Michael Fitzgerald:
Good afternoon.
Thanks for being here with us.
I have to tell you when that
pulsing bass first started I
thought, "Is that my heart?"
[Laughter]
Because I'm very excited to be
here and to get the chance to
introduce to you a number of
catalyzers and to talk about
this idea of catalyzing the
world around us, and the
organizations that we're in and
to deal with problems and
create great new things.
You know, catalysts -- I
thought about what a catalyst
is, and obviously, you know, it
makes chemistry kits a lot more
fun to have catalysts in them,
but I think in life, we have
people who drive change and
become catalysts for new kinds
of ideas, for changing
situations that are
troublesome, for no longer
accepting the status quo.
And what we're going to get to
see today are four people who
have, in their own ways, been
catalysts but have also helped
to create other catalysts.
And we're going to
hear from them.
In order, we're going to start
with someone who has changed
really the nature of publishing
and also shown us what it takes
for humans to exceed their own
wildest expectations, how that
happens, how it comes about,
and especially in context
of how we react to crisis.
We're also going to see someone
who has worked for 20 years --
more than 20 years -- to bring
together something that was
thought almost impossible at
the beginning, doing it in a
large-scale way across multiple
geographies, working with
sometimes thousands of people,
and in the end sort of getting
his arms around all this chaos
and helping to bring us
something new that is going to
take us into places that
we can barely imagine.
We'll also have someone who
really studies and thinks about
the kinds of tools that help
create change, that
galvanize society.
And we'll have someone, as
well, who has been, in
multiple ways, a catalyst.
And so it's just -- for me,
it's extremely exciting to
sort of be able to do this.
We're going to start with
Sebastian Junger, who is
probably familiar to almost
everyone in this room as the
author of "The Perfect Storm"
which catalyzed our language
and galvanized publishing,
creating this -- when he
published that book and the
reaction to it, it swept
through book publishing, at
least, and created this just
almost insane amount of demand
for narrative nonfiction
stories about real people
and real situations.
And really, the market
in publishing has not
been the same since he
published that book.
And I think part of the reason
why is that what he gets at in
that book and in his --
certainly in his new book
"War," he gets at the kind of
bonds that humans form in
circumstances that take them
through almost impossibly
difficult situations.
He looks at people in crisis
and he's able to sort of show
us all how we respond to crisis
successfully, and then we can
kind of, we hope, go back and
apply that in some small way in
our own lives or in our
own organizations.
So Sebastian is going to come
up, but first I'm going to
show you a brief movie.
[Movie played]
[Applause]
Sebastian Junger:
Thank you very much.
It's a real pleasure
to be here.
That was the trailer for a
movie that my partner, Tim
Hetherington, and I shot,
directed, and produced that's
been out for the past couple
months in the United States,
and if you're interested, it
may be playing in a city
near where you live.
That movie was shot in
the Korengal Valley of
eastern Afghanistan.
I spent a year, off and on,
there with Tim with a small
platoon in a small outpost.
They were in almost
500 firefights during
their deployment.
A fifth of all the combat in
all of Afghanistan while they
were there was taking place in
that six-mile-long valley.
I'm a journalist.
Specifically, I'm
a war journalist.
One of the things I cover -- I
realized, as I started thinking
about this talk I was going
to give, one of the things I
cover in my job is catalysts.
There are social and political
factors that cause wars that
can simmer for decades and be
ignited literally
in an afternoon.
One of my jobs -- one of the
things I do in my job is to
explain how that catalyst
worked or try to predict when
it's going to happen again.
It happens all the time.
There's a tax on tea and
suddenly the colonies are
rebelling against the
English government.
An airplane is shot down over
Rwanda with the president in it
and suddenly there's three
months of genocide that kill
almost a million people.
That kind of event that
precipitates a long-standing
problem is exactly what
I cover in my job.
It affects me personally.
I was in Liberia once during
the Civil War in 2003 and the
rebels were advancing on the
capital and the Charles Taylor
government -- it wasn't even a
government, really -- were
convinced that America was
backing the rebels, and I was
the only American
in the country.
I had come in kind of randomly
during a time of peace and then
suddenly the rebels attacked
and Charles Taylor, when --
While I was there, George Bush
declared that Charles Taylor
was a war criminal and could
not travel the world freely
and would be brought to
the Hague, if caught.
And that afternoon my
life was in danger.
It was the right thing to
say by President Bush.
It was true.
But suddenly I was accused of
being an American spy and
I had to -- I was actually
kicked out of the country.
I was dragged into a basement
detention center, interrogated.
The U.S. embassy, which was
getting mortared at the time,
intervened and so they kicked
me out of the country.
I couldn't get out because
rebels had surrounded
the capital and so
I went into hiding.
That statement by President
Bush was the catalyst for
something that almost ended
very, very badly for me and
remains -- for all the footage
that you saw there, remains
probably the most terrifying
experience of my life.
The way I understand catalysts
is that basically -- I mean, as
a journalist, I focus on
catalysts in the social
world, the political world.
I'm not a chemist, obviously.
The catalysts take a --
basically a sort of sea
of potential and they
convert it into energy.
You know, you light a match in
a kitchen with a gas leak and
that match is the catalyst
for an explosion.
Someone shouts an accusation
during a mob, a lynch mob, a
riot -- that happened to me
once in Liberia -- and suddenly
a mob turns into a lynch
mob and people get killed.
It can be one sentence.
Planes fly into buildings.
That's a catalyst.
In my job, catalysts can
produce a lot of good and a
lot of bad, and often both.
And I think it's very
interesting to watch the events
following 9/11 still unfolding,
watch to sort of see the bad
and the good compete
with each other.
One human reaction to
catastrophe is to group
together and help one another.
Another reaction is to become
extremely defensive and
paranoid and ready to kill.
They both happen.
I've seen it in wars over
and over and over again.
Tremendous examples of courage
and generosity side by side
with incredible acts of
violence and hatred.
Political and religious leaders
all act as catalysts for what I
think of as the sort of endless
human capacity for both
violence and for generosity
and collective action.
Successful political
leaders are catalysts.
The ones who are not successful
fail to become catalysts.
That's why they're
not successful.
I'm going to tell
a brief story.
I think no discussion on
catalysts is complete without
a story about a bar fight.
[Laughter]
When I was a young man, I
was traveling in Spain.
My dad grew up in Spain --
Spain and France -- and I've
been back there many times.
And I was in Pamplona during
the festival, the running of
the bulls, and, you know,
basically you're out all night
and you go to sleep at about 7
a.m. after they run the bulls
and you wake up in the
afternoon and --
I mean, at least that's
what you do if you're 22.
And I wound up with some
really nice young Spanish
guys, a couple of guys.
One of them -- I mean, they had
had quite a lot to drink, and
one of them was wearing a
plastic Viking helmet sort of
askew on his head, and we --
they were just friendly
and we started talking.
We were in a bar.
In walked three very
tough-looking Moroccan
guys, and spoke French.
My friends spoke Spanish.
And one of the Moroccan guys
walked up to the my -- the guy
with the Viking helmet, grabbed
it off his head, and said in
French, "That's my helmet.
You stole it from me."
I'm the only person who speaks
both languages so now I'm,
like, a U.N. translator in
the middle of a bar fight.
So I'm explaining everything.
The Spanish guys grab
the Viking helmet.
The other two Moroccan guys
grab the Viking helmet and
I'm trying to translate
and avoid a bar fight.
And I'm thinking in my
mind, "How long --
what's the protocol?
How long do you have to know
a guy before you really are
obligated to back him
up in a bar fight?"
[Laughter]
Like I'm hoping years.
Maybe -- maybe months.
[Laughter]
If it's an hour, I'm
in trouble, right?
So I'm trying to
negotiate this.
It's getting uglier and uglier.
Everyone else backs away.
And then suddenly, they're all
pull -- they haven't started
hitting each other yet,
but that's coming.
They're pulling at the Viking
helmet and they're all
cross-eyed drunk, right?
They're pulling at it and the
helmet, the thing they're
fighting over, starts to rip.
The only thing that could have
gotten these guys to stop was
that they were destroying
the thing they were
fighting over, right?
Of course.
So "Stop, stop, stop!"
