Creative Credits:
Ad Agency: TBWA Paris
Production: Moonwalk/ Knucklehead
Director: Ben Gregor
Executive Creative Director: Faustin Claverie, Benjamin Marchal
Copywriter: Nicolas Roncerel
Art Director: Jérémy Armand
Producer: Mathilde Nanot-Lachkar
Producer: Gaspard Chevance
DoP: Stuart Graham
The TED community has been very busy over the past few weeks. Below, some newsy highlights.
Crime forecasting in Rio. Before the 2016 Olympic Games, worries ran high that crime in Rio might affect the mega-event; one reported attack at the Games (which actually might not have happened) grabbed headlines around the world during the Games. But the longer-running news story is the way crime affects Rio’s locals every single day. How can residents stay safe? Together with Via Science and Mosaico Internet, Robert Muggah’s Igarapé Institute just launched CrimeRadar, a publicly available crime-prediction platform. CrimeRadar uses advanced machine learning to forecast future crime risk and track historical crime tends. The launch is focused on Rio de Janeiro, with plans to take the platform global. (Watch Robert’s TED Talk)
CrimeRadar, developed by Robert Muggah’s Igarapé Institute along with Via Science and Mosaico Internet, uses machine learning to forecast crime in Rio de Janeiro. The software runs on both mobile phones and desktops. Above, an example of the desktop version. Photo: courtesy of Robert Muggah
World of microbes. We’ve all heard some of the implications that microbes have for our health –from pandemic-level bad to the life-changing magic they perform in our guts– but Ed Yong is determined to show us how they influence everything in the world around us. Released August 9, his debut book I Contain Multitudes takes a “microbe’s-eye view of the world” to reveal their role in everything from deep oceans to forests, squid to worms. (Watch Ed’s TED Talk)
Breaking the silence. “We have in this country this dynamic where we really don’t like to talk about our problems. We don’t like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven’t understood what it’s meant to do the things we’ve done historically,” Bryan Stevenson said at TED2012. A desire to change that dynamic is behind his passionate and tireless work to create the first national memorial to victims of lynching. Designed by fellow TED speaker Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group, the memorial was officially announced on August 16. The memorial will be accompanied by a museum at Equal Justice Initiative’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, and both plan to open in 2017. (Watch Bryan’s TED Talk)
A global warning. Close to 3.3 billion people tuned in to watch the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games, but along with the usual celebration and dazzle, viewers were warned about the dangers of climate change. Many performances in the multi-hour spectacle highlighted the crucial role forests have in absorbing greenhouse gases — along with a video describing how rising CO2 levels lead to climate change. TED speaker, forester and sustainability activist Tasso Azevedo served as a consultant during development of the film, joining the elite club of TED speakers who’ve also appeared in Olympics opening ceremonies. (Watch Tasso’s TED Talk)
VR tech for paraplegics. Miguel Nicolelis is one of twenty scientists who published a paper in Scientific Reports detailing a new brain training approach that can induce partial neurological recovery in paraplegic patients. The sample size is small, eight patients, but all of them report being able to use their legs and feel sensation after sessions using an artificial exoskeleton, VR technology, and a brain-machine interface. Originally hoping to use the technique to help the patients regain a sense of control in their lives, the researchers stumbled upon its potential as a recovery tool. (Watch Miguel’s TED Talk)
Design for shared spaces. On August 2, Joe Gebbia announced the official launch of Samara, Airbnb’s own internal design studio, but the startup’s newest branch had already been hard at work designing a prototype home for the Japanese exhibition House Vision. The result, Yoshino Cedar House, houses a community center on its ground floor and accommodations beneath a gabled roof, exploring “how architectural features can engender a deeper relationship between hosts and guests.” But the idea doesn’t end there. Once the exhibition is over, the house will be moved to the rural town of Yoshino and become a bookable Airbnb rental. It will be maintained by the Yoshino community and proceeds will be used to benefit the area, which has been struggling since younger residents moved away. If Yoshino Cedar House is successful, the model may be used to rejuvenate rural communities elsewhere. However, Samara won’t just be involved in architecture; the design studio will work on service design and software engineering projects as well. (Watch Joe Gebbia’s TED Talk)
Women in the World of Wakanda. TED speaker and writer Roxane Gay and poet Yona Harvey, both first time comic writers, will pen a spinoff of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ popular Marvel Comic series Black Panther. The comic will also be set in the fictional African country of Wakanda and will follow Ayo and Aneka, two lovers and former members of the Dora Milaje, the Black Panther’s female security force. In an industry historically dominated by white male voices and characters, “the opportunity to write black women and queer black women into the Marvel universe, there’s no saying no to that,” Gay told The New York Times. (Watch Roxane’s TED Talk)
Advance prep. Jennifer Granholm, the former two-term Governor of Michigan, has been appointed to Hillary Clinton’s White House transition team. Both candidates are allotted offices in Washington and other resources to prepare for their potential administrations. (Watch Jennifer’s TED Talk)
Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.
