Connexion
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 accessible – à 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.
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.
Voici ce que vous verrez sur la page de votre parcours si votre parcours est éligible à un stage (pour vérifier, rendez-vous ici).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tu as des choix. Mode d’emploi pour ne pas sombrer dans la déprime.
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.
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.
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.
Benoît, responsable informatique et ex-patron de magasin informatique
“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
“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
“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”.
“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
“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
L’article J’ai pas eu mon Bac. Et maintenant ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pour exercer ce métier, il faut avoir à la fois :
La curiosité et la polyvalence intellectuelle qui sont donc nécessaires en font un métier passionnant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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]
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”.
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 :
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 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.
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.
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 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”.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :
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.
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.
L’article À quoi ressemble le métier d’UX designer en start-up ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Étudier en ligne ne signifie pas s’isoler. Au contraire, nous avons une belle communauté qui se réunit de plusieurs façons.
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.
Pour aller plus loin, épluchez :
L’article Pourquoi choisir l’apprentissage ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Qu’est-ce qui incite à devenir mentor ?
Nous avons posé la question à quelques-uns de nos plus anciens et fidèles mentors :
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.
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.
L’article Pourquoi devenir Mentor ? est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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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TED.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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“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.
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?
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.
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
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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“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.
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.
“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.”
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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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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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.
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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.”
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.
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.”
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 Project, Women 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.
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.
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.”
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, 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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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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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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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The directory of the Allen Brain Atlas, at brain-map.org, a huge collection of data from brains (mouse and human) that any scientist can use. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, like several other scientific and technical institutes funded by Paul Allen, does fundamental research that is made openly available.
What’s an appropriate second act after co-founding Microsoft? When Paul Allen left the massive software company, sure, he bought a sports team or two, founded a museum, funded schools and a telescope array, built some lovely buildings. But his deepest impact — even beyond the game-changing software he brought to market — may turn out to be his funding of foundational research in science and tech, driven by public spiritedness and a passion for inquiry.
The Allen Institute — composed of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Cell Science and The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group — explores fundamental questions like Can we build an atlas of the brain? and How does a single cell work within a complex system? Meanwhile, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, led by Oren Etzioni, conducts AI research and engineering “all for the common good.” In exploring ground-level questions and openly sharing their findings, these efforts empower future scientists and technologists to push further, faster.
Allen was a longtime TEDster, and this evening, Chris Anderson wrote on Twitter: “It’s been such an honor to have Paul as part of the TED community the past two decades. Despite being so smart and so powerful, he was extraordinarily humble, and contributed to numerous ideas and projects with zero fanfare. We’ll miss him terribly. RIP, Paul.”
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As usual, the TED community is busy with new projects and news — here are a few highlights.
Meet two newly minted MacArthur “geniuses.” Visual artist Titus Kaphar and violinist Vijay Gupta have been named 2018 MacArthur Fellows! The fellowship, established in 1981, awards $625,000 over the course of five years to individuals of exemplary creative merit, to spend as they like. Kaphar’s recent projects include The Jerome Project, a painting series on mass incarceration and The Next Haven project, a community space that offers fellowships to artists and curators and mentorship to local high-schoolers. In a video profile, Kaphar said, “I think merging art and history can help motivate social change.” Gupta is a social justice advocate who founded Street Symphony, a nonprofit that centers homeless and incarcerated communities through creative and educational programming in downtown Los Angeles. On his work, Gupta said, “It is as much our job to heal and inspire as it is to disrupt and provoke. It is our job to be the truth tellers of our time.” Congratulations to them both! (Watch Kaphar’s TED Talk and Gupta’s TED Talk.)
SpaceX achieves first California ground landing. Rocket company SpaceX, led by CEO Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell, has landed one of their previously used Falcon 9 rockets on California land for the first time. The Falcon 9 was launched on October 7 to deliver the first of two 3,500-pound Argentinian satellites into low Earth orbit; following the drop-off, the rocket returned to Earth faster than the speed of sound and landed on SpaceX’s new landing pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of LA. The full video of the launch and landing is about 30 minutes long and well worth the watch — it’s history in the making! (Watch Musk’s TED Talk and Shotwell’s TED Talk.)
A powerful musical tribute to #MeToo. In collaboration with singer Jasmine Power, Amanda Palmer has released a new song and video called “Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now,” marking the one-year anniversary of The New York Times exposé on Harvey Weinstein that catalyzed the #MeToo movement. Directed and choreographed by Noémie Lafrance, the video (NSFW) weaves striking visuals and haunting lyrics into a poignant reflection on sexual violence. In a statement, Palmer said, “As we directed the chorus members through our song chorus, I felt this overwhelming emotion come over me as I gazed into the eyes of each and every woman singing along … Women are rising up, everywhere. Change is happening at every level.” All proceeds from the song’s sales on Bandcamp will be forwarded to the Time’s Up legal defense fund. (Watch Palmer’s TED Talk.)