And one of the Spanish guys
yelled, you know, (speaking in
Spanish) and then he came to me
and he said, in this sort of
elegant Spanish way, "Do you
promise -- will you take
my place at the helmet?"
I was like, "Okay."
So I -- he said, "Do you
promise to defend the helmet
upon your ancestors,"
blah, blah, blah.
[Laughter]
And I said, "Yes," et cetera.
So he went and got the biggest,
cheapest jug of red wine that
he could from the bartender,
screwed the top off, and -- in
that bar at that time, you
could just buy big bottles
of wine from the bartender.
It was no problem.
So he came over and he filled
the Viking helmet with red
wine up to the brim, till
our fingertips were red.
And then he put his
hand underneath it.
And I think the only thing that
would have been worse for these
five guys, worse than
destroying the helmet, was --
would be spilling
red wine, right?
[Laughter]
So he puts his hand under
the helmet and he says,
"Now, everyone let go."
And we all let go and he gave
the helmet to the leader of
the three Moroccan guys and
said, "You drink first.
You're our guests.
In this country,
you drink first."
And he drank from the helmet,
passed it to his friends, went
around the circle, went around
again, filled up again with
more red wine, finished the
bottle, got another
bottle of red wine.
Half an hour later, the helmet
is, like, forgotten under a
table and they're just passing
the bottle of red wine around
and like an hour after that,
they're all best friends.
They can't understand each
other at all but they're so
drunk that it doesn't matter.
[Laughter]
You can see in that story the
hallmarks of human society.
You can see tribal affiliation.
You can see the defense of
resources and territory.
You can also see the incredibly
deep satisfaction of
the human connection.
That guy, that helmet, was a
catalyst -- threatened to be
a catalyst for violence.
It also became a catalyst
for human connection.
They're so close
those two things.
Human society -- we evolved
from the higher primates.
And we evolve from a system
where dominance -- there were
groups controlled by dominance.
Dominance hierarchies.
As language developed, that
system of controlling
the group broke down.
Before language -- I mean, just
on a very crude level, if
you're the biggest ape in the
group and there's no language
so no one else can form an
affiliation to confront you,
you basically call the shots.
And, as soon as you have
language, you have alliances
of weaker individuals who
collectively are stronger than
any one dominant individual.
With that language
you need empathy.
Zog wants to sleep
with your wife.
You go tell Joe that you're
unhappy about it, but
Zog is 8 feet tall.
Joe needs a certain amount
of empathy to say, "Okay.
I'll help defend your home
because you will do that
for me." I'm really
making this very simple.
But that's the essence of how
I understand this works.
As soon as you have language,
you have cooperation,
you have empathy.
And you have organized violence
and organized cooperation.
A society that doesn't have
organized cooperation, a human
society, an early human society
that doesn't have organized
cooperation cannot thrive.
And one that cannot assemble,
organize violence, organize
defense can't survive,
can't defend itself.
They estimate that something
like 15% of our early ancestors
died from intergroup violence.
15%.
Imagine a 15% casualty rate in
this society from violence
from another group.
I think the civilian casualty
rate in the 20th century, which
was such a bloodbath, was 1%.
Just imagine.
That was human prehistory.
So you got violence, and you
have cooperation and empathy.
Every social catalyst -- I
believe that every social
catalyst will potentially -- at
least of the ones I deal with
as a journalist will potentiate
one of those two or both.
I spent, as I said, a year
off and on with a platoon
of 30 men in a very remote
outpost in Afghanistan.
The outpost was
called Restrepo.
That's the name of the movie.
They had no running
water up there.
They couldn't bathe for
a month at a time.
They had no phone, no internet,
no connection to the outside
world, no Internet,
no hot food.
They basically lived in a world
of sandbags and crates of
ammunition, two or three
firefights a day, for a year.
No women, nothing.
It was -- they were on Mars
except with a lot of combat.
Very high casualties.
The guys really suffered.
And they came back -- it was
just, basically, the worst
thing a person can go through.
And they came back to their
base in Vicenza, Italy.
It was the battle company
of the 173rd airborne
based in Vicenza.
And a lot of things that were
not at Restrepo were very
easily available around
the base in Vicenza.
And they sort of indulged
themselves for a few weeks.
And after a few weeks or a
couple months, they, most
of them, realized that
they missed Restrepo.
They missed being
on that hilltop.
They missed the worst
experience of their lives.
It was a great -- it was
very confusing to them.
And in my book "War" I try --
the main thing I try to explain
is what is it about combat,
because it's so obviously so
awful, what is it about combat
that young men actually miss?
Why is that more compelling
than the society that
soldiers come home to?
I don't mean just in this war,
I mean going back to the Iliad.
I think one of the -- one of
the explanations is that combat
potentiates both of these great
human reactions to crisis.
It triggers organized violence.
And it triggers cooperation
and brotherhood and,
in a word, it -- love.
One of the guys in the platoon
said -- Brendan O'Byrne, said
to me -- we were on a hillside
outside an enemy village.
And American mortars were going
over our head and hitting
the far hillside.
It's very tense because
mortars sometimes fall short.
They were going right
over our heads.
We were trying to have
a conversation hoping
this all ended well.
And he said, "You
know, it's crazy.
There's guys in the platoon who
straight up hate each other.
But we would all die
for each other."
That is one of the most
tremendous human traits.
To briefly go back to
chimpanzees, they -- chimpanzee
groups will send out groups of
males -- 6, 7, 8 males into the
territory of a rival group.
And they will creep
-- it's a raid.
And they go in very quietly
and they're very observant
and they're very careful.
And they will attack lone
males of the rival group
and beat them to death.
And over the course of months
or years, one by one, they'll
kill off the males of
this rival group.
And then they'll expand
their territory.
Suddenly they have all the
females of that group.
They have more food.
With more food, the females in
their group are more likely
to raise healthy young.
And that group, that
aggressive group thrives.
The less aggressive
group dies out.
Chimpanzees happen to be,
genetically, our closest -- we
are the -- we are closest
primate relative
to chimpanzees.
So chimpanzees and
humans are over here.
The rest of the primate
groups are over here.
But here's what's interesting
about this: When this happens
and they attack a lone male
and he -- that lone male has
brothers in the area who can
hear his screams, they do not
rush to his aid even if doing
that would equalize the fight
and allow their compatriot
to escape alive.
They just get out of there.
The problem is that there's no
language to convey acts of
courage in chimpanzee society
and there's no language
with which to penalize
acts of cowardice.
As soon as you have language
and you fail to come to the aid
of a brother and you survive
but back at the campfire
everyone is talking about how
disgracefully you acted, all of
a sudden, courage is something
that's required of individuals
and cowardice is something
that's punished.
And one of the really
extraordinary human
accomplishments, I think, is
this idea that individuals will
risk or sacrifice their lives
for other people that they're
not even related to.
I don't mean their kid.
I don't mean their spouse.
I mean some guy who joined the
platoon three months ago.
There's no other animal species
that does that in that way, the
throwing yourself on
a hand grenade act.
I'm going to bring
this to a close.
I don't know how
long I've talked.
But I don't see a flashing
red light yet, but I think
we're getting close.
Some people, I feel, look
at human history, look at
human events, and they see
war, they see conflict.
That is what characterizes
the human experience.
As a journalist, I can tell you
that as much as that is true,
in equal part what I see is an
incredible sea of potential
altruism and generosity
and cooperation.
It is both.
There's a war in Afghanistan.
People are getting killed.
We've spent God knows
how much money.
A trillion whatever dollars.
There are also people from this
society who have nothing to do
with Afghanistan who have gone
over there, civilians, who have
gone over there as doctors, as
architects, as engineers to
help build roads, to help cure
people, bring medicine,
to educate children.
And, tragically, many
of those people have
been killed doing it.
That is altruism.
That is human altruism side
by side with human violence.
And I feel that, if we as a
species, if our leaders, if we
as a people can figure out a
catalyst that triggers
that altruism that's out
there, we'll be fine.
Thank you very much.
(Applause).
Michael Fitzgerald:
Thanks, Sebastian.
And you can see some of that
unfold in his book "War,"
which is available in airport
bookstores everywhere.
Your movie just came out, yes?
Sebastian Junger: It came
out a couple months ago.
Yes.
Michael Fitzgerald: Where
can we get information
on screenings?
Sebastian Junger: If you
go to the Web site, it's
Restrepothemovie.com.