CNN reporter Kelly Wallace wrote this about the power of the ping:
“Our smartphones are affecting our brains without us even being aware of it. When we hear the ping of an incoming text, social media update or email, our brains get a hit of dopamine, a chemical that leads to an increase in arousal, energizing the reward circuitry in our brains. And that expectation of a reward — Who’s texting me? Who tagged me on social media? — leads to a higher burst of dopamine than the reward itself.”
Wallace interviewed Dr. David Greenfield, a psychiatrist and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, which provides workshops on the abuse of technology. He explains why people would put their own lives and the lives of others in jeopardy–all because they feel this “compulsion” to immediately respond to a ping:
“The parts of the brain that say, ‘OK, how important is this text? Is this text worth dying for? Is this text worth killing somebody else for?’ The answer, of course, logically, would be ‘no,’ but if you have less access to that part of your brain when you’re in this state, which seems to be the case, then you’re not really using your judgment.”
Jennifer Smith knows only too well the heartbreak of losing a beloved parent. Her mother was killed by a distracted driver back in 2008. She founded StopDistractions.org to offer support to victims and their families and increase awareness of this growing problem. She recognizes the challenge of getting people to change their behavior:
“Because of the addictive nature of all of these things, people lack the self-control. I don’t know what the answer is, because our brain is craving this. Our brain is wanting this more than anything else, and it just disregards everything we know.”
“It’s like we need a mass education campaign, but I don’t even think that’s enough to beat out this reward system we’re getting in our brain when we’re like, ‘Ooh, something’s going on. I want to see what it is.’”
But taking your eye off the road for even a second can have lasting consequences. Matt Boeve was widowed in 2014.
His wife died because of a distracted driver. It’s well worth thinking about what he had to say:
“People respect that drinking and driving is dangerous. Now, we just have to know that phones are (dangerous) too. and take responsibility for our actions, just like we take responsibility for buckling in our kids and not getting behind the wheel impaired.”
The post Driving while distracted: Why can’t we ignore the pings? appeared first on The Good For You Network.
That’s the finding from a University of British Columbia study recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
The researchers further noted: “Considering that classroom teachers can take on many roles for elementary school students, including mentor, role model, and parental roles, it is possible that spending most of the school day in interaction with a stressed and burned out teacher is taxing for students and can affect their physiological stress profile.”
Back in 2012, Maurice Elias, Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, wrote for Edutopia about the warning signs of teacher burnout and what can contribute to it: “Teacher burnout is most often an organizational problem and it is insidious because it can remove dedicated teachers from education, sometimes even before they physically leave their jobs. Its solution most often is in creating a positive, supportive school culture and climate where teachers are treated as professionals and given the opportunity to collaborate, problem solve, and get needed, reasonable supports in timely ways.”
“The students need their teachers to stay engaged and fight for them. When the conditions of teaching are bad, the conditions of learning tend to be worse, and children suffer in lasting ways. That’s why the collateral damage of burned-out teachers is burned-up students.”
The post Stress is contagious in the classroom appeared first on The Good For You Network.
By Bob Jones, Chairman and CEO, Old National Bancorp and Alice Korngold, Co-Editor, Giving Thoughts, and author of A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot Old National Bank launched its foundation a decade ago with the goal of strengthening communities and positively impacting lives throughout its footprint. Ten years, […]
Here’s the next post in my blog series on how to scale up your brand. You’ll learn an exercise to identify your core customer target.