Rethink Robotics shutters. Widely regarded as the company that introduced the world to collaborative robots, Rethink Robotics, co-founded by Rodney Brooks, has closed. Rethink’s starred products, the Sawyer and Baxter robots, were breakthroughs, the first industrial robots built to work safely with people, rather than operated at a distance. The robots were designed to be used by factory floor workers who could program them by moving their “arms” to complete repetitive or dangerous tasks; they also had animated faces to communicate with their human co-workers. In The Verge, Rethink’s lack of commercial success was listed as the main reason for closing. (Watch Brooks’ TED Talk.)
Spittin’ Venom. Musician Reggie Watts debuted a new track on The Late Late Show with James Corden, paying homage to ’90s hip-hop with a hilarious take on Marvel’s new thriller Venom. Written by Demi Adejuyigbe and featuring Jenny Slate, along with a slew of aggressively ’90s outfits, the skit is a fun, quick watch with a surprisingly catchy beat. (Watch Watts’ TED Talk.)
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yasminsbelkhyr
L'actualité immobilière d'octobre 2018 a été riche en enseignements. Dans cette page, nous allons résumer les principaux chiffres et informations sur le marché immobilier en France de ce mois-ci.
Voici le programme :
La hausse des ventes réalisées par l'intermédiaire des agences immobilières.
La forte hausse de l'indice de référence des loyers.
Les dernières informations sur les taux de crédit immobilier en octobre 2018.
Les chiffres de recette fiscale sur l'Impôt sur la Fortune Immobilière en 2018 et les prévisions pour 2019.
La taxe d'habitation en 2018.
Mise à jour : découvrez les chiffres de l'immobilier en décembre 2018.
Ricardo Vargas, executive director of the Brightline Initiative, welcomes the audience to TEDSalon: Unconventional — a night of talks about creating simple and unique solutions to old problems. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Today’s volatile world demands that we do things differently — that we pay attention to things most people don’t see. At TEDSalon: Unconventional, presented by TED and the Brightline Initiative and hosted by TED’s Cloe Shasha and Alex Moura, six leaders and visionaries shared novel ideas that are driving the world’s most impactful organizations.
“Marketoonist” Tom Fishburne shares insights from his dual careers as a marketer and cartoonist, and makes the case for more humor in business. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
The power of laughing at ourselves. A sense of humor is one of the most important — and overlooked — tools in business, says author and cartoonist Tom Fishburne. With his “Marketoonist” cartoons as a backdrop, he shares three ways that laughing at ourselves is good for business. First, humor gives us a way to bond with others, opening up conversations and making people feel connected to each other. It’s also disarming, letting us talk about things that we’d otherwise be uncomfortable bringing up; in other words, “It helps us say what needs to be said.” And humor lets us be vulnerable, to let down our guard and confront our fears. “Fear kills creativity,” Fishburne says, “and humor is our most powerful tool to drive fear out of the system.”
What Henry Ford can teach us about AI. Henry Ford is best known for the assembly line, but a different aspect of his work interests AI strategist Kathryn Hume: charcoal briquettes. Ford began making charcoal in the 1920s to reuse wood scraps from his auto plants, eventually leading to the creation of the charcoal briquette used to power portable grills. By the mid-1930s, he was marketing “picnic kits” for suburban families driving to parks (in their Models Ts, of course), repurposing a byproduct of his core business to develop a whole new revenue stream. Hume brings this concept to her own work, where she helps companies use AI to optimize their current work and then use the data collected to create new businesses. She gives the example of a medical device company that uses machine learning to identify high-risk moments in prostate surgery: each operation has become a learning opportunity, and the data is being repurposed to empower an autonomous surgeon robot. This is the true promise of AI and machine learning, Hume says: using AI to make a process better, and then repurposing the data collected to build something entirely new. Or, as she puts it: “Take the fruits of yesterday’s work and transform it into tomorrow’s value.”
Publisher Chiki Sarkar introduces Juggernaut, a company that creates books and other digital content for users in India, meant to be read on mobile phones. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Transforming reading (and writing) for the smartphone age. Imagine if you could settle into a seat for your train or bus ride home from work, tap an app on your phone and get an engaging story that costs under $1 and occupies you for the length of your commute. That kind of concise, inexpensive, in-app reading experience is available in India via Juggernaut, which Chiki Sarkar cofounded in 2015. Juggernaut content is written specifically for reading on a phone, reflects what’s in the news and serves as a platform for new writers. Anyone can submit a poem, essay, story or novel to be considered for publication and sale on the app. “Just as we redefined what a book is and how a reader behaves, we’re rethinking who an author is,” Sarkar says. “By being everywhere, by being accessible and relevant, I hope to make reading a daily habit — as easy and effortless as checking your email, booking a ticket online or ordering your groceries.”