It will list the screenings.
It's playing in about
50 cities right now.
Restrepo, R-e-s-t-r-e-p-o.
Restrepothemovie.com.
Michael Fitzgerald: Our
next speaker is going
to be Andy Lankford.
Andy is a particle physicist at
the University of California
Irvine and deputy director of
ATLAS, which is one of the four
particle detectors at the large
hadron collider, the sort of
world beating particle
accelerator tool that he's
going to now talk to us
about the development of.
Andy, welcome.
Andrew Lankford: So it's a
pleasure to be here today to
have the opportunity to tell
you about the fun
I have at my job.
The large hadron collider
is a journey of discovery.
It's a global undertaking to
solve the mysteries of nature
both at the smallest scales of
the quantum world and at the
very largest scales
of the cosmos.
So I'll introduce
you to the LHC.
But in the process, I will try
to convey the scientific
challenge but also as well the
extreme technological
innovation that's needed in
order to address these
challenges and also what we've
reached in terms of extreme
levels of collaboration.
Finally, I'll try to illustrate
how tacting the basic questions
of science is a catalyst
for innovation.
So, in order to imagine the
challenge, since we're here at
a Google event, consider what
most be the world's most
energetic search engine.
It's a project sited on the
border between France and
Switzerland at CERN, the
European laboratory
for particle physics.
It's a 17-mile long ring lined
with superconducting magnets.
It's buried deep underground.
It accelerates two beams
of protons at nearly
the speed of light.
The two beams are brought into
violent collision with energy
densities that we haven't --
the universe hasn't experienced
since right after the Big Bang.
The beams collide in the
center of complex arrays
of particle detectors.
Deep in the heart of the
detectors, protons from
each beam interact and
create new particles.
These particles are detected by
rays of particle detectors, and
data is recorded, tremendous
amounts of data, up to 15
peta-bytes of data per
experiment over its lifetime.
And scientists will search
this data for answers
to the question.
What are the queries
that we make?
What are the questions
that we ask?
Some are age-old questions.
How has the universe evolved
since its creation,
since the Big Bang?
What drives the motion of the
heavenly bodies of the stars?
For instance, like in this
image of merging galaxies?
Today we know that the motion
is largely driven by what we
call dark matter, matter
that isn't visible, not the
luminous matter you see here.
The age-old questions include
question of what are the
basic building blocks
of the universe?
We know, of course, that
molecules are made of atoms and
atoms are made of protons,
neutrons, and electrons.
But there are many more
types of particles.
Why are there so many types?
Well, one of our speakers
today explained that.
Murray Gell-Mann explained that
all the particle species
arrived from three simple
smaller particles, the quarks.
But are quarks the
end of the story?
Other questions are more
recent and relate to
the quantum world.
Dark matter.
What is the particle
nature of dark matter?
Anti-matter, why is there more
matter than anti-matter?
When was the symmetry broken?
Supersymmetry.
Is there a supersymmetric
partner, a heavy supersymmetric
partner for each
of our particles?
Extra dimensions.
Are there just three spatial
dimensions, or are there more?
Our everyday world is the
mid-point of 60 powers of 10
stretching from the small
universe at the time of
the Big Bang to the very
large universe of today.
Telescopes examine
the large universe.
The LHC is a super-microscope
to study the subatomic world.
What search engine are we
using to find the answers
to our questions?
What is the science experiment
that we've mounted?
The world's most powerful
particle accelerator, the
LHC, has been built in
an underground ring.
The ring is solidly lined
with superconducting magnets
to guide the protons.
Inside the beams, there
are two beam pipes.
And within the vacuum of these
pipes the beams travel.
Energy is pumped into the ring
to accelerate the beams to
within one millionth of
the speed of light.
Each beam is composed
of protons.
The protons collide at four
locations around the ring.
Energy turns into matter
producing jets of particles --
Some ordinary, some familiar,
possibly some never
seen before.
These particles are
measured by experiments.
ALICE; ATLAS, the experiment
that I work on; CMS; and LHCb.
The LHC accelerator is a
technological tour de force,
a collection of extreme
accomplishments.
A complex of smaller
accelerators prepare the
particles for the LHC.
The LHC performs the final
stage of acceleration,
accelerating the protons
to an energy of 7
trillion electron volts.
At this energy, the protons
make more than
10,000 turns of
the ring every second.
During the time that a proton
spends in the beam, it travels
10 billion miles, further than
going to Neptune and back.
Superconducting magnets are the
critical components that make
available to us the energy that
we need for our research.
The dipole magnets are each
about 30 meters long.
Without superconducting
magnets, the LHC would be
nearly five times as big
and consume 40 times
as much energy.
Magnets are installed
end-to-end around the
ring and aligned with
incredible precision.
The superconducting coils
are insulated in cryostats.
Each magnet contains two coils,
one for each of the beams.
The beam cannot be
allowed to escape.
It has enough energy to
melt 50 tons of copper.
Instrumentation is required
to control the beams.
Every one of the 1800
superconducting magnets needs
to be operating properly in
order to circulate the beams.
There's no redundancy
available in this machine.
The magnets are cooled by super
fluid liquid helium at a
temperature just two degrees
above absolute zero.
It's colder than the
vacuum in outer space.
The liquid helium plant
is probably the largest
installation in the world.
The beam travels through
an intense vacuum.
Inside the vacuum pipe the
atmosphere is thinner
than it is on the moon.
There's 17,000 particle
accelerators in the world today
that are used in industry, for
medicine, as well as in
research and other fields.
The construction of ATLAS was a
tremendous engineering
undertaking as well, beginning
with the excavation of a cavern
to accommodate its monumental
size, ATLAS is half a
football field in length.
It's about 80 feet tall
and 80 feet wide.
It has as much steel as the
Eiffel Tower and it's about
the size of a cathedral.
The 4-year long assembly the
pieces of ATLAS in the cavern
was like assembly of a ship in
a bottle but, of course,
on a much grander scale.
Starting from the undercarriage
designed to precisely position
the 7,000-ton weight, an array
of racetrack-shaped
superconducting coils was
assembled to form a magnetic
field that enshrouds
the entire detector.
This field bends particles
called muons to measure
their momentum.
Chambers inside the field
detect the muons with a
precision much less than
the thickness of a
hair, even a thin hair.
Other particle detectors
are put inside the toroid.
The ATLAS toroid is perhaps
the iconic feature defining
the ATLAS experiment.
Last year it even appeared in
Valencia as a set of Barlioz's
opera, "The Trojans."
ATLAS was constructed
from pieces constructed
around the world.
Tracker modules made in the
U.S., a superconducting solloid
magnet made in Japan, a
tile calorimeter module.
These modules were made in
Spain, Russia and the U.S.
A cryogenic liquid Argon
calorimeter arriving
from Canada.
Another was made in Europe.
Here's a big wheel made with
chambers that came from China,
Israel, Japan and the U.S. And
here is the so-called small
wheel, the last component of
ATLAS being lowered down
100 meters into the pit.
ATLAS is the fruit of the
labor of 6,000 individuals
and 20 years of design,
construction, and assembly.
Although enormous, ATLAS
measures particles with an
incredible precision, a
precision that drives
challenging technological
solutions.
The innermost detectors are
like silicone digital cameras.
Small precise detectors
are assembled into
large precision arrays.
These detectors are as
intricate as a fly's eye.
These cameras have about
100 million pixels each.
Not so impressive by today's
standards, but keep in mind
that we take 40 million
pictures per second.
Particle detectors such as
these are used now quite a
bit for medical imaging.
The challenge of our search of
new discoveries, the challenge
of finding just a handful of
interesting particle
interactions in the billions of
trillions that we witness,
requires vast computational
resources and some
innovative new techniques.
Large processor farms process
data in nearly real time to
sift through tens of thousands
of particle interactions per
second to pick just the 100 to
200 interactions that we
can afford to store.
Even with this reduction, our
detectors are so fine grained
that each experiment may store
about 15 petabytes
of data each year.
This data volume is equivalent
to a stack of 15 million CDs,
about -- a stack that would
go about 12 miles high.
In order to amass the required
computational resources needed
to reconstruct and analyze our
data, CERN and the experiments
have assembled the worldwide
LHC Computing Grid.
This is an association of
60 or so computer centers
around the globe.
