you haven't done much pop science reading about cosmology and chemistry and the like, there's probably a lot here to interest you. To me, it didn't feel particularly insightful or inspiring. But that could have also been the result of sleep deprivation.
Amina Az-Zubair (Nigerian development worker)
* Nigeria has a population of 150 million, of which 80 million live in poverty.
* Nigeria was surveyed on a whole lot of benchmarks around 2000 or so, and did extremely badly: only about 50% had access to fresh water, only 10-20% had access to mosquito nets (for malaria prevention), textbooks were one between every five school children, most girls weren't even finishing primary school... and some others. Basically, it sounded pretty bleak.
* So they drew up a set of Millennium Development Plans, which is basically a set of goals they wanted to hit within the next ten years.
* They also asked for, and received, debt relief, which essentially meant that they had 10 billion dollars to play with each year that would have otherwise gone to servicing their debt. This money was then allocated towards the MDP's.
* The way things used to work in Nigeria involved rampant corruption at all levels. This time, the government vowed, it would be different. They were going to hit those goals. The political will was there.
* To do this they set up 30 or 40 NGO's whose job it was to make sure the money was being spent properly: eg. that contractors were actually doing the work they were paid for, that if a state said that it had spent 3 million on mosquito netting then that netting had actually made it into the stores, and so forth.
* One of the unexpected benefits of this was that some people started caring rather than treating it as 'business as usual'. For example, they paid a contractor to go to a remote area and sink a well, so that the people there would have access to clean water. But when he got up there, he discovered that there were way too many people to service with one well. So he chose to sink a second well there before he returned, where before a contractor like him would probably have just taken the money and disappeared without leaving even a single well. A teacher in charge of 150 kids or so went from leaving the class alone and fleeing to the market to staying and teaching after they were provided proper training in how to manage classes of that size.
* The state governments were stopped from corruption by putting money into bonds before the federal government would release any funds to them. So if it turned out that they didn't want to report on what they'd spent their funds on, or they lied about their spending, they were required to pay that money back. After this happened two or three times the others fell into line.
* Nigeria is now on track to meet all its MDP's.
*Overall: Very inspiring stuff, showing that intelligent use of resources backed up with a good attitude can make a huge difference.
Bruce Aylward (guy in charge of eradicating polio worldwide, works for the WHO)
* lots of people, including Jon Stewart, think that polio is eradicated or might as well be. They're wrong. It's still entrenched in parts of India and Nigeria, and has spread from there to cause cases in Russia and other random countries.
* Polio is much harder than smallpox to eradicate for a lot of reasons: smallpox infection is always visible while lots of polio infectees are just carriers, the vaccine isn't particularly effective and is especially ineffective in the hot climates where polio is most entrenched.
* on the plus side, polio is terrible at surviving outside the human body, so at least there's no risk of missing it through transmission to other animals, and previous attempts to eradicate it led to the complete eradication of one type of polio, leaving only two other strains to be vaccinated against.
* So the situation was that to eradicate polio they needed to vaccinate every single person in the hot spots, several times a year, using vaccines that weren't even very effective. They needed to do better.
* Due to repeated failures to eradicate polio in the past, a lot of people thought that we should stop trying to eradicate polio and settle for trying to control it.
* Progress they've made since then: using GPS tracking to make sure that their volunteers are reaching all the residences, collaboration with a biotech company to make a vaccine that was actually effective and could last in hot climates, and a few other innovations that will hopefully make a huge difference and finally allow polio to be eradicated.
*Overall: Another inspiring talk which can be summarised as illustrating the importance of not giving up
Salman Khan (former hedge fund manager who started up the Khan Academy, a free series of online lectures)
* It all started when he was tutoring his two cousins in maths, and he started making some videos as supplemental material. He uploaded them to youtube, not thinking much of it.
* His cousins then told him that they liked him better on youtube than in person. Rather than take offense at this, he thought about what it meant - that they liked being able to stop the video, rewatch parts that they didn't understand without feeling like they were wasting his time, skip ahead if they wanted, and all the other things you can do with video that you can't easily do with a real person.
* Then something else happened - his youtube videos started getting lots and lots of views
* He realised he was onto something, and dropped out of his job as a hedge fund manager to start the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to producing these free lectures. Now the lectures cover many levels of many different subjects, with dependency paths suggesting the next module to cover in that topic area.
* More recently, some schools have started using the Khan Academy in their classrooms - inverting the traditional classroom structure by assigning Khan Academy lectures for homework and getting the kids to do the exercises in class.
* Even more recently, another school has taken this even further and contracted Khan Academy to produce tracking tools, so that each student can progress at their own pace through the lectures and associated online exercises. Salman Khan then showed a giant spreadsheet, with students along one axis, topics along the other, and colours indicating whether the student had done that module or not and whether they'd had any trouble with it.
* Overall: Pretty cool stuff, and gets my personal vote for Most Useful Talk.