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Une nouvelle étape dans l’Histoire d’OpenClassrooms

Par : Nora Leon

OpenClassrooms vient de changer de dimension.

Nous avons en effet obtenu l’appui d’un groupe d’investisseurs, européens et américains, qui ont acquis une partie du capital de l’entreprise ; ce sont 60 millions de dollars, presque 50 millions d’euros, qui viennent de rentrer dans nos caisses. Dès demain, OpenClassrooms va disposer d’une réserve d’argent très importante pour financer son développement et continuer à croître.

Comme rien de tout cela n’aurait été possible sans le soutien permanent et bienveillant de la communauté OC, nous voulions vous en dire plus sur cette levée, ainsi que sur les partenaires avec lesquels nous avons choisi de travailler.

Qui sont ces investisseurs ? Parmi les plus importants figure une société d’investissement américaine nommée General Atlantic (GA).

Avant de nous engager, nous avons longuement discuté avec GA pour bien accorder nos violons : nous ne sommes pas prêts à grandir à n’importe quel prix, il était donc très important que nos partenaires potentiels soient totalement d’accord avec nous sur notre mission et ce qu’elle implique sur le long terme.

Qu’allons-nous faire de cet argent ? Accomplir notre mission, tout simplement. Depuis le début de l’aventure OpenClassrooms, notre objectif est de rendre l’éducation accessibleà tous, partout, de toutes les manières possibles.

En chiffres, nous visons un million de diplômés OC insérés dans l’emploi par an d’ici 2025 : la tâche est immense, et nous avons besoin de carburant pour l’accomplir.

De manière concrète, cet argent va nous permettre de créer de nouveaux parcours diplômants, et aussi de conquérir de nouveaux étudiants, en France et dans l’espace francophone mais aussi au Royaume-Uni et aux Etats-Unis. Pour les étudiants OpenClassrooms et la communauté au sens large, cet investissement va nous permettre d’améliorer encore notre offre.  

Deux choses pour conclure. D’abord un engagement : OpenClassrooms veut grandir, nous avons de l’ambition et la volonté de faire de cette entreprise un acteur majeur de l’éducation, à l’échelle mondiale ; mais nous voulons le faire en respectant notre mission. C’est pourquoi nous avons entamé les démarches pour devenir l’une des premières entreprises de France à inscrire sa mission dans ses statuts de l’entreprise : nous vous en dirons plus à ce sujet très bientôt.

Et un dernier mot : merci. Merci à vous tous, étudiants, mentors, professeurs, employeurs, membres de l’équipe, investisseurs, partenaires partout en France et ailleurs, merci à toutes et tous ceux qui chaque jour, font d’OpenClassrooms une communauté aussi riche et fructueuse.

Pierre Dubuc et Mathieu Nebra

L’article Une nouvelle étape dans l’Histoire d’OpenClassrooms est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Tout savoir sur les stages dans un parcours OpenClassrooms

Par : Nora Leon

L’objet de cet article est de vous donner toutes les informations sur les modalités de ces stages, pour que vous puissiez savoir si vous y êtes éligible dans le cadre de votre parcours, et comment procéder pour en demander un.

Si vous avez des questions, posez-les directement en commentaire afin que tout le monde puisse bénéficier des réponses. Si vous avez un doute, d’autres personnes le partagent sûrement sans pour autant le formuler.

Chaque jour chez OpenClassrooms, nous voyons fleurir de belles histoires. Celle de Laurent qui travaillait dans le jardinage avant de se reconvertir, après un an à suivre le parcours Chef de projet multimédia – option développement d’OpenClassrooms, il a été embauché en tant que développeur front-end et, quelques mois plus tard, passait manager de son équipe.

Celle de Sylvie aussi : après une carrière de professeur de mathématiques, elle est devenue développeuse front-end et elle est à présent freelance en création de sites web. Nous vous souhaitons une aussi belle réussite que ces deux étudiants, et tant d’autres !

Et nous avons voulu aller plus loin en proposant à nos étudiants d’effectuer un stage en entreprise. Au cours d’un stage, vous validerez en effet les compétences acquises sur les projets, et approfondirez votre pratique, pour maîtriser toujours mieux votre métier.

 

Les conditions pour faire un stage

 

Le type de parcours :

 

  • Vous devez être inscrit à un parcours dont la durée affichée est de 12 mois minimum* (exemple : Développeur d’application frontend, ou Chef de projet multimédia).
  • *Certains parcours de 6 mois peuvent comprendre un stage uniquement pour les étudiants financés par un organisme. Vous pourrez vérifier si votre parcours y est éligible sur sa fiche (voir le point illustré ci-dessous).
  • Votre parcours doit comporter un module stage (soit un projet qui peut être remplacé par une expérience en entreprise).

Voici ce que vous verrez sur la page de votre parcours si votre parcours est éligible à un stage (pour vérifier, rendez-vous ici).

L’expérience requise :

 

  • Vous devez déjà avoir réalisé et validé 3 projets avant de vous lancer en entreprise. Nous prenons cette mesure afin de vous donner le bagage suffisant afin que votre stage se passe bien et que vous en tiriez le meilleur parti, et que les employeurs constatent votre compétence.
  • Attention : Le stage de fin d’études n’est pas possible car les stages doivent remplacer un projet de stage.
La durée des stages :

 

  • Nous délivrons une convention pour un minimum de 2 mois (en France cela nous assure que vous serez indemnisés) et un maximum de 6 mois.
Le volet international :

 

  • Tous les étudiants peuvent a priori réaliser un stage, même si certaines particularités peuvent s’appliquer suivant le pays visé. Avant de partir, vous devrez prendre connaissance des conseils aux voyageurs accessibles via la fiche pays pour être certain que les stages sont acceptés dans votre pays ou le pays dans lequel vous souhaitez le réaliser.
  • Nous devrons vous fournir un document supplémentaire : si votre souhait est de faire un stage à l’international, signalez-le-nous.
Les modalités :

 

  • Nous souhaitons autant que possible que nos étudiants soient gratifiés pour faire un stage. Demandez à l’être, et tentez de négocier plus que le minimum légal. Vos compétences, votre motivation, débrouillardise et persévérance valent mieux que le minimum légal.
  • Conformément à la convention de stage, l’étudiant s’engage à rester abonné pendant la période de stage.

Organisez votre stage, mode d’emploi

 

Étape 1 : décrochez votre stage en entreprise

 

Avant toute chose, et surtout avant de solliciter les conseillers pédagogiques, il vous faut trouver l’entreprise où vous allez effectuer votre stage.

Pour vous aider, nous vous conseillons de suivre le cours sur le Personal Branding, qui va vous aider à être attractif auprès des employeurs, et de consulter ces ressources :

À lire AVANT de rédiger votre CV :

Les dix questions à se poser avant de rédiger son CV
Nos 8 conseils pour améliorer votre CV
10 conseils indispensables pour rendre votre CV attractif
Un article sur le fait d’enjoliver son CV (ou pas)

Quelques informations sur votre lettre de motivation :

Les indispensables qui feront la différence 
La lettre de motivation est-elle morte ?

Quelques conseils pour épater votre recruteur en entretien :

Les conseils de Mathieu Nebra pour faire comme les meilleurs candidats en entretien
Les conseils d’Honorine Jollans, experte RH, pour réussir votre entretien
Les pires et meilleures questions à poser à un recruteur
Les bonnes questions pour la fin de l’entretien
Un article sur la communication non verbale
Et enfin, nos conseils pour accélérer votre recherche.

Étape 2 : cliquez sur le projet puis le lien vers le formulaire

Vous arriverez sur un formulaire où vous pourrez renseigner toutes les informations relatives à votre stage, qui permettront aux conseillers pédagogiques d’éditer votre convention de stage. Au programme, notamment votre identité, vos coordonnées, la durée de votre stage et ses dates, le nom et l’adresse de l’entreprise, etc.

Étape 3 : recevez votre convention

 

Les conseillers pédagogiques pré-remplissent une partie de la convention de stage, puis vous l’adressent ainsi qu’à l’entreprise qui vous accueillera pour remplir l’ensemble des données nécessaires. Une fois toutes les données remplies, cette convention est signée électroniquement par toutes les parties (vous-même, votre entreprise d’accueil et OpenClassrooms). Vous serez alors paré pour faire votre stage.

 

Bonne chance !

 

L’article Tout savoir sur les stages dans un parcours OpenClassrooms est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

J’ai pas eu mon Bac. Et maintenant ?

Par : Nora Leon

Les résultats sont tombés ce matin. Tu pré-sentais que ça n’allait pas passer, et voilà, c’est fait.
T’es recalé au Bac.

Bon, maintenant c’est quoi le programme ?  Tu ne vas pas te laisser abattre si facilement quand même.

Du courage, de la niaque !

 


Tu
as des choix. Mode d’emploi pour ne pas sombrer dans la déprime.


Comment survivre aux résultats en 3 étapes vitales

 

D’abord, souffle un bon coup.

 

Oui, c’est décevant. Tu as bossé pour réussir, ou alors pas tant que cela mais tu espérais quand même que ça passerait. Game over.

Bon, effectivement, c’est ennuyeux.

>   Oui, le Bac est utile car la plupart des écoles et universités françaises l’exigent pour faire des études supérieures.
>   Oui, une majorité d’employeurs préfère embaucher des gens qui sortent de ces écoles.

Cela étant dit, assieds-toi, souffle un coup et fais la liste de tes options (on t’aide).

Il n’y a pas d’échec définitif et on peut toujours apprendre quelque chose et réussir ses projets.

Tiens, regarde cette vidéo, ce sera un bon point de départ pour penser P.O.S.I.T.I.F.


Ensuite, demande-toi si tu peux repasser le Bac.

 

➡ Tu es inscrit au rattrapage ? Qu’est-ce que tu fais à traîner ici ? Vas bosser, MAINTENANT !

(À lire : Le mode d’emploi spécial rattrapage de Studyrama).

Fais de ton mieux et si tu es définitivement recalé, tu liras nos conseils.

 

➡ Tu n’as pas eu 8/20 et ne peux donc pas passer les rattrapages ?
2 options s’offrent à toi.

1. Tu as le courage de repasser le Bac l’année prochaine. Allez, motive-toi. En te préparant mieux, ça passera sûrement.

Benoît est diplômé chez nous et a une carrière professionnelle florissante, le tout sans le Bac. Voici son conseil :

“Si tu en as la possibilité, repasse-le ! Même si on peut se débrouiller sans, tu seras quand même plus libre avec”

 2. Tu n’en es pas à ton premier essai ou tu sais que cela va être très dur de le repasser. 

C’est là qu’on intervient : tu pourras quand même étudier et développer des compétences très recherchées par les recruteurs.

 

Enfin, découvre tes possibilités sans le Bac.  

 

Donc, tu es sûr de chez sûr, tu ne vas pas repasser le Bac ? Pas par flemme ou par esprit de contraction ? Tu en as discuté avec tes profs et proches ? C’est vraiment au-dessus de tes forces ? D’accord.

Dans ce cas, on te la fait courte. OUI, on peut mener une belle carrière professionnelle sans avoir le Bac en poche. Nos diplômés témoignent.

 

Trajectoires de 3 diplômés OC qui n’ont pas le Bac

 

Benoît, responsable informatique et ex-patron de magasin informatique
Diplômé OpenClassrooms Chef de projet Multimédia Développement

 

“Au lycée, je séchais beaucoup. Je montais des PC dans un magasin d’informatique, en échange de quelques composants pour le mien. Je n’ai pas eu mon BAC S et j’ai été exclu du lycée.


J’étais coincé, je ne pouvais pas faire d’études. Le dirigeant du magasin d’informatique où je « bricolais » m’a conseillé de m’adresser à l’IFC, un centre de formation. Il recrutaient à partir de BAC +2. Devant mon insistance, ils m’ont fait passer des tests, que j’ai réussis grâces aux connaissances acquises au magasin. J’ai ensuite passé les certifications Microsoft sur Windows NT4 (MCSE). Elles m’ont permis de trouver du travail en intérim dans différentes SSII de la région Nantaise. J’ai fait ça pendant 5 ans. Ensuite, j’ai créé mon magasin d’informatique. Cette aventure a duré 6 ans.

Depuis 2010, je suis responsable informatique d’une PME d’environ 50 salariés. J’ai suivi la formation OpenClassrooms de Chef de projet Multimédia Spécialité Développement (que j’ai terminée en décembre 2017). J’avais toujours eu envie de toucher au développement, c’est un atout supplémentaire”.

 

Jonathan, Chef de projet IT en Banque et entrepreneur en développement web
Diplômé OpenClassrooms Chef de projet Multimédia Développement

 

“Je n’ai pas eu le Bac. À la place, j’ai enchaîné différents emplois : en Fast Food, magasin de sport, de bricolage, en banque. Après 7 ans en banque, je souhaitais évoluer professionnellement et même changer de secteur et de métier.

J’ai choisi OC car c’était pour moi l’exemple de l’entreprise qui est partie de rien pour aider des gens à se reconvertir. La formation m’a donné de bonnes bases de codage. Et en ce moment, j’apprends un nouveau langage de programmation pour mes besoins professionnels, car OpenClassrooms nous apprend à nous former en continu.

Aujourd’hui, je travaille pour un groupe bancaire international, et j’ai monté mon agence de développement en parallèle en Pologne, car je vis à Cracovie. Mes clients ne m’ont jamais demandé de fournir la preuve de l’obtention du Bac”.

 

Mohamed, Développeur PHP
Diplômé OpenClassrooms Chef de projet Multimédia Développement

 

 

“J’ai quitté le système scolaire à 17 ans, après une 2nde professionnelle en chaudronnerie et en logistique qui ne m’a pas plu.

 

Après cela, avec de la détermination, j’ai trouvé un emploi en tant que technicien de maintenance informatique où je pouvais me former en continu.

 

Peu à peu, j’ai découvert le monde du développement web, car notre entreprise m’a fait refaire son site internet et son intranet avec le CMS WordPress. Alors, j’ai saisi l’opportunité d’aller plus loin en suivant le parcours diplômant en développement via OpenClassrooms. Suite à ce parcours, j’ai trouvé un emploi en tant que Développeur PHP dans une entreprise, deux mois seulement après mon diplôme, et cela se passe bien”.

 

Bac ou pas Bac ? Comment faire sans ?

 

“Ça dépend. Sans le Bac, tout n’est pas perdu (OpenClassrooms est une voie possible). Par contre il ne faut pas croire que le BAC est inutile. Il sert à avoir un socle de connaissances sans lesquelles on est parfois handicapé. Par exemple, pour être Data Scientist, il faut de bonnes connaissances en Maths. Le Bac sert aussi à ouvrir des portes, surtout celles d’un premier emploi, car ensuite les recruteurs regardent l’expérience. Donc, si tu peux le repasser, fais-le, et dans le cas contraire, mets en avant ton expérience et tes compétences”.

Benoît

 

“Le BAC est encore vu en France comme le Saint Graal de la vie active sans lequel on est un raté. Mais je suis un exemple parmi d’autres qui montre qu’on peut réussir sa carrière sans lui. Attention : ce qu’on apprend au lycée est très utile. L’anglais, les mathématiques par exemple, ou dans mon cas l’Histoire pour comprendre celle de Cracovie (en Pologne), où je vis. Mais le bout de papier comme tel n’est pas indispensable pour exercer le métier qui te passionne : ce sont tes compétences, ta motivation et ta personnalité qui feront la différence”.

Jonathan

 

“Je ne suis pas sûr que le Bac soit nécessaire pour tous les métiers. Dans le numérique, on est plus jugés sur nos compétences”.

Mohamed

La boîte à motivation


3 conseils de nos diplômés

 


Choisis la voie qui te plaît, pas celle à la mode… et bosse. Donne-toi les moyens de réussir. Si tu bosses maintenant, tu gagneras ta vie sans travailler… mais en pratiquant ta passion”.

Benoît

 

“Si ton projet professionnel te permet de continuer sans le Bac, n’hésite pas. Beaucoup de gens réussissent leur carrière sans lui”.

Mohamed

 

“Quand on veut, on peut. Tu es maître de ton avenir. Tu as sûrement un énorme potentiel, mais il ne faut pas baisser les bras. Rassemble ta détermination et travaille. Pour monter un projet ou se vendre à un recruteur, il faut de la motivation, de la conviction, prouver que tu es unique et que tu as les compétences. Tu peux faire ça sans le Bac”.

Jonathan

 

Bonus : ils ont réussi… Sans le Bac

 

 

L’article J’ai pas eu mon Bac. Et maintenant ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Et si je me lançais en tant que freelance ?

Par : Nora Leon

C’est le grand saut, mais ça a l’air de valoir le coup. 

Votre rythme, les missions qui vous passionnent, les clients dont le projet fait sens pour vous. C’est tentant d’être son propre patron et de choisir ses spécialités. Mais aussi de rencontrer des personnes intéressantes au fil de nouveaux contrats. Ou encore pouvoir vous aménager la vie que vous voulez, où vous le voulez. Ce serait un bon moyen pour vous épanouir professionnellement, concilier travail et vie de famille ou projet entrepreneurial.


Pas de doute, se lancer en freelance est plus facile aujourd’hui qu’hier. Sur
Malt, 50 000 personnes ont déjà sauté le pas au sein d’une communauté qui grandit chaque jour.

Suite à un parcours diplômant OpenClassrooms, les métiers du numérique se prêtent tout à fait au format du travail indépendant. La grande majorité d’entre peuvent être exercés à distance. Développement, design, marketing, entrepreneuriat… Nous voulions donc aborder ce sujet pour donner aux étudiants les clés pour savoir si c’est fait pour eux, et des conseils pratiques pour se lancer.

°            °            °

 

Indépendant : est-ce que cela me correspond ?

 

La première question à vous poser : est-ce fait pour moi ? Il y a évidemment des avantages, mais une carrière en tant qu’indépendant requiert certaines caractéristiques et aptitudes et n’est pas de tout repos.

 

Vous sentez-vous capable de tenir une comptabilité ? Le statut de freelance comprend bien des aspects administratifs qu’il faut pouvoir gérer en toute autonomie ou en binôme avec un gestionnaire. Ces aspects constituent entre 5 et 10% du temps consacré à l’activité. 

Avez-vous la fibre commerciale et aimez-vous les nouveaux défis ? Pour chaque client recruté, combien d’appels, d’e-mails ou de rencontres dans le cadre du networking ? Le statut d’indépendant nécessite, pour pouvoir avoir une activité fluide, de consacrer au moins 10% de son temps à la prospection commerciale, même si l’on est déjà répertorié sur un site de profils en freelance.

 

Prenez-vous plaisir à élargir votre réseau ? Souvent, les opportunités se construisent au contact de personnes rencontrées lors d’événements. Sociabilité, proactivité et dynamisme sont de mise pour tout freelance, qui peut avoir parfois 5 rendez-vous ou plus pour agrandir son réseau. Une façon de créer des opportunités à moyen et long terme.


Êtes-vous organisé et capable d’établir un plan de travail sur plusieurs mois et de vous y tenir ? Ce statut demande plus d’anticipation qu’un emploi en tant que salarié, pour pouvoir réduire le risque, et définir le nombre et la nature des missions réalisables dans un laps de temps donné.

En tant qu’indépendant, il faut également se préparer aux inconvénients qui peuvent se révéler pesants pour certaines personnes : 

S’habituer à la réalité d’une activité parfois précaire. Au-delà du doute présent au quotidien quant au montant de son salaire mensuel, les opportunités de placements (immobiliers par exemple), peuvent être plus compliquées d’accès.
Mettre une croix sur la certitude d’une évolution de carrière linéaire.
Accepter de moins travailler en équipe et qu’on n’aura pas forcément l’occasion de manager quelqu’un au quotidien.
➤ Enfin, cela requiert de l’autonomie et de l’auto-discipline. Ceux qui ont du mal à s’y mettre ou à tenir la distance sur le long-terme pourraient avoir tendance à se démotiver.

 

Cela ne vous fait pas peur ? Vous y voyiez plus d’avantages que de risques ? Dans ce cas, c’est le moment de vous donner des éléments sur comment vous y prendre exactement.

 

Choisir votre statut

 

Nous vous renvoyons à l’article de Quentin Debavelaere, le Chief Operations Officer de notre partenaire Malt, qui vous expliquera les options qui s’offrent à vous.


 

En bref, en dessous de 170 000€ de chiffre d’affaires pour les entreprises d’achat et de vente de biens, et sous 70 000€ pour toutes les autres, le statut micro-entrepreneur suffit. Les plafonds relevés en 2018 par la Loi Finance permettent en effet de conserver ce statut plus longtemps.

 

Au-dessus de ce montant, Quentin conseille “de choisir entre la SASU (Société par Actions Simplifiée) ou l’EURL (Société Anonyme à Responsabilité Limitée) en fonction de vos priorités : rester au régime général de la sécurité sociale (c’est notamment le cas des personnes qui ont toujours été inscrites à ce régime et qui prendront leur retraite dans une dizaine d’années) ou bien gagner plus”.

Une fois votre statut choisi, optimisez votre présence en ligne.

Créer un profil attractif

 

Pour démarcher des clients, ayez un profil sé-dui-sant !


Les ingrédients d’un excellent profil

➤ Une photo professionnelle où vous souriez

➤ Une description courte et attrayante de ce que vous offrez

➤ Un profil limpide, qui donne en un coup d’œil un aperçu de vos compétences, votre expérience et votre parcours

➤ Un portfolio exhaustif et professionnel

➤ Des recommandations clients

➤ Le moyen de vous contacter

➤ Vos tarifs et conditions en un coup d’œil.

 

Pour réussir votre profil, nous vous conseillons le cours de Nicolas Decaux, notre expert de chez LinkedIn, sur le ‘Personal Branding’. Il vous permettra de créer votre propre marque, et ainsi de vous mettre en valeur.

 

Grâce à ce profil, recrutez vos premiers clients (le premier est toujours le plus dur).

 

Prospecter au mieux

 

Vous l’aurez compris, prospecter est l’une des clés d’une activité réussie en tant qu’indépendant. 10 à 20% de votre temps de travail environ devront être dédiés à recruter de nouveaux clients.

 

Pour cela, outre votre profil irréprochable, vous aurez besoin de sonder les demandes du marché et des entreprises en particulier, pour construire des propositions commerciales qui répondent à des besoins forts. Plus le besoin sera prégnant, plus cher vous pourrez facturer votre service.

 

Une fois le “pain point” (le besoin) compris, vous pourrez construire une proposition commerciale convaincante :

➤ Fondée sur la discussion avec le client et son besoin

➤ Sur-mesure

➤ Concise et claire

➤ Irréprochable au niveau formel.

Pour vous améliorer dans l’art de la prospection et de la fidélisation client, suivez le cours d’Henri, Account Director chez OpenClassrooms.

 



Enfin, en plus de ces éléments, voici quelques conseils pratiques pour organiser au mieux votre activité en tant qu’indépendant.

 

Vous faciliter la vie grâce à des services pour indépendants

 

Nous vous l’assurions plus haut, devenir indépendant est moins risqué aujourd’hui qu’hier. Et étant donnée la croissance sur ce marché, plusieurs entreprises se sont alliées pour proposer des services qui vous rendent la vie plus facile.

 

Nous avons un chouchou : le partenariat Sésame, entre Qonto, Malt, Alan, et l’ExpertComptable.com, notamment.

 

Ce package permet d’avoir au même endroit tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour gérer votre création d’entreprise : comptabilité, assurance, compte en banque, formation… Ces entreprises vous accompagnent dans les démarches administratives pour les alléger.

Au programme : 

 

➤ Le choix de votre forme juridique et la rédaction des statuts

➤ Le dépôt du dossier et de la demande d’ACCRE

➤ L’inscription aux impôts et aux caisses sociales faite automatiquement pour vous

➤ Le recrutement de votre comptable pour 80€ par mois, dont deux mois offerts

➤ Une session de conseils personnalisés et une séance photo, offerte par Malt

➤ Les trois premiers mois de frais bancaires à 29€ par Qonto, la banque des indépendants

➤ Le premier mois d’assurance offert par Alan

➤ -15% sur les bootcamps de code et de design par IronHack

➤ 20% de réduction sur le premier mois d’abonnement en co-working Co-pass à Paris

➤ Un Premium Solo OpenClassrooms offert.

 

Quelques ressources pour aller plus loin

 

Visitez le site des auto-entrepreneurs.

Renseignez-vous sur l’ACCRE, accessible aux demandeurs d’emploi et aux -25 ans.

Renseignez-vous sur les modalités du RSA pour les travailleurs indépendants.

Lisez le blog de notre partenaire Malt.

 

L’article Et si je me lançais en tant que freelance ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Devenir UX Designer, une bonne idée ?

Par : Nora Leon

Depuis quelques années, le métier d’UX designer a le vent en poupe. Cet architecte de nos outils numériques est de plus en plus demandé dans les petites entreprises comme dans les grands groupes. Nous nous sommes penchés sur les raisons qui rendent ce métier particulièrement passionnant.

1- Pour changer la vie des gens et construire d’excellents produits numériques

L’UX designer changerait-il la vie des gens ? N’est-ce pas un peu exagéré ? Réfléchissons à la manière dont Apple a transformé nos vies et nous verrons l’impact qu’un design révolutionnaire et une expérience utilisateur extraordinaire ont sur nos existences depuis 15 ans.