Data is recorded at CERN, and
then it is distributed to the
other centers which are
organized in clouds of
geographical clusters.
Jobs are sent wherever they can
find the data that they need.
Grid computing is working
quite well for us today.
The technical challenges of
the LHC require an extreme
level of collaboration.
The LHC accelerator was
built and financed by
the CERN laboratory.
CERN was established by 12
European nations by treaty in
1954, and it is now distinctly
the premier particles physics
laboratory in the world.
The LHC experiments were built
and financed by large
international collaborations of
scientists from institutions
around the globe with CERN as
a member institution.
As an example, ATLAS is
a collaboration of 175
institutions from 37 countries.
It's truly a global
collaboration as you
can see from the map.
There are 3,000 scientists,
including 1,000
students involved.
Students play a special
role in particle physics.
They are essential
contributors to the science.
They receive excellent
scientific and technical
training and that training
serves them well in
their ultimate careers.
ATLAS was designed,
collaboratively, built
collaboratively and it is now
maintained collaboratively.
How can such a collaboration
design and manage a
project of this scale?
The answer is we are united
by our scientific goals.
How can scientists and
institutions around the world
contribute to a project
that's based in Switzerland?
We rely heavily on
collaborative tools that enable
us to communicate at a
distance often and effectively.
The need to communicate amongst
our extreme collaborations gave
birth to the Worldwide Web
at CERN 20 years ago.
How far are we in our
journey of discovery?
We have reached a milestone
like this moment from Ron
Howard's Sony Pictures film
"Angels and Demons."
Collisions are
fixed and running.
Andrew Lankford:
That's my detector.
Particles at 99% the
speed of light.
(Video.)
Andrew Lankford: How far are we
in our journey of discovery?
Last November the LHC achieved
its first collisions.
In December, it reached a world
record collision energy.
In March, it reached a
collision energy three
times higher than that.
In 2012, the energy
will be doubled again.
Each of these milestones is
a momentous occasion for
the experimental teams.
The experiments have since
collected enough data to
start the exploration of
new scientific territory.
Nonetheless, we are just
starting the journey.
It is likely to take years to
search enough interactions
to find something that
revolutionizes our
understanding.
During the coming years, we
will advance the frontiers of
knowledge beyond our current
understanding, exploring the
theories and questions that we
have posed and finally reaching
beyond our theories into the
unknown, a regime in which we
might discover something truly
new and excited, something
totally unexpected.
The search to answer questions
never before answered requires
techniques never before used.
Basic research
catalyzes innovation.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
Michael Fitzgerald:
Thanks, Andy.
I have one question for you.
How many frequent flyer miles
did you build up while you
were working on this project
over the last 20 years?
Andrew Lankford: Millions.
Michael Fitzgerald: Not quite
enough to get you to Neptune.
Andrew Lankford:
No, not that many.
Michael Fitzgerald: Our next
speaker is coming to us from
the plains of Kansas, but he is
going to talk to us about the
tools of change and the
tools of catalyzing social
media and other things.
This is Michael Wesch.
If you would please come
up and do your thing.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
Michael Wesch: So I actually
got my start studying
in Papua New Guinea.
I was studying new media
and how it was affecting
very remote areas of
Papua New Guinea.
New media there was
actually books.
It wasn't anything exciting
like you see up here.
It brought to me a number of
questions that I thought were
really important, mostly about
the importance of media
and social change.
So think, for example, just if
you do a quick run-down of
human history, the importance
of speaking in the organization
of bands and tribes, the
importance of writing in the
organization of empire, the
importance of the printing
press in the Reformation,
Enlightenment, and so on.
And the reason why media is so
important in all of these major
shifts is because media
ultimately shape and sometimes
limit and sometimes even
dictate what can be said, how
it can be said, who can say
it and who can hear it.
And you take it a step further
and you recognize that media
also shape how things will be
stored, how they will be
accessed and actually what will
be stored and what will
be accessed by who.
And when you add all that up,
then you are into the level of,
you know, basically what is a
society's knowledge base going
to be and what's going
to count as knowledge.
And you take that another step
and you start to see that media
can shape all levels of culture
from economics to even really
important things like core
values and things like that.
I will get to some of
that in just a moment.
Now, where I'm starting from
is this idea that media
are not just tools.
We hear that a lot.
I'm going to suggest that
media are not just tools.
Media are not just forms
of communication.
They actually -- media
mediate relationships.
So when media change,
relationships change.
And, therefore, you see these
broad changes happening
throughout society.
So I'm going to start with just
a real simple run-down of
television and how it
changed our society.
Then I'm going to shift into
new media to show you what's
happened since then.
So I'm going to, first
off, look at what happens
when television enters
into a living room.
You have to rearrange
your furniture.
It really reshapes the
relationships in the family.
And let's face it, this
isn't just the living room.
This is also people's dining
room in a lot of cases.
This is essentially the
American dining room reshaped
around the television.
And as Neil Postman has pointed
out, I will just do a 60-second
run-down of Neil Postman's
argument about television and
how it's affected culture.
The conversations of our
culture are ultimately
happening here in
the television era.
Those conversations are
controlled by the few and
designed for the masses.
The conversations are always
entertaining -- that's how
you get the masses watching
-- even the serious ones.
So our political debates go
from long-form political truly
debates to what we see today
which is more like 8-second
sound bites, more like an
entertainment situation.
The conversations are
punctuated by 30-second
commercials.
And these conversations create
our culture of irrelevance,
incoherence and impotence.
What he means by "impotence"
is he asks you -- like, he is
writing this book in 1985.
He asks you to imagine yourself
in 1985 watching the most
important program
you can imagine.
Imagine watching the news
in 1985 and he asks you
a series of questions.
He says, So what steps do you
plan to reduce conflict in the
Middle East or the rates of
inflation, crime
or unemployment?
What do you plan to do about
NATO, OPEC, the CIA, et cetera?
And then he takes the liberty
of answering for you.
He says, "You plan to do
nothing" which is basically
what you could do in 1985.
There weren't a whole
lot of options.
Here we are bombarded
with media.
This has a particularly
profound effect on our youth
and how they're learning
about the world.
And I just want to show
you real quickly here
a commercial here.
This is created by Dove as part
of a campaign to demonstrate
how this mass media onslaught
is affecting our young girls.
(Video.)
This is a very
powerful commercial.
It demonstrates, I think,
Marshall McLuhan's famous
aphorism, "We shape our
tools and thereafter
our tools shape us."
Something interested has
happened recently, and you guys
all know about this and how new
media is shaping our
society in new ways.
I have this little clip here
and I think it demonstrates
sort of a hero for our
mediated culture of today.
I'm going to leave out all
the sociology for you guys.
This guy really represents the
sort of lonely individual that
the sociological thinking has
been theorizing here for
the last few decades.
He is this lonely guy.
Comes home to Sydney.
Doesn't have anybody to hug
when he gets to the airport.
So he goes down to the mall
with his "free hugs" sign
and eventually somebody
gives him a hug here.
And then you will see that
this "free hugs" movement
actually starts to spread.
Other people start taking
up the sign, start
getting hugs themselves.
And this spreads throughout
Sydney, and the mall is just
sort of rife with
these free hugs.
Then it goes on to YouTube and
gets over 45 million views
and then it goes global.
This is where a number of
interesting points can be made
about new media and how it
is shaping our society.
The first point, of course,
is that it is global.
The second is that, you have
individual pursuits leading to
large-scale collective actions.
And, third, you can also point
out that you have gone from
this lonely individual thing,
we've had several decades of
sort of being trapped in our
homes with our television sets
and suddenly people are
wanting to reach out.
Of course, on YouTube there
is always the parody.
[ Laughter ]
(Video.)
This is where things get really
interesting because sometimes
these parodies are really
quite cutting and important.
And I will just draw
your attention back to
that Dove commercial.
Here is a remix of that Dove
commercial which probably could
never have existed on network
television, but it did
exist on YouTube.
Here's the remix.
(Video).
A lot of you are probably
actually familiar with this.
One way or another, you are
familiar with this -- not just
this particular video but
perhaps movies -- or
videos like this.
This one in particular
was very effective.
Two weeks and about a million
views after this was created,
the creators of this were at
the table with Unilever, Dove's
parent company and Unilever
actually signed a moratorium
on deforestation.