With her “Spanglish folk blues,” Gaby Moreno performs two songs at TEDSalon: Unconventional. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Spanglish beats. During a musical interlude, singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno brings her soothing and melodic voice to the TED stage. Born and raised in Guatemala, she sings in both English and Spanish, a unique genre she calls “Spanglish folk blues.” Moreno plays two songs, the soulful “O, Me” and mesmerizing “Sálvese Quien Pueda,” leaving the audience in just the right vibe to finish off the evening.
How to learn a language in months, not years. Lýdia Machová loves languages so much that she learns a new one every two years. She’s currently studying her eighth one. Machová is a polyglot — someone who can speak many languages fluently — and part of a large community of people from around the world who are just as passionate as she is about living a linguistically rich life. Each polyglot has their own way of absorbing the rules of conversation, vocabulary and syntax, she says — whether it’s watching episodes of Friends in German or making dinner with an Italian cookbook — but they all share the same four principles. The most important one, she says, is enjoyment. If you can infuse each step of the language-learning process with joy, the rest of the principles should follow easily: creating personalized methods of memorization, incorporating learning into your daily life, and cultivating a large dose of patience — because no language can be fully learned in a day. “If you’ve tried to learn a language and you gave up, thinking it’s too difficult, or you don’t have the language talent — give it another try,” Machová says. “Maybe you’re just one enjoyable method away from learning a language fluently.”
What does it mean to be civil? Author Teresa Bejan thinks that civility is BS — or, at least the way we talk about it is. In the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be diverse and tolerant, disagreements occur often, and in our divided political and social landscape, they can quickly become heated. Calls for civility during high-stakes disagreements can actually serve to silence, berate and dismiss opposing views, Bejan says. Through her research, she found that bringing the idea of civility — or the lack of it — into arguments dates as far back as the 16th century, when theologian Martin Luther called the Pope the “Anti-Christ.” Luther’s opponents spat back insults like “heretic,” “Protestant” and, yes, “uncivil.” The problem with civility talk, she says, is its concern with the manner of discussion rather than the ideas being discussed; accusing someone of incivility during an argument distracts from the dialogue entirely. Bejan suggests that instead we try “mere civility,” which she defines as “being able to disagree fundamentally with others, but doing so without destroying the possibility of a common life tomorrow with the people who are standing in our way today.”
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brianwgreene89
Acheter un appartement à Paris ne correspond pas à un achat immobilier classique. Il faut tenir compte des spécificités de ce secteur géographique et adapter son projet de logement en fonction de ces contraintes.
Voyons pour commencer ce qui rend ce type d'acquisition plus difficile et si spécifique. Regardons ensuite comment suivre l'évolution des prix des appartements à Paris dans les différents arrondissements ou quartiers. Nous étudierons ensuite la recherche du bien, son financement et le cas particulier de l'investissement locatif dans la Capitale.
Ceci n'est pas le cas qu'à Paris, tous les secteurs ultra-recherchés, où l'offre est faible par rapport à la demande et où les tarifs sont donc très élevés subissent des contraintes similaires pour un achat immobilier.
Au sommaire de cette page :
Déséquilibre entre l'offre et la demande
Évolution des prix des appartements
Cas de l'investissement locatif
The TED community is brimming with new books and projects. Below, a selection of highlights.
A powerful story of an American odyssey. Writer and business leader Casey Gerald has published a new memoir on his journey through American life. Titled There Will Be No Miracles Here, the book tells Gerald’s story from a childhood of scraping by, to Yale University, to his role as the leader of a nonprofit placing MBA graduates in communities where they can share their knowledge and make a difference. In an interview with NYMag, Gerald says, “I feel very certain that this book, writing it and giving it away, was the highest and best use of the luxury of being alive. Only time will tell whether that’s true.” The memoir, which The New York Times calls “magnificent,” can be found in bookstores and online. (Watch Gerald’s TED Talk.)
New insights on the benefits of playing instruments. In collaboration with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, guitar manufacturer Fender has published a new report on the emotional, physical and mental benefits of playing instruments with a focus on the guitar. The study has some fascinating findings: women make up half of all new and aspiring guitar players, 72% of participants began playing guitar as a way of bettering themselves and 42% of participants considered guitar-playing a part of their identity. On the study, Levitin said, “Playing an instrument has a meditative aspect that can release positive hormones in the brain … When we play an instrument, it allows us to see ourselves differently — taking on something that is seen as being a masterful skill in society.” (Watch Levitin’s TED Talk.)