Le métier de l’UX designer, c’est d’améliorer les interfaces utilisateurs sur tous les supports (site internet, objet numérique, application mobile, etc) pour les rendre plus intuitives et agréables à utiliser.

En amont de la création pure, l’UX designer discute avec le client pour définir ses besoins, et pendant la phase de développement, il teste les solutions. Et tous les professionnels du milieu l’assurent, c’est grisant lorsque les utilisateurs leur disent que leur produit est génial.

2- Pour avoir un impact sur le produit

Au même titre que les équipes commerciales ou les développeurs, l’UX designer “construit” le produit.

Parmi ses missions les plus stratégiques, il définit les profils types des clients qui vont utiliser le produit, et fait un “mapping” de tests utilisateurs pour déterminer quel chemin, quelle fonctionnalité doivent être adoptés.

Ses découvertes sont une réelle “boussole” pour construire le produit. Elles ont d’ailleurs du poids, puisqu’elles s’appuient sur des tests quantitatifs et qualitatifs.

3- Pour relever de nouveaux défis au quotidien

Pour améliorer l’expérience utilisateur, l’UX designer doit inventer au quotidien de nouvelles solutions créatives. Aucun projet ne ressemble aux autres, les stratégies changent en fonction des produits, des cibles et des secteurs.

Devenir UX designer, c’est donc l’assurance de ne jamais s’ennuyer, et de pouvoir utiliser son  esprit analytique et sa créativité tous les jours.

4- Pour allier connaissances techniques et scientifiques

Pour exercer ce métier, il faut avoir à la fois :

  • des connaissances techniques (connaître les dessous d’une application ou d’un site, savoir communiquer avec une équipe de développeurs, être à jour dans sa veille technologique)
  • des connaissances scientifiques, car l’UX design emprunte beaucoup à la psychologie et à la sociologie.

La curiosité et la polyvalence intellectuelle qui sont donc nécessaires en font un métier passionnant.

5- Pour suivre l’évolution numérique de près

ProductHunt, l’Apple Store, TechCrunch ou encore les sites spécialisés de design… Cela fera partie de votre job d’être curieux de tout ce qui se fait au niveau technologies.

En outre, le métier est appelé à évoluer en fonction des nouveaux terminaux : demain, on imagine bien un UX designer travailler sur des objets connectés ou de la réalité virtuelle, ce qui demandera une mise à jour des compétences et devrait s’avérer passionnant.

En cela, on peut dire que l’UX designer, au même titre qu’un responsable produit, devrait être acteur de la construction de ces objets connectés et nouveaux terminaux, puisqu’il y définira l’expérience utilisateur.

6- Faire partie d’une communauté de passionnés

La culture du partage fait partie intégrante du crédo de la communauté internationale des designers.

Entrer dans cette communauté, cela veut dire que non seulement vous pourrez (et devrez) partager votre savoir, vos bons plans, vos découvertes, mais aussi que vous pourrez demander de l’aide.

Il n’est pas rare qu’un UX designer expérimenté soit le mentor d’un plus jeune, ou que des professionnels du milieu se penchent sur un projet pour partager des avis, ou des bonnes pratiques qui aident à avancer.

7- Choisir comment vous voulez exercer ce métier

En freelance, en CDI dans une entreprise de la taille et du secteur que vous souhaitez… En france ou à l’international, ou même en voyage, vous aurez le choix de l’offre que vous accepterez, en fonction de votre chemin de vie et conception du travail.


8- Pour avoir de belles perspectives d’évolution

L’UX designer a de nombreuses casquettes : sociologue, architecte 2.0, consultant, product manager, même parfois développeur. Le métier vous ouvre donc bien des portes, et peut amener vers une carrière verticale dans l’UX design, ou des postes connexes de Product Manager, Développeur web, UI designer, ou encore consultant. À vous donc de savoir quel tournant vous souhaitez donner à votre carrière

 

L’article Devenir UX Designer, une bonne idée ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Découvrez l’UX design, le pendant numérique du métier d’architecte

Par : Nora Leon

L’UX designer est un architecte. Il écoute les besoins de son client pour penser la structure du site, qui représente une grande partie de l’expérience utilisateur”.  Adeline Brogard, UX designer chez OCTO Technology

 

Que l’entreprise soit un média, un prestataire de services, ou même un site de e-commerce, tout doit être fait pour que l’internaute utilise intuitivement le site et le trouve suffisamment pratique pour y rester, et, le cas échéant, acheter.

Dans ce contexte, les excellents UX designers sont de plus en plus recherchés.

Découvrez ce métier à la fois analytique, créatif et tech, encore méconnu mais qui a de beaux jours devant lui.

[À lire : le métier d’UX Designer en start-up]

Notre experte

 

Adeline Brogard est UX designer chez OCTO Technology. Elle s’est reconvertie après une première partie de carrière en marketing.

Lorsqu’elle exerçait en marketing, Adeline voulait se rapprocher des utilisateurs pour mieux comprendre leurs besoins. Elle raconte : “En marketing, on a une vision-cible des profils qui se serviront de notre produit mais pas des utilisateurs réels. Avec l’UX design, j’ai découvert une méthode pour améliorer l’expérience client de manière concrète en répondant à leurs besoins”.

 

Pouvez-vous nous décrire une journée type ?

Plutôt un projet type. Il y a deux temps fort dans l’UX design : la partie cadrage, et la partie conception (que l’on nomme « delivery » chez OCTO Technology).

Le cadrage permet de comprendre le contexte client, explorer et définir le besoin.  Je démarre par des immersions, que je synthétise à travers des livrables :

  • Les personas, qui catégorise par usage les profils d’utilisateurs réels rencontrés,
  • Les experience maps : le chemin utilisateur, pour analyser leur journée type et définir leurs nuances de sentiments pour apporter la meilleure solution en terme d’expérience à chaque étape de leur chemin
  • Et les empathy maps, pour comprendre les émotions diverses des personas.

À partir de cette synthèse, je fais ressortir les “pain points” pour l’utilisateur, c’est-à-dire les problématiques prioritaires, qui viennent dessiner les priorités du projet.

Cet ensemble d’informations permet d’apporter des recommandations à mon client. Nous en discutons alors pour se mettre d’accord sur les hypothèses retenues.

La partie conception sert à prototyper, tester et réaliser fonctionnalités demandées. La fréquence de mes interventions est variable en fonction du moment du projet. Elle est aussi dépendante de mon accès aux utilisateurs, pour les rencontrer, faire les tests et co-construire la solution.

 

Ce qui vous plaît le plus ?


Ce qui me plaît, c’est d’abord d’être en empathie pour mettre l’utilisateur au centre de la réflexion. De tout faire pour comprendre ses besoins et lui proposer la meilleure solution possible. J’adore aussi l’opérationnel : aller sur le terrain faire ce qu’on appelle de l’UX research, réaliser des interviews pour pouvoir construire des hypothèses.

 

Quels sont les plus grands défis quand on exerce ce métier dans le Conseil ?


L’évangélisation ! Cela va vous paraître étrange, mais c’est parfois difficile de faire comprendre à notre client notre métier (et les avantages pour lui). Il y a toujours une réticence du client à intégrer l’UX design. Et notamment des équipes marketing, qui ciblent d’un point de vue business les personnes qu’ils veulent attirer, en les confondant avec les utilisateurs.

Or, en design, on sait que la persona marketing n’est pas l’utilisateur final. Nous devons justement nous confronter à l’utilisateur réel.

Cela étant dit,  aujourd’hui, avec la recrudescence des méthodologies agile et lean, l’UX design est de plus en plus reconnu. Il parle aux professionnels de la transformation numérique.

 

Comment voyez-vous le métier d’UX designer dans 10 ans ?


Je n’ai pas de réponse arrêtée. Cependant, si je fais le parallèle avec le Marketing, l’UX design est amené à évoluer de pair avec les technologies. Dans 10 ans, on devrait designer des interfaces locales, des hologrammes, travailler en 3D. On travaillera aussi avec des data scientists et des spécialistes du machine learning.

Une autre transformation que je vois se profiler : pour moi, le métier de sociologue se concentrera demain sur l’éthique. Avec la multiplication des chatbots, l’aube de l’intelligence artificielle et d’autres outils qu’on ne connaît pas encore, la question de l’éthique sera centrale. L’Homme programme les machines à son image mais avec des biais cognitifs. À mon sens, l’UX design devrait bientôt viser à corriger ces biais.

 

C’est fait pour qui ?

 

C’est fait pour les sociologues, les ethnologues, les gens du marketing, les ergonomes, ceux qui ont fait des études d’UX design, qui ont fait du conseil. Il faut avoir une forte capacité d’écoute, d’analyse et de synthèse.

Attention à l’effet “c’est facile, il faut demander au client ce qu’il veut”. Car comme disait Steve Jobs, « Ce n’est pas le boulot des consommateurs de savoir ce qu’ils veulent”.

 

Quelles sont les qualités à développer pour évoluer dans cette branche ?

 

En tout premier lieu la curiosité. Il faut aussi avoir la capacité à apprendre, vouloir participer à des conférences (par exemple la FUPA, Paris Web, Toulouse Web, Meetup UX République) et se mettre à jour continuellement grâce à une veille efficace.
Il faut aussi s’intéresser à ce qui se trouve hors de son périmètre. Comprendre le fonctionnement des product owners ou coachs agiles par exemple, est utile pour travailler efficacement avec eux.

 

Avez-vous des bonnes pratiques pour ceux qui débutent dans ce métier ?

 

  • Aimer les gens, être curieux. C’est la base de l’UX. On a une posture particulière : être dans l’observation sans jugement de la personne qu’on suit, pour comprendre pourquoi elle fait les choses.
  • Être empathique sans être sympathique. Concrètement, être là pour comprendre les problèmes mais ne pas les résoudre de manière immédiate pour supprimer des frustrations.
  • La créativité est plutôt du côté UI.  En UX, il faut être ordonné, synthétique (On voit 10 personnes, puis on capter les éléments des profils et les restitue fidèlement).
  • Il faut s’entraîner à exposer des besoins sans parler de solutions, pour remettre en cause les idées reçues des clients. Tout le jeu d’équilibriste, c’est d’apporter des recommandations en termes d’opportunités, qu’on les traduit en hypothèses mais sans imposer une solution au détriment d’une autre.  
    Par exemple, si on met en place une application mobile en banque pour faciliter les échanges d’argent entre potes pendant un voyage, notre objectif n’est pas de dire que l’application mobile est la seule solution possible, mais qu’on peut répondre à ce besoin sur mobile, le web, ou une forme de réseau social. La solution recommandée dépend des résultats des immersions et des orientations business de l’entreprise.
Des ressources à partager pour apprendre au mieux ?

 

  • Muzli, qui regroupe tous les sites de tendances pour faire des maquettes.
  • Sketch et InVision comme outils de travail incontournables.
  • Pinterest comme source d’inspiration très riche.
  • Huntsplash pour les photos libres de droits.
  • SketchAppSource pour trouver des templates gratuits faits par des UX ou UI designers et partagés à la communauté.
  • Milanote, qui est une sorte d’Evernote visuel (pour rassembler les inspirations visuelles, les articles de blog, etc).
  • Medium, pour avoir des dizaines de retours très pertinents d’UX designers en cherchant les bloposts par mots-clés.
  • Et bien sûr YouTube, pour trouver des tutos sur le Design Thinking, le Sprint, l’UX design, surtout si on comprend l’anglais.

 

Intéressé par ce métier ?

Renseignez-vous sur notre formation diplômante à Bac +5  avec l’emploi garanti, en tant qu’UX designer, en suivant ce lien.

 

L’article Découvrez l’UX design, le pendant numérique du métier d’architecte est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

À quoi ressemble le métier d’UX designer en start-up ?

Par : Nora Leon

Le rôle d’UX Designer est très prisé, car chaque entreprise présente sur la toile a besoin de récupérer et d’analyser des données sur ses utilisateurs pour optimiser l’expérience client en ligne. 

L’enjeu est simple : créer le meilleur produit ou service possible pour fidéliser ses clients.

Nous avons voulu vous donner un aperçu de ce métier dans différents environnements et secteurs. Cet article se focalise sur ce rôle en start-up.

[À lire : le métier d’UX Designer dans le Conseil]


Notre expert

 


Xavier Dumont
est Product Manager et UX designer chez Bureaux à Partager.

À sa sortie d’école de management, Xavier n’a fait que des stages en web marketing, et c’est donc dans cette discipline qu’il s’est spécialisé. Il s’est formé sur le tas à l’intégration et au web design, puis est entré en école de web design puis en web développement.

Le rôle de Product Manager, centré sur l’utilisateur et toujours très lié à l’UX design, l’a séduit car il est au croisement entre ses compétences en web design, développement web et web marketing.

 

Qu’est-ce qui te plaît dans l’UX design ?

 

La combinaison entre la réflexion et la stratégie en amont, et le côté très terre à terre, car l’utilisation concrète prime en fin de compte. On réfléchit sur le long-terme pour construire une expérience client sur le long-terme. Et également l’aspect créatif.

Quand on construit des plateformes, on met sur pieds de manière créative quelque chose de concret qui servira à l’utilisateur.

 

Une semaine type en tant que Product Manager et ce qu’elle comprend en UX

 

Je travaille sur toute la boucle d’itérations sur le produit. J’analyse les données que je trouve sur le site, je réfléchis à prioriser les aspects du produit que nous allons développer en fonction des retours utilisateurs et de la ‘roadmap’, et enfin je fais le travail effectif d’un UX designer, en essayant de confronter mes maquettes à l’utilisateur, jusqu’à la mise en application.

Chez Bureaux à Partager, on fait beaucoup avec peu, et les Product Managers sont polyvalents. Je fais l’UX de la plateforme, et je participe au brainstorming sur l’UX des autres produits régulièrement. Aucune semaine ne ressemble à une autre. Nous sommes tous des couteaux suisses.

Peux-tu nous décrire la stratégie UX Design de Bureaux à Partager ?

 

Chez BAP, dans notre offre de matching pour trouver des bureaux ou des salles, nous avons deux cibles. Ceux qui cherchent une place pour travailler et ceux qui ont des places à louer.

La première étape a été de définir nos personas et surtout d’aller à la rencontre de nos utilisateurs pour construire la meilleure expérience possible sur le site. Nous avons utilisé des formulaires qualis, quantis, et des entretiens pour comprendre leurs attentes.

Avec ces infos, nous avons défini nos cibles et cerné leurs attentes pour créer un produit sur-mesure et optimisé.

  • Les co-workings ont déjà un outil de contractualisation, car c’est leur business. Par contre, ils ont besoin de leads pour pouvoir louer leurs bureaux, et donc on leur en fournit via notre plateforme.
  • Les non professionnels, qui cherchent un bureau ou en louent un, ont besoin des bons contacts et des bons outils, que nous développons pour eux. Un exemple simple : nous avons travaillé sur un outil de signature électronique car nous savions que ce serait utile aux non-professionnels, que cela leur faciliterait la tâche dans les contrats signés via chez nous.

Ensuite, lorsqu’on a fait la refonte du site en octobre dernier, il a fallu  se poser la question de la cohabitation des différentes cibles et offres. En effet, nous avions cette cible multiple d’offreurs et de demandeurs, avec différents espaces (bureaux, salles de réunions), ainsi que différentes temporalités (à la journée ou au mois).

Là, nous avons pris le parti de privilégier notre principale proposition de valeur : trouver un bureau au mois. en simplifiant notre message sur la landing page :

  • l’accessibilité des demandeurs, pour que celui qui cherche un bureau trouve facilement ;

Mais aussi de mettre en avant la possibilité d’être offreur d’une salle ou d’un bureau. Le bouton “publier une annonce” est donc très présent, par exemple.

C’est cela, construire une démarche UX : faire des choix pour que le chemin utilisateur soit intuitif tout en correspondant aux objectifs principaux de l’entreprise.

 

Quelles sont les qualités clés pour exercer ce métier, particulièrement en start-up ?

 

La première chose, c’est de savoir écouter (écouter vraiment) et se remettre en question. C’est primordial de prendre en compte les retours des utilisateurs sur ce qu’on fait, ou même de gens qui ne sont pas dans le milieu, mais qui ont un regard frais et du bon sens.

Il faut être humble aussi. On est un peu les exécutants des besoins qu’on priorise et qui sont parfois dictés par quelqu’un d’autre. Et agile, car il arrive souvent de devoir faire passer une tâche avant une autre, revoir son planning ou même se dépêcher d’installer une fonctionnalité. Évidemment, c’est ambivalent, car car l’UX designer ou le Product Manager doivent avoir confiance en leurs conclusions et se faire confiance en imposant leur vision. Cela fait partie de l’expérience métier de comprendre quelles sont les meilleures décisions à mettre en place.

Enfin, la curiosité est un très bon défaut dans notre métier. Il est utile de regarder ce qui se fait chez les autres, les nouvelles pratiques en termes d’outils, de navigation. C’est à ce titre qu’on reste pointu et qu’on ne se laisse pas dépasser par les innovations qu’on ne connaît pas.

 

Xavier vous a donné envie d’exercer ce métier ? 
Par ici pour l’apprendre, dans notre parcours UX Designer

L’article À quoi ressemble le métier d’UX designer en start-up ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Pourquoi choisir l’apprentissage ?

Par : Nora Leon

L’apprentissage est de plus en plus plébiscité par les entreprises et les étudiants. Chaque année, plus d’un demi million d’étudiants se lancent.

Votre cœur balance encore entre l’apprentissage et une autre modalité de formation ?  Voici quelques éléments pour décider en connaissance de cause.

[Saviez-vous que c’était le bon moment pour démarrer une alternance ? Jusqu’au 31 décembre 2020, le gouvernement propose une aide à l’embauche. Les entreprises peuvent toucher entre 5 et 8000€ de prime d’alternance supplémentaire. Le temps de recherche a aussi été étendu de 3 à 6 mois après le début d’une formation. Vous commencez sereinement votre parcours diplômant chez nous, et nous vous aidons à trouver votre employeur dans les mois qui suivent. Rendez-vous sur notre page Alternance]

L’apprentissage, un dispositif avantageux

1- Pour vous former sans vous ruiner

Tout le monde n’a pas les moyens de s’offrir une ou plusieurs années de formation en école ou à l’université . En apprentissage, c’est l’employeur qui paie vos études. La formation est financée par la taxe d’apprentissage, un impôt dû par les entreprises. L’entreprise vous verse un salaire grâce à cette taxe (net, sans charges, en fonction de votre âge et de votre année d’entrée en apprentissage).  Et pour information, il est plus intéressant pour une entreprise de prendre un alternant car les coûts sont moindres, ce qui explique que ce type de contrat soit répandu.

2-  Pour mettre en pratique ce que vous apprenez

Si l’apprentissage est plébiscité par des étudiants de tous métiers et secteurs, c’est parce qu’il vous permet d’être dans le concret. Vous mettez en pratique ce que vous apprenez dans vos cours et dans vos projets en entreprise. C’est l’assurance de bien assimiler, puisque vous réutilisez directement vos découvertes dans un contexte professionnel. Or, la mise en pratique vous aidera à les ancrer et même à aller plus loin dans votre apprentissage.

3- Pour avoir un pied dans le monde professionnel

En tant qu’apprenti, vous signez un contrat de travail avec votre employeur. Vous êtes donc considéré comme un salarié, et avez les missions et les avantages qui correspondent à ce titre.

Finis les stages photocopies où vous vous ennuyez à mourir adossé à la machine à café. Au sein de l’équipe, vous apprendrez tout ce qui s’acquiert sur le terrain : travailler en collaboration, animer une réunion, présenter une idée, mener à bien un projet, réussir un sprint. En apprentissage, vous serez en plein dans le grand bain.
Vous bénéficierez aussi des mêmes avantages que les salariés. Selon l’entreprise, cela pourra être l’achat de produits à tarifs préférentiels, l’accès au CE, le droit au télétravail, à un treizième mois, à de l’intéressement aux résultats… C’est donc un statut valorisant.

4- Pour apprendre à vous organiser

Si dans votre vie personnelle votre emploi du temps a tendance à flotter, en apprentissage, vous allez vite apprendre à le structurer.

Le rythme est intense : combiner cours, projets et un poste requiert de l’endurance. Pour  y parvenir, vous développerez une bonne capacité à gérer un planning, compétence très appréciée par les employeurs dans de nombreux métiers : ceux du développement, de la gestion de projets, du marketing, des ressources humaines, de la data… et bien d’autres. L’effort en vaut la chandelle.

5- Pour décrocher facilement votre premier emploi

Ce n’est pas un secret, les employeurs recherchent des jeunes diplômés débrouillards qui pourront prendre un poste sans avoir besoin d’une période de formation et d’adaptation trop étalée.

À cet égard, l’apprentissage est un réel atout car il est comptabilisé comme une vraie expérience professionnelle. Vous pourrez défendre vos compétences techniques acquises en cours et mises en pratique, ainsi que vos qualités interpersonnelles exercées au sein de votre équipe (le travail de groupe, la négociation, l’argumentation, l’organisation, la communication…).

Et vous verrez que votre entreprise vous proposera peut-être même un poste, comme c’est le cas pour de nombreux apprentis.

Les bonus chez OpenClassrooms

6- Pour bénéficier d’un coup de pouce dans votre quête d’une entreprise

Pendant 2 mois, nous vous offrons l’aide d’un mentor spécialisé en RH pour vous aider à mettre en place votre stratégie de recherche d’emploi, votre discours en entretien et à améliorer votre identité en ligne. CV, lettre de motivation, compte LinkedIn, portfolio, nous vous aidons à être le plus attractif possible vis à vis de vos potentiels employeurs et à les convaincre que vous êtes la bonne personne pour cette apprentissage.
De plus, nous sélectionnons pour vous des sites Internet pertinents avec des offres de contrats d’apprentissages pour faciliter votre recherche.

7- Pour pouvoir commencer à tout moment

Vous pouvez chercher votre apprentissage et commencer à tout moment. Cela vous évite le stress des délais serrés de la rentrée, moment où commencent pas mal d’apprentissages en école ou en universités. Vous avez aussi un avantage concurrentiel certain sur les étudiants qui n’ont pas le choix de la date de début de formation, car vous pouvez prendre en compte la préférence de votre futur employeur.

8- Pour étudier avec une pédagogie innovante qui a fait ses preuves

Vous saviez que nos formations sont un cocktail de cours et de projets eux aussi professionnalisants ? En étudiant chez nous, vous aurez la dose parfaite de théorie et de pratique, et les savoirs les plus à la pointe dans votre métier.

9- Pour être suivi chaque semaine par votre mentor

Nous accordons beaucoup d’importance au mentorat. Pourquoi ? Car avoir un expert pour vous expliquer les points bloquants, vous aider à aller plus loin et vous apporter sa vision du métier vaut tous les cours magistraux au monde. Ce moment par semaine où votre apprentissage sera littéralement sur-mesure, c’est ce qui vous permettra d’aller encore plus loin dans votre métier.
Et pour optimiser encore mieux la réussite de chaque étudiant, OpenCFA est en contact régulier avec votre maître d’apprentissage.

10- Pour faire partie d’une communauté dynamique d’étudiants

Étudier en ligne ne signifie pas s’isoler. Au contraire, nous avons une belle communauté qui se réunit de plusieurs façons.

  • En ligne, les étudiants communiquent via un équivalent à Facebook, le Workplace, sur lequel ils se retrouvent sur les groupes de leur parcours et de leurs intérêts communs (musique, cinéma, sport, groupes géographiques…).
  • Nous avons aussi mis en place les partenariat avec JobIRL (une communauté virtuelle où vous pouvez échanger avec les professionnels de votre métier et d’autres étudiants) et Engagement Jeunes (la plateforme qui vous permet de vous mettre en relation avec les entreprises qui recrutent en contrat d’alternance et à l’issue de vos études). Ces partenariats devraient vous aider dans votre recherche d’emploi.
  • En présentiel, nous vous invitons deux fois par mois à des sessions de co-workings dans toutes les grandes villes de France, où vous pourrez travailler en binôme ou par petits groupes avec d’autres étudiants pour avancer plus efficacement.

Ces communautés virtuelles et en présentiel vous permettront, comme en école ou à l’université, de vous constituer un réseau de personnes compétentes et de profiter de ses mécanismes : recommandations, offres d’emplois internes, échanges de bonnes pratiques professionnelles.

* * *

Vous l’aurez compris, l’apprentissage est un dispositif de formation qui a fait ses preuves.

En 2017, les apprentis trouveraient un emploi au plus 7 mois après la fin de leur contrat et étaient deux fois moins souvent au chômage que les autres diplômés (7 contre 14%). Leurs conditions d’emploi étaient également meilleures que celles de ceux qui avaient suivi un cursus classique : avec un salaire plus élevé (32500 contre 30000) et une majorité de CDI (73 contre 61%). Enfin, ils avaient fréquemment des responsabilités plus avancées.

Étant données les mesures incitatives vis à vis des entreprises pour les pousser à embaucher des apprentis, il y a fort à parier que l’avenir de l’apprentissage est prometteur.

Cela vous intéresse ?
Rendez-vous sur la page Alternance d’OpenClassrooms. 


Pour aller plus loin, épluchez :

 

 

L’article Pourquoi choisir l’apprentissage ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Apprentissage ou contrat pro, mode d’emploi chez OpenClassrooms

Par : Nora Leon

En France, chaque année, plus de 420 000 étudiants choisissent l’apprentissage et près de 200 000 personnes optent pour le contrat de professionnalisation afin de se former.

