Study guide literacy IA mid-term

I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag
full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table, for the kids. And, from my
experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or what is foreign to
them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and
maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little
kids. So, I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "Now, whatever you do,
don't stare at her legs."

But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal
with the adults that the kids could come in, without any adults, for two minutes, on their own. The doors open, the kids
descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put
their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. And I said, "Kids, really quickly -- I woke up this
morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house -- nothing too big, two or three stories -- but, if you could
think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs
would you build me?"

And immediately a voice shouted, "Kangaroo!" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" "No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" "No,
no, no! It should be The Incredibles." And other things that I don't -- aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old
said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." (Laughter) And just
like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that
had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting.

So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago, and there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this
conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. TED literally was the launch pad to the next
decade of my life's exploration. At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. I had woven
carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday.
And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs.

So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic
community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. So that we can stop
compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. Well, lucky for me, a lot of
people answered that call. And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee -- Chee
Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and
she gave me a cover story.

This started an incredible journey. Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting
numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. People would come up to me after
the conference, after my talk, men and women. And the conversation would go something like this, "You know Aimee,
you're very attractive. You don't look disabled." (Laughter) I thought, "Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel
disabled." And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. What does a
beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it
mean to have a disability? I mean, people -- Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody
calls her disabled. (Laughter)

So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen,
and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. So, three months after TED I
found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover -- Fashion-able? Three
months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made
from solid ash. Nobody knew -- everyone thought they were wooden boots. Actually, I have them on stage with me:
Grapevines, magnolias, truly stunning. Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a
realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look,
and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.

I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "The Cremaster
Cycle." This is where it really hit home for me -- that my legs could be wearable sculpture. And even at this point, I
started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. So we made what people
lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material.
Heavy! Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out
the top, and a very lovely brass toe. That's a good close-up of that one. Then another character was a half-woman,
half-cheetah -- a little homage to my life as an athlete. 14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had
articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. (Laughter) And then another pair of legs we
collaborated on were these ... look like jellyfish legs. Also polyurethane. And the only purpose that these legs can
serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. So whimsy matters.

Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have
different negotiations of the terrain under my feet. And I can change my height -- I have a variable of five different
heights. (Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1". And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopaedic in
England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. And
a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5'8". Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she
went, "But you're so tall!" And I said, "I know. Isn't it fun?" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have
an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. And I was having fun with it. And
she looked at me, and she said, "But, Aimee, that's not fair." (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she
really meant it. It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it.

And that's when I knew -- that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last
decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It's a conversation about augmentation. It's a
conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a
symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. So people that
society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to
change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much
right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology -- robotics, bionics -- with the age-old poetry, we are moving
closer to understanding our collective humanity. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we
need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. I think of
Shakespeare's Shylock: "If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?" It is our humanity,
and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. Thank you. (Applause)

This is the exact moment that I started creating something called Tinkering School.

Tinkering School is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects, and be trusted.
Trusted not to hurt themselves, and trusted not to hurt others. Tinkering School doesn't follow a set curriculum. And
there are no tests. We're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing.

When the kids arrive they're confronted with lots of stuff, wood and nails and rope and wheels, and lots of tools, real
tools. It's a six-day immersive experience for the kids. And within that context, we can offer the kids time. Something
that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives. Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of
how to make things than when they arrived, and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling
around.

Nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever. (Laughter) And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry -- (Laughter)
and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity.
We start from doodles and sketches. And sometimes we make real plans. And sometimes we just start building.
Building is at the heart of the experience. Hands on, deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand.
Robin and I, acting as collaborators, keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion. Success is in the
doing. And failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear.

When faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities, a really interesting behavior emerges: decoration.
(Laughter) Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation. From these interludes come deep
insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before.

All materials are available for use. Even those mundane, hateful, plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger
than anyone imagined. And the things that they build amaze even themselves.

Video: Three, two, one, go!

Gever Tulley: A rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds.

Video: Yay! (Applause)

Gever Tulley: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. (Applause)

I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people.
And that was in 1960. And I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the
future. But I will not use digital technology as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. Instead, I have progressed. And
I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box.

This box contains one billion people. And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion
people. In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. And they lived away then. There was a big gap
between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. In the industrialized
world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. And their aspiration was to buy a car. And in
1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. This was the economic level at which Sweden was. But in
contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the
day. And they were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew
up. And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world which we still use linguistically
when we talk about "the West" and "the Developing World." But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade
that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it as it now is.

And that's what I'm going to show you. Because since 1960, what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a
staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. Just look how many. The world population
has doubled since I went to school. And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. A lot of companies
have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. And now their aspiration is not
only to have a car. Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. So this is
where they are today. And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know. And they
have become emerging economies, we call them. And they are now buying cars. And what happened a month ago
was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company. And then finally the Swedes understood that
something big had happened in the world. (Laughter)

So there they are. And the tragedy is that the two billion over here [are still] struggling for food and shoes, they are
still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three
billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated,
and they already also have two or three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. And their aspiration now is,
of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. But this is the world we have
today. No longer any gap. But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here, is
wider than ever. But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving to flying -- [there are] people on all
levels. And most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. This is the new world we have today in 2010.