I’m writing this series because I recognize there are lots of start-ups, but much fewer scale-ups — and companies often don’t make the leap between the two because of their brand. It’s either vague and unfocused, disconnected from the business, or practically non-existent. The series has already covered How To Conduct A Brand Diagnostic, which helps you evaluate the current strength of your brand through three lenses and identify opportunities to build it and grow. Assess Your Brand Power outlined five critical dimensions of brand power so you can determine which direction you need to take your brand. And Set Your Brand Purpose, Values, and Attributes introduced two Brand Tools to help you develop the first building blocks of your strategic brand platform.
Today I introduce you an exercise that will help you identify your core customer target. Your target is part of your brand positioning. According to Jack Trout and Al Ries, the fathers of positioning, a brand should own a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind — one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. Essential to creating a brand positioning is specifying who those prospective customers are.
I recommend more established, resourced organizations identify their core customer target by undertaking a needs-based segmentation research which involves using quantitative survey data and multivariate analysis to cluster customers into needs-based segments of different value by combining their attitudes and usage occasions. (Learn more about needs-based segmentation here and in my book, What Great Brands Do.)
Start-ups and scale-ups can usually use a less data-based, more creative and simpler approach. You probably already have a sense of your core customers’ demographics (e.g., adults aged18-54) and category behaviors (what they currently buy, where they shop, what products/brands they use). You might even know you want to target customers of a certain economic value (e.g., customers who spend $500+ in our category, companies that have more than 100 employees, etc.)
Your brand platform should describe your core customers with more distinguishing, meaningful characteristics — values, attitudes, needs, goals. Sometimes it is difficult to get at these descriptors without some stimuli; other times, you might be struggling to achieve consensus about your target among different stakeholders. One exercise to help you arrive at a clear, common understanding of your target is to create a Customer Collage.
In the Customer Collage exercise, your brand team members (see the previous post in this series to learn how to assemble your team) use a collection of magazines and each person is asked to:
Then ask each person to present their collage to the team, explaining why they chose the images and title. Once everyone in the group has shared, you should have a rich list of words and ideas. Analyze, synthesize, and prioritize them to create a succinct description or short set of bullet points that describe your target.
example of customer collage
A few tips for a successful exercise:
I have a couple more tools/exercises to help you Scale-Up Your Brand. Look for the next installment in this blog series soon.
previous posts:
The post scale-up your brand — identify your core customer target appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.
Dr. Sally Cram, a consumer adviser for the American Dental Association (ADA), was responding to a recent Associated Press story headlined Medical benefits of dental floss unproven. In an interview with CNN, Dr. Cram referred to the ADA’s Mouth Healthy website, which makes the following points:
“Although recent news reports have questioned the benefits of cleaning between your teeth, using an interdental cleaner (like) floss is an essential part of taking care of your teeth and gums.”
“Also referred to as periodontal disease, gum disease is caused by plaque, the sticky film of bacteria that is constantly forming on our teeth.”
“When you eat or drink foods containing sugars, the bacteria in plague produce acids that attack tooth enamel. The stickiness of the plague keeps these acids in contact with your teeth and over time the enamel can break down. This is when cavities can form.”
“Flossing may also help prevent gum disease and cavities.”
And what’s good for your oral health is believed to benefit your overall well-being. As Dr. Cram explained:
“A prevailing opinion among the public for many years is that a tooth is just a tooth. Now we are understanding that when you have inflammation and disease in your mouth, the mouth is connected to your whole body, and inflammation can spread to the rest of the body.”
“If you have a history (of heart disease) in your family, you need to be a little more careful to make sure you are brushing (at least twice a day), flossing (once a day) and having regular checkups.”
Still thinking about whether you need to floss every day?
Dr. Mathew Messina, an Ohio dentist who is also an adviser to the ADA, had this recommendation for flossing skeptics: Brush first, then floss to see that brushing can’t get to all the food particles trapped between the teeth.
The post Stopped flossing? Teeth still vital to overall health appeared first on The Good For You Network.