Chez OpenClassrooms, nous souhaitons vous donner la possibilité de vous former de manière professionnalisante. Les formations comportent donc des projets pratiques qui vous donnent une première expérience dans votre métier.

Et pour ceux qui souhaitent mettre leurs connaissances pratiques en application directement, l’alternance est possible, sous deux formes. Explication.

Contrat d’apprentissage et de professionnalisation, quelles différences ?

La rémunération

En contrat de professionnalisation, vous touchez 65% du SMIC si vous avez moins de 21 ans, et 100% du SMIC si vous avez plus de 21 ans, voire plus selon l’entreprise.

En contrat d’apprentissage, vous touchez jusqu’à 65% du SMIC si vous avez moins de 21 ans et jusqu’à 78% du SMIC si vous avez plus, voire plus selon l’entreprise.

Le temps passé en entreprise

En contrat de professionnalisation, vous passez 75 à 80% du temps en entreprise. Vous passez donc un jour à vous former en ligne par semaine.

En contrat d’apprentissage, vous passez 50% du temps en entreprise.

C’est donc un critère important de savoir quelle proportion de votre formation vous souhaitez passer en entreprise.

L’âge pour y être éligible

Pour être admis en contrat de professionnalisation, vous devez avoir entre 16 ans et 25 ans, ou être demandeur d’emploi 26 ans ou plus, bénéficiaire du revenu de solidarité active (RSA), de l’allocation de solidarité spécifique (ASS) ou de l’allocation aux adultes handicapés (AAH), ou avoir bénéficié d’un contrat aidé (contrat unique d’insertion – CUI). Dans ces cas, il n’y a pas de limite d’âge.

Pour être admis en contrat d’apprentissage, vous devez avoir moins de 30 ans, sauf dans 4 régions où vous devez avoir moins de 25 ans révolus : en Corse, en Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, en Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes et en Normandie. Si vous êtes Handicapé (RQTH), créateur d’entreprise, ou sportif de haut niveau, c’est sans limite d’âge.

Le suivi en entreprise

En contrat d’apprentissage, vous êtes plus encadré, par un maître d’apprentissage au sein de l’entreprise et un tuteur qui passe deux fois pour vérifier que les missions sont conformes au contrat et que l’apprentissage se déroule bien (chez OpenCFA ce seront deux visioconférences car aucune visite physique prévue). Vous serez aussi suivi par votre mentor chaque semaine, toujours en visioconférence.

L’organisme signataire

En contrat de professionnalisation, vous signez avec l’entreprise et OpenClassrooms SAS. En contrat d’apprentissage, le contrat est signé entre OpenCFA, l’apprenti et l’entreprise. Pour information, OpenCFA est un organisme distinct d’OpenClassrooms SAS, porté par l’organisme gestionnaire ATNE et créé pour pouvoir former des apprentis.

Comment postuler

 

Je postule en contrat pro ICI
Je postule en apprentissage ICI

Et pour toute question, contactez nos conseillers pédagogiques, qui pourront vous renseigner de vive voix.
J’en parle avec mon conseiller ICI


Pour aller plus loin,

Regardez la documentation officielle concernant toutes les modalités de l’alternance.

L’article Apprentissage ou contrat pro, mode d’emploi chez OpenClassrooms est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

Pourquoi devenir Mentor ?

Par : Nora Leon

On ne naît pas mentor, on le devient !

Qu’est-ce qui incite à devenir mentor ?

Nous avons posé la question à quelques-uns de nos plus anciens et fidèles mentors :

Qu’est-ce qui vous a incité à devenir mentor chez OC ?

Olivier : j’étais dans l’enseignement et l’informatique, à Strasbourg. J’aime bien apprendre, et j’ai suivi beaucoup de cours sur OpenClassrooms. Quand j’ai vu l’annonce de recrutement des premiers mentors il y a 2 ans, j’ai postulé. Cela m’a paru naturel : cela fait le lien entre mes deux métiers, l’enseignement et l’informatique. C’est aussi un complément de revenus.

Aurélien : je suis indépendant basé en Equateur depuis plusieurs années, mais je garde une grande partie de mon activité en France : j’y ai des clients startups et PME. Le mentorat sur OpenClassrooms convient à mon activité à distance. Je le fais parce que j’ai toujours aimé partager, transmettre – j’ai même formé moi-même des jeunes au développement informatique.
Je trouve aussi motivant d’appartenir à l’équipe d’OpenClassrooms, qui fait un travail extraordinaire dans l’éducation : je peux ainsi participer au projet, et partager avec d’autres mentors. Ca m’aide également à améliorer ma manière de travailler en tant que freelance.

Stéphane : j’ai été sollicité au départ par un ancien collègue qui travaillait chez OpenClassrooms, pour mentorer sur le parcours Gestion de projet. J’aime beaucoup la diffusion de connaissances, et le côté réseau social également, le partage entre mentors.

Séverine : moi j’ai fait un changement de vie, une reconversion dans le web : je me suis formée en partie sur OpenClassrooms, et j’ai été l’une des premières à suivre le premier parcours certifiant Développeur Web Junior sur OpenClassrooms. J’ai été sollicitée par Mathieu (Nebra, fondateur d’OpenClassrooms) pour voir si j’étais intéressée par le mentorat, lors de son lancement. Cela a été une opportunité d’entrer dans ce nouvel univers, et aussi de partager et de montrer à d’autres que c’était possible, en tant que femme, et en tant que personne pas très jeune (+ de 40 ans). J’aime partager mes connaissances, me dépasser, et aider les gens à changer de vie.

Quand on est mentor depuis 1 an, deux ans… est-ce qu’on continue pour les mêmes raisons qu’au départ ?

Guillaume : oui, j’aime toujours autant l’idée de partager des compétences, de former des élèves pour les amener le plus loin possible, et leur permettre d’être recherchés sur le marché du travail.

Benoît :  aujourd’hui, je consacre plus de temps au mentorat qu’au début. Et cela me plaît autant sinon plus :  j’ai moi aussi gagné en professionnalisme et j’ai enrichi ma connaissance des technologies abordées. J’ai enfin eu l’occasion d’accompagner des personnes très différentes, ce qui a enrichi mon expertise en tant que mentor.

Certains mentorés partent de zéro, sont en complète reconversion professionnelle.  C’est grisant de les accompagner : j’aime l’idée de casser les codes du système scolaire classique, de faire en sorte que tout devienne possible, d’aider tout un chacun à coder… avec un certain niveau d’exigence et de professionnalisme.

Philippe : mes motivations par rapport aux étudiants n’ont pas changé. La transmission du savoir est mon moteur. Je suis aussi un peu de la vieille école, je n’hésite pas à leur passer – gentiment – un petit savon quand ils n’ont pas travaillé – c’est pour eux qu’ils bossent.

Envie de devenir mentor à votre tour ?

Rejoignez-nous !

 

L’article Pourquoi devenir Mentor ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.

You can now get customized TED Talk recommendations in your inbox

Par : TED Staff

As the number of TED Talks on TED.com grows, we’ve created a new way to discover talks you’ll love: Tell us your favorite topics and areas of interest, and we’ll send you a customized email brimming with talks worth your personal attention.

Here’s how it works: Visit ted.com/recommends and tell us the topics that fascinate you most, as well as your personal goals in watching TED Talks. In other words: What do you want to get out of your time online? After you’ve answered these two quick questions, you’ll be asked to sign up for TED, or log in with your existing TED account. In less than a minute, you’ll get a personalized recommendation.

At the TED Recommends sign-in page, you can decide what kind of talks you’d most like to watch. Ask yourself: What do you hope to learn from watching a talk?

We’ll take that input and combine it with your watch history to serve up jaw-dropping, a-ha-moment-inducing, worldview-altering talks—picked just for you. The more you watch, the better the recommendations will get.

And you won’t just be taking our word for it. The recommended talks are selected by members of our community who share your passions and have strong opinions about what you need to see right now. You’ll hear from these community members in your personal email and learn why they served up what they did.

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Electric and empowered: Monica Araya on Costa Rica’s clean energy future


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Monica Araya made a big prediction on the TED stage in 2016: Costa Rica, her home country, will be the first nation in the world to pursue 100% renewable energy. Fast forward to 2018, and they’re on their way. Costa Rica already generates over 99% of their electricity through renewable energy, and went 300 days on clean energy in 2017. And in May, in a visionary next step, new president Carlos Alvarado announced at his inauguration that Costa Rica would phase out the use of fossil fuels in transportation, calling it a “generational imperative.” We talked to Monica, the director of Costa Rica Limpia (Clean Costa Rica), about what lies ahead.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Can you tell us about the clean energy movement in Costa Rica? What are the core objectives and how is Costa Rica positioned to lead the way?

I went on the TED stage [to share] a vision of a small country thinking big. We should completely get rid of fossil fuels. Why not? The country already runs on renewable energy, which is not the case for the world — it’s not the case for Europe, the US, India or China. We’ve already broken free from fossil fuels for power and electricity generation. We’ve done the work with civil society from the ground up, but we needed it to become a vision for the country. Costa Rica is a young nation that’s going to turn 200 in 2021. 200 years ago, we broke free from Spain and we became a free nation — and that matches perfectly with this timing. We’re now ready to say, “We are going to free ourselves from fossil fuels.”

“This is the new Costa Rica, and in that new Costa Rica, we know that the future is renewable and electric.”

We have all the conditions — we have clean electricity, we have a young president who wants to do right, and we have technology on our side. Renewable energy has become a part of the country’s identity. People feel proud: they believe it’s a Costa Rican thing to go green. If you look at the citizen consultations we’ve done with Costa Rica Limpia, people disagree on many things but they agree on this. The president knows that he can set a precedent at a time when the world is trying to figure out how to transition to electric mobility. We have to show that it’s doable and beneficial, that it works technologically; I think that’s the value of a small country doing it first.

What are the challenges that Costa Rica will face in transitioning to 100% clean energy? I’m particularly interested in transportation, and moving from gasoline to electric energy — what are the challenges of that?

In practice, there are five things we have to do. We managed to pass the first electric zero-emissions law in Latin America. That came out of a coalition led by congresswoman Marcela Guerrero Campos. We created that coalition and it led to a law — Argentina and Columbia are going to try to do the same — and now, the law needs to be implemented. It calls for electrification of at least 10 percent of all the transportation owned by the state, and gives financial incentives for five years for electrification. This law is the first step — and it was hard — but we won it. It was a big day. I had some tears in my eyes when we passed it.

Second, on June 5th, on World Environment Day, we launched an initiative to electrify buses. That’s going to take some time because that’s a sector that is resistant to change — in Costa Rica, the buses belong to companies and they run for concessions every seven years. We have to make sure when they apply for concessions for the next seven-year cycle, the mandate for the buses are embedded in this requirement. In the meantime, we’re going to start testing three bus lines. Public transportation is very important in Latin America and in Costa Rica. Latin America has the highest number of people in the world using public transit. So the electrification of buses is a very important step.

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Monica Araya: “By 2022, electric cars and conventional cars are expected to cost the same, and cities are already trying electric buses…if we want to get rid of oil-based transportation, we can, because we have options now that we didn’t have before.” Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

The next element that is very important is the First Lady’s Office. The first lady is amazing — she’s an architect, and she’s totally into decarbonization. Her office is focusing on urban issues, and public transit is a big part of that. Her priority is to lead the process towards the urban electric train. The train is very important to this administration — it’s a symbol of modernization. For Costa Ricans, the train is something that was wanted for a long time and was blocked by bus companies. The First Lady has taken this on; by the end of the four years, we should have started the first electric train.

I think there’s a new generation around the world — it doesn’t matter if it’s Costa Rica, or Columbia, or the Philippines  — that aspire to have bikes and safe bike paths. It’s about democratizing the street and making sure the streets don’t belong to private cars. The President of our Congress, Carolina Hidalgo Herrera, goes to work on a bike — she rode her bike to the inauguration in high heels. That’s another route to decarbonization; the bike path is a symbol of good planning, and that is where we have failed in the past. In emerging economies, it’s common to just let cars rule. The electric bus was used to transport all of the ministers to the transportation and it was important for the people to see a zero-emission bus arriving to the inauguration. There’s a lot of backcasting — looking to the ideal future and working backwards from there to see what we need to do. It’s about having a direction of travel.

The President and Minister put a draft law in Congress that makes it impossible for Costa Rica to do any drilling and any exploitation of fossil fuels. We already have a moratorium on oil exploration and exploitation from around 15 years ago that has been sustained by five different governments from three different parties; it cannot be removed. This new government wants to make sure it is the law. It’s a way of saying that they’re serious about fossil fuels not being the future for us. In the early 2000s, there was lobbying by a company in Texas who wanted to do oil exploration in Costa Rica, and there was a lot of pressure on us. The Minister of Energy and Environment at the time said, “No way, this is not going to happen,” — and I know this because I asked him — he said, “Look, I don’t know what will happen, but I can assure you that as long as I’m the minister, they will have to go over my dead body.” That was very reassuring for me to hear as a young advocate.

“There’s a long tradition of environmental protection in Costa Rica.”

Here’s what’s interesting: the Minister of Energy and Environment at that time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, is the minister again. It’s reassuring to have a confident and experienced minister because it means we’re going to think big. We organized a free citizen encounter with him a few weeks after he was appointed — we brought him to a museum and sat him in front of citizens. The two of us were on the stage — two chairs, nothing fancy — and I asked him questions and he answered. We also used Facebook Live so people could listen from home. And he says he wants to do these kinds of citizen encounters every six months.

That’s great — connecting the citizens to what can be a more abstract concern is important. Environmental changes can be very macro so bringing it to the citizens in an accessible place of understanding and engagement is necessary.

It’s very important to have symbols. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to get rid of plastics or protect the ocean — you have to know what your symbols are. We came up with a logo of a contour of Costa Rica’s map that connects through a plug, meaning that there’s clean electricity that connects us as Costa Ricans, as a country.

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Photo: Costa Rica Limpia

We created the Costa Rican Association for Electric Mobility as a separate entity that represents users of electric mobility — electric buses, motorbikes, cars, etcetera. It’s helped as we talk to young people, mothers, grandmothers — people who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the climate. It’s easy to feel small and scared, and feel like it all depends on what China or Trump does. That’s a dangerous framing of the problem because it’s so easy to do nothing and have a “why bother?” mentality. And when advocates and governments have that kind of framing, you lose the citizens, the people. So we had to think about the symbols of success. What is the symbol of success if we decarbonize? I’m obsessed with exhaust pipes and the fumes that come out of cars — they’re a symbol of the last century that we really need to get rid of.

“The day we are a country without exhaust pipes — the buses won’t have them, the cars won’t have them — then we have succeeded in our mission to decarbonize the country. Hopefully, the world will get there someday; Costa Rica will need to get there as soon as possible to show that it’s possible.“

The plug has become an important symbol for us. We show a very modern-looking plug and say — look, you have electricity at home to toast your bread, charge your phone, make your coffee. Everything you do is electric. Why on earth would you want an old technology that burns, that’s liquid, that’s not even Costa Rican? It costs a lot to bring it in, it causes climate change, and when you put it in your car, you have to burn it, then it comes out of an exhaust pipe and pollutes the air. People are really intrigued by the idea that everything they use is already electric other than their cars.

This technology will allow us to meet the Paris Agreement targets, and that’s important — we don’t walk around the Paris Agreement targets like other countries do. We won’t have a global impact on emissions or average temperature, because we’re too small. It’s easy to be cynical: people will say, “What’s the point? Whatever you’re reducing in Costa Rica won’t make a difference.” But we’re the ones who benefit the most. You have to win this on the basis of the benefits for the people and avoid the argument that you do it for the 2-degree temperature change — that framing won’t work for a family in Costa Rica.

It’s important to communicate that the situation is tough but it’s also important to pivot to resilience and to ideas of what is possible for us to protect ourselves. The TED Talk let us use a storytelling format — you can share it on Facebook, watch it on a phone. The TED Talk expanded the imagination of the people who listened to it. Even bigger countries like India have told me, “Maybe India can’t move forward the same way that Costa Rica can, but that doesn’t mean that a city in India the size of Costa Rica cannot think big and move faster to clean energy.” That was a very empowering idea. There’s something about smaller locations that’s great because we can move forward and just wait for the rest of the country to get there. In my country, if you want to get people excited, you have to say that this will make us a country that could inspire others.

We matter because of our ideas, not our size. Being small doesn’t mean thinking small.”

Can you tell us about your work with Costa Rica Limpia? How do you involve and center citizens in your approach? ​

Costa Rica Limpia (Clean Costa Rica) is centered on engaging citizens and consumers in the transition to a fossil free society. We educate, inspire and empower citizens by translating technical issues such as decarbonization, Paris targets and NDCs into layman’s language. We are very focused on zero emissions mobility because being carbon free in Costa Rica means using electricity instead of oil for transportation. We design education materials like infographics and videos that respond to common questions and myths. We also conduct citizen consultations on climate change and renewables, based on a Danish Board of Technology methodology. We pioneered the concept of Electric Mobility Citizen Festivals (we organized two in 2017 and 2018) because it is critical to get people to experience these new technologies.

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Congresswoman Marcela Guerrero and Monica Araya attend an Electric Mobility Citizen Festival with their mothers. Photo: Monica Araya

In your talk, you mention that Costa Rica disbanded its army in 1948 and has been able to redirect those funds to programs that develop social progression and growth. In a world that, in a lot of respects, seems unwilling and unable to change, how has Costa Rica been able to cultivate a culture of forward-thinking innovation?

This would not be possible if we didn’t have a social contract that takes care of people’s needs by giving them free health care and free education. We do this work because it makes life better for people who are taking public transit. There’s something about the social guarantee in the ’40s before the abolition of the army that was important. It allowed people to have a safety net, and when you do that, you build a more resilient society. Social progress was able to develop in Costa Rica partially because we have the infrastructure for it. When you go to other places in Latin America, there is a very small group of people who have nearly everything, and you have a very large population that is very poor; we have been very fortunate in Costa Rica to be able to negotiate with those stakeholders.

If there’s something I’ve learned about Costa Rica, it’s that we’ve succeeded because we have a strong middle ground in politics. The new president, Carlos Alvarado, as a political scientist, is trying to practice this lesson from Costa Rica’s history. This is an environmental story, yes, but it’s also about balance. You have to do the environmental work but you can do it better when you have invested in the people’s social progress and have turned it into a good business opportunity. Costa Rica has a larger group of people making money off ecotourism now than in the ‘80s. This bet on natural capital has paid off — when you look at the materials and marketing of Costa Rica in the world, it emphasizes that we have a social safety net. It’s a balancing act between social, environment and economic concerns that we need to get right. It’s worked in the past, and if we want to make sure it works now with fossil-free Costa Rica, we will have to be able to bring on board the private sector but also be very socially oriented. We have to make sure that the people who have the least benefit the most.

What are some other ways Costa Rica is working to protect the environment?

There’s a big movement in Costa Rica to do more about the oceans and our plastic consumption as well. There is a protected area that was launched last year in the south of Costa Rica — it continues with our tradition to resist the exploitation of our natural capital for fossil fuels. The conservation agenda today is not just the land — it’s the oceans too. The relationship between the oceans and the fossil fuel agenda is extremely close because the drilling often happens offshore. If we keep protecting areas around the world, it’ll hopefully create an awareness that the gasoline you put in your car comes from somewhere. The same thing with plastics — there’s a cultural shift and awareness about our unsustainable plastic use. When you link it to oil, it’s really interesting: it comes from oil, from petroleum and natural gas. We continue to work in different bubbles — I’m in the fossil fuel and energy transportation bubbles, but other people are in the ocean bubbles and plastic bubbles. What links us is that we all advocate that we fundamentally have to change our relationship to fossil fuels.

Are you going to play a role in the energy transition? What are your next steps?

I’m going to help with the decarbonization pathways — that takes time, and it takes not just technical work but also consultation with key stakeholders. There’s methodologies with this but the Minister doesn’t want to end up with something too theoretical but rather, is grounded in our political reality. I’ll be helping with that. We need to find as many partners as possible — in Costa Rica, obviously — but also outside. My role is to tell the story as best as I can so that we can attract anyone around the world with brilliant ideas. We want to be the testing ground for a fossil-free society. In Costa Rica Limpia, I see the electrification of buses as a very strategic action plan. This is something that is going to transform life in a very tangible way. The buses are beautiful, quiet, and they don’t pollute. Imagine a single mom with two kids who will be commuting on that bus — her life will be transformed for the better.

 

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What does TED look for in its Fellows?

Par : TED Staff

Every year, TED opens applications for its new group of TED Fellows. We get thousands of applications from all corners of the world, representing every field under the sun — marine mammal conservation, biomechatronics, Khmer dance, space archeology. How do we select just 20 people to become TED Fellows?

It’s not an easy process. (Technically, our acceptance rate is lower than Harvard’s.) But we love reading your applications and hearing about your latest medical breakthroughs, ambitious art projects and incredible explorations in outer space and under the sea. We also love seeing the diversity of the people doing this groundbreaking work.

What exactly makes for a good application? Here are five traits that we look for in a TED Fellow.  

A track record of achievement. In order to be selected, you have to have done something in the world. What does that “something” look like? It depends. Maybe you’ve started a company or invented a new product. Maybe you’ve made a groundbreaking film or discovered a new galaxy. Whatever you’re doing, you should be deep in your craft, building something big.

Individuals on the cusp of a big break. Beyond a track record, we are looking for people who are ready to make a giant leap forward, and could benefit from support. Fellows are often in the early part of their careers, but we also know that big breaks can happen at any age. Fellows’ projects should have real potential for impact, and they should realistically be scalable in the next three to five years. What that scale looks like depends on the project, but we select Fellows whose ambitions are big and often global.

Originality and authenticity. An original “idea worth spreading” is the key to a successful Fellows applicant. Maybe you’re working to make a current system more efficient or equitable. Or maybe you’re working across fields, challenging the underlying assumptions of our current systems and creating brand-new ones. In fact, we’ve chosen Fellows whose work is just getting off the ground — but whose vision of the future is so imaginative and convincing that we know TED’s network can help them realize that future.   

Kind, collaborative character. The TED Fellows program now encompasses more than 450 Fellows in more than 90 countries. We’re looking for people who want to engage deeply in this amazing network — build companies together, start nonprofits, share research. Often, TED Fellows are engaging deeply with the communities around them, perhaps in the places where they were born or raised. In our experience, some of the best and most overlooked ideas for our contemporary global challenges come from those whose lives depend on the solutions.  

The truth is, we don’t always know what we’re looking for. Often, Fellows totally surprise and challenge us with brand-new ways of thinking about the world. There really is no secret formula to becoming a TED Fellow, but we know it when we see it. If you’re unsure about applying, do it anyway.

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Our application is now open. Dream bigger and apply by August 26, 2018.

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Ideas sparked by “What if?”: The talks of TED@UPS 2018

Juan Perez, UPS’s chief information and engineering officer, opens TED@UPS with a question: “What if?” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The greatest ideas of our time will be sparked by a simple question: “What if?”

What if we had truly inclusive workplaces? What if we removed the inefficiencies that stand in the way of eliminating world hunger? What if we could deliver quality health care in the home? What if we took back our privacy online? At this year’s TED@UPS — held on July 19, 2018, at SCADShow in Atlanta — TED and UPS partnered for the fourth year in a row to bring remarkable UPSers to the stage to explore these questions and more. In a time of uncertainty, global evolution and rapid innovation, their ideas on how to solve our most intractable problems have never been more important to hear.

After opening remarks from Juan Perez, UPS’s Chief Information and Engineering Officer, the talks in Session 1 …

“The lessons we learn about diversity at work actually transform the things we do, think and say outside of work​​,” says Janet Marie Stovall. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Getting single-minded about racially diverse workplaces. Inclusion crusader Janet Marie Stovall asks us to imagine a place where people​ ​of​ ​all colors and all races​ ​ar​e ​on​ ​and​ ​climbing every rung of the corporate ​​ladder — where they “feel safe and indeed expected to bring their unassimilated, authentic selves to work every day, because the difference that they bring is both recognized and respected.” How do we get there? According to Stovall, companies must​ ​create an action plan that has three key components. The first is “real problems.” By 2045, the US population is projected to be predominantly non-white, and businesses that don’t mirror that diversity in their workforce and customer base are set up to fail. The second: “real numbers.” Businesses need to set specific diversity goals and commit to them, Stovall says. And if they don’t reach those numbers, there must be “real consequence” — Stovall’s third attribute. We spend one-third of our lives at our jobs, and if we can do so in inclusive, diverse environments, these benefits will be felt society-wide. “The lessons we learn about diversity at work actually transform the things we do, think and say outside of work​​,” Stovall says.

What we can learn from Marines and machines. Before he entered the business world, Drew Humphreys was a platoon commander with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines in Afghanistan — in charge of 36 Marines fighting the Taliban and maintaining a vital supply route through Helmand Province. After commanding every convoy himself for months, Humphreys’ mission changed when the Marine Corps started pulling troops and equipment out of Afghanistan, forcing him to divide his platoon and give over some control to other commanders. The result: an unlocking of human potential. Humphreys defined success but allowed the Marines in his command to find their own solutions to the obstacles they encountered. But it’s not just the military moving toward this kind of decentralized leadership model — the same thing is happening in business, spurred on by innovations in machine learning. Humphreys outlines three lessons we can learn from this ongoing trend. First, emphasize purpose over process. “When you micromanage, you limit what’s possible,” Humphreys says. Next, encourage early and lifelong learning — the ultimate competitive advantage. And finally: have a bias for action. “Get comfortable with the decision that’s probably right instead of waiting for the elusive perfect answer,” Humphreys says.