So that was actually
a great moment.
It actually demonstrates
also that this is not a
one-way conversation.
Speaking of conversations,
here's an interesting --
another interesting example.
This is Shawn Ahmed.
He was a graduate student at
Notre Dame sitting in a room
like this hearing about poverty
and thinking, "What can I
really do about poverty as a
graduate student?" And he just
decided to get up and leave.
He actually left
the university.
He was saving up some money to
buy an Xbox and decided to
spend it instead going to
Bangladesh and trying to do
something real about poverty.
What he is trying to do is
change the conversation.
What he does is he goes
around Bangladesh and
other places in the world.
He creates now over a hundred
videos about poverty
through his eyes.
And then he, in the
meantime, gets over 279,000
followers on Twitter.
Starts up a type of
organization that a lot of NGOs
could only dream of copying.
Essentially, he put donors
directly in contact with the
people that they are helping
which is something that donors
really like and he does it
all through this
community-generated space like
you will see here.
(Video.)
There is so much here
that you can point to.
One thing I want to point to is
something that maybe just went
right under the surface there
and that was the music
in the background.
The music in the background was
also created through a global
collaboration of artists
working together
almost accidentally.
Here you've got Collin Muchler
who uploaded the guitar
track to Opsound.
And then CoraBeth from North
Carolina picks it up and plays
the violin over the top
of it here that you hear.
And then that's posted and then
Vavrik over here takes all
these clips that are being
posted to Opsound and creates
the sound track you just
heard on that video.
There is something, I think,
especially important about
thinking about music in this
collaborative space because
when you think about these
collaborations that are
happening here, all these
spaces are, in a sense, spaces
for collaboration in which --
and each one structured in a
different way that actually
shapes what can be
done in those spaces.
And so music actually becomes
an interesting way to look at
this because it is a way of
sort of seeing and feeling
the layers upon layers that
are created through this.
So here's a project from Eric
Wittiker, I think, demonstrates
this really well.
He had some music up on iTunes.
One of his fans picked
it up and sung it back
to him on YouTube.
He was so moved by hearing this
person sing his music to him on
YouTube, they thought if
I could just create a
whole virtual choir.
You can see there he recorded
himself conducting the choir.
He put the sheet music up for
free, and then he had all these
people try out and ultimately
had from 12 different countries
these 185 singers create
this virtual choir.
But this is really just a
metaphor for the different
layers you see happening in
this collaborative space.
And sometimes it
gets very serious.
Like, here you see the Kenyan
-- the elections -- Kenya
elections in 2007 and the
violence after that.
These four Kenyans get together
and they put together this
thing called Ushahidi which
allows people on the ground
with their cell phones to
report on the violence and
troubles that they are
having at those times.
Other people on the ground can
then receive updates based
on where they are through
their cell phones as well.
They essentially unleashed
45,000 citizen reporters to
talk about so they could share
information about what was
happening on the ground.
Three years later in Haiti,
that same software is freely
available because those four
Kenyans give it away for free
and some students at Tufts
University are able to
implement it for
Ushahidi Haiti.
You can see here they get over
100,000 messages coming in.
They are documenting
these messages, placing
them on the map.
There are messages like this,
"We are looking for Baby
Joseph who got buried
under the university."
mapped not using Google Map but
using Open Street Map which is
collaboratively edited by
thousands of people
around the world.
Those are the maps that are
ultimately on the ground.
And here you see Clark Craig
from the U.S. Marine Corps'
comment, "It is saving
lives every day.
I wish I had time to
document every example,
but there are too many.
I say with confidence that
there are hundreds of these
kinds of success stories.
The Marine Corps is using your
project every second of the day
to get aid and assistance to
the people who need it most."
I'll end there.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
Michael Fitzgerald:
Just one thing.
We can see why you're one of
the leading media theorists,
theorists on new media.
I know you're also a
terrific educator.
You were Professor of
the Year in 2008.
And you work a lot with
educating kids on these tools.
What do you tell them?
Michael Wesch: Well, I
think it's not so much
what I tell them.
It's how you set up
the environment.
The key to me is not setting up
a teaching environment, but
a learning environment.
We focus so much on setting up
teaching environments, and I
was just talking to Murray.
Like, teaching is not
actually possible.
People can learn but, it's
really impossible to teach.
But we set up these teaching
environments where you have all
these neat fixed chairs in
these neat rows, where it's
basically an information dump.
Well, people don't
learn well that way.
You need to set them up
engaging real problems, you
know, using -- working together
and using the right media at
the right time, and then they
end up practicing the
tools that they need
to be great learners.
So...
Michael Fitzgerald: Thanks.
And you mentioned Murray.
Murray Gell-Mann, if you'd
please come up and join me
here, and I'll sort of try
to start your introduction.
Murray is a true polymath.
He entered Yale at age 15.
I think he graduated
at age 16 or so.
He went on from there to really
become the instigator of
finding the quark, for which
he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in physics in 1969.
He's a linguist who is widely
published in that field.
In fact, he's published myriad
papers on academic subjects.
He's also published books,
including the book that
defined, kind of for a general
audience, his theories on
simplicity and complexity
called "The Quark
and the Jaguar."
He was a cofounder of the Santa
Fe Institute, which is a
pioneering and a premier
interdisciplinary research
center in Santa Fe, which was
made famous, in part, for what
it brought to the study of
complexity, and I could go on.
But we are going to sit down
and talk a bit about just a
couple of your ideas on
how to be a catalyst.
I mean, you have been, in many
ways, a catalyst, and so it's a
privilege to get to sort of sit
down with you and talk with you
a bit about how you do that.
And why don't we just
sort of start there.
Start with the quark, actually.
How did that theory come about?
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, that's
a very good thing to start
with, because it can illustrate
something we ought
to talk about.
What is a quark?
Well, we heard how -- and most
of us know anyway -- how atoms
are made up of nuclei, which in
turn are made up of neutrons
and protons, and then there
are electrons as well.
So we have a nucleus with
electrons swarming around it.
The nucleus, as I said, made
of neutrons and protons.
But the neutrons and protons
turn out not to be the
elementary particles that
everybody thought they were.
Instead, each neutron or proton
is made of three quarks,
roughly speaking.
And people ask me, "How
did you think of that?"
Well, turns out it
was very easy.
If you look at a chart of
various discovered particles,
some kind of thing you heard
about in an earlier talk, it's
pretty obvious that the neutron
and proton ought to be
made of three quarks each.
[Laughter]
It's not -- but it is very
difficult to believe it.
That's why it wasn't
immediately advertised by
everybody as a model or as a
theory, because it violated --
the quark idea violated some
well-known principles.
For example, that the neutron
and proton are elementary.
Everybody knew they
were elementary.
So of course they're not
made up of smaller things.
Second, an elementary particle
should have a charge that's an
integral multiple of
the proton's charge.
Could be in units of the
proton's electric charge, it
could be -- the charge of the
new particle could be one or
zero or minus one or two, but
not two-thirds or
minus a third.
But those are the electric
charges of the quark: plus
two-thirds and minus a third.
The third principle: Nobody had
ever heard of a particle type
such that the particle was
always confined inside
something else, the way that
quarks are permanently confined
inside things like the
neutron and proton.
Can't get out.
Nobody had ever heard
of anything like that.
So we had three clearly defined
ideas that made the quarks
wrong, but those three ideas
were themselves wrong.
That was the problem with them.
And that occurs over and over
and over again in science.
Look at the Maya glyphs in
Mexico and Central America, the
two kinds of these characters
often chiseled in stone.
One set describe calendrical,
astronomical information, about
the apparent rising and setting
of the sun in different places
of the sky, the motions of the
planet Venus, the motions of
the moon -- apparent motions
of the moon and so on, all
described in these calendrical
glyphs and they were deciphered
a hundred years ago or so.
But that left the
non-calendrical glyphs.
What were they?
Well, the dictator of Maya
studies at that time was
the Englishman
Sir J. Eric S. Thompson.
And this influential Englishman
ruled that the non-calendrical
glyphs were not writing.
He didn't say what they were,
but they were definitely not
writing, and anyone who tried
to publish a paper saying they
were writing was unsuccessful.
Anybody who wanted to be
promoted at a university
had better agree that
they were not writing.
There was only one trouble.
They were writing!
