In his TED Talk, Dave Meslin wondered: What would happen if Nike advertised sneakers in the same way local governments announced important information — with long, bland, black-and-white newspaper ads filled with jargon?

“Apathy as we think we know it doesn’t actually exist,” said Meslin, a local organizer in Toronto. “People do care, but we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in the way.”

Across Canada, Natasha Letchford — a Deputy Municipal Clerk in North Vancouver — stumbled on Meslin’s talk on Facebook. She found herself highly inspired, in part because she wanted to prove it wrong.

“One of reasons I went into local government was because I truly believe that I make a difference. So when Dave Meslin said that government is in some ways trying to deny people an opportunity to involved, I disagreed with him on that,” she says. “I took it as a bit of a challenge.”

“We in local government get so focused on making sure that the water’s turned on and making sure that the garbage gets taken away that when it comes to something like statutory notices … it becomes ‘that’s just the way we’ve always done it.’”

As she puts it, “We’re not going out of our way to deny people the opportunity to understand what’s going on. We just weren’t making the time to re-think our standard statutory notices.”

Just before Letchford watched this talk, the senior executive team in North Vancouver’s city hall had asked employees to think about year-long projects. So Letchford decided to update North Vancouver’s notices and signage.

In an email to the team, she wrote: “I wanted to share something I’ve been struggling with: how do we meet our legislative requirements for notice, yet not put people to sleep with overly legal black-and-white newspaper ads, or, simply have them ignored? This TED talk does a great job of explaining what local governments do wrong in regards to notice and how we might fix it.”

It wasn’t hard to get the go-ahead to redesign North Vancouver’s newspaper notices and “posted property” signs, Letchford says. In general, she aimed for far fewer words, going back to legislation in order to figure out the minimum that were required. She combed out “legalese” and redundant information, and upped point sizes, so that signs would actually be readable from a car. And she began including images of what the proposed property would look like.

North Vancouver has gotten great feedback on the redesigned notices and signs so far — including one very sincere form of flattery: Letchford has noticed that greater Vancouver has started rethinking its public notices too.

A before newspaper notice in North Vancouver. And a sample after.

A before posted notice in North Vancouver. And a sample after.

Mikko Hypponen speaks just last week at TEDxBrussels, expressing outrage at the NSA.

“We already knew this.” “It’s necessary for the War on Terror.” “Other countries are doing it too.” “But I have nothing to hide.” These are the most common reasons people express for not feeling outrage over the revelations this year that the United States’ National Security Agency has been involved in widespread surveillance.

Mikko Hypponen: How the NSA betrayed the world’s trust — time to act

In today’s blistering talk, security expert Mikko Hypponen shares why he is hopping mad about the NSA’s actions, and why every user of the internet should be equally enraged. Because at the end of the day, he says, these rationalizations obscure a shocking fact: because the world relies on American companies for its information needs, virtually every user of the internet is being watched.

Digital privacy is, obviously, something on many of our minds. Below, a collection of articles, think pieces, op-eds and TED Talks on the state of digital privacy, some that echo Hypponen’s vigor and some that offer differing opinions.

1. The story that started it all. In June, when journalist Glenn Greenwald first broke the story in The Guardian that the NSA was collecting Verizon phone records for millions daily, and that the Prism program was tapping into the data of major tech companies, some were riveted and outraged while some tuned out because the news at first glance didn’t sound shocking. So, in case you missed them, read the initial stories that would eventually make Edward Snowden a household name. While Greenwald just announced that he is leaving The Guardian after 14 months of reporting this story, for now, his column “On Security and liberty” is a great resource for the latest revelations in just how far this surveillance goes. The most recent articles: “NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users” and “NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel.”

2. The deep look at the data. The New York Times and The Guardian have just completed a pair of in-depth analyses of the documents they received from Snowden in June. Both concluded that no information, no matter how small or seemingly irrelevant, escaped the NSA’s purview. The New York Times described the NSA’s strategic plan as that of an “electronic omnivore… eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets.” According to the leaked documents, only 35% of the NSA’s efforts are focused on collecting information on terrorist activities. The NSA is spying on both friends and foes, using information to gain “diplomatic advantage” over US allies like France and Germany, and “economic advantage” over growing economies like Japan and Brazil.

3. A new revelation this week: evidence that the NSA and (its British counterpart) GCHQ hacked Google and Yahoo. In his talk, Hypponen points out how strange it is that, while leaked documents show the exact dates that the NSA began monitoring major American providers, many of these providers had also stated publically that they hadn’t given backdoor access. Just days after Hypponen’s talk was delivered, new evidence emerged that Google and Yahoo had indeed been hacked — not by tapping into the software, but by tapping into their private networks via leased fiber. This Washington Post article gives a nice explanation of how we know that the NSA had access to internal cloud data from these companies. And read Google’s hopping mad response to this news, which they call “industrial scale subversion.” A member of the TED tech team points out that this doesn’t necessarily support the solution Hypponen shares in his talk — to create alternatives to American providers. “This was not happening just within the US, but on international soil as well,” he explains.