Ten years earlier, Arthur “Tom” Thomas was in dire need of a heart transplant. He received the heart of Michael Stepien, Jeni’s father, who tragically had been murdered.
While the two families had corresponded over the years, it wasn’t until the night before Jeni’s big day that they finally met. Jeni’s sister, Michelle, described the emotional meeting this way: “Just hugging him made me feel like I was close to my dad again, which on this day was perfect. It was what I needed.”
Imagine what it was like for Jeni, when Thomas took her hand and placed it on his wrist so she could hear the beating of her dad’s heart: “It’s just like having my dad here and just better because we get to share the story with other people and you know that other people see that organ donors do matter.”
The post Man Who Received Bride’s Father’s Heart Walks Her Down The Aisle On Her Wedding Day appeared first on The Good For You Network.
Wildlife filmmakers Beverly and Dereck Joubert spoke at TEDWomen 2010 about their commitment to saving Africa’s big cats from extinction. The biggest factor that threatens these majestic animals: trophy hunters.
Dereck and Beverly Joubert have been living in the bush in Botswana, making wildlife and conservation films together, for more than 30 years. Their films have shaped an intimate and profound narrative about the interconnected relationship among people, animals and the land, adding layers of understanding based on years of close and constant observation of animal behavior. (Their latest film, The Soul of the Elephant, was just nominated for an Emmy.)
This summer, TEDWomen host Pat Mitchell visited the Jouberts in one of the Great Plains safari camps and preserves they founded: Great Plains Conservation, launched a few years ago in Botswana and Kenya. Mitchell sends this timely report — Wednesday, August 10, it turns out, is World Lion Day.
Out on a game drive at Great Plains Conservation in Botswana: From left, filmmaker Dereck Joubert, TEDWomen host Pat Mitchell, Mitchell’s husband Scott Seydel, and filmmaker Beverly Joubert.
On this visit, we talked about how much has happened since their 2010 TEDWomen talk about their Big Cats Initiative. I well remember how they stunned the TEDWomen audience, describing the shocking decline in big cat populations in Africa. They told us that the number of lions had gone from about 450,000 when they were growing up to less than 45,000 in 2010 – a literal decimation – with similar declines in cheetah and leopard populations. Sadly, they told me now, the number has declined even further since then, and is approaching 20,000.
The Jouberts told me they still receive hundreds of messages a week about their TED Talk. This talk, along with their films about the lions of Duba Plains and the leopards they’ve tracked over many years, have raised public awareness about the threats to the big cats: habitat encroachment; community pressure, where conflicts arise between animals and people; and, of course, the biggest single factor, hunting. The Jouberts helped lead the fight to ban hunting in Botswana, and as a result the animal population, including big cats, is increasing here.
But in many other countries in Africa – where big cats are an important attraction in the safari experiences that bring more than $27 billion a year into local economies – at least five lions are lost per day. Working with the National Geographic Society on the Big Cats Initiative, the Jouberts are committed to changing that.
Meanwhile, they told me, they have a new cat film in production for Nat Geo Wild — not about big cats this time, but the smaller ones, the ones we call “domesticated.” The film will explore behavioral links between the cats we pet and love in our homes and the cats we admire from a safe distance.
TEDWomen host Pat Mitchell shares this epic selfie with a lion spotted at Great Plains.
At this year’s TEDWomen conference in October, I’ll be sharing updates, ideas and perspectives from the front lines of conservation, in Africa and in many other places. These battles to sustain our natural environments are being fought by champions like the Jouberts, who are seeking a better balance between us and the world we inhabit.
Main theater passes are still available for TEDWomen 2016, to be held in San Francisco October 26-28. Find out more about TEDWomen 2016: It’s About Time >>
A view over the Old Square of Homs, looking towards the Old Souk, taken from the remains of Marwa and Ghassan’s destroyed architecture studio. Photo: Marwa Al-Sabouni, 2016.
At the TEDSummit in June, we featured a talk by a young Syrian architect, Marwa Al-Sabouni. In it, she shares an important and original insight about how the roots of conflict can be traced, among other better-studied reasons, to misdirected and divisive urbanism. She offers the example of her own country, where violent conflict has been raging and spreading for more than five years now, destabilizing the whole region and driving millions of refugees into the neighboring countries and, more recently, Europe.