New thoughts on gun safety. The slogan “Make America great again” reminds gun safety advocate David Farrell that gun violence wasn’t always rampant in the US. Forty years ago, mass shootings were a rarity in America. But in the 1970s, crime spiked, and the media went wild. By the ’80s, the NRA no longer touted guns solely as a tool for recreation — they were a means of countering fear. And when a gun becomes a tool to address our own fears, “it’s not hard to believe that somebody who’s troubled, angry or disenfranchised would then use a gun to solve their problems. And if you’re mentally disturbed, we’ve now made guns a rational decision,” Farrell says. He believes that fear should not be the reason people purchase guns. Responsible gun owners must insist that the NRA refocus on gun safety, and recognize that gun control does not equal infringing on gun rights. If we can stop being so afraid, we can “make America safe again,” Farrell says.

One of the oldest sounds in Chinese history. With a musical interlude, Yue Xiu Lim from UPS Singapore delights the audience with the riveting, delicate and harmonious sounds of the Chinese guzheng, a harp-like instrument that dates back to ancient times. She played two songs: “White,” a calming tune reminiscent of lullabies, and a twist on Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” with accompanist Joey Yeung.

Aparna Mehta reveals the unseen world of “free” online returns, which often end up in landfills instead of back on the shelf. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Are free online returns really free? Every year, four billion pounds of returned clothing ends up in the landfill — the equivalent of every resident in the US doing a load of laundry and then throwing it straight in the trash. Why? Because sometimes it’s cheaper for a company to throw a returned item away than to make the effort of relabeling it and returning it to the shelf. Recovering shopaholic and retail consultant Aparna Mehta has the ideal vantage point to assess the scope of our online return addiction — and an ideal platform to do something about the waste it creates. Obviously, shoppers could take the extra time to decide what they truly need and purchase accordingly, but this is only a first step. Aparna has an idea to go a step further: “green-turns” instead of “returns.” “What if, when a person is trying to return something, it could go to the next shopper who wants it, and not the retailer?” Each unwanted item could be assessed electronically for condition, matched with someone who wants it and redirected accordingly. With the proper incentives built into the system to get shoppers to use it, “green-turns” could revolutionize the way we buy — and return — clothes online, Mehta says.

Simple, logistical steps we can take to eradicate world hunger. During a work trip to Uganda in 2016, food advocate Dan Canale was shocked to see how small inefficiencies caused serious delays to food shipments to refugee camps. For example, the lack of a forklift at one humanitarian organization’s warehouse meant it took three hours of manual labor to load a single truck. As a result of inefficiencies like these across food delivery systems, Canale estimates that nearly a third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. That’s why he’s working to find solutions to shipping and delivery problems — offering action-based steps like diversifying the number of ports able to receive food and ensuring that food closest to expiration is shipped first. He encourages us to imagine: What if we used our most cutting-edge technology, like drones and military-grade aquatic vehicles, to deliver food to the hungry? By approaching these questions with innovation and zeal, Canale says, we can solve world hunger for good.

Global citizen Wanis Kabbaj shares some lessons for nationalists and globalists alike. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Moving beyond binary thinking. Why do we have to choose between nationalism and globalism, between loving our countries and caring for the world? Wanis Kabbaj has been grappling with this question for years — having lived in four continents, the debate between nationalism and globalism isn’t new to him. But the recent worldwide surge in nationalist fervor got him thinking: What if, instead of making a choice between the two, we took it on ourselves to challenge this binary thinking? He provides some interesting insights for nationalists and globalists. For those opposed to nationalism, he offers research showing how national satisfaction is more predictive of overall happiness than job satisfaction or household income. And for those who see globalism as evil, he provides compelling examples of how even national treasures like the Eiffel Tower, cricket or Italian home cooking are actually products of cross-cultural interaction.

Two poems on discovering and celebrating love. To close out session 1, poet Muslim Sahib performs two lyrical, humorous poems for the close-listening crowd. In his first piece, “The Coming Out Beauty,” Sahib weaves together religion, queerness, family and beauty, guiding the audience through his journey to self-love and encouraging them to recognize the beauty within themselves. In his second poem, “419 square feet,” he shares the bittersweet practice of finding love and building a home in what can be a restrictive world.

Musician and UPS package car driver John Bidden rocks the UPS stage with a performance of “Not About Me.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

To open Session 2, singer-songwriter and UPS package car driver John Bidden returns to the TED@UPS stage, performing an electrifying, reggae-tinged rendition of “Not About Me.”

Anti-trafficking champion Nikki Clifton outlines three ways businesses can fight sex trafficking. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Businesses can help end sex trafficking. ​Pe​ople may think there’s little overlap between the buttoned-up world of business and the criminal underworld of sex trafficking. But according to one ​survey​, ​most johns — people who purchase sex — are employed, and ​web-based sex-buying ​tends to ​spike around 2pm. “These johns are likely buying sex in the middle of the workday,” says anti-trafficking champion Nikki Clifton.​ Businesses have a huge opportunity to reach the johns in their workplaces​ and to mobilize their employees and resources to fight against trafficking​, Clifton suggests. She outlines a three-point plan​, starting with the idea that businesses should state in their official employee handbook that sex buying at work, on company travel or with company resources is prohibited (and, of course, enforce this​ policy). Second, all employees ​should be​ trained to spot the signs of sex trafficking. For example, Clifton says, UPS teamed up with a group called Truckers Against Trafficking to educate its drivers about what to look for and who they can call for help. Third, businesses ​can​ figure out how they can use their​ special​ capabilities to combat sex trafficking. Clifton points to Visa, MasterCard and American Express — they joined forces and refused to process transactions from Backpage.com, an online sex-trafficking hub, which helped shut it down. “There are thousands of things that businesses can do; they just have to decide what to do to join the fight,” Clifton says.

Small business success: it takes a village. Nearly half of all US small businesses fail within their first five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a figure that got small business strategist Ruchi Shah wondering: Is there a new model for entrepreneurial success? After shutting the doors of her own startup, Shah looked for answers from one group of consistently successful entrepreneurs: Guatemalan small business owners. Why? Because Guatemala and other developing countries use a microfinance approach called “village banking,” in which local entrepreneurs join together to get the loans and support they need to run their businesses. (The village banking concept was pioneered by social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the idea in 2006.) Shah traveled to South America to study why village banks work, discovering three primary reasons: they give entrepreneurs a built-in team of advisors upfront; they adjust to customer needs; and they have a relentless focus on managing cash flow. Shah believes the idea of entrepreneurs having a vested interest in each other’s success can help build a strong foundation for any business, helping them weather the tough times with a diverse network of support. “Ultimately, it’s going to take more than our country’s determined entrepreneurs to improve our startup failure rates,” Shah says. “From what I have learned, it takes a village.”

Healthcare delivered at home. It’s time to fix our broken and obsolete hospital system, says healthcare futurist Niels van Namen. Beyond their general unpleasantness, hospitals present many logistical challenges: patients often have to travel long distances to reach them, especially for people living in remote areas, and many people avoid hospitals due to the costs, causing them to miss out on proper treatment altogether. For those who do get treatment, hospitals often make them sicker thanks to antibiotic-resistant bacteria that flourish in hospitals. “We have the opportunity to revolutionize the system,” van Namen says. “It is time to create a system that revolves around health care at home.” With recent innovations in medical technology (such as the at-home blood test), “homecare” presents a cheaper and more accessible alternative to hospital stays. In this setup, patients would receive treatment from the comfort of their homes and in the proximity of their families, while hospitals would become small, agile and mobile care centers focused on acute care. Homecare could also be a boon to rural areas, enabling a kind of sharing economy that matches people in need of care with someone who can provide a nearby home for treatment. “I am passionate to make the change and help ensure that patients, and not their diseases, are in control of their lives,” van Namen says.

Robin Hooker asks: What new ideas could budding creatives bring to life if there was a makerspace in every town? (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

A makerspace in every town. While his friends were outside playing football, young Robin Hooker was in the garage with his dad, an Air Force mechanic, fusing iron with an oxyacetylene welder (and dodging the shoe-melting molten debris that would occasionally fly free). Hooker wasn’t just gaining a feel for design and learning his way around a workshop — he was learning that the world could be mashed-up, modded, repaired, reclaimed. Now he believes “we can transform the world by giving more people access to spaces like my dad’s garage” — what artisans now call “makerspaces.” Makerspaces are shared workshops that allow budding builders and designers to access the tools they need to create things — tools that otherwise would be prohibitively expensive. Perhaps more important, makerspaces offer inventors, hobbyists and tinkerers of diverse cultures, generations, genders and professions a chance to inspire each other to invent world-changing stuff. “What if entrepreneurs brought a makerspace to every town?” Hooker asks. “What new ideas could budding creatives bring to life?”

How to take back our online privacy. If someone broke into your house, chances are you’d take precautions to prevent it from happening again: new locks, a security alarm, increased insurance. Yet year after year, as massive data breaches sweep the internet, most of us have failed to safeguard our digital information. “We make the trade of online privacy for convenience,” says data privacy enthusiast Derek L. Banta. He’s working on a new way to protect people’s privacy called “anonymous commerce,” or “a-commerce.” Instead of giving your personal information to every website you visit, with a-commerce you’d give your information to a single, trusted third party. That third party would then secure your information and give you a personalized code to use when shopping online, serving as a kind of intermediary “avatar” between you and the brand. And what if the third party got hacked? The return on the hack would be less enticing, as hackers would only get access to one avatar at a time, instead of thousands of transactions. “In an a-commerce world, privacy is the business model,” Banta says. “We have an opportunity to hit the reset button on how we do business online. We can effectively disown the unintended consequences of being pioneers in the digital age.”

The dark side of disaster donations — and what you can do about it. In the aftermath of disaster, the world often responds with generosity and love, shipping thousands of boxes of resources to cities and countries healing from calamity. But what we’re not considering, says disaster relief expert Dale Herzog, is the logistical nightmare of receiving all of these donations. According to Herzog, the vast majority of disaster donations are destroyed — for example, a whopping 60 percent of donations sent to Haiti and Japan after natural disasters in 2010 and 2011 were thrown away. Herzog urges us to reconsider how we respond to disaster relief, suggesting that we replace that box of old clothes with a cash donation, and send an email or Tweet of support rather than mail a handwritten card. Instead of bogging relief organizations down with more stuff, we can donate in ways that help survivors recover and rebuild, Herzog says.

A silent national pandemic. In 2009, 11,341 untested rape kits — some dating back to the 1980s — were found in an abandoned warehouse where the Detroit police once stored evidence. When this scandal was uncovered, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy set a plan into action to get justice for the thousands of people affected, but she needed help to deal with the massive logistical challenges. In an eye-opening talk, Worthy explains how UPS supported her office and created a protocol to have these kits tracked and tested. As of June 2018, their partnership has led to more than 10,000 rape kits being tested, 2,600 identified suspects and historic state-wide laws being passed. But there is still a lot of work to be done — with more than 400,000 kits nationally that have yet to be tested and a rape culture that needs be fixed. The solution, says Worthy, will take inspired multi-industry collaboration.

Special thanks to the artists and filmmakers who contributed their work to TED@UPS.

Andrew Norton, Where Do Ideas Come From?

Fredrik Kasperi, Take On An Idea

Great Big Story, Laugh the Pain Away (Srsly)

Mainframe (North), For Approval

Issimo, Think A New Thought

TED@UPS - July 19, 2018 at SCADshow, Atlanta, Georgia

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Why TED takes two weeks off every summer

Par : TED Staff

Why_we_close_983pxTED.com is about to go quiet for the weeks of August 1 and August 8, 2022, while most of the TED staff takes our annual two-week summer holiday. Yes, we all, or almost all, go on holiday at the same time. (No, we don’t all go to the same place.)

We’ve been doing it this way now for more than a decade. Our summer break is a little lifehack that solves the problem of a digital media and events company in perpetual-startup mode, where something new is always going on and everyone has raging FOMO. We avoid the fear of missing out on emails and new projects and blah blah blah … by making sure that nothing is going on.

Here’s how TED’s founding head of media, June Cohen, once explained it: “When you have a team of passionate, dedicated overachievers, you don’t need to push them to work harder, you need to help them rest. By taking the same two weeks off, it makes sure everyone takes vacation,” she said. “Planning a vacation is hard — most of us still feel a little guilty to take two weeks off, and we’d be likely to cancel when something inevitably comes up. This creates an enforced rest period, which is so important for productivity and happiness.”

Bonus: “It’s efficient,” she said. “In most companies, people stagger their vacations through the summer. But this means you can never quite get things done all summer long. You never have all the right people in the room.” Instead, for two weeks — almost no one is.

So, as the bartender said: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. We won’t post new TED Talks on the website for the next two weeks. (Though we’ll keep serving up great recommendations for talks you already love, or might have missed, across all our platforms.) And we stay off email. The whole point is that vacation time should be truly restful, and we should be able to recharge without having to worry about what we’re missing at work.

See you on Monday, August 15!

Note: This piece was first posted on July 17, 2014. It was updated on July 27, 2015; July 20, 2016; June 23, 2017; July 27, 2018; July 26, 2019; July 24, 2020; August 12, 2021; and yet again on July 22, 2022.

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3 reasons why women are still fighting for equal healthcare

“A common theme here is that the data exists, but it has been ignored or beaten back,” says science journalist Linda Villarosa. At the Aspen Ideas Festival, TEDWomen co-host Pat Mitchell (at right) led a conversation about challenges around getting fair and equitable health care for women. The panel included, from left, journalist Villarosa, Dr. Deborah Rhodes of the Mayo Clinic and Dr. Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College.

TEDWomen co-host Pat Mitchell writes: Once again this summer, I had the privilege of moderating sessions during the Spotlight Health Aspen Institute Ideas Festival. There were some surprises in a session titled “Breakthroughs and Challenges in Women’s Health” with importance for all women, and I want to share some of that information with you.

With two esteemed physicians — Dr. Deborah Rhodes of the Mayo Clinic and Dr. Paula Johnson, who was chief of women’s health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard University and is now the president of Wellesley College — as well as science journalist Linda Villarosa, we began our conversation with the important reminder that improving health care depends in large part on research.

We don’t know what we don’t look for

Despite legislation passed over 20 years ago, women, and especially women of color, are still being left out of clinical trials, and the health outcomes for women, and especially women of color, reflect this disparity.

Dr. Paula Johnson talked about the disparity between the resources for research on men’s diseases and those specific to women in her 2014 TEDWomen talk — and if you haven’t seen it, I highly encourage you to watch it.

Dr. Johnson explained that every cell in the human body has a sex, which means that men and women are different right down to the cellular level! As a result, there are often significant differences in the ways in which men and women respond to disease or treatment. It’s very important in research trials to differentiate between female and male subjects so we can tease out the differences.

Although we have made progress since the 1990s with more women included in late-phase trials, we’re still not there in phases 1 and 2. This is important, she says, because how do we get to phase 3? Phases 1 and 2. In these early stages of research, female cells and female animals still aren’t being used. Why? She says one commonly cited reason is that female animals have an estrous cycle. Well, guess what, she says, so do we. What are we missing by not including female cells earlier in the research process?

The power and persistence of the status quo

One of the barriers to progress that perhaps we don’t think about as much is the problem with well-entrenched power paradigms, profit motives and institutional priorities. What happens when a doctor sees a need and solves it but the status quo is preferred over progress?

Dr. Deborah Rhodes — whose talk above from TEDWomen 2010 is a must — spoke about the challenges to her attempts to introduce a new diagnostic protocol for women with dense breasts. Dr. Rhodes (who in spirit of full disclosure is my personal physician at the Mayo Clinic) has observed in her practice that about 50% of women were potentially missing a cancer diagnosis because traditional mammograms fail in detecting breast cancer in women with dense breasts. Mammograms depend on visually seeing cancer cells, and in dense breasts this is more difficult because of the surrounding dense tissue.

As Dr. Rhodes says, in looking at entrenched paradigms in medicine, there is perhaps nothing more entrenched than the mammogram. She worked with physicists to come up with a new way to look for tumors using a tracer that has been safely used in cardiovascular medicine for decades that distinguishes tumor cells regardless of density. Her technique is FDA-approved, but you’ve probably never heard of it. It speaks to, as she says, “the extraordinary difficulties of upsetting something that is so precious to us as a mammogram.”

Earlier detection using her new test in women with dense breasts whose cancer may be hidden in a mammogram could spare women from toxic treatment (less advanced cancer means less chemotherapy) and, in more advanced cases, saving lives. Despite that, her research has been very, very difficult to fund. She says it’s a daily uphill battle to overturn the status quo. Doctors have invested years and years in learning how to read these difficult mammograms, and billions of dollars are invested in the current technology, resulting in a resistance to new technology and new ways of testing.

Intersection of gender, race and ethnicity

One of the more shocking statistics that Dr. Rhodes highlighted in her presentation was the disparity in outcomes for white women and women of color with breast cancer. White women are more likely to get breast cancer than black women, but black women are more likely to die of breast cancer. She says that is true particularly for black women under the age of 50 who are diagnosed with breast cancer. They are 77% more likely to die than white women. She points out that despite abundant data that informs us of these disparities, solutions are not being pursued.

The same tragic disparity between what we need to know for better health outcomes and what is fully understood as life and death factors was the subject of Linda Villarosa’s recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine titled “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis.” In her incredible article, she noted that black women were three-to-four times as likely to die in childbirth than white women and black babies die at a rate that is twice that of white babies.

Linda was one of the first journalists to put the maternal and infant mortality rates together and to investigate why black women and babies are so at risk. As she put it: “A common theme here is that the data exists, but it has been ignored or beaten back.” And further, she connected a condition identified earlier by Dr. Arline Geronimus called “weathering” that is a significant factor in the health outcomes for women of color. “The effect of racism — living with the near daily episodes of microaggressions and discriminations — have an adverse impact on health that needs to be better understood and incorporated into diagnosis and treatment for women of color.”

Shocking, yes, and deeply disturbing, but the good news is that the more we know about our own health and what impacts it adversely, the more proactive we can be as health consumers.

As one of the panelists noted to this highly engaged audience at Aspen Institute, “Nothing less than our lives depends on being informed and demanding that our health care institutions and physicians are, too.”

You can listen to the entire panel on aspenideas.org.

– Pat

TEDWOMEN 2018 UPDATE

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The theme for this year’s TEDWomen event is “Showing Up.” We’re planning three inspiring days of ideas and connections full of creators, connectors and leaders. These dynamic and diverse pioneers are facing challenges head on and shaping the future we all want to see. If you haven’t been before, this is the year to show up!

I hope you’ll join us in Palm Springs Nov. 28–30, 2018. Registration is filling up fast and I don’t want you to miss out, so click this link to apply to attend today.

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A model of possibility: Tiq Milan on being the architect of his own destiny

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“I saw the exact person I wanted to be in my mind and I manifested that in this world. If I can do that, I can do anything,” says Tiq Milan, left, who spoke with partner Kim Katrin Milan onstage at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth/ TED

Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan brought warmth and light to the TEDWomen stage in 2016, sharing their vision of queer love and possibility. As a Black trans activist, writer and media maker, Tiq Milan expands the cultural imaginary on what it is to live beyond the margins. It’s an interesting time to be Tiq; he’s working on a book, just completed a video project with GLAAD and Netflix — and recently became a first-time parent too. He made time to talk with us last month about his work as a trans advocate, what it means to redefine masculinity and how he lives as a model of possibility for LGBTQ+ youth.

This interview has been edited and condensed. (Learn more about TEDWomen 2018, coming up this fall.)

Can you tell me a little bit about your journey and your work? Who is Tiq Milan and how have you gotten here?

I started off working in hip hop journalism, but I was becoming increasingly masculine in my appearance and I was trying to figure out if I was trans or not. In that environment, being a masculine woman at the time was really hard. People weren’t necessarily hostile. People were awkward — and it was just humiliating. People would misgender me, then look at me weird. I decided to switch it up and work in LGBT nonprofit and work with youth, which I had done before. I figured that if I was able to work in communities that would give me the space to transition in a way that felt really comfortable, I could be a role model and model of possibility for people around me. I was able to find the space where I could use media as a space for advocacy.

I started my transition about 12 years ago, in 2007. Transitioning was an evolution; there wasn’t a point in my life where I was like, “I’m trans and I have to do this.” It really was something that evolved over time. My book, Man of My Design, is about the evolution — it’s not so much about the legal and physical transition but rather about my journey throughout the spectrum of gender, from being a tomboy to a feminine teenager to a butch lesbian to a man. Being me has definitely been a process, and I’m still in that process to becoming my best self.

I am intrigued by that title. I think it’s a really interesting concept, especially in a world where — to some people — gender is immovable, inherent and unchanging. What does designing your own masculinity mean to you?

We’re changing the idea that gender is innate and immovable, and understanding it as self-determined. As transgender people, we’re showing other people in the world — particularly cisgendered people — that we’re all having gendered experiences. But we’re also securing the space to be who we are in our genders, whether you’re trans or cis. As a person who was not born into manhood, I’ve had to curate my masculinity from a blank slate. I had to look at different examples and tropes of masculine and decide what I wanted to engage in and what I didn’t. I had to think about how I could find a home in masculinity and not engage in what is so toxic about it. I had to intentionally not revel in the idea that being a man means being the one in control, being the one who has all the strength or power. It’s easy to fall in that place, particularly as a transman who is always assumed to be cisgender. I don’t deal with a lot of trans antagonism because people perceive me as a cisgender person, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to take up space in the perceived privileges that come with that.

“What does it look like to be a man tethered to my spirit, not so much to what I can control?”

This is about what I call organic masculinity. Manhood — particularly cisgendered heterosexual masculinity — defines itself by what it can control, and when it loses that control, when the entitlement is taken away, men lose their fucking mind. They get violent, they get awful. What happens when I take away that entitlement, take away that control and just start to create the man that I want to be? I am masculine and I have masculine traits, but I’m also compassionate. I believe as a man I can have a range of emotions — it doesn’t have to stop at lust and anger. There’s an idea that men can’t have fear, that men can’t be complicated. I want to turn that on its head.

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When Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan spoke at TEDWomen 2016, they shared a vision of love and marriage that allowed each person to be who they were. Tiq, left, is a thoughtful spokesperson for a new vision of masculinity that involves choosing aspects of manhood that work for you — and leaving the negativity behind. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

What drives you to do the work that you do, toward “living visibly and living out loud”?

I’m visible so other people don’t have to be. Somebody has to be visible. Someone has to be a model of possibility for younger people, and for older people who aren’t out or are still dealing with their gender. Someone has to do it, so why not me? Particularly as a Black man, it’s important to push up against these ideas that being queer and being trans is something that is white. Making sure that people see that this is an intersectional human experience. Here I am, in the flesh, being Black, being queer, being a man; I am all of those things.

I’m starting to become obsessed with this idea of becoming my best self. I listen to Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday podcast. She’s on that guru shit. I’m trying to figure out what the formula is for this life. I was born a girl and I’m going to die a man. I saw the exact person I wanted to be in my mind and I manifested that in this world. If I can do that, I can do anything.

“What does it look like to be the architect of your own destiny? I want to use the trans experience of self-determination as a blueprint.”

I’m inspired by our journey as trans people, by us taking the reins and saying, “This is the person I want to be, and this is who I’m going to be.” I’m really interested in what that next step looks like spiritually. I want to raise my consciousness. My purpose is my wildest dreams, so what does it look like to live in that purpose? To live and breathe on another frequency is to stay in a place of gratitude, even when it’s hard, even when things aren’t going the way they should be. If I stay in a place of gratitude, then I stay understanding that what I want in this life is unequivocally possible. I think it’s about trying to let go of ego. What does it look like to be selfless? What does it mean to understand that we’re all in this together? Particularly now, with the rampant, vile racism that’s happening in the world I have to keep myself grounded in the fact that we’re all in this together. I try to operate with the understanding that the things that I say and do in this world have a ripple effect. You never know who you’re going to affect. That’s what I mean by raising my consciousness; I want to have a spiritual base, and understand myself as part of a community rather than as an individual.

As you navigate this world existing at multiple intersections of identity and marginalization, what are your core values? As you and Kim said in your talk, you exist at these intersections but you don’t live marginalized lives.

My most core value is to stay true and speak with integrity. I try to say what I mean and mean what I say. Because I hold those values, rarely do I say things that I can’t take back. I’m really conscious about thinking before I speak. What we speak is what we put out into the world, it’s what we create. What we write is what creates truth and what creates this world. I take that very seriously.

In your TED Talk, you mention having to hold up a mirror to yourself and interrogate masculinity, and that it was a process of learning and unlearning. What does that process of reflection look like to you? What does it look like to build your masculinity in a way that doesn’t subscribe to misogyny and toxic patriarchal ideals?

In my process of becoming a man, I had to understand that I swallowed a lot about the superiority of men and the inferiority of femininity. I had to do a lot of unlearning and check myself on a lot of things. What’s been helping has been being surrounded by so many amazing women in my life who would also check me too, and say, “You think you’re so smart and sophisticated, but you’re a sexist and I’m gonna show you all the ways you’re sexist.” It took a lot of hard conversations with really brilliant people to work through these things. I’m not perfect; I feel like I’m always working towards letting go of hardcore, engrained shit about gender.