4. A valid question: who is watching the watchers? In late October, another new wrinkle in this story emerged, which Hypponen mentions in his talk — that the NSA was monitoring the telephones and emails of 35 world leaders, including Angela Merkel of Germany, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Felipe Calderón of Mexico. And apparently, President Barack Obama did not sign off on this … or even know about it until an internal review in the wake of the NSA revelations this summer. Here, the Washington Post breaks that story, while John Cassidy of the New Yorker thinks more deeply about what it means, writing, “From the very beginning of this, the biggest question has been about the supervision—or lack of supervision—of the spying agencies: Who watches the watchers?”

5. Another interpretation of NSA outrage: a battle for power on the internet. In this talk from TEDxCambridge, security expert Bruce Schneier (the man who pointed out “The security mirage”) gives a fascinating analysis of why revelations of NSA, GCHQ and other government surveillance programs are so shocking — because they represent a shift. For the first part of the internet’s history, the medium gave power to those traditionally without it — to individuals and grassroots organizers. But now, the internet is increasingly becoming a tool for traditional powers like governments and international corporations. So where does this leave the majority of citizens? Stuck in the middle, says Schneier. (Bonus: Read both Schneier and Hypponen’s initial take on the revelations of NSA surveillance, given to the TED Blog this summer.)

6. An alternative cloud service. In his talk, Hypponen ends with a call for people outside of the United States to band together to create Open Source, secure alternatives to American internet companies. And Hypponen’s company, F-Secure, has just launched one such alternative: Younited, a personal cloud service hosted in Finland, which has strict privacy laws. Hypponen writes of the service, “It’s high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.”

7. But is Open Source the answer? TED’s tech team is not convinced. “I’d rather trust an open source project than a closed one any day of the week. But Open Source is not a silver bullet,” says one team member. “You can see even back in 2003 people tried to back door the Linux kernel. This patch was submitted in a strange way so it was caught but the code looks so innocent that if it was part of a normal merge it might not have been caught. Those three lines of code would give anyone root access — god access on linux systems. As of 2012, there are over 15 million lines of code.” Just for fun, he suggests watching this YouTube clip of what happened recently when the creator of the Linux kernel was asked if he has been approached by the NSA about giving backdoor access, as it will definitely scare you. And another team member agrees: “The solution is not so much Open Source and governments, but probably strengthening the whitehat community around Open Source.”

8. Another rebuttal to Hypponen: why we can’t cut off the data flow between the U.S. and the world. Cameron Kerry, the General Counsel of the US Department of Commerce, recently gave a speech warning against a solution like the one Hypponen forwards. According to the blog The Hill, Kerry argues that cutting off the flow of data between Europe and the United States would be a mistake. “It would cause significant and immediate economic damage,” he says. “Moreover, it would lead to loss of competitiveness on both sides, as other economies around the world that embrace open Internet architectures and freedom to experiment with data analytics offer havens for innovators … Our economic future is at stake in our international engagement.” (Note: Kerry will speak soon at TEDxBeaconStreet.)

9. The end of the internet? Security experts are echoing Kerry’s concerns: according to The Guardian, they are now warning that this data collection policy might lead to the dissolution of the Internet as we know it. Countries like Brazil, Germany and India have begun encouraging regional online users to route their data locally rather than over the monitored US and UK servers. Indian government employees, for example, have been advised not to use the US-based Gmail, and to type up sensitive documents on typewriters, rather than on a computer. For a system that is based on interconnectivity, the implications of a fractured and localized Internet pose a threat to the network, global economies, and our access to information.

9. In defense of the program. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are standing firmly in support of the NSA surveillance program, insisting that it is effective and necessary. General Keith B. Alexander, director of the NSA, said last month that he saw no effective alternative to the government’s program of collecting electronic metadata in the fight to prevent terrorism. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, published an op-ed in USA Today strongly defending the program, arguing that the program has been effective in helping to prevent terrorist plots against the U.S. and its allies. And, for the first time, information collected by the NSA is being used to build a criminal case around a suspected terrorist. Jamshid Muhtorov, who is accused of supporting the Islamic Jihad Union, was informed that data collected in his private communications was used to arrest him. This case is expected to precipitate further legal action and possibly head to the Supreme Court.