And what will happen in the future? Well, I'm going to project into 2050. I was in Shanghai recently. And I listened to
what's happening in China. And it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. All the projections [say that]
this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. [But this second] grows with seven, eight percent.

And then they will land up here. They will start flying. And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging
income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology
-- so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap -- then they will move all the
way up here. And they will start to buy electric cars. This is what we will find there.

So what about the poorest two billion? What about the poorest two billion here? Will they move on? Well, here
population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per
woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. [But here among the poorest],
population is growing. So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion. And they will
thereafter increase to four billion. There is nothing -- but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen -- that can stop this
[growth] from happening. Because we already have this [growth] in process. But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of
poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cellphone and come [to
live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes,
because then we get continued population growth.

And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. Here I have on the screen my country
bubbles. Every bubble is a country. The size is population. The colors show the continent. The yellow is the Americas;
dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East; and this light blue is South Asia. That's India and this is
China. Size is population. Here I have children per woman, two children, four children, six children, eight children --
big families [versus] small families. The year is 1960. And down here, child survival, the percentage of children
surviving childhood up to starting school. 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have
today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960. One
billion Western world here, high child-survival, small families. And all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries,
with very large families and poor child survival.

What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing?
They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination and penicillin. And then family planning. Family size is decreasing.
[When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease. And most of the Arab countries in the Middle
East is falling down there [to small families]. Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. [All] emerging economies [in
the] world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size. But we still have the poorest billion.
Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? They are still up here. And they still have a child
survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to
the next generation. And the population will double in one generation.

So the only way of really getting world population growth to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent.
That's why [health] investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national
government in the poorest countries, are so good. Because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable
population size of the world. We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. Child survival is the new green. It's
only by child survival that we will stop population growth. And will it happen? Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a
pessimist. I'm a very serious "possibilist." It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work

analytically with the world. It can be done. We can have a much more just world. With green technology and with
investments to alleviate poverty, and with good global governance, the world can become like this.

And look at the position of the old West. Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own
life. This will not happen again. The role of the old West in the new world is to become [part of] the foundation of the
modern world -- nothing more, nothing less. But it's a very important role. Do it well and get used to it.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Please close your eyes, and open your hands. Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe
your wallet. Now open your eyes. What about a life?

What you see here is a premature baby. He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive
because he can't regulate his own body temperature. This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to
stay warm. Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year, around the world. Four million of these babies die
annually.

But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. The reason
is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop
normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. Imagine, many of these
problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm.

That is the primary function of an incubator. But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand
dollars. So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. As a result, parents resort to local
solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you
see here -- methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. I've seen this firsthand over and over again.

On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby,
Rani. She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani a city hospital so she
could be placed in an incubator. But that hospital was over four hours away. And Sevitha didn't have the means to get
there, so her baby died.

Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a
local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use,
given that the majority of births still take place in the home. We needed something that was portable, something that
could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies, and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars
that an incubator in the U.S. costs.

So, this is what we came up with. What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. It looks like a small sleeping bag
for a baby. You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. There is no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily.
But the magic is in this pouch of wax. This is a phase-change material. It's a wax-like substance with a melting point
of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's
able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. So,
you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby.

Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians,
to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. We plan to launch this product in India in 2010.
And the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator.

Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. But the longer-term social impact is a
reduction in population growth. This seems counter-intuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced
population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. We hope
that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of
technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact.

In designing this we followed a few basic principles. We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people
like Sevitha. We try to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. And then
we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. In doing this, I believe we can truly bring
technology to the masses. And we can save millions of lives, through the simple warmth of an Embrace.

It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" -- they will
not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you.

(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police,
and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a
community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years.

The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because
of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement.
There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. And in
some countries -- let me pick Afghanistan -- 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. And I don't mean that they
drop out of school in the third or fourth grade -- they don't go.

So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. We have
half a million laptops today in the hands of children. We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other
children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. So, in rough
numbers, there are a million laptops. That's smaller than I predicted -- I predicted three to 10 million -- but is still a
very large number.

In Columbia, we have about 3,000 laptops. It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of
Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been
completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and
kidnappings and assassinations, lived.

And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. They've leapfrogged. The change is absolutely monumental,
because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. So yes, they're building roads, yes,
they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in
Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the
world. Before, they were closed off.

Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic
growth. And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's
an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. 31 countries in total are involved,
and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in
Uruguay will have a laptop -- a little green laptop.

Now what are some of the results? Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying
they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties -- not by us --
skyrockets. Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. They own the laptops. They take

them home. And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one
of the three children brought her mother. And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had
been teaching her mother how to read and write. Her mother had not gone to primary school. And this is such an
inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change.

So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. The reason
you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. This is an education project, not a laptop project. They
need to learn learning. And then, just think -- they can have, let's say, 100 books. In a village, you have 100 laptops,
each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. You and I didn't have 10,000
books when we went to primary school.

Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a
collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do
anyway. So we're once again doing "Give One, Get One." Last year, we ran a "Give One, Get One" program, and it
generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to
countries that can't afford it at all. And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan,
Ethiopia, Mongolia. Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, et
cetera. And then we can actually roll out large numbers.

So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. And think of the laptop as a vaccine. You
don't vaccinate a few children. You vaccinate all the children in an area.

Study guide literacy IA mid-term

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