This goes back to what it means to be a man who is compassionate. I have a heart. I empathize with people. I try to understand the space I take up as a man, and try to be really deliberate about creating space for other people. For instance, when I’m on panels or moderate panels with people of different genders, I make a point to make sure that the feminine people and women on the panels speak the most. I try not to take up space where there are women and feminine people who could speak to something in a better way than I can. I try to be conscious of those things.

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“We can change the culture and start saying, ‘Being compassionate, empathic, emotionally complicated and available is a part of being a masculine person because it’s a part of being a human being,'” says Tiq Milan, shown here with his wife Kim Katrin Milan at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Research has shown that people who are conditioned to be men have been taught to emotionally repress, and that has devastating consequences, both to those men and to everyone else in the world who faces the backlash from that repression. How do we encourage boys and men to be vulnerable and emotionally communicative? How do we help men heal?

We need to teach little boys to be vulnerable, that nothing is taken away from them if they cry, nothing is taken from them if they’re scared or if they’re in pain. Nothing is taken from them if they’re in love. We have to start early. Growing up, I was a little girl. I’m not the trans person who knew I was trans when I was six. Not growing up in that man culture has had a huge influence on the man I am today. It has allowed me to be better. I don’t feel vulnerable around my own fear or falling in love. If I’m scared, I’ll tell you, I’m petrified. If I need help, I ask for it.

There are so many things that can fuck manhood up. You wear the color pink, you’re not man enough. You show some fear, you’re not man enough. If you actually love a person and show how much you love them, it’s not manly.

“Refusing emotions takes away from the complexity and wholeness of a human being.”

We can change the culture and start saying, “Being compassionate, empathic, emotionally complicated and available is a part of being a masculine person because it’s a part of being a human being,” instead of limiting masculinity to being one kind of person. That’s why there are so many men who are so oppressed, violent and awful. There are just so many cisgendered men who are just awful to everyone. How can you be happy with your humanity if everything tells you that if you don’t act in a very specific way you’ll be stripped of your masculinity, which is something that men hold dear?

There are lot of men who deny there’s a problem, who don’t care, or who just don’t realize. These men are still a part of a misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic social fabric — how do we reach them?

I think it takes a lot of hard conversations. The thing is — people need to be willing to change. We can’t force people. I can meet people where they’re at.

“I can educate people who are ready to change, who say, ‘I’m ready to be uncomfortable, and I’m ready to have my truths complicated so I can grow.’”

If they’re not saying that, there’s no conversation to be had. There’s just so many people out there who don’t care and who don’t want to care, because once they know there’s a problem, there’s an obligation to do something about it, and they don’t want that responsibility. We say ignorance is bliss — it’s easier to pretend that nothing’s going on. You can’t tell me that it’s natural for men to be so violent towards each other, and towards women and children in their homes. I don’t think that’s natural; I think that it’s conditioned. I think a lot of men are coming to place where they’re ready to change, and they’re becoming more disinvested in toxic masculinity. Look at Terry Crews — he’s one of the only men to come out and talk about sexual assault; yet women have been talking about sexual assault for centuries. It’s good to see a man finally say, “This has happened to me too, and I’m understanding this toxic culture that creates these systems.” We need men to understand that toxic masculinity exists in our culture, that we benefit from it, and that we created it so we have to change it.

How are you navigating fatherhood, and what does queering family mean for you?

I’m just trying to do my best. [laughs] I’m trying to make sure my kid doesn’t fall off the bed, doesn’t choke on anything, doesn’t poison herself. A lot of fatherhood is just making sure your kid is fine. My wife is such a good partner, and we’re both parenting full-time. Your whole life changes when you become a parent. My daughter is the light of my life. My kid has a cisgendered queer mom and a transgendered dad. We want her to grow up in a world where gender isn’t a binary system, gender is a spectrum of possibilities. She’s going to know that as a truth in her life; she’s going to know that gender looks so many different ways, and that her gender can look however she chooses as she gets older. Her journey in gender is not a process of coming out, it just is. We also want her to know that families can look a whole bunch of ways. We’re being really intentional about meeting other queer parents, other queer parents of color, other gay parents, so that she has a really open idea around family and around love.

Queerness is freedom to create family and love how we want. She’s going to be raised with queerness as a culture. I think queerness is the future.”

 

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Tiq and Kim with their daughter. As Tiq says: “My kid has a cisgendered queer mom and a transgendered dad. We want her to grow up in a world where gender isn’t a binary system, gender is a spectrum of possibilities. She’s going to know that as a truth in her life.”

Find out more about TEDWomen 2018: Showing Up, coming up this fall in Palm Springs, California.

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Nnedi Okorafor pens a new Black Panther comic series, and more updates from TED speakers

We’ve been on break but the TED community definitely hasn’t — here are some highlights from the past few weeks.

Black Panther’s Shuri stars in her own comic. Writer Nnedi Okorafor will team up with visual artist Leonardo Romero to bring Marvel’s newest Black Panther comic series to life. Shuri will follow Wakandan princess and tech genius Shuri as she struggles to lead Wakanda after the mysterious disappearance of her brother, T’Challa, the Black Panther and Wakandan king. Okorafor will infuse her signature Afrofuturist style into the African fantasy franchise, which has also been written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and TED speaker Roxane Gay. In an interview with Bustle, Okorafor said “[Shuri is] a character in the Marvel Universe who really sings to me.” (Watch Okorafor’s TED Talk.)

Saving media through blockchain technology. Alongside Jen Poyant, journalist Manoush Zomorodi has launched Stable Genius Productions, a podcast production company that aims to “help people navigate personal and global change” through the lens of technological advances. In an innovative move, the company has joined forces with Civil, a decentralized marketplace operating with blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies to fund digital journalism. Their first project, ZigZag, is a podcast about “changing the course of capitalism, journalism and women’s lives,” and documents the co-founders’ journey building Stable Genius Productions. In an interview with Recode, Zomorodi comments on her partnership with Civil: “The idea is that there’s this ecosystem of news sites … niche is okay; they don’t need to be massive. We’re not trying to build another New York Times on here. This is small and specific and quality.” (Watch Zomorodi’s TED Talk.)

Pope declares death penalty “inadmissible.” Pope Francis recently instituted a change in the Catholic Church’s position on capital punishment, naming it an “attack” on the “dignity of the person.” Though the Catholic Church has been vocally opposed to the death penalty for several decades, with Pope John Paul II calling the practice “cruel and unnecessary,” this move sets a clear and firm position from the Vatican that the death penalty is inexcusable. Pope Francis also urged bishops to advocate for rehabilitation and social integration for offenders, rather than punishment for the sake of deterring future crimes, and announced a goal to work toward the abolishment of the death penalty globally. (Watch the Pope’s TED Talk.)

Two nominations for the alternative Nobel Prize in literature. More great news for Nnedi Okorafor! Both Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnedi Okorafor have been longlisted for the New Academy Prize in Literature. Following the announcement that the Swedish Academy would withhold awarding a 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature due to sexual assault allegations, The New Academy was founded to ensure that an international literary prize was awarded this year. Adichie and Okorafor have been nominated along with other international literary luminaries such as Jamaica Kincaid, Neil Gaiman, Arundhati Roy and Margaret Atwood. (Watch Adichie’s TED Talk.)

A new exhibition on the strength and beauty of the Black Madonna. Artist Theaster Gates has funneled his fascination with how the Virgin Mary and Christ are represented into his new solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland. Inspired by Maerten van Heemskerck’s Virgin and Child, Gates’ new work urges viewers to complicate their understanding of the Virgin Mary, a character who is most often rendered as white in traditional fine art. Speaking to BBC Culture, Gates says his show “weaves back and forth from religious adoration to political manifesto to self-empowerment to historical reflection.” Other aspects of the exhibition include a 2,600-strong photo collection of black women whom Gates calls “Black Madonnas…everyday women who do miraculous things,” drawn from the iconic Ebony magazine archive. (Watch Gates’ TED Talk.)

 

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Moving healthcare forward: The talks of TED Salon: Catalyst

TED and Optum partnered to cultivate the dialogue and collaboration that’s needed to understand and guide changes in healthcare. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Healthcare is at a turning point. Big data, evolving consumer preferences and shifting cost structures are just a few of the many complex factors shaping the opportunities and challenges that will define the future. How can we all become forces for positive change and progress?

For the first time, TED partnered with Optum, a health services and innovation company, for a salon focused on what happens when we trust our ideas to change health and healthcare for the better. At the salon, held on July 31 at the ARIA Las Vegas, six speakers and a performer shared fresh thinking on how we can make a health system that works better for everyone.

Empathy shouldn’t be a nice-to-have, says Adrienne Boissy — it’s a hard skill that should be integrated into everything we do. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

How we can put empathy back in healthcare. Many in healthcare believe that empathy — imagining another person’s feelings and then doing something to help them — is a “soft skill,” and not an important factor in the success or failure of medical treatments. But according to Adrienne Boissy, chief experience officer for the Cleveland Clinic Health System, empathy is a critical part of healthcare that, when cultivated, delivers proven, positive impacts to everything from controlling high blood pressure to the outcomes of diabetes. Best of all, it’s something that healthcare workers can learn, in order to “bake caring fixes back into every single part of the healthcare system.” Boissy knows that patients and doctors both suffer under current healthcare systems and their long wait times, communications gaps, and the endemic pressures that lead to staff burnout. To address these problems in her health system, Boissy implemented some big fixes, like same-day appointments for patients, communications training for doctors and less bureaucratic pressure. Her strategies are designed to build empathy back into the healthcare system and “transform the human experience into something much more humane.”

The myth of obesity and the need for a social movement. The global obesity crisis has reached epidemic proportions — but its root cause may not be what you think. Obesity expert Lee Kaplan has studied the issue for nearly 20 years, and the misconceptions around obesity have remained fairly constant throughout: if people simply ate less and exercised more, the thinking goes, they’d be able to control their weight. But the reality is much more complex. “Numerous studies demonstrate that each of our bodies has a powerful, and very accurate, system for seeking and maintaining the right amount of fat,” Kaplan says. “Obesity is the disease in which that finely tuned system goes awry.” There are many types of obesity, with many causes — genetics, brain damage, sleep deprivation, medications that promote weight gain — but in the end, all obesity reflects the disruption of this internal system (controlled by the body’s adipostat). In order to begin solving this massive health crisis, Kaplan calls for us to stop stigmatizing obesity and take collective action to improve the lives of those affected. “We need to change the public perception of blame and responsibility, and support a social movement that will lead to real progress,” Kaplan says. “In so doing, we will begin to see society shrink before our eyes.”

If we design healthcare systems with trust, innovation and ambition, says Dr. Andrew Bastawrous, we can create solutions that change the lives of millions of people worldwide. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Innovating the healthcare funding and distribution model. While working in an eye care clinic in Kenya, Andrew Bastawrous was frustrated to find that because of rigid funding regulations, he wasn’t able to help people in desperate need who didn’t have “the right problems.” Though specific resource allocation makes business sense, Bastawrous says, inflexible rules often block healthcare organizations from adapting to shifting situations on the ground. This makes it difficult to deliver even simple medical treatments — for example, though we’ve had glasses for over 700 years, 2.5 billion people still don’t have access to them. That’s why Peek Vision, the eye care organization Bastawrous co-founded and leads, is set up as both a company and a charity — an innovation that allows them to sustainably create healthcare products and serve the communities who need them most. Peek Vision’s successful partnership with the Botswana government to screen and treat every child in the country by 2021 shows that this model can work — now, it needs to be scaled globally. If we design health care systems with trust, innovation and ambition, Bastawrous says, we can create solutions that fulfill the needs of financial partners and improve the lives of millions of people worldwide.

One pill to rule them all? We live in the age of the “quantified self,” where it’s possible to measure, monitor and track much of our physiology and behavior with a few taps of a finger. (Think smartwatches and fitness trackers.) With all this information, says Daniel Kraft, we should be able to make the shift into “quantified health” and design truly personalized medicine that allows us to synthesize many of our medications into a single pill. Onstage, Kraft revealed a prototype that would not only engender an easier time taking medications but also print the drugs he envisions right in the home. “I’m hopeful that with the help of novel approaches like this, we can move from an era of intermittent data, reactive one-size-fits-all therapy,” he says, “improving health and medicine across the planet.”

When it comes to health, we’re not as divided as we think we are, says Rebecca Onie. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

Divided on healthcare, united on health. The American conversation around healthcare has long been divisive. Yet as health services innovator Rebecca Onie reveals in new research, people in the US are not as polarized as they think. She launched a new initiative to ask voters around the country one question: “What do you need to be healthy?” As it turns out, across economic, political and racial divides, Americans are aligned when it comes to their healthcare priorities: healthy food, safe housing and good wages. “When you ask the right questions, it becomes pretty clear: our country may be fractured on healthcare, but we are unified on health,” she says. The insights from her research demonstrate how our common experience can inform our approach to pressing healthcare questions — and even bring people across the political spectrum together.

Medicine isn’t made by miracles. Our narratives of our greatest medical and healthcare advances all follow the same script, Darshak Sanghavi says: “The heroes are either swashbuckling doctors fighting big odds and taking big risks, or miracle drugs found in the unlikeliest of places.” We love to hear — and tell — stories based on this script. But these stories cause us to redirect our resources toward creating hero doctors and revolutionary medications, and by doing so, “we potentially harm more people than we help,” Sanghavi says. He believes we should turn away from these myths and focus on what really matters: teamwork. Incremental refinements in treatments, painstakingly assembled by healthcare workers pooling their resources over time, are what really lead to improved survival rates and higher-quality lives for patients. “We don’t need to wait for a hero in order to make our lives better,” Sanghavi says. “We already know what to do. Small steps over time will get us where we need to go.”

Jessica Care Moore performs her poem “Gratitude Is a Recipe for Survival” to close out the salon. (Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED)

She has decided to live. Poet, performer and artist Jessica Care Moore closes out the salon with a performance of “Gratitude Is a Recipe for Survival” — a vigorous, personal, lyrical journey through the mind and life of a professional poet raising a young son in a thankless world.

TEDSalon Optum - July 31, 2018 at ARIA Resort & Casino, Las Vegas

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‘Crazy Rich Asians’ shows that diversity onscreen is a win for everyone

Actress Michelle Yeoh in a scene from "Crazy Rich Asians." (Photo by Sanja Bucko) © 2017 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and SK Global Entertainment

Michelle Yeoh, center, in a scene from “Crazy Rich Asians.” Photo by Sanja Bucko © 2017 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and SK Global Entertainment

Crazy Rich Asians, a new Hollywood film that is an adaptation of the best-selling book by Kevin Kwan, topped the box office over the weekend, proving the “power of diversity (again).”

The romantic comedy is a major motion picture with big studio backing and a reported budget of $30 million. For Hollywood it also presents something unique: an all-Asian cast. As The New York Times reported last week, “The last time a major Hollywood film set in the present day showcased a majority Asian cast was a whopping 25 years ago, with The Joy Luck Club in 1993.”

NYT writer Robert Ito called Crazy Rich Asians something of a “cinematic Halley’s comet because — before Joy Luck Club, there was The Flower Drum Song in 1961, and then what?”

The film was not only an incredible opportunity for Asian actors, but also for Asian- and Asian-American moviegoers. The filmmaker and Kwan turned down a lucrative deal with Netflix in order to get to the silver screen. “Ultimately, we decided Netflix is probably the future. But right now, it’s not,” director Jon M. Chu told Vanity Fair. “We’re really focused on the financial victory of people showing up so that other voices can be heard and other stories can be told.”

Hollywood has made depressingly little progress

Despite the big opening for Chu’s film, a recent report from Stacy Smith’s research team at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, “Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films,” revealed some disappointing data for women and particularly women of color in Hollywood. Of the top 100 films in 2017, two thirds didn’t include a single Asian or Asian-American character. Two-thirds. Among the female leads, only 4 actors out of the 33 films that had female leads weren’t white.

None were Asian.

Courtesy of Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

The smaller screen is no better. A recent study by Asian-American Pacific Islander academics found that 64% of television shows do not include one Asian or Asian-American character.

With all the talk in Hollywood of inclusion and diversity, we’d all hoped to see some movement in these numbers over the past few years. But the study reveals just how little top-grossing movies have changed when it comes to the on-screen prevalence and portrayal of females, underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, the LGBT community and individuals with disabilities.

In order to combat ongoing inequality in film, report authors offer several solutions.

Put more women in charge.

The answer to addressing “on-screen diversity deficits may lie behind the scenes,” Dr. Stacy Smith and her co-authors of the Annenberg report write: “The presence of a female in the directing or writing role is associated with more female characters on screen. The same is true for Black directors and Black characters — particularly Black female characters.”

One woman with power agrees. In the September issue of Vogue, Beyoncé told journalist Clover Hope why she insisted on working with “this brilliant 23-year-old photographer Tyler Mitchell.” At 23, Mitchell is among the youngest photographers to have shot the cover of Vogue. He is also the first African-American photographer to have done it in the magazine’s 125-year history.

“We will all lose” without diversity, Beyoncé says. “If people in powerful positions continue to hire and cast only people who look like them, sound like them, come from the same neighborhoods they grew up in, they will never have a greater understanding of experiences different from their own. They will hire the same models, curate the same art, cast the same actors over and over again, and we will all lose.”

But first we need to get more women and people of color into those powerful positions. The Annenberg report notes that “few women or people of color have worked as directors on the most popular films across more than a decade. Of 2017’s top-grossing film directors, only 7.3% were female, 5.5% were Black, and 3.7% were Asian. Only one woman of color worked on the top movies released last year.”


New projects should make use of inclusion riders.

Dr. Stacy Smith is the founder and director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California. She and her team have been conducting extensive research on gender equality in entertainment for over a decade. Other organizations, such as the Sundance Institute, the Representation ProjectWomen in Film, and the Women’s Media Center, also lead initiatives intended to document the diversity gap and to implement programs to close that gap.

In 2014, Stacy wrote an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter introducing the concept of equity, or inclusion, riders and talked about it in her 2016 TEDWomen talk (watch below). A template of the rider is available at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative website.

Set targets for inclusion goals.

One way to move toward measurable change is for companies to set target inclusion goals. These objectives, which should be transparent and public, should specify not only a company’s expectations for inclusion but also the steps it will take to achieve the goals.

One model for how studios and production companies can activate equilibrium change for inclusion comes from powerhouse producer and director Ava Duvernay. She set a goal that she met: 100% women directors for her TV series, Queen Sugar.

 

Just add five.

Most of the background speaking roles in film are awarded to men. In order to increase the percentage of women on screen and set a new overall norm for female characters, “directors could add five female speaking characters to every one of the 100 top movies next year.”

Geena Davis, founder of Institute on Gender in Media, lays out the process in two easy steps. Besides speaking roles, she encourages parity in crowd scenes and other scenes involving extras. Although you can’t “snap your fingers and suddenly half the Congress is female,” onscreen it’s much easier, she explains. “In the time it takes to make a movie or create a television show, we can change what the future looks like.”

Tax incentives that promote diversity.

Lastly, entertainment companies benefit from state tax incentives that subsidize production costs. Earlier this year, Asian-American lawmakers in California pushed through legislation that extended its film and TV tax incentive program and introduced new measures for productions receiving the credit to report on diversity. The Hollywood Reporter notes that even though productions don’t have to meet any quotas to be considered for the credit, the “objective is to motivate change by starting with self-awareness.”

“‘By including reporting on diversity above the line, this bill creates accountability,’ said Dr. Stacy L. Smith. ‘Rather than waiting for reports like mine, content creators have to tabulate their own scores on inclusion, and creating this awareness opens up a space for people to make intentional choices in who is hired, and it forces filmmakers to recognize when they have not made choices toward inclusion.’”

Other states with successful tax incentive programs, such as my home state of Georgia where more films were made last year than in Hollywood and New York, should follow California’s lead and institute inclusion reporting of their own.

Yes, we have a long way to go in getting to gender and racial equality onscreen…to getting closer to the “REEL” world looking like the “real” world, and we can’t wait for the film and TV industry to move in this direction without new strategies and incentives. But another very effective lever for this change is what you and I buy tickets to watch and listen to and what we decide to stream and read. Supporting projects that promote diversity is one very important step in that direction.

Will Crazy Rich Asians be another Halley’s Comet or a new constellation that lights up Hollywood?

As actress Constance Wu tweeted, “I know [Crazy Rich Asians] won’t represent every Asian American. So for those who don’t feel seen, I hope there is a story you find soon that does represent you. I am rooting for you. We’re not all the same, but we all have a story.”

It’s a good time to start telling the untold ones.

– Pat


TEDWomen 2018 Update

TEDWomen, the conference that I am honored and privileged to curate in partnership with the TED team, continues to do our part to equalize with an unparalleled digital platform for women’s ideas and stories.

Join us this year at TEDWomen 2018! The theme is “Showing Up” and you can be sure that we’ll be talking about ideas and strategies for equity in media, business, academia, government and health care. This year the conference will be held in Palm Springs, Calif. from November 28-30.

Registration is filling up fast, so I encourage you to register to join us today!

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Galaxies hidden in plain sight, a new role at Netflix and other TED news

The TED community is busy with new projects and ideas: below, some highlights.

A new galaxy cluster hidden in plain sight. Researchers at MIT, including TED speaker Henry Lin, have recently discovered a cluster of hundreds of galaxies obscured by an intensely active supermassive black hole at its center. That extra-bright black hole, named PKS1353-341, is 46 billion times brighter than our sun; in their newest paper, the team concluded that a feeding frenzy (big chunks of matter falling into the hole and feeding it) is the likely cause of the black hole’s extraordinary light, which blocked the cluster from view. This insight has led to the development of CHiPS, or Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight, an initiative that will re-analyze older data and images, in the hopes of identifying other galaxy clusters. (Watch Lin’s TED Talk.)

Mothers of Invention: the women solving climate change. Alongside comedian Maeve Higgins, Mary Robinson has launched a new feminist podcast spotlighting women who are leading the charge in the climate change battle. The series, Mothers of Invention, has featured Judi Wakhungu and Alice Kaudia, Kenyan policymakers who instituted Kenya’s plastic bag ban; Tara Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican restaurateur who led efforts to develop sustainable farming measures on the island following Hurricane Maria; and TED speaker Tara Houska, an indigenous rights lawyer who works toward mass divestment from fossil fuel funds. Robinson, who helped negotiate the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, has long advocated for environment policy that protects vulnerable communities; in an interview with iNews, she said, “Climate change isn’t gender neutral: it affects women worse. So of course it makes sense that they would be the ones coming up with solutions.” (Watch Robinson’s TED Talk.)

Diversity specialist Vernā Myers joins Netflix. Following two decades of leading the Vernā Myers Company, Vernā Myers will soon join Netflix as Vice President of Inclusion Strategy. In the newly created role, Myers will strategize how Netflix can best integrate “cultural diversity, inclusion and equity” into their global expansion plans. In a press release from Netflix, Myers said, “I am so excited and look forward to collaborating all across Netflix to establish bold innovative frameworks and practices that will attract, fully develop, and sustain high performing diverse teams.” (Watch Myers’ TED Talk.)

Monica Lewinsky talks Emmy nomination. In a podcast interview with Vanity Fair, Monica Lewinsky discusses her anti-bullying work and recent Emmy nomination for her PSA “In Real Life.” The campaign, which debuted last October, features actors recreating real cyberbullying comments on the streets of New York to unknowing bystanders, and shows strangers stepping in to defend the victims. The film, which was produced in collaboration with ad agency BBDO New York and Dini von Mueffling Communications, asks the question: If it’s not okay in person, why is it okay online? “There’s a lot of pain out there from this,” Lewinsky said to Vanity Fair. “We carry that with us for a long time. I hope it helps heal people.” (Watch Lewinsky’s TED Talk.)

A celebration of poetry and art in Bhutan. Poet and educator Sarah Kay captivated audiences last week at the Mountain Echoes literary festival in Thimphu, Bhutan, with an enthralling performance and workshop session. The annual festival, which registered 17,000 visitors this year, gathered artists and literary luminaries including Kay, the Queen Mother Dorji Wangmo and theatre actress Sanjana Kapoor to facilitate ”cultural dialogue, share stories, and create memories.” In addition to her performance, Kay led a workshop session called “Considering Breakthrough: Connecting with Spoken Word Poetry.” In The Times of India, Kay, who leads the global education initiative Project VOICE, says that for her, poetry is like “puzzle-solving.” (Watch Kay’s TED Talk.)

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New insights on climate change action, a milestone for Maysoon Zayid and more TED news

As usual, the TED community is making headlines. Below, some highlights.

Does local action make a difference when fighting climate change? Environmental scientist Angel Hsu teamed up with experts at several climate research institutes on a fascinating new report about the potential effects of local action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally. Hsu synthesized data from thousands of cities, regions and companies at Data-Driven Yale, the Singapore-based research group she founded and leads. The study found that committed action by local entities could help bring the world closer to the goals of 2015’s Paris Climate Agreement. Researchers also found that local action by American entities could reduce emissions by at least half of America’s initial Paris Agreement pledge, even without federal support. On the study, Hsu said, “The potential of these commitments to help the world avoid dangerous climate change is clear – the key is now to ensure that these commitments are really implemented.” (Watch Hsu’s TED Talk.)