Marwa herself, however, could not travel to our conference to give her talk, because she lives in Homs, a city in the central-western part of Syria. Traveling outwards isn’t easy, to say the least, and there is no guarantee of being able to travel back. And with her family, she’s determined to stay despite the dangers.
Homs is today a half-destroyed city. Reporters have equated it to Berlin after World War II. Before the war, the province’s population was nearly 2 million people; it is down by more than half now. “Almost everyone we knew has left,” says Marwa, who’s 35. With her husband Ghassan, 43, and their daughter Naya and son Ayk (11 and 8, respectively), she’s among those who have stayed. “We were lucky: our house is still standing,” she adds candidly. The small architecture studio she and Ghassan ran in the center of town before the war, however, is a ruin, only rubble surrounding what’s barely recognizable as a whiteboard.
Marwa Al-Sabouni photographed earlier this year in Homs with her husband, Ghassan, their daugther Naya and son Ayk.
To bring Marwa’s idea to TED, therefore, we resolved to record the talk over the Internet. Which meant dealing with unstable connectivity, electricity cuts and background noise. More on that below.
I discovered Marwa Al-Sabouni during one of my “reading storms” last Spring. I’ve curated the TEDGlobal conferences for 11 years, as well as many other TED events, and in the process of designing the speaker programs I’ve come to develop the habit of doing research in waves. While I work with a first group of speakers, I collect books and field notes and clippings from newspapers, journals, blogs and social media about other potential speakers. Something would pique my interest online or offline. I would visit a lab or meet a scientist or artist and take notes. A TED community member would point me to something intriguing. All goes into a folder that, after a while, may contain ideas for dozens of potential TED talks. When enough ideas have accumulated, I then go off for a few days and “storm” (for lack of a better word) that folder, reading voraciously through a wide variety of topics and researching them with my assistant Katerina Biliouri, establishing priorities and connections and imagining possible narratives. That’s how the speaker programs come together.
One of those articles was a profile of this young Syrian architect who had just published a book written during the war, while living in the middle of, called The Battle for Home. I picked it up and read it, and found, first, an amazing story of courage and resilience, of insight and hope. But the core of the book is a convincing study on how communities move apart, mixed urban fabrics turn into segregated islands, and living together morphs into sectarian hatred. The Syrian war has many roots — political, social, religious and economic. Marwa’s book highlights another cause that has been overlooked: the role played by decades of mismanaged architecture and divisive urban planning. A sentence from her talk summarizes her main argument: “From my point of view, losing the sense of belonging to a place and the sense of sharing it with someone else has made it a lot easier to destroy.”
Page after page, it became obvious that there was a potential TED Talk here. Not only for the provocative originality of her insights. Her reasoning also maps with similar developments in other parts of the world — reading some chapters of her book, it’s easy to think for instance of the marginalized suburbs, the banlieues, of Paris or Brussels. Furthermore, understanding how divisive urban planning can create divisions in society may be the only way to prevent this kind of bad planning from happening again.
While the book was fascinating, I didn’t know whether Marwa could tell the story in the form of a talk. A friend who’s published by the same house introduced me to her publisher, Thames & Hudson in London, who after a discussion put me in touch with her. We started emailing, then talking over video calls, and I learned to know a brilliant, optimistic, very articulate woman. She told me that life and economic activity have been slowly coming back to the least-destroyed parts of Homs since the beginning of the year. Ghassan, Marwa and their kids live on a second-floor apartment overlooking rows of small shops and workshops. When the war broke out, they were mostly relying on Internet cafés for their electronic communication, but the fighting took connectivity with it for long stretches of time, and power blackouts weren’t kind to the computers. Only a couple of years ago they got a friend to bring them a laptop from the UAE, and managed to set up a capricious connection at home.