[Laughter]
It took a Russian scholar,
Uri Knorosov, to carry out
the first steps of the
correct decipherment.
That's the kind of thing
that goes on all the time.
Michael Fitzgerald: So in the
case of the quark, how did you
get people to come around
to your point of view?
Murray Gell-Mann:
Well, two things.
One was that it was clear to a
lot of people that the quark
picture explained a
great many things.
Second, some friends of mine at
Stanford University, at the
accelerator there, were able to
take what amounts to an
electron microscope picture of
the protons, and, roughly
speaking, there were
the three quarks.
Michael Fitzgerald:
So you had evidence.
Murray Gell-Mann: So there
was certainly evidence, yes.
But --
[Laughter]
But it often takes a long time
to overcome these rules that
you mustn't think
in a certain way.
I was asked once by a company
to appear in a commercial on
television for the company.
I wasn't supposed to praise the
company nor even mention it.
I was just supposed to
discuss asking "Why not?"
Because that's what we've
been talking about.
Why this negative prescription
that you mustn't think
in a certain way?
Why not think in that way?
So I talked about it a little
bit, and they paid me a
substantial fee, and then it
turned out it was a quite
successful commercial and they
renewed it for another year,
paying me my fee a second time,
as they were obliged to do by
the rules of actors equity.
I also got a second
year's membership in the
Screen Actors Guild.
[Laughter]
And then they invited me to
come to their headquarters and
talk to their important
employees on the intranet, and
in fact talk to all their
employees who were awake at the
time, given that many of them
were in different parts of the
world, talk to all of them
through the intranet,
the company intranet.
So I did.
And I talked about how I don't
know much about business but I
know a little bit about
theoretical science and I
assume that there's
some similarity.
And in theoretical science,
it's good to ask -- when
you're told not to think
in certain ways, it's
good to ask "Why not?
Are we sure that we mustn't
think in those ways?"
And usually there's a damn
good reason why not.
But not always.
Sometimes it turns out this
prohibition is misguided.
And we've just talked about two
or three examples of that.
But I was careful to mention
that you must ask -- you must
check and make sure there isn't
a simple reason why not.
"For example," I said, "in
business I assume you always
have to worry about profit
and loss and you always have
to worry about legal and
ethical considerations."
What was the company?
Of course.
Enron.
Michael Fitzgerald: Enron.
[Laughter]
Michael Fitzgerald: So why do
you think in that case --
[Laughter]
Michael Fitzgerald: -- they
took the other view of "why
not," which is "Why not
ignore this stuff"?
Murray Gell-Mann:
Well, of course.
The whole idea is to be able to
distinguish those negative
prohibitions that are there for
a damn good reason and
the ones that are not.
And in this case, there was a
damn good reason why you should
pay attention to legal and
ethical considerations and
there was a damn good reason
for worrying about
profit and loss.
[Laughter]
Michael Fitzgerald:
And there we have it.
[Laughter]
Michael Fitzgerald: So you've
been involved with the Santa Fe
Institute, which sort of --
Murray Gell-Mann: Oh, yes.
From the prehistory of the
Santa Fe Institute up to now.
That's where I work every day.
Michael Fitzgerald: How did
that come about, and was that
another example of this
"why not" thinking?
Murray Gell-Mann: In a way.
In a way.
We met -- a group of us
-- during the early
1980s in Los Alamos.
These were people who
were employed by Los
Alamos, in some cases.
In other cases like mine, they
were consultants to Los Alamos.
And we talked about our dream
of starting a scientific
institute in Santa Fe,
which we all love.
But it would be a civilian
scientific institute.
It would not be run by the
government, although it might
accept government money if
it were begged to on
certain occasions.
It would -- but the main thing
that I emphasized in these
discussions was that we ought
to have no barriers among
the different fields.
At universities, you typically
run into all these walls
between the disciplines coming
from curricula, from textbooks,
from sections of granting
agencies, from curricula,
and so on and so forth.
So it's very difficult to
have real interdisciplinary
cooperation.
It's possible, but
it's very difficult.
And I said that we should set
up an institute, an institute
where it was easy and where we
encouraged people to do it.
And that's the way
it works now.
We have little groups that form
after some discussion in the
kitchen, usually, at tea time
to study problems of
mutual interest.
And each person can make a
contribution whether or not
that person is trained
in a relevant field.
Doesn't matter.
As long as the person has some
knowledge, intuition, is
relatively bright, and so on,
a contribution can be made.
But we do have a rule that at
least one person in the group
should know something
about the subject.
[Laughter]
Michael Fitzgerald: And that's
all it takes to overcome
these barriers?
Murray Gell-Mann: No.
It takes something else.
It takes a determination, a
real devotion to the idea of
doing these things, because the
languages are different for
different fields, the way of
judging ideas is different in
different fields, people have
different vocabulary in
different fields, and
overcoming these differences
and barriers is
not easy at all.
But it is possible for
people who have always
dreamt of doing that.
We had our founding seminars in
the fall of 1984 at this room
kindly lent us by the School of
American Research in Santa Fe.
Beautiful, beautiful weather.
We had terrible problems
getting people to go home.
[Laughter]
And -- but anyway, I made the
phone calls for a lot of the
invitations, and I knew what
people would say, because
these were quite important,
interesting scientists in many,
many different subjects.
And I knew they were going to
say something like this: "I
have my teaching, I have my
research, I'm writing two
textbooks, and I consult for
several companies and I
just don't have the time.
I'm terribly sorry.
Don't call me; I'll call you."
But that isn't what they said.
We had a list of people that we
suspected might be interested
in this project, and it turned
out nearly every one of them
said something like the
following: "When can I come?
Can I come sooner?
I've been dreaming about
this all my life!"
Well, we hadn't expected
that amount of enthusiasm,
but that's what we got.
Michael Fitzgerald:
Which is great.
We have a -- and it's gone on
to have a sort of story of
development since then.
We have just a couple of
minutes left and I'm curious,
is there a question that you --
is there a problem to which
you wish we were asking
"why not" about now?
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, yes.
It's something I'm working on
very hard with some bright
Russian linguists, and that is
the question of distant
relationships among
human languages.
To take the known families and
see if they aren't descended
from superfamilies, and if the
superfamilies shouldn't
be grouped into a
super-superfamily.
In other words, to carry the
process of historical
linguistics back before six or
seven thousand years ago,
because the experts in the
field mostly have this negative
-- this prohibition, this
negative requirement: "You must
not think of anything
before six or seven
thousand years ago.
It's wrong, it's unscientific,
it's prescientific.
It's misleading, it's not
properly proved," and
so on and so forth."
And I suspect that this is
another one of those fake
prohibitions, wrong
prohibitions.
I can't prove it rigorously at
this time, but I suspect it is.
Michael Fitzgerald: And in the
world of business, is -- is
there something that you think
businesses should be asking
"why not" about, or can
they do a better job of
processing "why not"?
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, why
not do the things that are
represented here at Zeitgeist?
This is a marvelous, really
splendid milieu for thinking
about important problems of
business and its relation to
every other human activity,
including happiness, as we
heard, including all the things
that lead to happiness.
Why not carry all that away
from here and actually do it?
Some people do, apparently,
and I think it's marvelous.
Michael Fitzgerald: Well, on
that note, we're out of time.
Thank you very much, Murray.
It was wonderful.
[Applause]
Michael Fitzgerald: We're going
to, in the interest of time, in
compressing time, skip past the
panel we were going to have
with the four of our previous
speakers and move directly
to the panel that Eric
Brewer is going to run.
Eric is the founder of Inktomi,
which is a pioneering
search engine effort.
He is now a visiting
scientist at Google.
He teaches at Berkeley, at the
University of
California-Berkeley, and he is
working a great deal on
technology for
developing countries.
So Eric, I think we have a
video to show, and then you
-- then it's your show.
Eric Brewer: We do.
We're going to see some
catalysts in person.
(Video.)
Eric Brewer: All right.
So we're going to talk about
two catalysts, in the last
little bit we have in this
session, and the video you just
saw represents the work of
Cameron Sinclair, on the near
side, and he created
Architecture for Humanity, and
Marc Koska, who created
SafePoint, who you'll
hear from in a minute.
And what they share, like with
many people in the audience, is
fantastic passion, the kind
that Murray just talked about,
that actually led them to do
things that I think we want
to make many other
people able to do.