A groundbreaking comedy show. Actor, comedian and disability activist Maysoon Zayid will write and star in a new show inspired by her life for ABC. The show, titled Can, Can, will follow a Muslim woman with cerebral palsy as she navigates the intricacies of her love life, career and her opinionated family. Much of Zayid’s comedy explores and expands the intersections of disability and Muslim-American identity. Zayid will be joined by writer Joanna Quraishi to help produce and write the single-camera series. (Watch Zayid’s TED Talk.)

Meet 2018’s Humanist of the Year. For his advocacy work on responsible and progressive economic ethics, Nick Hanauer will be honored as Humanist of the Year by the Humanist Hub, an organization based at MIT and Harvard. In a statement, Hanauer said, “It is an honor both to receive this award, and to join the Humanist Hub in helping to change the way we think and talk about the economy. It turns out that most people get capitalism wrong. Capitalism works best when it works for everybody, not just for zillionaires like me.” The Humanist Hub, a nonreligious philosophy group, annually celebrates a public individual they believe embodies the ideals of humanism, a philosophy of living ethically to serve the greater good of humanity. (Watch Hauner’s TED Talk.)

Are you saving enough for retirement? Behavioral economist Dan Ariely doesn’t think so — in a new study conducted with Aline Holzwarth at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, Ariely found that we can expect to spend up to 130% of our preretirement income once we retire. Ariely and Holzwarth urge us to abandon the conventional idea that 70% of our income will be enough for retirement. Instead, they suggest we approach saving for retirement with a personalized methodology that takes into account the seven most prominent spending categories: eating out, digital services, recharge (relaxing and self-care), travel, entertainment and shopping, and basic needs. Moving past a generic one-size measurement, they advocate planning your retirement spending only after you spending time understanding your individual needs. (Watch Ariely’s TED Talk.)

In Italy, a bridge offers hope after tragedy. Following a devastating bridge collapse that killed 43 people in Genoa, Italian architect Renzo Piano has offered to donate a new bridge design to help his beloved hometown recover from the traumatic loss. Preliminary designs present a bridge that is distinctly ship-like, alluding to Genoa’s maritime history; it includes 43 illuminated posts resembling sails to memorialize each of the victims. Meanwhile, Piano has worked closely with England’s Royal Academy of the Arts to design and curate an expansive retrospective of his work called “The Art of Making Buildings,” opening September 15. On the exhibition, Piano said, “[M]aking buildings is a civic gesture and social responsibility. I believe passionately that architecture is about making a place for people to come together and share values.” (Watch Piano’s TED Talk.)

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Meet the Fall 2018 class of TED Residents

Par : TED Staff
Activist Glenn Cantave (far left) and artist Kemi Layeni (far right) introduce themselves; behind them, Savannah Rodgers (center) says hello to alumnus Bayeté Ross Smith.

In the foreground, activist Glenn Cantave (far left) and artist Kemi Layeni (far right) introduce themselves; behind them, Savannah Rodgers (center) says hello to alumnus Bayeté Ross Smith during the meet-and-greet that kicked off this season’s Residency. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

On September 12, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. These 21 Residents will spend 14 weeks in TED’s New York headquarters working and thinking together. The class includes exceptional people from all over the map — from Bulgaria to South Africa, Canada to Kansas.

New Residents include:

  • A rabbi helping to bring centuries-old wisdom to modern-day social media
  • An underwater photographer depicting the surprising variety of wildlife in urban waters
  • A former banker who inherited a plot of land and is now learning how to farm
  • A journalist seeking transparency in the US healthcare system
  • A rapper helping others find their voice

Heidi Boisvert, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist and creative technologist building an open-source biometric lab and AI system to understand humans’ emotional reactions to media. Her goal: to figure out what makes media truly affecting and effective, so the knowledge can be used for good and to safeguard against manipulation.

TED Fellow and human rights activist Yana Buhrer Tavanier — based in Sofia, Bulgaria — is the co-founder of Fine Acts, which bridges human rights and art to instigate social change. In 2017, she launched Fine Acts Labs, bringing activists, and artists and technologists together in one space to tackle one social issue.

Recognizing that history-book narratives are Eurocentric, Glenn Cantave’s organization Movers and Shakers wants to paint a fuller picture using augmented reality. His team is working with local educators to create an AR book on the true story of Christopher Columbus. He also plans to launch neighborhood walking tours that depict digital landmarks of black and brown people in the US. He calls the project a “Pokemon-Go for contextualized history.”

Maria Adele Carrai is a sinologist and political scientist finishing a book about sovereignty in China, and how its infrastructure initiatives are changing the country’s place in the world.

Diana Henry chats with fellow residents Heidi Boisvert and Azi Jamalian.

From left, investor Diane Henry chats with fellow residents Heidi Boisvert, an artist and technologist, and Azi Jamalian, a cognitive scientist and entrepreneur. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

Luz Claudio, PhD, is an environmental health research scientist, author and educator who develops innovative tools for research and the mentoring of young scientists. She is also developing new ways to translate discoveries from the environmental health sciences into practical actions—like writing a children’s book!

Keith Ellenbogen is an acclaimed underwater photographer who focuses on environmental conservation. His work dives into New York’s surprisingly vibrant and diverse marine ecosystems.

Diane Henry is a tech seed investor and startup strategist dedicated to finding, funding and amplifying visionary founders who believe in building ethics into tech as it evolves.

Muhammed Y. Idris is putting his PhD in social data analytics to good use through his app, Atar — a mobile platform that gives refugees seeking asylum information about their rights and available services. For now, the app is limited to people in Montreal but in the last year he has partnered with the UNHCR to expand his work further.

Azadeh (Azi) Jamalian is an entrepreneur and cognitive science PhD building invention hubs and communities for kid inventors. Her mission is to create a world in which all children dare to act on their dreams.

Keith Kirkland is an industrial designer, CEO and cofounder of WearWorks, a company that makes haptic navigation products for the blind. Their product, Wayband, helped the first blind person ever navigate the 2017 NYC Marathon without sighted assistance.

TED Res alumni came back to give the new class some advice on how to take advantage of their time.

TED Res alumni came back to give the new class some advice on how to take advantage of their time. A veteran of the first class, podcaster and author Brian McCullough (in orange), gives his thoughts. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

TEDx organizer Kelo Kubu started her career in finance and later founded a design studio, but then inherited farmland as restitution from apartheid but didn’t know what to do with it. She’s launching an ag-tech accelerator focusing on urban female farmers so they can all learn to profit from their land.

Kemi Layeni is an artist focusing on the stories and experiences of people of African descent. She is working on a multimedia project about slavery “through a speculative, Afro-futuristic and Afro-surreal lens.”

Entrepreneur and graduate of The Second City, Mary Lemmer is applying improv comedy training to help people become better leaders.

Mordechai Lightstone is a Chasidic rabbi, the social media editor at Chabad.org and the founder of Tech Tribe. He is passionate about using new media to further Jewish identity and community building.

Jullia Suhyoung Lim designs technology to tackle challenges in education and medicine. She is currently designing an AR app to help autistic children identify abstract concepts in real life.

Samy el-Noury is an actor and LGBTQ+ advocate developing his first full-length play, about the life of a historical transgender activist. His goal is to recognize trans people in history and create more opportunities for working trans artists.

Technologist Muhammad Y. Idiris meets alum Danielle Gustafson.

Technologist Muhammad Y. Idiris meets alum Danielle Gustafson. Photo: Dian Lofton / TED

Jeanne Pinder demands radical transparency from the US healthcare system. Although price opacity is often drowned out by the noisier debate about policy and politics, the effects on real people are huge and growing, she says. Her award-winning startup, ClearHealthCosts, reports on and crowdsources true costs of medical procedures and makes the data public.

Originally from Colombia, Mariana Prieto designs scalable solutions to solve complex wildlife conservation challenges.

Savannah Rodgers is a documentary filmmaker from Kansas City. She wanted to make movies after seeing her favorite film, Chasing Amy (1997), for the first time at age 12. Now she’s making a documentary about the film and its enduring, controversial LGBTQ+ legacy.

Julie Scelfo is a journalist and social justice activist whose stories about society and human behavior reframe popular ideas and ask us to rethink basic assumptions. The author of The Women Who Made New York says she believes Donald Trump is onto something when he talks about “fake news” — although she would define it differently.

Raegan Sealy is a poet, singer, rapper and the founder of Sound Board NYC. An advocate of social change through the arts, Raegan and her work draw on her own experiences of overcoming domestic violence, sexual abuse and addiction.

Two members of this class, Kemi Layeni and Savannah Rodgers, won their seats in the Adobe Project 1324 TED Residency challenge, for young creatives (aged 18 to 24) with big ideas to share. The TED team chose the winners; Adobe is generously picking up the tab for their travel, room and board.

The fall Residency will culminate with a program of TED Talks in December. Would you or someone you know like to become a Resident? Applications for the Spring 2019 Residency (February 25–May 31) open October 1 and will close December 3, 2018. You can learn more at ted.com/residency.

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Activist Glenn Cantave (far left) and artist Kemi Layeni (far right) introduce themselves; behind them, Savannah Rodgers (center) says hello to alumnus Bayeté Ross Smith.

Diana Henry chats with fellow residents Heidi Boisvert and Azi Jamalian.

TED Res alumni came back to give the new class some advice on how to take advantage of their time.

7 big ideas gain momentum: Updates from The Audacious Project

In this anonymous conference room, The Bail Project is doing paperwork to release 20 people from jail in a single day. Want to know more about the bail system in the US? Read this explainer.

Their ideas are ambitious, with the goal of changing outdated systems and impacting millions of lives. It’s been five months since The Audacious Project’s first class of project leaders spoke at TED2018, and each one is gaining momentum. Below, the latest news.

1,600 bails paid and counting

More than 1,600 people have now had their bail paid by The Bail Project, allowing them to await their trial from home rather than in a jail cell. In July 2018, The Bail Project opened in Detroit, working with the Detroit Justice Center — and that same week, they had their biggest-impact day so far, bailing out more than 20 people in Louisville, Kentucky. Next up for the project: California. They’ve started operations in San Diego, and are gearing up to launch in Compton, working with the UCLA School of Law and the Compton Public Defender.

The media is starting to take note. Robin Steinberg and “bail disrupters” Shawna Baldwin-Harrell and Richard Baxter were featured on NBC’s Dateline in a powerful episode that takes you inside the local jail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet some of the women affected. Meanwhile, The Bail Project has gotten great coverage from The Christian Science Monitor, Michigan Public Radio, PBS NewsHour and St. Louis Public Radio. And after California passed a sweeping set of reforms that Steinberg and other activists fear will dramatically increase pretrial incarceration, she explained last week in an op-ed in The New York Times what should come after cash bail.

Two satellites take aim at methane

Earlier this month, Fred Krupp’s talk posted on TED.com, explaining the Environmental Defense Fund’s plan to slow down climate change by focusing on the greenhouse gas methane. Barely a week later, the Trump administration issued a proposal to weaken EPA rules, made in 2016, to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas companies. EDF projections show that this proposal could result in a half million additional tons of methane pollution by 2025. While they plan to fight the proposal, EDF stresses that it just strengthens the need for MethaneSAT. When oil and gas companies have data on leaks, they take action — this summer, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Equinor and Shell all committed to addressing the problem of methane emissions.

Last week, Krupp attended the Global Climate Action Summit in California, where Governor Jerry Brown announced exciting news: California is developing its own satellite to measure greenhouse gas emissions. EDF is working with the state, and these two satellites will work together in tandem. While MethaneSAT will take broad, detailed measures of methane emission, surveying 80 percent of global oil and gas operations every four days, California’s system will detect medium to large leaks at specific locations. As EDF puts it on their blog, “It’s like having two camera lenses — wide angle and telephoto — that together produce a more complete picture.”

Trachoma is on the run

It was announced in June, but made official in a ceremony in August: Ghana has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. It is the seventh country to do so in recent years, following Cambodia, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, Oman and Nepal. Sightsavers has been working since 2000 on eliminating the disease in Ghana, and getting to this milestone was a long road. Watch a video on what it took, and read an account of the final days of trachoma in Ghana, spent searching towns for the final patients, with nurses performing surgeries in teams of four.

Meet the ctenophore, an incredible inhabitant of the ocean’s twilight zone. Want to meet more creatures who live here? Check out this gallery.

Already, new insights on the twilight zone

The first cruise in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s mission to explore the ocean’s twilight zone — define — left shore from Newport, Rhode Island, on August 11. The goal was to test Deep-See — a tool that’s 20 feet long and packed with broad-frequency sonars, cameras and sensors capable of capturing two terabytes of data every hour. When the cruise returned to land 10 days later, it had already generated more data about the twilight zone than almost any expedition before it. Andone Lavery, a physicist who is part of the project, said it was surprising to see organisms evenly distributed through the zone, rather than in dense layers. She told Science magazine that the new tool was “like color TV versus black-and-white.”

Meanwhile, a second cruise — funded in collaboration with NASA and NSF —  is making its way through the Pacific, looking at the role the twilight zone plays in Earth’s climate. What it finds could show us new dimensions of the carbon cycle. And this is just the beginning.

Health workers amplify vaccination efforts

Living Goods and Last Mile Health have a new partner in their project to digitally empower community health workers, to serve their neighbors in key countries in East and West Africa. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is joining them to make sure that community health workers can collect data and educate communities about immunizations. This work should allow nurse supervisors to vaccinate up to 8 million people by 2021. It’s exciting work, sure to have a big impact. The news comes just as a controlled study of Last Mile Health’s community health worker program was published in the American Journal of Public Health, showing that its model rapidly increases access to lifesaving care for children.

On the road to Selma, a #StressProtest

T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison of GirlTrek are midway through a 50-city wellness tour they’ve dubbed the Road to Selma. As they travel the country and hold workshops with Black women, they’re gathering insights on how to make next year’s Summer of Selma a success. Planning for the event is underway, alongside partners at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation.

Over Labor Day, the GirlTrek team took a break to camp out in Rocky Mountain National Park for the second annual #StressProtest, a long weekend of self-care, hiking and nature for Black women. Dixon and Garrison spoke to Essence and Shondaland about why this is so vital. “Slowing down is the most radical thing you can do in this capitalist world that demands your work from sunup to sundown,” said Dixon. She and Garrison, recently named Women’s Health 2018 Game Changers, had an incredible time, from long hikes to conversations around the campfire. But even in this weekend of self-care, there was a bitter moment: As Garrison posted on Instagram, while driving a van full of Black women down the road after a hike, she was pulled over by a park police officer. “This man was asking me what I was doing in the park,” she writes. “Asked me while still holding his hand to his gun, despite seeing our hiking gear when we rolled the windows down.” But as Garrison powerfully writes: “I belong here. We belong here.” And she promises: “We’ll be back to the park next year. Thinking we will bring 1,000 Black women this time.”

Helping one million farmers help themselves

One Acre Fund is building capacity, and fast. By the end of the year, Andrew Youn and his team will serve more than 750,000 small-scale farmers, tracking far ahead of their goal of one million by 2020. This work is far-reaching, but its impact is personal. Six years ago, Wycklyfe Mwanje — now age 40 — was a small-scale farmer whose only source of income was his two-acre farm. Today, after working with One Acre Fund to improve his planting materials and techniques, he runs his farm, owns a mill for grinding maize and operates a popular butcher shop.

Wycklyfe Mwanje has gone from small-scale farmer to the owner of a mill and butcher shop. Want to know more about One Acre Fund’s plans to scale? Watch the update from TED2018.

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Humanizing our future: A night of talks from TED and Verizon

Hosts Bryn Freedman, left, and Kelly Stoetzel open the “Humanizing Our Future” salon, presented by Verizon at the TED World Theater, September 20, 2018, in New York. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

There are moments when the world begins to shift beneath our feet. Sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically. Now more than ever we are living and working in an era of exponential technological advancement. How we address rapid change, what collaborative relationships we create, how we find our humanity — all this will determine the future we step into.

For the first time, TED has partnered with Verizon for a salon focused on building that future. In a night of talks at the TED World Theater in New York City — hosted by TED curators Bryn Freedman and Kelly Stoetzel — six speakers and one performer shared fresh thinking on healing our hospital system, empowering rural women, creating a safer internet, harnessing intergenerational wisdom and much more.

How intergenerational wisdom helps companies thrive. In 2013, Chip Conley, who built a multi-decade career running boutique hotels, was brought into Airbnb to be the mentor of CEO Brian Chesky. Conley was 52 (and thus 21 years older than Chesky) and he wondered what, if anything, he could offer these digital natives. But he realized he could become what he calls a “Modern Elder,” someone with the “ability to use timeless wisdom and apply it to modern-day problems.” For instance, he shares with the younger employees the people skills he gained over decades, while they teach him about technology. Nearly 40 percent of Americans have a boss who is younger than them — and when people of all ages exchange knowledge and learn from each other, good things happen. “This is the new sharing economy,” Conley says.

Can hospitals heal our environmental illness? “It’s not possible to have healthy people on a sick planet,” says healthcare change agent Gary Cohen. Working in healthcare for 30 years, Cohen has seen firsthand the pollution created by hospitals in the United States — if American hospitals were a country, he says, they would have more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire United Kingdom. Cohen suggests that it’s time for hospitals to go beyond medical practice and become centers of holistic community healing. What could that look like? Investment in sustainable, renewable energy and transportation, green and affordable housing, and partnership with schools to pool local food resources. “Transform hospitals from being cathedrals of chronic disease to beacons of community wellness,” Cohen says.

Meagan Fallone works on an education program that’s teaching thousands of rural, illiterate women to create solar power systems — and improve their communities and lives along the way. She speaks at the “Humanizing Our Future” salon. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Empowering rural women through solar-powered education. The innovators best prepared to cope with the issues of the future won’t be found in Silicon Valley or at an Ivy League school, says Barefoot College CEO Meagan Fallone. Instead, they’ll be found among the impoverished women of the Global South. Fallone works on groundbreaking programs at Barefoot College, a social work and research center, helping illiterate women break cycles of poverty through solar power education and training. Nearly 3,000 women have completed Barefoot College’s six-month business and solar engineering curriculum, and their skills have brought solar light to more than one million people. Following the success of the solar education program, and at the request of graduates, Barefoot College developed a follow-up program called “Enriche,” which offers a holistic understanding of enterprise skills, digital literacy, human rights and more. By democratizing and demystifying technology and education, Fallone says, we can empower illiterate women with the skills to become leaders and entrepreneurs — and make real change in their communities.

It’s fine to enjoy a dystopian movie, says Rima Qureshi — but when we’re building our real future, dystopia is a choice. She speaks at the “Humanizing Our Future” salon. {Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Dystopia is a choice. From The Matrix to Black Mirror, many of us crave science-fiction tales of rogue technologies: robots that will take our jobs, enslave us, destroy us or pit us against one another. Is our dread of dystopia a self-fulfilling prophecy? Rima Qureshi offers a warning — and some hopeful advice to remind us that dystopia is a choice. Our love for dystopia courts actual disaster through “target fixation”: the phenomenon where a driver or a pilot panics when a hazard looms, and thus becomes more likely to actually strike it. Although we should always keep cyber threats in our peripheral vision, Qureshi says, we should remain focused on the technologies that will help us: virtual classrooms, drones that race into burning buildings to find survivors, or VR that allows doctors to perform surgery remotely. We should not assume the future will be terrible (though we can still enjoy the next apocalyptic movie about how technology will destroy us all).

Ever played a djembe? The audience at the “Humanizing Our Future” salon got to try their skills on this traditional drum, led by motivator Doug Manuel, at the TED World Theater. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

How drums build community. In 1995, entrepreneur Doug Manuel made a trip to West Africa and fell in love — with a drum. That drum is called the djembe, a rope-tuned instrument played with the hands; it’s one of the world’s oldest forms of communication. “With its more than 300 different traditional rhythms, it’s accompanied every aspect of life — from initiations to celebrations and even sowing the seeds for an abundant harvest,” Manuel says. Since his life-changing trip, Manuel has used the djembe to develop team-building programs and build bridges between Africa and the West. In a live demo of his work, Manuel invites the audience to try their hands at the djembe during two upbeat drum lessons. Backed by two professional drummers, Manuel teaches a few beats — and shows how the djembe can still bring people together around a collective rhythm.

Healing the pain of racial division. During the Civil Rights era, Ruby Sales joined a group of freedom fighters in Alabama, where she met Jonathan Daniels, a fellow student. The two became friends, and in 1965 they were jailed during a labor demonstration, ostensibly to save them from vigilantes. After six days in jail, the sheriff released the activists — but shortly after, they were attacked by a man with a shotgun. Daniels pulled Sales out of the way, and he was killed by the blast. In this moment, Sales witnessed “both love and hate coming from two very different white men that represented the best and the worst of white America.” Traumatized, she was stricken silent for six months. Fifty years later, our nation is still mired in what Sales calls a “culture of whiteness”: “a systemic and organized set of beliefs … [that] maintain a hierarchical power structure based on skin color.” To battle this culture, Sales calls for each of us to embrace our multi-ethnic identities and stories. Collectively shared, these stories can relieve racial tension and, with the help of connective technology, expand our vistas beyond our segregated daily lives.

Bryn Freedman, left, interviews technologist Fadi Chehadé at the “Humanizing Our Future” salon in New York. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

What the internet is missing right now. Technology architect Fadi Chehadé helped set up the infrastructure that makes the internet work — basic things like the domain name system and IP address standards. Today as an advisory board member with the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, Chehadé is focused on finding ways for society to benefit from technology and on strengthening international cooperation in the digital space. In a crisp conversation with Bryn Freedman, curator of the TED Institute, Chehadé discusses the need for norms on issues like privacy and security, the ongoing war between the West and China over artificial intelligence, how tech companies can become stewards of the power they have to shape lives and economies, and what everyday citizens can do to claim power on the internet. “My biggest hope is that we will each become stewards of this new digital world,” Chehadé says.

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Preview our new podcast: The TED Interview

Par : TED Staff

TED is launching a new way for curious audiences to immerse themselves more deeply in some of the most compelling ideas on our platform: The TED Interview, a long-form TED original podcast series. Beginning October 16, weekly episodes of The TED Interview will feature head of TED Chris Anderson deep in conversation with TED speakers about the ideas they shared in their TED Talks. Guests will include Elizabeth Gilbert and Sir Ken Robinson, as well as Sam Harris, Mellody Hobson, Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil and more. Listen to the trailer here.

NEW: Listen to the first episode, our conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert.

“If you look at the cast of characters who have given TED Talks over the past few years, it’s a truly remarkable group of people, and includes many of the world’s most remarkable minds,” Chris said. “We got a glimpse of their thinking in their TED Talk, but there is so much more there. That’s what this podcast series seeks to uncover. We get to dive deeper, much deeper than was possible in their original talk, allowing them to further explain, amplify, illuminate and, in some cases, defend their thinking. For anyone turned on by ideas, these conversations are a special treat.”

The launch comes at an exciting time when TED is testing multiple new formats and channels to reach even wider global audiences. In the past year TED has experimented with original podcasts, including WorkLife with Adam Grant, Facebook Watch series like Constantly Curious, primetime international television in India with TED Talks India Nayi Soch and more.

“We’ve been very ambitious in our goal of developing and testing new formats and channels that can support TED’s mission of Ideas Worth Spreading,” said Colin Helms, head of media at TED. “A decade after TED began posting talks online, there are so many more differing media habits to contend with—and, lucky for us, so many more formats to more to play with. The TED Interview is an exciting new way for us to offer curious audiences a front-row seat to some of the day’s most fascinating and challenging conversations.”

The first episode of the TED Interview debuts Tuesday, October 16, on Apple Podcasts, the TED Android app or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Season 1 features eleven episodes, roughly 40 minutes each. New episodes will be made available every Tuesday. Subscribe and check out the trailer here.

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We the Future: Talks from TED, Skoll Foundation and United Nations Foundation

Bruno Giussani (left) and Chris Anderson co-host “We the Future,” a day of talks presented by TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation, at the TED World Theater in New York City, September 25, 2018. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

We live in contentious times. Yet behind the dismaying headlines and social-media-fueled quarrels, people around the world — millions of them — are working unrelentingly to solve problems big and small, dreaming up new ways to expand the possible and build a better world.

At “We the Future,” a day of talks at the TED World Theater presented in collaboration with the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation, 13 speakers and two performers explored some of our most difficult collective challenges — as well as emerging solutions and strategies for building bridges and dialogue.

Updates on the Sustainable Development Goals. Are we delivering on the promises of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the collection of 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, which promised to improve the lives of billions with no one left behind? Using the Social Progress Index, a measure of the quality of life in countries throughout the world, economist Michael Green shares a fresh analysis of where we are today in relationship to the goals — and some new thinking on what we need to do differently to achieve them. While we’ve seen progress in some parts of the world on goals related to hunger and healthy living, the world is projected to fall short of achieving the ambitious targets set by the SDGs for 2030, according to Green’s analysis. If current trends keep up — especially the declines we’re seeing in things like personal rights and inclusiveness across the world — we actually won’t hit the 2030 targets until 2094. So what can we do about this? Two things, says Green: We need to call out rich countries that are falling short, and we need to look further into the data and find opportunities to progress faster. Because progress is happening, and we’re tantalizingly close to a world where nobody dies of things like hunger and malaria. “If we can focus our efforts, mobilize the resources, galvanize the political will,” Green says, “that step change is possible.”