While working on successive drafts of the talk, which focuses on architecture, the conversations were often about daily life during the war. “From 2012 to the beginning of 2015, fighting was very intense. Bombing and shelling were relentless. We almost learned to differentiate the weaponry just by their ‘tone’. There were snipers. At times even birds and cats had fled the city,” she told me. While their studio was right where most destruction happened, their home was in another neighborhood, a less-targeted one. “We got a few bullets inside the kitchen, broken windows from the shock of shelling. We spent most of the time indoors and never went out after dark. When the walls shook during the night, we called it a ‘noisy night.’ Garbage filled the streets. The cold winters were colder without heating — there was no fuel, and only a few hours of electricity which, like water and gas, was scarce and expensive. At a certain point, these essentials became the only things people talked about: how to find them, how to cope.”
“There were times when we had to bathe using a pot, and read using candles” until LED batteries arrived. People who were sick got sicker because hospitals weren’t functioning, “and the Red Crescent with its humble resources was the main help.” Ghassan and Marwa had no car, but those who did “struggled to find gas, and often it would be mixed with other substances, thus ruining the engines, for which there were no spare parts.” That statement applies more generally to almost any kind of goods. “If they existed,” she says, “the quality was very bad, the prices very high, and the one who had them generally had very bad manners.”
To pay those prices — to keep going during the worst period of the war — Ghassan scraped together some small income and his brother sent help from abroad, and the family drained their small savings.
In late 2015, things in Homs started getting gradually better, with a ceasefire agreed between the government and the rebel factions. “Until last year, clothes were mostly damaged or second-hand, people would buy a pair of torn pants and fix them. Now there are more goods, those who had stalls in the old city market now sell off shacks on the streets. The quality is still bad though.” There are now makeshift hospitals, schools and other facilities, mostly located in the residential buildings that are still standing.
The obvious question at this point is: have Ghassan and Marwa ever thought of leaving, like so many others? “No. We believe that staying was the right choice for our family,” she said, making me marvel at their bravery.
It is absolutely remarkable that Naya and Ayk managed to never miss a day of school despite the war, thanks to the presence of a small school very close to their home. They now attend a bigger one farther away, and “are both very good”, says their mother. Before the war, they were into art. Naya took violin and drawing lessons, Ayk preferred the piano, “but all had to stop because there were no more good teachers and no instruments”. Marwa has recently started teaching architectural design to second-year students at a private university in Hama, about 40 kilometers from Homs (the main road is now blocked and she has to take a much longer detour). Ghassan juggles several small jobs to support the family, including a tiny bookstore that he and Marwa opened recently, having found a way to procure books every few weeks from a handful of publishers, mostly in English, through a wholesaler in Damascus. “We’re making a little money from it, enough to keep it going, but our main goal is to make a small cultural contribution to restoring some normalcy in the town; people tell us that they see it as a sign of the worst being over,” she told me during one of our conversations.
A few weeks before the TEDSummit, with our video team in New York, across seven time zones, we made several attempts at recording Marwa’s talk, over the Internet, from her home in Homs. We tried at different times of the day, because the quality of the connection would vary greatly. We used different types of videoconferencing software. At moments, Marwa’s voice would disappear for a few seconds, the light would change in her home, and a new noise would signal that the grid had gone off and the generators had kicked in. At other times, connectivity was so bad that it was impossible to distinguish Marwa’s words. Making the recording more difficult were the noises of the town, the honking of cars and the racket of trucks. But accustomed to poor connectivity, she persevered, speaking to us — to the old camera attached to her laptop — over and over, with Ghassan helping out to make sure things were working at their end.
We finally got the full talk onto our hard drives. She appears in her living room, wearing a purple headscarf, against the backdrop of two framed drawings by her children. We had to apply filtering software to improve the quality of the sound. Our video editors added photos and images, some of them aerial shots of the city, courtesy of UNHCR. And the brilliant TED volunteer translators worked fast to get the first subtitles (in Arabic, of course) ready before the talk was screened at the conference (in the meantime, nine other languages have been added).
It is an important talk. Fully worth 10 minutes and a half of your time. Watch it here.
Bruno Giussani is the European director of TED and the curator of TEDGlobal and TEDSummit.
*reSET is the only Connecticut organization to receive the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Growth Accelerator Competition Award, announced by President Obama on August 4th, 2015.