So why don't we start with
your story, Cameron.
Cameron Sinclair: Okay.
So the video you saw
actually is not for you.
And I'm going to tell you
about -- a bit about
how that came to be.
First off, Architecture
for Humanity --
I'm a recovering architect.
I trained as an architect.
And I didn't become an
architect because I went to
great cathedrals, but I lived
in a real hellhole of South
London and I realized early on
that our communities and the
way the fabric of the
environment was set up actually
dictated the way
people behaved.
So I decided I would be an
architect to try and improve
these environments.
So, you know, what I'm doing
now pretty much was dictated
from an early age.
When I was in -- early on, in
my early 20s, I decided that
instead of doing high-rises in
Manhattan and, you know, law
firms in L.A., which I was
doing, that I'd begin to do a
side project, which was: How do
we get licensed professionals
in the architectural and
construction industry
to get involved in
humanitarian problems?
And it started off with a
simple idea, and I'm not going
to tell you the full story, but
10 years later we've now worked
in about 38 countries, we have
70 city chapters, and we have
5600 architects actively
working on projects
around the world.
Right now, 40% of our work is
in Haiti, but we're rebuilding
in Pakistan, we just finished
our first dozen permanent homes
yesterday and we're going to
push into a hundred by the end
of next month, as well as
in Chile and elsewhere.
So, yeah, that's us.
We're about providing not just
design solutions, but
construction capabilities, so
you can take some of these
innovative ideas and
actually implement them.
I think probably the most
important message is that what
I've found over the last decade
is that there's a million ideas
that can change the world, but
unless you build it,
it doesn't matter.
And when you're focused on the
systemic issues or on
post-disaster, that actually
implementing innovative
solutions is the key and really
the catalyst for our
organization to grow
exponentially.
Eric Brewer: That's definitely
a theme we're going
to come back to.
Really the idea is that
the idea is not it.
The idea is the
start, and it's the passion and
the tremendous amount of work
-- a decade, in your case --
and more than that
in Marc's case.
Why don't you tell people a
little bit about your story.
Marc Koska: Well, because
I'm older than Cameron.
And my story revolves around
solving a problem and it's
probably just best illustrated
if I can show you a short
clip of the film from
India that we made.
(Video.)
Marc Koska: And that film was
made last year, and as I
said, made under cover.
In 1984, there was a prediction
-- 26 years ago -- that
syringes would be a major
transmission route for HIV, and
I took this very seriously.
I thought that was kind
of really unacceptable.
After 2 1/2 years of research,
I designed this,
which is my syringe, and
basically it operates exactly
the same as a normal syringe,
and then is used and if you try
and reuse it again, it locks
and then breaks and
it can't be used.
The trick was to make it in
such a way, design it in such
a way, that any manufacturer
in the world can make this.
And we've been relatively
successful in the field.
We're the leading design group
or licensing group, and we now
have 14 manufacturers around
the world making these.
It took me 17 years to sell the
first one, in 2001, to UNICEF.
And since then we've sold about
2 billion and the syringe is
being credited with
saving about 10 million
fatal infections.
[Applause]
Eric Brewer: Now, one thing
that unites the two of
you is persistence.
Marc Koska: Yeah.
Eric Brewer: And I think
that's, in some sense, the --
you guys are here because you
persisted and you were
successful, but there must be
literally millions of young
people like the two of you that
aren't at this meeting because
they haven't gotten
up that path.
I want to talk a little bit
about your path and a little
bit about how you kind of had
to do this on your own, in
some sense, building these
things from scratch.
Either/or.
Cameron Sinclair: Well,
I was very lucky.
The cofounder of my
organization, Kate Stohr,
worked for a company that
worked for this website called
pathfinder, and it was one of
the first early websites.
And so when we started this --
and she was a journalist -- and
we began talking about -- you
know, we always focused
on the issue, we never
focused the solution.
So if we utilized the Internet
as a mechanism to show
innovation, to show solutions,
that's how innovation spreads.
And so we started with I think
about 700 bucks and we started
a website and we just said,
"Look, we're going to give pro
bono professional design
services to anyone
who wants it."
And it just spiraled
out of control.
It was literally going to be a
weekend project, and, you know,
within a few years, we suddenly
realized that we were -- in
terms of the pro bono
architectural groups, we became
the largest entity, primarily
because we jumped on
technology early on.
We were on Twitter early on.
We were on Facebook early on.
We -- and then not only going
on that technology, but
figuring out how
you utilize it.
And what's happening and what's
really amazing is that, you
know, I sit in a very
interesting position that I get
to see all these young -- new,
young, innovative designers
around the world that are
actively doing stuff.
So you get to see me in maybe a
few projects, but right now
there are tens of thousands of
innovative building
technologies that are
happening, all open sourced,
all collaboratively around the
world, but they're not
looking to get re-tweeted
by Ashton Kutcher.
You know, what they're looking
for is a way to influence and
support their communities and
then share their solutions with
other like-minded people.
So for us, technology isn't
about the number of "likes" you
get on Facebook or the number
of views you get on YouTube.
It's who's actually utilizing
that technology and how are
they sharing it with each
other to exponentially
make that change.
Eric Brewer: Excellent.
Now, Marc, you had quite a
bit of -- I would say a
longer path than Cameron.
And you had to build up some
partnerships pretty much
from scratch, including
manufacturers, the obvious one.
Many other people knew
this was a problem.
So why do you think
you were the guy who
could get this done?
Marc Koska:
I think one of the reasons --
my journey was completely
different to Cameron's.
But one of the reasons I stuck
with it, if that's one of the
basic elements of your
question, is that, instead of
designing straightaway, I
researched the problem.
And, having understood the
problem by going to
immunization camps and working
with drug addicts, not that
they're a target market for us,
but they have a very
complicated methodology of
using syringes, and going to
syringe factories and patent
office and trying to
understand the whole scene.
Once I really understood
the problem, the solution
was much easier.
And I knew it was true to me.
And so that allowed
me to stick with it.
Eric Brewer: That must have
been like '86 or something.
Marc Koska: Don't remind me.
But it was, yeah.
I started in '84.
I designed this product in '87.
And then we repatented it
in '96, and we've got
eight more years left.
Eric Brewer: I'm kind of
chastising the world, myself
included, for not helping you
out between 1986 and now.
Marc Koska: I called.
I called.
Eric Brewer: You must have some
opinions on what happened in
that era to make it so long.
You were clearly right.
You told us so.
You can say so now.
Marc Koska: Yeah, I was right.
Not really.
It's more of an
in-depth conversation.
There were a lot of
vested interests.
There were a lot of whys
and why nots in the field.
Whether it was with the large
NGOs, the World Health
Organization type
organizations, or whether it
was local ministries
or manufacturers.
There were lots of
barriers along the way.
But, by designing it to fit
an existing manufacturing
system, that was really
the breakthrough.
That was going to allow our
first early adopters to
pick it up and start
manufacturing them.
So sticking with that inner
belief was really the key
through all those ups
and downs and forming
those relationships.
You really have no idea what's
going on in the guy's mind
you can be talking to.
For example, I met the Prime
Minister of Pakistan.
And he signed papers, "We
will adopt your product."
They never made one.
But he's telling you he's
going to do it three
or four years ago.
But there's no
intention to do it.
He wanted a press article which
made him look good, and there
was an election the
following month.
There's so many different
things built into the journey.
You really have no idea.
All you have to do
is keep going.
Eric Brewer: One of the things
you brought up that's been true
for Cameron as well is an issue
of transparency and
accountability.
You've written already that one
thing that's unique about these
small organizations is they get
money from donors that
expect accountability.
And sometimes you're working
directly with donors that
donate directly to particular
projects that have
to be transparent.
You talk about a little
of the issues you had
to face that's similar?
Cameron Sinclair:
It's fascinating.
We're like a tug boat,
and a lot of these large
NGOs are like tankers.
I don't see them as opposition.
They have these very
vague claims, right?
They're going to end poverty
for children, right?
And they're going to go from
A to B, and they're going to
get there in one direction.
And these smaller nonprofits
and organizations and
for-profits collaborating
and working together can
be just as impactful.
And it doesn't mean
we're against.
It's not a competition.