Sustainability expert Johan Rockström debuts the Earth-3 model, a new way to track both the Sustainable Development Goals and the health of the planet at the same time. He speaks at “We the Future.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

A quest for planetary balance. In 2015, we saw two fantastic global breakthroughs for humanity, says sustainability expert Johan Rockström — the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. But are the two compatible, and can be they be pursued at the same time? Rockström suggests there are inherent contradictions between the two that could lead to irreversible planetary instability. Along with a team of scientists, he created a way to combine the SDGs within the nine planetary boundaries (things like ocean acidification and ozone depletion); it’s a completely new model of possibility — the Earth-3 model — to track trends and simulate future change. Right now, we’re not delivering on our promises to future generations, he says, but the window of success is still open. “We need some radical thinking,” Rockström says. “We can build a safe and just world: we just have to really, really get on with it.”

Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, is spearheading a new global initiative, Generation Unlimited, which aims to ensure every young person is in school, training or employment by 2030. She speaks at “We the Future.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

A plan to empower Generation Unlimited. There are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world, one of the largest cohorts in human history. Meeting their needs is a big challenge — but it’s also a big opportunity, says the executive director of UNICEF, Henrietta Fore. Among the challenges facing this generation are a lack of access to education and job opportunities, exposure to violence and, for young girls, the threats of discrimination, child marriage and early pregnancy. To begin addressing these issues, Fore is spearheading UNICEF’s new initiative, Generation Unlimited, which aims to ensure every young person is in school, learning, training or employment by 2030. She talks about a program in Argentina that connects rural students in remote areas with secondary school teachers, both in person and online; an initiative in South Africa called Techno Girls that gives young women from disadvantaged backgrounds job-shadowing opportunities in the STEM fields; and, in Bangladesh, training for tens of thousands of young people in trades like carpentry, motorcycle repair and mobile-phone servicing. The next step? To take these ideas and scale them up, which is why UNICEF is casting a wide net — asking individuals, communities, governments, businesses, nonprofits and beyond to find a way to help out. “A massive generation of young people is about to inherit our world,” Fore says, “and it’s our duty to leave a legacy of hope for them — but also with them.”

Improving higher education in Africa. There’s a teaching and learning crisis unfolding across Africa, says Patrick Awuah, founder and president of Ashesi University. Though the continent has scaled up access to higher education, there’s been no improvement in quality or effectiveness of that education. “The way we teach is wrong for today. It is even more wrong for tomorrow, given the challenges before us,” Awuah says. So how can we change higher education for the better? Awuah suggests establishing multidisciplinary curricula that emphasize critical thinking and ethics, while also allowing for in-depth expertise. He also suggests collaboration between universities in Africa — and tapping into online learning programs. “A productive workforce, living in societies managed by ethical and effective leaders, would be good not only for Africa but for the world,” Awuah says.

Ayọ (right) and Marvin Dolly fill the theater with a mix of reggae, R&B and folk sounds at “We the Future.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Songs of hardship and joy. During two musical interludes, singer-songwriter Ayọ and guitarist Marvin Dolly fill the TED World Theater with the soulful, eclectic strumming of four songs — “Boom Boom,” “What’s This All About,” “Life Is Real” and “Help Is Coming” — blending reggae, R&B and folk sounds.

If every life counts, then count every life. To some, numbers are boring. But data advocate Claire Melamed says numbers are, in fact, “an issue of power and of justice.” The lives and death of millions of people worldwide happen outside the official record, Melamed says, and this lack of information leads to big problems. Without death records, for instance, it’s nearly impossible to detect epidemics until it’s too late. If we are to save lives in disease-prone regions, we must know where and when to deliver medicine — and how much. Today, technology enables us to inexpensively gather reliable data, but tech isn’t a cure-all: governments may try to keep oppressed or underserved populations invisible, or the people themselves may not trust the authorities collecting the data. But data custodians can fix this problem by building organizations, institutions and communities that can build trust. “If every life counts, we should count every life,” Melamed says.

How will the US respond to the rise of China? To Harvard University political scientist Graham Allison, recent skirmishes between the US and China over trade and defense are yet another chapter unfolding in a centuries-long pattern. He’s coined the term “Thucydides’ Trap” to describe it — as he puts it, the Trap “is the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.” Thucydides is viewed by many as the father of history; he chronicled the Peloponnesian Wars between a rising Athens and a ruling Sparta in the 4th century BCE (non-spoiler alert: Sparta won, but at a high price). Allison and colleagues reviewed the last 500 years and found Thucydides’ Trap 16 times — and 12 of them ended in war. Turning to present day, he notes that while the 20th century was dominated by the US, China has risen far and fast in the 21st. By 2024, for instance, China’s GDP is expected to be one-and-a-half times greater than America’s. What’s more, both countries are led by men who are determined to be on top. “Are Americans and Chinese going to let the forces of history draw us into a war that would be catastrophic to both?” Allison asks. To avoid it, he calls for “a combination of imagination, common sense and courage” to come up with solutions — referencing the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and United Nations as fresh approaches toward prosperity and peace that arose after the ravages of war. After the talk, TED curator Bruno Giussani asks Allison if he has any creative ideas to sidestep the Trap. “A long peace,” Allison says, turning again to Athens and Sparta for inspiration: during their wars, the two agreed at one point to a 30-year peace, a pause in their conflict so each could tend to their domestic affairs.

Can we ever hope to reverse climate change? Researcher and strategist Chad Frischmann introduces the idea of “drawdown” — the point at which we remove more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we put in — as our only hope of averting climate disaster. At his think tank, he’s working to identify strategies to achieve drawdown, like increased use of renewable energy, better family planning and the intelligent disposal of HFC refrigerants, among others. But the things that will make the biggest impact, he says, are changes to food production and agriculture. The decisions we make every day about the food we grow, buy and eat are perhaps the most important contributions we could make to reversing global warming. Another focus area: better land management and rejuvenating forests and wetlands, which would expand and create carbon sinks that sequester carbon. When we move to fix global warming, we will “shift the way we do business from a system that is inherently exploitative and extractive to a ‘new normal’ that is by nature restorative and regenerative,” Frischmann says.

The end of energy poverty. Nearly two billion people worldwide lack access to modern financial services like credit cards and bank accounts — making it difficult to do things like start a new business, build a nest egg, or make a home improvement like adding solar panels. Entrepreneur Lesley Marincola is working on this issue with Angaza, a company that helps people avoid the steep upfront costs of buying a solar-power system, instead allowing them to pay it off over time. With metering technology embedded in the product, Angaza uses alternative credit scoring methods to determine a borrower’s risk level. The combination of metering technology and an alternative method of assessing credit brings purchasing power to unbanked people. “To effectively tackle poverty at a global scale, we must not solely focus on increasing the amount of money that people earn,” Marincola says. “We must also increase or expand the power of their income through access to savings and credit.”

Anushka Ratnayake displays one of the scratch-off cards that her company, MyAgro, is using to help farmers in Africa break cycles of poverty and enter the cycle of investment and growth. She speaks at “We the Future.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

An innovative way to help rural farmers save. While working for a microfinance company in Kenya, Anushka Ratnayake realized something big: small-scale farmers were constantly being offered loans … when what they really wanted was a safe place to save money. Collecting and storing small deposits from farmers was too difficult and expensive for banks, and research from the University of California, Berkeley shows that only 14–21 percent of farmers accept credit offers. Ratnayake found a simpler solution — using scratch-off cards that act as a layaway system. MyAgro, a nonprofit social enterprise that Ratnayake founded and leads, helps farmers save money for seeds. Farmers buy myAgro scratch cards from local stores, depositing their money into a layaway account by texting in the card’s scratch-off code. After a few months of buying the cards and saving little by little, myAgro delivers the fertilizer, seed and training they’ve paid for, directly to their farms. Following a wildly successful pilot program in Mali, MyAgro has expanded to Senegal and Tanzania and now serves more than 50,000 farmers. On this plan, rural farmers can break cycles of poverty, Ratnayake says, and instead, enter the cycle of investment and growth.

Durable housing for a resilient future. Around the world, natural disasters destroy thousands of lives and erase decades of economic gains each year. These outcomes are undeniably devastating and completely preventable, says mason Elizabeth Hausler — and substandard housing is to blame. It’s estimated that one-third of the world will be living in insufficiently constructed buildings by 2030; Hausler hopes to cut those projections with a building revolution. She shares six straightforward principles to approach the problem of substandard housing: teach people how to build, use local architecture, give homeowners power, provide access to financing, prevent disasters and use technology to scale. “It’s time we treat unsafe housing as the global epidemic that it is,” Hausler says. “It’s time to strengthen every building just like we would vaccinate every child in a public health emergency.”

A daring idea to reduce income inequality. Every newborn should enter the world with at least $25,000 in the bank. That is the basic premise of a “baby trust,” an idea conceived by economists Darrick Hamilton of The New School and William Darity of Duke University. Since 1980, inequality has been on the rise worldwide, and Hamilton says it will keep growing due to this simple fact: “It is wealth that begets more wealth.” Policymakers and the public have fallen for a few appealing but inaccurate narratives about wealth creation — that grit, education or a booming economy can move people up the ladder — and we’ve disparaged the poor for not using these forces to rise, Hamilton says. Instead, what if we gave a boost up the ladder? A baby trust would give an infant money at birth — anywhere from $500 for those born into the richest families to $60,000 for the poorest, with an average endowment of $25,000. The accounts would be managed by the government, at a guaranteed interest rate of 2 percent a year. When a child reaches adulthood, they could withdraw it for an “asset-producing activity,” such as going to college, buying a home or starting a business. If we were to implement it in the US today, a baby trust program would cost around $100 billion a year; that’s only 2 percent of annual federal expenditures and a fraction of the $500 billion that the government now spends on subsidies and credits that favor the wealthy, Hamilton says. “Inequality is primarily a structural problem, not a behavioral one,” he says, so it needs to be attacked with solutions that will change the existing structures of wealth.

Nothing about us, without us. In 2013, activist Sana Mustafa and her family were forcibly evacuated from their homes and lives as a result of the Syrian civil war. While adjusting to her new reality as a refugee, and beginning to advocate for refugee rights, Mustafa found that events aimed at finding solutions weren’t including the refugees in the conversation. Alongside a group of others who had to flee their homes because of war and disaster, Mustafa founded The Network for Refugee Voices (TNRV), an initiative that amplifies the voices of refugees in policy dialogues. TNRV has worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other organizations to ensure that refugees are represented in important conversations about them. Including refugees in the planning process is a win-win, Mustafa says, creating more effective relief programs and giving refugees a say in shaping their lives.

Former member of Danish Parliament Özlem Cekic has a novel prescription for fighting prejudice: take your haters out for coffee. She speaks at “We the Future.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Conversations with people who send hate mail. Özlem Cekic‘s email inbox has been full of hate mail and personal abuse for years. She began receiving the derogatory messages in 2007, soon after she won a seat in the Danish Parliament — becoming one of the first women with a minority background to do so. At first she just deleted the emails, dismissing them as the work of the ignorant or fanatic. The situation escalated in 2010 when a neo-Nazi began to harass Cekic and her family, prompting a friend to make an unexpected suggestion: reach out to the hate mail writers and invite them out to coffee. This was the beginning of what Cekic calls “dialogue coffee”: face-to-face meetings where she sits down with people who have sent hate mail, in an effort to understand the source of their hatred. Cekic has had hundreds of encounters since 2010 — always in the writer’s home, and she always brings food — and has made some important realizations along the way. Cekic now recognizes that people of all political convictions can be caught demonizing those with different views. And she has a challenge for us all: before the end of the year, reach out to someone you demonize — who you disagree with politically or think you won’t have anything in common with — and invite them out to coffee. Don’t give up if the person refuses at first, she says: sometimes it has taken nearly a year for her to arrange a meeting. “Trenches have been dug between people, yes,” Cekic says. “But we all have the ability to build the bridges that cross the trenches.”

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Bronwyn King leads global pledge for tobacco-free finance, and more TED news

The TED community has been making headlines — here are a few highlights.

Tobacco-free finance initiative launched at the UN. Oncologist and Tobacco Free Portfolios CEO Bronwyn King has made it her mission to detangle the worlds of finance and tobacco — and ensure that no one will ever accidentally invest in a tobacco company again. Together with the French and Australian governments, and a number of finance firms, King introduced The Tobacco-Free Finance Pledge at the United Nations during General Assembly week. The aim of the measure is to decrease the toll of tobacco-related deaths, which now stands at 7 million annually. More than 120 banks, companies, organizations and groups representing US$6.82 trillion have joined the launch as founding signatories and supporters. (Watch King’s TED Talk.)

The Museum of Broken Windows. Artists Dread Scott and Hank Willis Thomas are featured in a new pop-up show grappling with the dangerous impact of “broken windows” policing strategies, which target and criminalize low-income communities of color. The exhibition, which is hosted by the New York Civil Liberties Union, explores the disproportionate and inequitable system of policing in the United States with work by 30 artists from across the country. Scott’s piece for the showcase is a flag that reads, “A man was lynched by police yesterday.” Compelled by the police killing of Walter Scott, Scott revamped a NAACP flag from the 1920s and ‘30s for the piece. Thomas’ contribution to the exhibition are poems, letters and notes from incarcerated people titled “Writings on the Wall.” The exhibition is open through September 30 in Manhattan. (Watch Scott’s TED Talk and Thomas’ TED Talk.)

The future of at-home health care. Technologist Dina Katabi spoke at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference about Emerald, the healthcare technology she’s working on to revolutionize the way we gather data on patients at home. Using a low-power wireless connection, Katabi’s device, which she developed with a team at MIT, can monitor patient vital signs without any wearables — and even through walls — by tracking the electromagnetic field surrounding the human body, which shifts every time we move. “The future should be that the healthcare comes to the patient in their homes,” Katabi said, “as opposed to the patient going to the doctor or the clinic.” Some 200 people have already installed the system, and several leading biotech companies are studying the technology for future applications. (Watch Katabi’s TED Talk.)

Does New York City have a gut biome? In collaboration with Elizabeth Hénaff, The Living Collective and the Evan Eisman Company, algoworld expert and technologist Kevin Slavin has debuted an art installation featuring samples of New York City microorganisms titled “Subculture: Microbial Metrics and the Multi-Species City.” Weaving together biology, data analytics and design, the exhibit urges us to reconsider our relationship with bacteria and redefine how we interact with the diversity of life in urban spaces. Hosted at Storefront for Art and Architecture, the project uses genetic sequencing devices installed in the front of the gallery space to collect, extract and analyze microbial life. The gallery will be divided into three spaces: an introduction area, an in-house laboratory and a mapping area that will visualize the data gathered in real time. The exhibit is open through January 2019. (Watch Slavin’s TED Talk.)

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Society 5.0: Talks from TED and Samsung

Carmel Coscia, vice president of B2B marketing for Samsung Electronics America, welcomes the audience to TEDSalon: Society 5.0, held at Samsung’s 837 Space in New York, September 26, 2018. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

We live in an interconnected world where boundaries between physical and digital spaces are blurring. We can no longer think about innovation in isolation, but must consider how emerging technologies — like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, 5G networks, robotics and the decentralized web — will combine to create (we hope!) a super-smart society.

At TEDSalon: Society 5.0, presented by TED and Samsung, seven leaders and visionaries explored the new era of interconnectivity and how it will reshape our world.

Do you know how your data is being used? We tap on apps and devices all day long, not quite grasping that our usage is based on a “power imbalance,” says Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, director of digital policy at the Norwegian Consumer Council. Most of us automatically click “yes” to terms and conditions without realizing we have agreed to let companies collect our personal information and use it on a scale we could never imagine, he explains. To demonstrate, Myrstad introduces Cayla, a Bluetooth-connected doll. According to Cayla’s terms, its manufacturer can use the recordings of children and relatives who play with the doll for advertising, and any information it gathers can be shared with third parties. Myrstad and his team also looked at the terms for a dating app, finding that users had unwittingly forked over their entire dating history — photos, chats and interactions — to the app creator forever. After the Council’s investigations, Cayla was pulled from retailers and the app changed its policies, but as Myrstad points out, “Organizations such as mine … can’t be everywhere, nor can consumers fix this on their own.” Correcting the situation requires ongoing vigilance and intention. Companies must prioritize trust, and governments should constantly update and enforce rules. For the rest of us, he says: “Be the voice that constantly reminds the world that technology will only truly benefit society if it respects basic rights.”

Aruna Srinivasan, executive director for the mobile communication trade group GSMA, believes the Internet of Things will improve our quality of life — from tackling pollution to optimizing food production. She speaks at TEDSalon: Society 5.0. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

How the Internet of Things is solving real problems. You’re surrounded by things connected to the internet — from cars and smart elevators to parking meters and industrial machines used for manufacturing. How can we use the data created by all of these connected devices to make the world safer and healthier? Aruna Srinivasan, executive director at the mobile communication trade group GSMA, shows how the Internet of Things (IoT) is helping to solve two pressing issues: pollution and food production. Using small IoT-connected sensors on garbage trucks in London, Srinivasan and her team created a detailed map showing pollution hotspots and the times of day when pollution was worst. Now, the data is helping the city introduce new traffic patterns, like one-way streets, and create bicycle paths outside of the most highly polluted areas. In the countryside, IoT-enabled sensors are being used to measure soil moisture, pH and other crop conditions in real time. Srinivasan and her team are working with China Agricultural University, China Mobile and Rothamsted Research to use the information gathered by these sensors to improve the harvest of grapes and wheat. The goal: help farmers be more precise, increasing food production while preventing things like water scarcity. “The magic of the IoT comes from the health and security it can provide us,” Srinivasan says. “The Internet of Things is going to transform our world and change our lives for the better.”

Web builder Tamas Kocsis is developing his own internet: a decentralized network powered and secured by the people. He speaks at TEDSalon: Society 5.0. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Internet by the people, for the people. Web builder Tamas Kocsis is worried about the future of the internet. In its current form, he says, the internet is trending toward centralization: large corporations are in control of our digital privacy and access to information. What’s more, these gatekeepers are vulnerable to attacks and surveillance, and they make online censorship easier. In China, for instance, where the government tightly controls its internet, web users are prohibited from criticizing the government or talking about protests. And the recent passage of EU copyright directive Article 13, which calls for some platforms to filter user-generated content, could limit our freedom to openly blog, discuss, share and link to content. In 2015, Kocsis began to counteract this centralization process by developing an alternative, decentralized network called ZeroNet. Instead of relying on centralized hosting companies, ZeroNet — which is powered by free and open-source software — allows users to help host websites by directly downloading them onto their own servers. The whole thing is secured by public key cryptography, ensuring no one can edit the websites but their owners — and protecting them from being taken down by one central source. In 2017, China began making moves to block Kocsis’s network, but that hasn’t deterred him, he says: “Building a decentralized network means creating a safe harbor, a space where the rules are not written by political parties and big corporations, but by the people.”

The augmented reality revolution. Entrepreneur Brian Mullins believes augmented reality (AR) is a more important technology than the internet — and even the printing press — because of the opportunities it offers for revolutionizing how we work and learn. At a gas turbine power plant in 2017, Mullins saw that when AR programs replaced traditional training measures, workers slashed their training and work time from 15.5 hours to an average of 50 minutes. Mullins predicts AR will bring a cognitive literacy to the world, helping us transition to new careers and workplaces and facilitating breakthroughs in the arts and sciences. Ultimately, Mullins says, AR won’t just change how we work — it’ll change the fundamentals of how we live.

MAI LAN rocks the stage with a performance of two songs, “Autopilote” and “Pumper,” at TEDSalon: Society 5.0. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

A genre-bending performance. During a musical interlude, French-Vietnamese artist MAI LAN holds the audience rapt with a performance of “Autopilote” and “Pumper.” Alternating between French and English lyrics, lead singer Mai-Lan Chapiron sings over diffuse electronic beats and circular synths, bringing her cool charisma to the stage.

Researcher Kate Darling asks: What can our interactions with robots teach us about what it means to be human? She speaks at TEDSalon: Society 5.0. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Robotic reflections of our humanity. We’re far from developing robots that feel emotions, but we already feel for them, says researcher Kate Darling — and an instinct like that can have consequences. We’re biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement that seems autonomous to us, which sometimes makes it difficult to treat machines (like a Roomba) any differently from the way we treat our own pets. But this emotional connection to robots, while illogical, could prove useful in better understanding ourselves. “My question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: ‘Do we empathize with robots?'” Darling says. “It’s: ‘Can robots change people’s empathy?'”

Humans belong in the digital future. Author, documentarian and technologist Douglas Rushkoff isn’t giving up on humans just yet. He believes humans deserve a place in the digital future, but he worries that the future has become “something we bet on in a zero-sum, winner-takes-all competition,” instead of something we work together to create. Humans, it sometimes seems to him, are no longer valued for their creativity but for their data; as he frames it, we’ve been conditioned to see humanity as the problem and technology as the solution. Instead, he urges us to focus on making technology work for us and our future, not the other way around. Believing in the potential and value of humans isn’t about rejecting technology, he says — it’s about bringing key values of our pre-digital world into the future with us. “Join Team Human. Find the others,” Rushkoff says. “Together let’s make the future that we always wanted.”

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Reboot: The talks of TED@BCG

CEO of BCG, Rich Lesser, welcomes the audience to TED@BCG, held October 3, 2018, at Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

How do we manage the transformations that are radically altering our lives — all while making a positive impact on our well-being, productivity and the world? In a word: reboot.

For a seventh year, BCG has partnered with TED to bring experts in leadership, psychology, technology, sustainability and more to the stage to share ideas on rethinking our goals and redefining the operating systems we use to reach them. At this year’s TED@BCG — held on October 3, 2018, at the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto — 18 creators, leaders and innovators invited us to imagine a bright future with a new definition of the bottom line.

After opening remarks from Rich Lesser, CEO of BCG, the talks of Session 1

Let’s stop trying to be good. “What if I told you that our attachment to being ‘good people’ is getting in the way of us being better people?” asks social psychologist Dolly Chugh, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. The human brain relies on shortcuts so we can cope with the millions of pieces of information bombarding us at any moment. That’s why we’re often able to get dressed or drive home without thinking about it — our brains are reserving our attention for the important stuff. In her research, Chugh has found the same cognitive efficiency occurs in our ethical behavior, where it shows up in the form of unconscious biases and conflicts of interest. And we’re so focused on appearing like good people — rather than actually being them — that we get defensive or aggressive when criticized for ethical missteps. As a result, we never change. “In every other part of our lives, we give ourselves room to grow — except in this one where it matters the most,” Chugh says. So, rather than striving to be good, let’s aim for “good-ish,” as she puts it. That means spotting our mistakes, owning them and, last but not least, learning from them.

You should take your technology out to coffee, says BCG’s Nadjia Yousif. She speaks at TED@BCG about how we can better embrace our tech — as colleagues. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Treat your technology like a colleague. “The critical skill in the 21st-century workplace is … to collaborate with the technologies that are becoming such a big and costly part of our daily working lives,” says technology advisor Nadjia Yousif. She’s seen countless companies invest millions in technology, only to ignore or disregard it. Why? Because the people using the technology are skeptical and even afraid of it. They don’t spend the time learning and training — and then they get frustrated and write it off. What if we approached new technology as if it were a new colleague? What if we treated it like a valued member of the team? People would want to get to know it better, spend time integrating it into the team and figure out the best ways to collaborate, Yousif says — and maybe even give feedback and make sure the tech is working well with everyone else. Yousif believes we can treat technology this way, and she encourages us to “share a bit of humanity” with our software, algorithms and robots. “By embracing the ideas that these machines are actually valuable colleagues, we as people will perform better … and be happier,” she says.

Confessions of a reformed micromanager. When Chieh Huang started the company Boxed out of his garage in 2013, there wasn’t much more to manage than himself and the many packages he sent. As his company expanded, his need to oversee the smallest of details increased — a habit that he’s since grown out of, but can still reference with humor and humility. “What is micromanaging? I posit that it’s actually taking great, wonderful, imaginative people … bringing them into an organization, and then crushing their souls by telling them which font size to use,” he jokes. He asks us to reflect on the times when we’re most tired at work. It probably wasn’t those late nights or challenging tasks, he says, but when someone was looking over your shoulder watching your every move. Thankfully, there’s a cure to this management madness, Huang says: trust. When we stop micromanaging the wonderfully creative people at our own companies, he says, innovation will flourish.

Dancing with digital titans. Tech giants from the US and China are taking over the world, says digital strategist François Candelon. Of the world’s top 20 internet companies, a full 100 percent of them are American or Chinese — like the US’s Alphabet Inc. and Amazon, and China’s Tencent and Alibaba. Europe and the rest of the world must find a way to catch up, Candelon believes, or they will face US-China economic dominance for decades to come. What are their options for creating a more balanced digital revolution? Candelon offers a solution: governments should tango with these digital titans. Instead of fearing their influence — as the EU has done by levying fines against Google, for instance — countries would be better off advocating for the creation of local digital jobs. Why would companies like Facebook or Baidu be willing to tango with governments? Because they can offer things like tax incentives and adapted regulations. Candelon points to “Digital India,” a partnership between Google and the government of India, as an example: one of the project’s initiatives is to train two million Indian developers in the latest technologies, helping Google develop its talent pipeline while cultivating India’s digital ecosystem. “Let’s urge our governments and the American and Chinese digital titans to invest enough brainpower and energy to imagine and implement win-win strategic partnerships,” Candelon says. The new digital world order depends on it.