A free resource on integrating ethics and tech. In a closing keynote at the 2018 Borah Symposium, game designer and technologist Jane McGonigal spoke about the tangible benefits of video games. As quoted in The Argonaut, McGonigal said, “Microsoft Research estimated that the United States’ global life expectancy had increased by 2.825 million years just because of the amount of increase in physical activity [from the release of Pokémon Go]. That’s a real outcome.” McGonigal also discussed Ethical OS, her latest project, a free online ethics toolkit for technology makers and futurists. McGonigal crafted it in collaboration with the Omidyar Network and her team at the Institute for the Future, where she is the Director for Game Research and Development. (Watch McGonigal’s TED Talk.)
Marvel’s SHURI series is here. The Black Panther universe has a new addition: a comic series focusing on Shuri, the princess of Wakanda. Written by Afrofuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor and illustrated by Leonardo Romero, the first issue was released last week. This series signals a departure from the Black Panther lore so far. According to Marvel, SHURI leads the eponymous main character on exciting adventures and challenges as she strives to lead Wakanda — the fictional African country of the Black Panther universe — in the absence of her brother, King T’Challa. The first issue has three gorgeous covers by artist Sam Spratt and the second issue is out next month. (Watch Okorafor’s TED Talk. and read our new interview with her)
Brief Answers to Big Questions. The final book of the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was published in October, seven months after Hawking passed away at age 76. Published by Bantam Books, Brief Answers to Big Questions explores some of life’s greatest mysteries, including the existence of God and the possibility of time travel (spoiler alert: Hawking says no and maybe, respectively). The book was finished and polished by Hawking’s family members, who drew from his research, notes and papers following his death. In addition, Hawking, widely considered one of the most influential scientists of his generation, will be honored at the 2019 Breakthrough Prize ceremony. Hawking was awarded a Special Fundamental Physics Prize by the organization in 2013 for his discovery that black holes emit radiation. (Watch Hawking’s TED Talk.)
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing a tsunami of change that will dramatically affect how we interact with and adapt to technology. The ways we choose to ride this wave will determine the shape of our future. Will we use this as an opportunity to solve our most pressing issues, or allow it to become a calamity that divides us?
At TED Salon: The Next Wave, presented by TED and Zebra Technologies and hosted by TED’s Bryn Freedman, five speakers and one performer explored the tools and expertise we’ll harness to build the future.
Does artificial intelligence keep humans from learning too? AI is more and more important in our workplaces, but there’s a big catch, says researcher Matt Beane: it’s threatening our own ability to learn on the job. Beane studies the relationship between humans and AI, and he’s found that, in industries ranging from investment banking to surgery, the story is the same: As tools get more sophisticated, workers (especially people just starting out) get fewer opportunities for hands-on learning, the kind that involves struggle, practice and mentorship. The paradox: That’s the very experience necessary to leverage sophisticated tools. “Organizations are trying harder and harder to get results from AI,” he says, “but we’re handling it in a way that blocks learning on the job.” It’s early days for AI in most fields — though by 2030, half a billion of us will be using it in some way — so Beane’s talk is an important corrective right now. What can be done? He shares a vision that flips the current story into one of distributed, AI-enhanced mentorships that empower everyone to learn and grow wiser.
Tiana Epps-Johnson shares her work helping local election officials learn the skills and technologies they need to run modern-day elections. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Empowering local election officials. “Voting is one of the most tangible ways that each and every one of us can shape our communities,” says civic engagement champion Tiana Epps-Johnson. And yet, compared to the rest of the world, the United States has one of the lowest voter turnout rates. Why does the US fall so far behind? Epps-Johnson identifies the main issue as outdated technology. But her approach to fixing this problem is more targeted than simply getting newer technologies out there. She focuses on an important but untapped resource for election modernization: local election officials. These are the people on the ground, the ones who are supposed to make voting the best possible experience for the voters in their counties. Currently, many of them lack the basic skills needed to achieve this goal. Epps-Johnson works with local election officials to train these officials in the skills needed for modern-day elections — such as using social media to get the word out, harnessing data to improve the voting process, or creating and maintaining a website for voters in their county. “If you’re ready to help millions, if you’re ready to close the gap between the system that we have and the system that we deserve, we need you,” Epps-Johnson says.
Automation and its discontents. What’s the future of work? That’s the question that Roy Bahat, head of the venture firm Bloomberg Beta, has spent the past two years trying to answer. He helped lead a wide-ranging project to understand how technology will impact work over the next 10 to 20 years — interviewing AI experts, video game designers, educators, truckers, inmates and everyone in between to identify concerns and emerging trends. In a candid conversation with Bryn Freedman, curator of the TED Institute, Bahat shares insights from his findings, discussing two major themes that surfaced: stability and dignity. First and foremost, Bahat says, people want a stable and secure income. Beyond that, people kept bringing up the idea of dignity — of feeling needed and finding self-worth through work. As automation increases, we need to create respect for work like caregiving and educating — jobs that can’t be replaced by robots, Bahat says. If we can do that, we’ll be prepared for the future of work.