But we can latch on to that oil
tanker and pull it to a more
sustainable and holistic
solution that's
community-based.
Because certainly in many of
the places I work, most NGOs
say, "There's a massive
disaster in Haiti.
We need to build lots of
houses, and everyone's
going to be happy."
That's not what people want.
Yes, they want shelter.
But they want a job.
So how are we making sure we're
designing and building
buildings that create the most
amount of jobs in the community
that actually employ people
locally and integrate
disaster mitigation both
future and current?
You know, that has to be done
with a lot of different groups.
So working with economists and
working with environmentalists
and bringing those
groups together.
And then distributing that.
So that's the idea of
competing against large NGOs.
The other is accountability.
My largest donor base right
now in Haiti is high
school children.
There are hundreds of groups
all over the country right
now that are raising
money to build schools.
That video was done by somebody
I've never met before, Ashley
Gutierrez, who said, "Look,
you're in the business
of building buildings.
I'm a filmmaker.
I'm going to give this to
you as a present." She
uploaded it on Vimeo.
We kind of sent it viral.
We sent it to schools who
wanted to raise funds.
We used the square to
raise money in person.
Raised enough money to build
the schools and then
interconnect through
video connections.
Now, that's the first
half of the story.
Sorry, but this is
really important.
Suddenly, when you have
100,000 donors, how are
you accountable to them?
Everybody can ping
me on Facebook.
So we have to create a
mechanism that's transparent
so people can show on.
So we actually -- there's a
slide, I don't know if they
can put it up -- of mine.
Do you guys have that
slide or that video?
If not, I can show
it through this.
So, you know, if I want money
from the U.S. government,
I'm an architect.
So can anyone guess
where it comes from?
Well, it's -- I'm not going
to leave you waiting.
It's the National
Endowment of the Arts.
So, basically, I have to steal
money from sculptors and
photographers to fund
fund humanitarian work
through architecture.
I'm not going to do that.
I have to figure out a way to
raise funding -- that's yours.
Marc Koska: That's mine.
Cameron Sinclair: So anyway,
what we did is we created an
iPad app that has every single
project we've done around the
globe that updates
on the ground --
Michael Fitzgerald: Might want
to hold it to the camera.
Cameron Sinclair: Okay.
I don't know if you need it.
But, for instance, you know, we
can go over to Pakistan or
Afghanistan and our architects
mentioned that are on the front
lines are using their camera
phones to upload every day.
So we build these houses
in Pakistan through
$50, $100 donations.
And they can see today
the roof got put on.
Today it's complete.
I'm going to put
another 100 bucks in.
So that level of accountability
is not happening
at the large NGOs.
They just have to put in some
big white paper and say we did
the work that you
told us to do.
So this level of accountability
needs to transform on
the larger oil tankers.
Eric Brewer: That sounds easy.
You, apparently, had to deal
with partnerships of all
kinds, especially in
the health sector.
You can't just go be a doctor
and give out needles.
How did you get groups
to help you distribute?
You have billions of
these things out there.
Marc Koska: We used
a licensing basis.
I never wanted to be a
manufacturer of syringes.
There are too many
manufacturers in the world.
We've got 600 factories, which
is way too many anyway.
So that was why it was
so key to be able to
retrofit the factories.
And also to make the
product the same price.
That was really key, so that
there was as minimal change
to the distribution
line as possible.
So all our distribution is done
by the normal channels that
were already in place from
those manufacturers.
And so that was quite easy.
But what we had to do was kind
of jump in front of the
manufacturing and supply lines
and lobby governments, which is
where I started my NGO.
And, for example, in India, I
was able to raise a modest
amount of money and inform
through a mass media campaign
on television, radio, and
newspapers about 700 million
views of this message
over a 5-day period.
And then we used that to lobby
the government to change the
law on the use of injections.
In fact this hospital that
you saw is only using
this type of syringes.
Eric Brewer: I love this path.
We could go to WHO and just
get this problem solved.
Or we could advertise on TV to
build up public support to get
the government of India
to adopt what's right.
Marc Koska: The answer
is in the question.
Because, if WHO were going to
do it, they'd have done it.
They know these figures.
They know the problems.
And they said they can't
do it, and I said I can.
So you just go and do it.
Eric Brewer: Fascinating.
One of the things that's
different between your two
groups but I think is worth a
little bit of discussion, you
said to me, personally at
least, that when you went with
Creative Commons to essentially
open source your plans
is when you took off.
And I know intellectual
property was critical to your
success so you could make your
manufacturers successful.
Comments on this model?
Open source is what we talk
about, but you clearly needed
some amount of something else.
Marc Koska: Yeah.
I mean, we funded our
commercial side of the
business through investors.
But what I'm working on now is
a plan where we can buy the
investors out, which would
include me, but then literally
give the patents to any
manufacturer and allow
them to make it on a
royalty-free basis.
And that's what I'm
really keen to do now.
Because that will allow
us to get to scale.
And not just syringes.
I think there are many products
that fit that profile, which
are kind of under a glass
ceiling of unfair competition.
They don't even know there's
competition, but they're not
growing to scale because of
these real competitive
pressures.
And I think we need to
throw the baby out.
Let's start again.
Let's open source
all these ideas.
Let's just get on with the job.
Eric Brewer: Talk about
your experience with that.
Cameron Sinclair: Well, you
know, I had a mid-life
crisis when I hit about 30.
And part of that was I realized
all the work we've done around
the world, I felt very chuffed.
We've impacted the
lives of 1.2 million
people around the world.
Tiny little organization.
Looking at statistics and
looking at the issues out
there, it's not even a
drop in the ocean, not
even a beat of sweat.
So the only way we could really
impact is by open sourcing
everything and saying look,
we're in the business of social
innovation, not financial gain.
So by using Creative Commons
as a mechanism on physical
structures, we can share
those innovative details.
Now, fast forward, we
were very fortunate.
We got the Ted prize.
We were able to help push
something called the Open
Architecture Network.
In 2007 there was one
building with a Creative
Commons license.
As of today there are 5,000
buildings that we know of.
And those have been
replicated many times.
So all the work we've done
on the Gulf Coast, which is
almost 700 houses, are all
under Creative Commons.
If there's a storm on the
Carolinas next year, you can
download full construction
documentation.
You can implement buildings.
Make sure you adhere to local
code, and you're ready to go.
Why should we have to spend
money on jump starting
innovation in these disasters?
One quick example is last year
we hosted a design competition
to design the classroom
of the future.
We said you can only enter
if you went into your
local school and you work
with teachers and kids.
And we ended up with 10,000
people from around the world.
They entered designs, and we
ended up being able to build
a couple of these schools.
Fast forward a few
months, Haiti happens.
They lose 100% of their schools
in western Port-au-Prince,
25% of their schools
in the country.
Guess what they need?
Plans for schools.
Guess what we've got?
600 plans for schools.
Suddenly, we can go through
that, call up the schools and
say, "Hey, you know what?
We can tweak your design based
on materials and labor and
implement it in this area.
Are you up for it?"
Who's going to say no?
So the idea is crowd sourcing
innovation, but making sure
the people who are being
sourced have the expertise
and skills to do it.
So this isn't hey, you've got
an idea, throw it up there.
This is a health and safety
issue, so making sure you've
got licensed professionals
doing it.
Eric Brewer: Excellent.
We're getting near
our end of time.
I think James Wolfensohn is in
the audience, and he had a
comment before about World Bank
being one of the groups that
hasn't historically worked with
the kinds of people
we have up here.
Did you want to
comment on that, Jim?
James Wolfensohn: Such a
fantastic set of presentations.
It's a little
difficult to do that.
What I was reminded of was that
we had at the World Bank
a thing called
the Innovation Marketplace.
And we have still every year
some thousands of innovative
ideas, creative ideas.
But what's come through
today, I think, is that
the idea is part of it.
But the management and sticking
with it and bringing it about,
in your case 17 years before
you got the sales of your
syringes, is a critical element
in what we're hearing
about today.
And so I think it's extremely
interesting as evidence of
great creativity that behind
each one of these stories is a
story of management --
continuing management
and building.
And I think we've been very
lucky to have this group of
people to present before us.
(Applause)
Eric Brewer: In the interest
of time, I'm going to
make that the last word.
Thank you so much for a
great session, and we'll
be up here to continue it.