Upcycling air pollution into ink. In 2012, a photo of an exhaust stain on a wall sparked a thought for engineer Anirudh Sharma: What if we could use air pollution as ink? A simple experiment with a candle and vegetable oil convinced Sharma that the idea was viable, leading him home to Bangalore to test how to collect the carbon-rich PM2.5 nanoparticles that would make up the ink. Sharma and his team at AIR INK created a device that could capture up to 95 percent of air pollution that passed through it; using it, 45 minutes of diesel car exhaust can become 30 milliliters of ink (or about 2 tablespoons). Artists worldwide embraced AIR INK, and this success brought surprising interest from the industrial world. Sharma realized that by incentivizing corporations to send their pollution to AIR INK, they could upcycle pollution usually headed for landfills into a productive tool. AIR INK won’t necessarily solve global pollution concerns, Sharma says, “but it does show what can be done if you look at problems a little differently.”

Leadership lessons for an uncertain world. Jim Whitehurst is a recovering know-it-all CEO. Kicking off Session 2, Whitehurst tells the story of how his work as the COO of Delta trained him to think that a good leader was someone who knew more than anyone else. But after becoming CEO of RedHat, an open-source software company, Whitehurst encountered a different kind of organization, one where open criticism of superiors — and not exactly following a boss’s orders — were normal. This experience yielded insights about success and leadership, as Whitehurst came to realize that being a good leader isn’t about control and compliance, it’s about creating the context for the best ideas to emerge out of your organization. “In a world where innovation wins and ambiguity is the only certainty, people don’t need to be controlled,” Whitehurst says. “They need to get comfortable with conflict. And leaders need to foment it.”

Elizabeth Lyle shares ideas on the future of leadership in the workplace at TED@BCG. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Why we need to coach people before they lead. The C-suites of corporate America are full of management coaches, yet top-tier execs are not the ones who really need the help, says Elizabeth Lyle, a principal in BCG’s Boston office. “Outdated leadership habits are forming right before our eyes among the middle managers who will one day take their place,” she says. While the uncertain future of work demands new ways of thinking, acting and interacting, tomorrow’s leaders aren’t given the autonomy or training they need to develop — and they don’t ask for it, lest they seem pushy and disagreeable. They also think that they’ll be able to change their behavior once they’ve earned the authority to do things their own way, Lyle says, but this rarely happens. By the time they’re in a high-stakes position, they tend to retreat to doing what their bosses did. The solution: senior leaders must present their direct reports with the opportunities to try new things, and reports should return that trust by approaching their work with thought and creativity. Lyle also suggests bringing in coaches to work in the same room with leaders and reports — like a couples therapist, they’d observe the pair’s communication and offer ideas for how to improve it.

A breakdown, and a reboot. Each of us feels the burden of daily repetitive actions on our bodies and psyches, whether we create them or they’re imposed by outside forces. Left unchecked, these actions can “turn into cages,” says Frank Müller-Pierstorff, Global Creative Director at BCG. In an electronic music performance, he uses soundscapes built out of dense, looped phrases to embody these “cages,” while dancer Carlotta Bettencourt attempts to keep up in an accompanying video — and ultimately shows us what might happen if we could only “reboot” under the weight of our stress.

WWMD? What would MacGyver do? That’s what Dara Dotz asks herself, whether she’s working to help build the first factory in space or aiding survivors of a recent catastrophic event. Much like the fictional genius/action hero, Dotz loves to use technology to solve real-life problems — but she believes our increasing reliance on tech is setting us up for major failure: Instead of making us superhuman, tech may instead be slowly killing our ability to be creative and think on our feet. If disaster strikes — natural or man-made — and our tech goes down, will we still have the ingenuity, resilience and grit to survive? With that concern in mind, Dotz cofounded a nonprofit, Field Ready, to support communities that experience disasters by creating life-saving supplies in the field from found materials and tools. With real-world examples from St. Thomas to Syria, Dotz demonstrates the importance of co-designing with communities to create specific solutions that fit the need — and to ensure that the communities can reproduce these solutions. “We aren’t going to be able to throw tech at every problem as efficiently or effectively as we would like — as time moves on, there are more disasters, more people and less resources,” she says. “Instead of focusing on the next blockchain or AI, perhaps the things we really need to focus on are the things that make us human.”

Rebooting how we work. What are we willing to give up to achieve a better way of working? For starters: the old way of doing things, says Senior Partner and Managing Director of BCG Netherlands, Martin Danoesastro. In a world that’s increasingly complex and fast-paced, we need a way of working that allows people to make faster decisions, eliminates bureaucracy and creates alignment around a single purpose. Danoesastro learned this firsthand by visiting and studying innovative and hugely profitable tech companies. He discovered the source of their success in small, autonomous teams that have the freedom to be creative and move fast. Danoesastro provides a few steps for companies that want to replicate this style: get rid of micro-managers, promote open and transparent communication throughout the organization, and ensure all employees take initiative. Changing deeply ingrained structures and processes is hard, and changing behavior is even harder, but it’s worth it. Ultimately, this model creates a more efficient workplace and sets the company up for a future in which they’ll be better prepared to respond to change.

The power of visual intelligence. Are you looking closely enough? Author Amy Herman thinks we should all increase our perceptual intelligence — according to Herman, taking a little more time to question and ponder when we’re looking at something can have lasting beneficial impact in our lives. Using a variety of fine art examples, Herman explains how to become a more intentional, insightful viewer by following the four A’s: assess the situation, analyze what you see, articulate your observations and act upon them. Herman has trained groups across a spectrum of occupations — from Navy SEALS to doctors to crime investigators — and has found that by examining art, we can develop a stronger ability to understand both the big picture and influential small details of any scene. By using visual art as a lens to look more carefully at what’s presented to us, Herman says, we’ll have the confidence to see our work and the world clearer than ever.

Fintech entrepreneur Viola Llewellyn shares her work pairing AI with local knowledge to create smarter products for the African market. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Culturally attuned microfinance for Africa. Financial institutions in Africa’s business sector don’t have the technology or tools to harness the continent’s potential for wealth, says fintech entrepreneur Viola Llewellyn, opening Session 3. The continent is made up of thousands of ethnic groups speaking more than 2,000 languages among them, rooted in a long, rich history of cultural diversity, tradition and wealth. “You need a deep understanding of nuance and history,” Llewellyn says, “and a respect for the elegance required to code and innovate [financial] products and services for the vast African market.” She cofounded Ovamba, a mobile technology company, to bridge the gap in knowledge between institutions and African entrepreneurs. Working with teams on the ground, Ovamba pairs human insights about local culture with AI to create risk models and algorithms, and ultimately product designs. Llewellyn highlights examples across sub-Saharan Africa that are successfully translating her vision into real-world profit. “In digitizing our future, we will preserve the beauty of our culture and unlock the code of our best wealth traits,” she says. “If we do this, Africans will become global citizens with less reliance on charity. Becoming global citizens gives us a seat at the table as equals.”

Globalization isn’t dead — it’s transforming into something new. All the way up to Davos, business leaders have proclaimed the death of globalization. But Arindam Bhattacharya thinks their obituary was published prematurely. Despite growing economic protectionism, and the declining influence of multilateral trade organizations, business is booming. Technology has allowed data-driven businesses like Netflix to reach their customers instantly and simultaneously — and as a result, Netflix revenues have grown more than five-fold. Netflix is one of a new breed of companies using cutting-edge technology to build “a radical new model of globalization.” And it’s not just data — soon, 3D printing will redefine our supply chains. Working with the manufacturer SpeedFactory, Adidas allows customers to choose designs online, have them printed at a nearby “mini-factory,” and delivered via drone in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Aided by local production, cross-border data flow could be worth $20 trillion by 2025 — more than every nation’s current exports combined. As society becomes “more nationalistic and less and less open,” Bhattacharya says, commerce is becoming more personalized and less tied to cross-border trade. These twin narratives are reinvigorating globalization.

Viruses that fight superbugs. Viruses have a bad reputation — but some might just be the weapon we need to help in the fight against superbugs, says biotech entrepreneur Alexander Belcredi. While many viruses do cause deadly diseases, others can actually help cure them, he says — and they’re called phages. More formally known as bacteriophages, these viruses hunt, infect and kill bacteria with deadly selectivity. Whereas antibiotics inhibit the growth of broad range of bacteria — sometimes good bacteria, like you find in the gut — phages target specific strains. Belcredi’s team has estimated that we have at least ten billion phages on each hand, infecting the bacteria that accumulate there. So, why is it likely you’ve never heard of phages? Although they were discovered in the early 20th century, they were largely forgotten in favor of transformative antibiotics like penicillin, which seemed for many decades like the solution to bacterial infections. Unfortunately, we were wrong, Belcredi says: multi-drug-resistant infections — also known as superbugs — have since developed and now overpower many of our current antibiotics. Fortunately, we are in a good place to develop powerful phage drugs, giving new hope in the fight against superbugs. So, the next time you think of a virus, try not to be too judgmental, Belcredi says. After all, a phage might one day save your life.

Madame Gandhi and Amber Galloway-Gallego perform “Top Knot Turn Up” and “Bad Habits” at TED@BCG. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

How music brings us together. “Music is so much more than sound simply traveling through the ear,” says sign language interpreter Amber Galloway-Gallego, during the second musical interlude of the day. In a riveting performance, musician and activist Madame Gandhi plays two songs — her feminist anthems “Top Knot Turn Up” and “Bad Habits” — while Galloway-Gallego provides a spirited sign language interpretation.

Agreeing to disagree. Our public discourse is broken, says behavioral economist Julia Dhar, and the key to fixing it might come from an unexpected place: debate teams. In the current marketplace of ideas, Dhar says, contempt has replaced conversation: people attack each other’s identity instead of actually hashing out ideas. If we turn to the principles of debate, Dhar believes we can learn how to disagree productively — over family dinners, during company meetings and even in our national conversations. The first principle she mentions is rebuttal: “Debate requires that we engage with a conflicting idea directly, respectfully and face-to-face,” she says — and as research shows, this forces us to humanize the “other side.” Second, ideas are totally separate from the identity of the person advocating for them in debate tournaments. Dhar invites us to imagine if the US Congress considered a policy without knowing if it was Democrat or Republican, or if your company submitted and reviewed proposals anonymously. And third, debate lets us open ourselves up to the possibility of being wrong, an exercise that can actually make us better listeners and decision makers. “We should bring [debate] to our workplaces, our conferences and our city council meetings,” Dhar says — and begin to truly reshape the marketplace of ideas.

A better world through activist investment. Who’s working on today’s most pressing issues? Activist investors, says BCG’s Vinay Shandal, or as he calls them: “the modern-day OGs of Wall Street.” These investors — people like Carl Icahn, Dan Loeb and Paul Singer — have made an art of getting large corporations to make large-scale changes. And not just to make money. They’re also interested in helping the environment and society. “The good news and perhaps the saving grace for our collective future is that it’s more than just an act of good corporate citizenship,” Shandal says. “It’s good business.” Shandal shares examples of investors disrupting industries from retail to food service to private prisons and shows growing evidence of a clear correlation between good ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing and good financial performance. You don’t need to be a rich investor to make a difference, Shandal says. Every one of us can put pressure on our companies, including the ones that manage our money, to do the right thing. “It’s your money, it’s your pension fund, it’s your sovereign wealth fund. And it is your right to have your money managed in line with your values.” Shandal says. “So speak up … Investors will listen.”

TED@BCG - October 3, 2018 at Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

brianwgreene89

Immobilier-danger.com : Vendre un logement avec un dessous-de-table

Lorsque vous vendez un bien immobilier, il peut être tentant de chercher à masquer la réalité du prix de vente en proposant à l'acheteur de régler une partie de la transaction par un dessous-de-table. Cela est surtout vrai sur les biens de grande valeur et pour ceux issus d'un héritage ou qui ne sont pas votre résidence principale. Cela peut apporter des avantages financiers importants notamment en diminuant les impôts sur la plus-value ou la succession.

Seulement, les risques d'un paiement dissimulé en liquide sont importants pour le vendeur aussi bien vis-à-vis du fisc que vis-à-vis de l'acheteur. Voici quelques explications sur cette pratique du dessous de table immobilier et sur l'importance des risques qui peuvent vous condamner à perdre beaucoup plus que le gain escompté.

Immobilier-danger.com : Immobilier août 2018 : les chiffres et informations du mois

Comme tous les mois, nous revenons sur les faits marquants de l'actualité immobilière en France. Dans ce numéro d'août 2018, nous ferons un point complet sur le niveau actuel des taux de crédit immobilier, sur les gains de pouvoir d'achat obtenus suite à la baisse des taux depuis un an, sur le franchissement des 1 000 milliards d'encours de prêt immobilier en France ainsi que sur les changements qui auront lieu sur le calcul des APL à partir du 1er semestre 2019.

Prenez connaissance de ce qu'il se passe sur le marché immobilier en août 2018.

Mise à jour : découvrez les actualités immobilières en octobre 2018.

Immobilier-danger.com : Immobilier-danger fête ses 10 ans

Août 2008, cela faisait de nombreux mois que j'étudiais le marché immobilier et je commençais à publier des contenus à ce sujet avec un nom créé pour attirer l'attention et questionner : Immobilier-danger.com.

Cela fait désormais 10 ans que le site existe. L'occasion d'apprendre énormément de choses et de tenter de les partager de manière structurée et accessible au plus grand nombre. Voici un condensé de ce qui a été créé en 10 ans et mes remerciements.

En outre, pour fêter les 10 ans d'Immobilier-danger.com, profitez d'une promotion exceptionnelle sur nos guides sur le financement immobilier jusqu'au 29 août 2018 à 9h.

Immobilier-danger.com : Taux immobilier en septembre 2018

Comme souvent en été, les tendances sont très stables au niveau des taux de crédit immobilier. Il y a peu de changements sur les taux moyens, ni au niveau de la production de crédit immobilier. Nous verrons ce que nous réservent les banques pour ce mois de septembre 2018 qui marque généralement le temps d'une nouvelle vague d'offres commerciales plus agressives pour les financements immobiliers. Découvrez tout ce qu'il faut savoir avant d'emprunter avec ce point sur les taux de prêt immobilier en septembre 2018.

Mise à jour :découvrez les taux de prêt immobilier en novembre 2018.

Immobilier-danger.com : Acheter maintenant avec des taux bas ou attendre une baisse des prix ?

Dans un contexte de taux très bas et de prix très haut, les candidats à l'achat d'une résidence principale peuvent se poser la question suivante : "faut-il acheter maintenant pour profiter des taux très bas ou attendre une baisse des prix en cas de remontée des taux ?".

C'est une question récurrente sur ces dernières années, depuis que l'énorme chute des taux de prêt immobilier est en marche. La crainte d'une hausse importante des taux qui viendrait faire chuter les prix des appartements et des maisons est-elle fondée ? Faut-il différer son achat ou au contraire l'anticiper en fonction de sa situation ? Voici quelques éléments concrets pour apporter à votre réflexion.

Immobilier-danger.com : Immobilier septembre 2018 : les chiffres et informations du mois

Cette rentrée 2018 est riche en informations et en chiffres sur le marché immobilier français. Nous reviendrons tout d'abord sur les derniers chiffres et graphiques sur l'indice Notaires-INSEE sur le marché de l'immobilier ancien au 2ème trimestre 2018. Puis nous ferons un point sur le marché immobilier neuf au 2ème trimestre 2018 avant de regarder comment évoluent les taux de crédit immobilier et les tendances pour les semaines à venir.

Nous finirons ensuite par un point sur les risques identifiés par la BCE de bulle immobilière en Europe à cause des taux bas et sur le renfort des contrôles au niveau des professionnels du diagnostic immobilier.

Retrouvez tout ce qui fait l'actualité immobilière de septembre 2018 ci-dessous.

Mise à jour : découvrez les chiffres et informations sur l'immobilier en novembre 2018.

Immobilier-danger.com : Faut-il faire des travaux locatifs en 2018, 2019 ou 2020 suite au prélèvement à la source ?

La mise en place du prélèvement à la source des impôts à partir de 2019 crée une situation particulière pour la déduction des travaux des revenus fonciers pour les investissements immobiliers en location nue. Voici les règles à suivre pour la déduction des travaux dans un bien locatif pour 2018, 2019 et 2020.

Nous verrons ainsi s'il est judicieux de faire des travaux dans vos investissements immobiliers en 2018. De même pour 2019 et 2020. Il vaut mieux tenir compte de ces spécificités temporaires afin de ne pas perdre d'argent en ne pouvant pas déduire ou pas totalement vos travaux. Il est aussi possible d'optimiser le moment de la réalisation des travaux pour bénéficier de la meilleure déduction possible.

Immobilier-danger.com : Changez d'assurance de prêt avant 2019

Vous payez chaque mois pour une assurance de prêt immobilier en plus de vos mensualités de remboursement ? Si vous voulez tester les conditions du marché et voir pour changer d'assurance emprunteur pour en prendre une moins chère, faites le avant la fin de l'année 2018. En effet, à partir de 2019, un changement au niveau de la fiscalité sur ces assurances de crédit va venir réduire les gains potentiels.

Immobilier-danger.com : Taux de crédit immobilier en octobre 2018

Octobre 2018 va être un mois dans la lignée des précédents en matière de taux de crédit immobilier. En effet, les conditions restent excellentes, proches des records historiques. Il n'y a quasiment pas de changements pour les taux immobiliers actuels par rapport aux mois précédents.

Néanmoins, on peut se demander jusqu'à quand cela va tenir. Quelle tendance à plus long terme, notamment en 2019 ? Découvrez tout ce qu'il faut savoir sur les taux de crédit immobilier en octobre 2018 et nos conseils pour améliorer votre financement.

Mise à jour : découvrez les taux de prêt immobilier en décembre 2018.

Immobilier-danger.com : Faire face à des difficultés de remboursement d'un crédit immobilier

Pendant les nombreuses années de remboursement du prêt immobilier de votre maison ou de votre appartement, il peut arriver une période où vous rencontrerez des difficultés pour payer votre mensualité et votre assurance de prêt.

Ne laissez pas ce type de situation durer. Il existe différentes solutions pour tenter de surmonter ces obstacles et éviter les incidents de paiement à la banque. Voici ce qu'il est possible de faire en fonction de votre contrat de crédit immobilier et des conditions du moment.

FreshRSS 1.9.0

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • Features
    • Share with Mastodon #1521
  • UI
    • Add more Unicode glyphs in the Open Sans font #1032
    • Show URL to add subscriptions from third-party tools #1247
    • Improved message when checking for new versions #1586
  • SimplePie
    • Remove "SimplePie" name from HTTP User-Agent string #1656
  • Bug fixing
    • Work-around for PHP 5.6.0- CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION open_basedir bug in favicons and PubSubHubbub #1655
    • Fix PDO PostgreSQL detection #1690
    • Fix punycode warning in PHP 7.2 #1699
    • Fix crash when adding a new category while adding a new feed #1731
    • Fix ExtensionManager exception handling #1724
  • CLI
    • New command ./cli/db-optimize.php for database optimisation #1583
    • Check PHP requirements before running actualize_script.php (cron for refreshing feeds) #1711
  • SQL
    • Perform VACUUM on SQLite and PostgreSQL databases when optimisation is requested #918
  • API
    • Breaking change / compatibility fix (EasyRSS): Provide link to articles without HTML-encoding #1683
  • Extensions
    • Breaking change: uppercase ./Controllers/ directory #1729
    • Show existing extensions in admin panel #1708
    • New function $entry->_hash($hex) for extensions that change the content of entries #1707
  • I18n
  • Misc.
    • Customisable constants.local.php #1725
    • Basic mechanism to limit the size of the logs #1712
    • Translation validation tool #1653
    • Translation manipulation tool #1658
    • Improved documentation #1697, #1704
    • New .editorconfig file #1732

FreshRSS 1.10.0

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • API
  • Features
    • Ability to pause feeds, and to hide them from categories #1750
    • Ability for the admin to reset a user’s password #960
  • Security
    • Allow HTTP Auth login with REDIRECT_REMOTE_USER when using Apache internal redirect #1772
  • UI
    • New icons for marking as favourite and marking as read in the Reading View #603
    • Add shortcuts to switch views #1755
  • Bug fixing
    • Fix login bug when HTTP REMOTE_USER changes (used by YunoHost) #1756
    • Fix warning in PHP 7.2 #1739
  • Extensions
    • Allow extensions to define their own reading view #1714
  • I18n
  • Misc.
    • More sites in force-https.default.txt #1745
    • Trim URLs when adding new feeds #1778

FreshRSS 1.10.1

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • Deployment
    • New Docker image, smaller (based on Alpine Linux) and newer (with PHP 7.1) #1813
  • CLI
    • New command ./cli/prepare.php to make the needed sub-directories of the ./data/ directory #1813
  • Bug fixing
    • Fix API bug for EasyRSS #1799
    • Fix login bug when using double authentication (HTTP + Web form) #1807
    • Fix database upgrade for FreshRSS versions older than 1.1.1 #1803
    • Fix cases of double port in FreshRSS public URL #1815
  • UI
    • Add tooltips on share configuration buttons #1805
  • Misc.
    • Move ./data/shares.php to ./app/shares.php to facilitate updates #1812
    • Show article author email when there is no author name #1801
    • Improve translation tools #1808

FreshRSS 1.10.2

Par : Alkarex

This version is only relevant for Docker.

Changelog:

  • Bug fixing
    • Fix Docker image for OPML import #1819
    • Fix Docker image for CSS selectors #1821
    • Fix Docker other missing PHP extensions #1822

FreshRSS 1.11.0

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • API
  • Features
    • Several per-feed options (implemented in JSON) #1838
      • Mark updated articles as read #891
      • Mark as read upon reception #1702
      • Only for admin user #1905
        • Feed cURL timeout
        • Ignore SSL (unsafe) #1811
    • Light Boolean search implementation #879
      • All parts are implicitly AND (which must not be written), except if OR is stated.
      • No use of parentheses. Support for quotes to disable the Boolean search, like "This or that".
      • Example: Hello intitle:World OR date:P1D example OR author:Else intitle:"This or that"
    • Share with Pocket #1884
  • Deployment
    • Includes an optional cron daemon in Docker to refresh feeds automatically #1869
    • Docker Compose example #1882
  • Bug fixing
    • Fix Docker bug affecting Apache CustomLog (unwanted local copy of access logs), ErrorLog, Listen (IPv6 bug) #1873
    • Fix muted feeds that were not actually muted #1844
    • Fix null exception in shares, showing only the first article #1824
    • Fix error during import #1890
      • Fix additional automatic sequence bug with PostgreSQL #1907
    • Fix errors in case of empty/wrong username when updating user settings #1857
    • Fixes in subscription menu #1858
    • Fix allowing Unix sockets for MySQL and PostgreSQL #1888
    • Fix create-user CLI option no_default_feeds #1900
  • SimplePie
    • Work-around for feeds with invalid non-unique GUIDs #1887
    • Fix for Atom feeds using a namespace for type #1892
    • Remove some warnings during parsing attemps of some bad feeds #1909
  • Security
    • Strip HTTP credentials from HTTP Referer in SimplePie #1891
    • Use autocomplete="new-password" to prevent form autocomplete in user management pages (fix bug with e.g. Firefox) #1877
  • UI
    • Add tooltips on user queries #1823
  • I18n
  • Misc.
    • Use cURL for fetching full articles content #1870
    • Add error log information when SQLite has not enough temp space #1816
    • Allow extension dir to be a symlink #1911

FreshRSS 1.11.1

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • Features
    • Better support of media: tags such as thumbnails and descriptions (e.g. for YouTube) #944
  • Extensions
    • New extension mechanism allowing changing HTTP headers and other SimplePie parameters #1924
    • Built-in extension to fix Tumblr feeds from European Union due to GDPR #1894
  • Bug fixing
    • Fix bug in case of bad i18n in extensions #1797
    • Fix extension callback for updated articles and PubSubHubbub #1926
    • Fix regression in fetching full articles content #1917
    • Fix several bugs in the new Fever API #1930
    • Updated sharing to Mastodon #1904

FreshRSS 1.11.2

Par : Alkarex

Changelog:

  • Features
    • New menu to mark selected articles (view) as unread #1966
    • Share with LinkedIn #1960
  • Deployment
    • Update Docker image to Alpine 3.8 with PHP 7.2 #1956
  • Bug fixing
    • Fix bugs when searching with special characters (e.g. preventing marking as read) #1944
    • Avoid cutting in the middle of a multi-byte Unicode character #1996
    • Fix username check in API to allow underscores #1955
    • Fix Fever API to allow 32-bit architectures #1962
    • Fix CSS font bug for Origine-compact theme #1990
    • Fix last user activity for SQLite and PostgreSQL #2008
    • Fix article counts with SQLite #2009
    • Fix some automatic URL generation cases #1946
  • Security
    • Avoid feed credentials in logs #1949
  • UI
    • Improved mark-as-read the bottom articles during scrolling #1973
    • Show all authors for articles with multiple authors #1968
  • I18n
  • Mics.
    • Auto-login after self user creation #1928
    • Better test if server has public address #2010
    • Allow - in database name at install time #2005
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