Design technologist James Morley-Smith shares how a challenging family experience helped him come up with a new approach to design. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Start by thinking about impairments. When design technologist James Morley-Smith’s son Fintan was five months old, he was diagnosed with an eye cancer that eventually led to a complete loss of vision. Fintan, who is “incredibly resilient,” has learned Braille and excels at school and in playing the piano. This last activity led to Morley-Smith’s epiphany — he saw how Fintan’s piano instructor took his impairments into account and decided to teach him songs on only the black keys first so Fintan could use them as anchors for the white keys. In his work at Zebra, Morley-Smith designs for employees who are often in noisy, poorly lit industrial settings and clad in bulky protective gear. By following the black-keys tactic, he’s factoring in users’ limitations from the get-go. By making small changes — such as increasing type size and ensuring that interfaces can be handled easily with gloved fingers — he has increased productivity by up to 20 percent in some cases. Morley-Smith believes we can apply this thinking to every aspect of our lives. “It doesn’t matter what is impairing you from reaching your goals,” he says. “Reframe them so they are no longer a disability, and they might just be the advantage you need.”
Naia Izumi performs his own song, “Soft Spoken,” the elegantly complex tune that won him the 2018 NPR Tiny Desk Contest, during the TED Salon: The Next Wave. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
An electric, genre-bending performance. Singer and guitarist Naia Izumi has had quite a year — while the Georgia native was busking on the streets of Los Angeles, he submitted to the 2018 NPR Tiny Desk Contest, and he won! He’s now busily on tour along the East Coast, and he swung by the TED office to share his winning song. Encouraging the audience to join in the beat, Izumi played his song “Soft Spoken,” a soulful, genre-hopping tune that draws from his personal story and his musical roots, and features his innovative, percussive guitar style under heavenly vocals.
Ensuring our right to cognitive liberty. Brain reading tech is on the horizon, says bioethicist Nita A. Farahany, and we need to be prepared. The technology to translate thoughts is advancing every day; using electroencephalography (EEG) monitors similar to the fitness wristbands that track heart rate and sleep, we can decode thoughts of shapes and numbers — and even track emotional states. Real-world applications of this tech are already in practice globally in the manufacturing, automotive and entertainment industries. While the potential for this technology is groundbreaking and thrilling, Farahany warns of a darker future, in which the government can surveil and criminalize certain thought patterns, and private interests can capture and sell our brain data. The right to cognitive liberty, she says, is a fundamental human right, alongside self-determination and freedom of speech. We need to demand and secure legal protections for our brain data, she concludes, because our right to thought privacy is too important to risk.
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En ce mois de novembre 2018, les taux de crédit immobilier n'évoluent qu'à la marge. Les conditions d'emprunt restent quasiment les mêmes depuis plusieurs mois et cela pourrait durer encore au moins jusqu'à la fin de l'année, voire un peu plus.
Découvrez notre dernière analyse sur les taux de prêt immobilier en novembre 2018 avec les dernières statistiques, un comparatif sur les taux moyens, des tendances pour les semaines et mois à venir et de nombreuses calculettes de prêt pour vous aider à trouver le montage financier le plus optimisé pour votre emprunt immobilier et son assurance emprunteur.
Mise à jour : découvrez le taux immobilier en janvier 2019.
TED’s Chee Pearlman (right) and Stephen DeBerry welcome the audience to the TED salon Radical Craft, held on November 8, 2018, at the TED World Theater in New York City. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Craft — in the timeless, universal sense of making — connects us all. We craft our environments, our tools and toys, our transport and communications, our world.
At Radical Craft — an evening of talks curated by TED’s design curator, Chee Pearlman, and co-hosted by Pearlman and Stephen DeBerry — seven designers, inventors, artists, musicians and storytellers took to the stage at the TED World Theater. They explored the world of radical making — and shared the beautiful, strange, puzzling and joyful experiences they found there.
Stephen Doyle leads a double life: by day, he runs a much-lauded design firm, and after hours, he is the maker of radically inventive art. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
A graphic designer who plays with words. Editors and designers are sometimes seen as belonging to separate tribes: the former speaks in the language of words, while the latter communicates in images. Stephen Doyle, a New York City–based graphic designer, happens to be bilingual — and his home is the spot on the Venn diagram where the two camps overlap. “I lift the words off the page and bring them into the three-dimensional world that we live in,” he says. This could mean making the letters on the cover of a Vladimir Nabokov book look like pinned specimens, slyly alluding to the author’s butterfly-hunting habit. Or, to mark the 75th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote, blowing up the letters of one of its sentences to be eight feet high, and pasting them on the floor of Grand Central Station for commuters to walk on and absorb. Doyle also delights in cutting up the words from books and reconfiguring them: a paper tank of text rises from the pages of Machiavelli’s The Prince, while a cloud of contagious prose is emitted from Albert Camus’s The Plague. “I get to build sculptures that ask questions, making monuments to language to focus on the profound power and incredible importance of words,” Doyle says, “because words matter.”
Perspective of the world from an astronaut’s point of view. What job is best for a young man who’s been a tennis ace, a cross-country traveler, a chemistry nerd and an NFL draftee? Why obviously: an astronaut. When he was a kid, Leland Melvin never thought he’d be “one of those moon guys,” but as he was presented new opportunities — each grander than the next — he began to see his world open up in the most magnificent ways. By accepting each challenge with an open mind, passion and curiosity, Melvin has lived a storied life on Earth — and in orbit, among the stars in the International Space Station. Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour (and watching the sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes) brought a holistic point of view to his life, one that he’s looking to share. On the TED stage, Melvin urges others to join him in broadening their horizons and appreciating the ways we’re all connected on Earth. “Perspective is something that we all get, that we all have,” he says. “It’s just how far do we open up our blinders to see that shift and change.”
Crush Club brought their funk-inflicted dance pop, driven by groovy guitar riffs and a chic vibe. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
A fusion of funk, pop and Latin rhythms. On the heels of the Salon’s heady opening half hour, New York City’s Crush Club lay down some earthy, Studio 54-infused funk frosted with soaring falsetto vocals. Playing three songs — “My Man,” their new single “Trust” and “We Dance” — the band noticeably raises the temperature in the TED theater. New York-based DJ Jerome keeps the show moving with some electro-acoustic sampling, spinning tunes over the course of whole evening.
Gabby Rivera, the author of Marvel’s America Chavez series, is redefining the concept of superheroes. “That myth of having to go it alone and be tough is not serving us,” she says. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
The superhero we need right now. With Marvel’s America Chavez, writer Gabby Rivera is penning a new kind of superhero — one that reflects the faces of her community in the Bronx and the idea that “soft is the new super.” Informed by her own childhood as a queer Latina in New York City surrounded by strong Puerto Rican women, Rivera built a narrative that resonates with people on the margins, slipping “love notes to [America] and all the other queer kids of color trying to be magnificent.” Throughout the series, Rivera has intentionally made space for America’s (super)humanity, giving her something she says the women of her family never had: the permission to be soft. So, while America is out punching Nazis and fighting off evil corporations, her mentors encourage her to take time to quiet her mind and teach her that asking for help is not weakness. “That myth of having to go it alone and be tough is not serving us,” Rivera says. “Even America Chavez, a whole entire superhero, needed a team of support to find herself … It’s that space where softness and vulnerability meet strength that we transcend our everyday selves.”
The strange, intellectually masochistic and incredibly joyful world of puzzles. What do a video of a chicken-suit-wearing dancer, crowds of LEGO people looking at LEGO versions of famous artworks, and the replica of a WWII cryptographic device built out of cardboard have in common? They’re all examples of the diabolically difficult puzzles in what Alex Rosenthal calls “the Olympics meets Burning Man” for super-nerds: the MIT Mystery Hunt. A marathon puzzle-solving competition, the MIT Mystery Hunt takes place over dozens of sleepless hours, with teams drawn from more than 2,000 scientists, explorers, composers, cryptographers and other thinkers. The teams gather to extract information buried within a puzzle that is “obtuse enough to make you work for it, but elegant enough so that you can get to the ‘aha’ moment where everything clicks into place,” says Rosenthal. It’s this “aha” moment — an almost physical high inspired by a instant mental clarity — that is the true prize of the competition. Humans love puzzles, but solving a challenging conundrum brings us more than mere satisfaction. According to Rosenthal, successful puzzles help build teams, reveal new perspectives, expand your mind — and just may infuse your world with more joy.
Architect Débora Mesa Molina uses standard elements in nonstandard ways, rethinking how overlooked materials can be made into architecture. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
Radical architecture. Architect Débora Mesa Molina and her firm Ensamble Studio transform prosaic, undervalued, overlooked materials into breathtaking bespoke structures. Architecture is a balance between following the rules and making room for experimentation, Mesa Molina says — a mixture that characterizes many of her firm’s projects. A cultural building in Santiago de Compostela, for instance, incorporates scavenged chunks of industrial granite — a material required by the city’s building codes — into a bustling urban park. Mesa Molina employed a similar approach for her family’s home in Madrid, using industrial materials to create a comfortable and cozy feel. When the family moved across the Atlantic to Brookline, Massachusetts, they again became their own clients, building a family home from parts they prefabricated themselves from low-cost materials, transforming a parking structure into a home. Mesa Molina finishes her talk with a stunning look at Ensamble’s recent project for the Tippet Rise Art Center, just completed on a 10,000-acre ranch in Montana. Their vision? To create a constellation of spaces across the land, meant to immerse visitors in the surrounding wilderness. “By using the resources at our disposal in radical ways, by making a space for experimentation, we are able to bring to light architectures that find the beauty latent in the raw and imperfect things that surround us,” she says, “that elevate them and let them speak their own language.”
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brianwgreene89
Encore un programme riche en chiffres et en information pour cette revue de l'actualité immobilière de novembre 2018. Voici les thèmes qui seront abordés ce mois-ci :
Un point complet sur l'évolution des ventes et des prix des logements anciens à Paris et en Ile-de-France.
Un point sur les derniers chiffres sur les taux de prêt immobilier.
Un constat de légère dégradation de la production de crédit immobilier malgré des taux très bas.
Un nouveau dispositif de réduction d'impôts pour la rénovation de logements anciens dans les centres-villes de certaines villes.
Les derniers chiffres sur l'immobilier neuf qui montrent un recul de la construction de logements.
Découvrez tout ce qui fait l'actualité immobilière en novembre 2018.
Mise à jour : découvrez les actualités immobilières de janvier 2019.
It’s been a busy few weeks for the TED community. Below, our favorite highlights.
Meet 2018’s Technology in Journalism Honorees. Journalists Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu received this year’s Technology in Journalism Award from the National Press Foundation for their work on “The House That Spied On Me.” The article details how they transformed Hill’s apartment into a fully operational smart home by installing 18 different internet-connected appliances and devices. They tracked and monitored the data each device collected on Hill’s habits with fascinating, even scary, insights for digital home improvement. A hearty congratulations to the both of them! (Watch Hill and Mattu’s TED Talk.)
10 nights of women-led storytelling. Activist Halima Aden, researcher Brené Brown, comedian Maysoon Zayid, model Geena Rocero, artist Cleo Wade and creator Luvvie Ajayi will be featured at Together Live, a touring storytelling event celebrating women through “raw, hilarious, vulnerable, authentic stories.” This year will feature 30 women across 10 cities; the program is produced in collaboration with hellosunshine, a media company founded by Reese Witherspoon. (Watch Aden’s, Brown’s, Zayid’s, Rocero’s, Wade’s and Ajayi’s TED Talks.)
A new documentary on the extraordinary life of Halima Aden. Al Jazeera has released a 25-minute documentary on Halima Aden, exploring the model’s life, ambitions and her mainstream impact in the face of Islamophobia. Aden was born in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp before relocating to Minnesota; she shot to fame as the first hijab-wearing model in the Miss USA pageant. In an interview with Star Tribune, Halima says, “I also do think being black, being Muslim, being Somali, being American on top of that, a lot of different people relate to different parts of my story.” (Watch Aden’s TED Talk.)
Radical hope and laughter. LitHub’s Daniel Asa Rose interviewed writer Anne Lamott on her 18th book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. They discussed how to find resounding happiness despite the world’s many miseries. “We need laughter in our lives. Laughter is carbonated holiness,” she says, “I celebrate that we’re all crazy and damaged and we’re all sort of floundering and flailing, and yet we stick together. We take care of each other the best we can. And that is so touching it fills me with hope.” (Watch Lamott’s TED Talk.)
A new cartoon brand launches. Cartoonist Bob Mankoff retired from the New Yorker in May but he hasn’t slowed down — he’s just launched a new cartoon company, Cartoon Collections. To form Cartoon Collections Mankoff merged Cartoon Bank, the cartoon archive he started in the early ’90s, with another archive called CartoonStock. “When you really want to communicate a point in a meaningful way, I think single-panel cartoons can do that better than anything.” he says in an interview with Folio Mag. (Watch Mankoff’s TED Talk.)
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Longtemps perçue comme un échec dans une carrière, la reconversion professionnelle est désormais considérée comme un réel levier pour changer de métier. Selon un récent sondage effectué en mai 2018 par la société d’études BVA, environ la moitié des salariés en France envisage la reconversion professionnelle. Pourtant, ils sont près de 9 Français sur 10 à penser que la reconversion professionnelle est très difficile après 45 ans. En revanche, 4 personnes sur 10 considèrent que le changement de carrière professionnelle est difficile à tout âge.
Cet article se penche sur les conditions pour réussir votre reconversion professionnelle. Ce sera aussi l’occasion d’aborder la question du choix et du financement de votre formation menant à votre reconversion.
Sommaire de l’article :
Votre reconversion professionnelle doit être un choix mûrement réfléchi. Il arrive que la sensation de démotivation à un poste ne soit que temporaire. Il ne s’agit donc surtout pas d’envisager une reconversion lorsqu’on est au bord du burn out mais bien de s’organiser avec méthode. Une fois ce choix personnel validé, il vous reste de vous assurer le soutien de votre entourage.
Si les encouragements de la personne qui partage votre vie ou de parents sont toujours bons à prendre, les avis négatifs doivent être écoutés prudemment. La crainte générée par un changement de vie sera réelle. Cela ne doit pas cependant vous contraindre à stopper vos projets.
L’expérience des uns ne faisant pas celle des autres, se fier au récit d’une personne ayant raté une reconversion professionnelle ne signifie pas que la vôtre suivra le même chemin. Tirez parti du discours de votre famille et de vos amis sans y voir une fatalité. Ce sera une étape indispensable à un changement de carrière.
Se pencher sur le vécu d’autres personnes ayant réussi leur reconversion professionnelle peut être salvateur. Christophe en est le parfait exemple. Devant se réinventer après avoir exercé en tant que concepteur électronique (CAO) durant une quinzaine d’années, il se tourna vers le développement web et trouva un emploi dans la foulée de sa formation.
Beaucoup de personnes considèrent que changer de voie professionnelle fait perdre toute valeur à leurs précédentes expériences professionnelles. Il n’en est rien. Chaque expérience professionnelle peut vous aider à identifier le métier qui est fait pour vous. Il vous suffira pour cela de vous re-pencher sur les éléments de ces expériences que vous avez particulièrement appréciés. A défaut de démontrer un savoir-faire, votre vécu professionnel pre-reconversion vous permettrait de démontrer votre savoir-être à votre futur employeur.
Pour valider vos points forts professionnels, vos motivations ainsi que les contours de votre reconversion professionnelle, un bilan de compétences vous sera utile. Afin de vous guider dans les démarches administratives à mener pour bénéficier de ce bilan, adressez-vous au service des ressources humaines de votre société ou directement des organismes de formation privés. Si vous êtes demandeur d’emploi, il vous sera nécessaire de déposer votre demande de bilan de compétences auprès de Pôle Emploi ou de votre organisme référent (Cap Emploi, Association Pour l’Emploi des Cadres…).
Le bilan de compétences vous permettra aussi d’identifier les compétences à acquérir pour réussir votre reconversion et donc les formations à suivre. Nombre de salariés en reconversion professionnelle optent pour des formations courtes et à distance. Objectif : acquérir des compétences rapidement grâce à un fonctionnement suffisamment flexible pour coller à leurs emplois du temps. Cela se révèle d’autant plus intéressant lorsque ces formations sont diplômantes. Donnant accès à un diplôme reconnu, les parcours de formation d’OpenClassrooms ont été pensés pour répondre à cet objectif de reconversion professionnelle efficace et flexible.
Nous en sommes convaincus, le succès de votre reconversion professionnelle passera par une démarche organisée. Votre bilan de compétences réalisé et les compétences à acquérir ainsi que les formations à suivre identifiées, vous voilà déjà sur la voie d’un changement de métier réussi. Il est temps de se pencher sur le financement de votre parcours.
De l’aveu même des Français, les formations continues diplômantes apparaissent comme étant onéreuses. Si cela peut s’avérer vrai pour certaines formations, notamment en école, les parcours universitaires ou encore les formations en ligne peuvent proposer des tarifs moins élevés. Il faut ainsi compter 7 000 euros en moyenne pour un diplôme universitaire en formation continue selon la Conférence des directeurs de service universitaire de formation continue. Les formations diplômantes d’OpenClassrooms sont quant à elles à 300 euros par mois sans engagement.
Ces offres Premium peuvent faire l’objet d’une prise en charge totale ou partielle. C’est notamment le cas dans le cadre d’une reconversion professionnelle financée par Pôle Emploi. Vous pouvez aussi utilisé vos droits à la formation (Compte Personnel de Formation, Formation Professionnelle financée par l’employeur, Organisme Paritaire Collecteur Agréé…).
Si vous êtes demandeurs d’emploi, l’offre Premium Solo d’OpenClassrooms peut être intégralement prise en charge. N’hésitez pas à parler de nos différentes offres de formations à votre conseiller ou conseillère de retour à l’emploi. Il ou elle pourra mettre en place les demandes de prises en charge auxquelles vous pouvez prétendre. Le changement de métier est à la portée de tous et peut être le premier pas vers votre épanouissement professionnel.
L’article Reconversion Professionnelle: Les Etapes Clés est apparu en premier sur OpenClassrooms : le blog.
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