11. Other major threats to privacy: facial recognition, social media, and cell phone GPS. In his recent TED Talk, “Why privacy matters,” behavioral economist Alessandro Acquisti sounded a warning bell on the fact that facial recognition abilities are exponentially improving while, meanwhile, the line between personal and public is blurring via social networking sites. In his talk, he warns that we are about to have an Adam and Eve moment — where all of a sudden, we realize we aren’t wearing any clothes. “Any personal information can become sensitive information,” he says. (Read the TED Blog story: The future of facial recognition.) In another chilling TED Talk, “Your cell phone company is watching,” German politician Malte Spitz shares what happened when he asked his cell phone company to share the data they were collecting on him. The result: 35,830 lines of code that added up to a nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.

Liz Jacobs contributed heavily to this article.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:15)

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I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called Blink, and it’s about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. (laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it’s not really about happiness- so I decided instead I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years. A man who is a great personal hero of mine, someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for re-inventing spaghetti sauce.

Howard is- (holds hand slightly below shoulder level)- Howard’s about this high, and he’s round, and he’s in his sixties, and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he keeps a- has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he’s a great aficionado of medieval history. And he, by profession, he’s a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship.

But- (laughter) Howard- As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was- this is many years ago, back in the early 70s- one of his first clients was Pepsi. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, you know, we- there’s this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We’d like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi, in order to have the perfect drink. Right?

Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that’s what Howard thought. ‘Cause Pepsi told him, look, we’re working with a band between 8 and 12%. Anything below 8% sweetness is not sweet enough, anything above 12% sweetness is too sweet. We wanna know, what’s the sweet spot between 8 and 12. Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it’s very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness- 8%, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12- and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration. Right? Really simple.

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all the sudden he realizes- it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola’s not that easy, you know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way, you know, let’s just make an educated guess, and they simply point and they go for 10%, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, what was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?

And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go- trying to dream up some work for Nescafe. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. And Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and he would say- You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi- you’re wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis. And people would look at him with a blank look, and they would say, what are you talking about? This is craziness. And they would say, you know, move! Next! Tried to get business, nobody would hire him- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression “to a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” This was his horseradish. (laughter) He was obsessed with it!

And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, Mr. Moskowitz- Doctor Moskowitz- we wanna make the perfect pickle. And he said, there is no perfect pickle, there are only perfect pickles. And he came back to them and he said, you don’t just need to improve your regular, you need to create zesty. And that’s where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him, and that was Campbell’s Soup. And this was even more important- in fact, Campbell’s Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell’s made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragu, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s.

Now in the industry, I don’t know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this, but it was, technically speaking- this is an aside- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu. The quality of the tomato paste is much better, the spice mix is far superior, it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way, in fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragu and Prego- you’d have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragu would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That’s called adherence. And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.

So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell’s soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce. By sweetness, by level of garlic, by tartness, by sourness, by tomatoey-ness, by visible solids- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business (laughter)- every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, he went to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, he went to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload. Into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and he gave them, over the course of that two hours, 10 bowls. 10 small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.

At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn’t believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let’s see if we can group these different- all these different data points- into clusters. Let’s see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy, and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said “You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?” And he said yes! (laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, oh my god! We’ve been thinking all wrong! And that’s when you started getting 7 different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil, and- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego, and today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties. Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional (pause)- Extra Chunky Garden. (laughter) That’s Howard’s doing. That is Howard’s gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I’ll explain to you why.

(picture of a bowl of spaghetti with sauce)

Because what Howard did, is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people wanna eat- what will make people happy- is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say “what do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years- 20, 30 years- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (laughter)

People don’t know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, “the mind knows not what the tongue wants.” It’s a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we can not always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee- You know what you’d say? Every one of you would say “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27% of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. Which you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want- that I want a milky, weak coffee. (laughter)

So that’s number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize- it’s another very critical point- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation. Why is this critical? It’s critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right? Used to be, there were two mustards. French’s and Gulden’s. What were they? Yellow mustard. What’s in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics, and what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it’s made in Oxnard, California, and instead of charging $1.50 for the 8 ounce bottle, the way the French’s and Gulden’s did, they decided to charge 4 dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he’s eating the Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone’s take home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It’s to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication, and culture, and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that’s wrong! Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.

Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (laughter) What do I mean by that? For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way- a perfect way- to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction- they don’t give you five options on the reduction. Right? They don’t say, do you want the extra chunky reduction, or do you want the… No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say- you know what? You’re wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion- a Platonic notion- of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It’s blended, it’s thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest Ragus. Which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That’s what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce-A; and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that’s what would please the maximum number of people.

And Howard- and the reason we thought that, other words- people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it’s good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science- through the 19th century and much of the 20th- was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists- were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don’t wanna know how necessarily- just how cancer works, we wanna know how your cancer is different from my cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.

What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. I’ll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is- oh, I’m sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren’t just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee- a type of coffee- a brew- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe 3 or 4 coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just- one of those for each of those individual clusters- your scores would go from 60, to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz. That in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you.

Toni Griffin speaks at TEDCity2.0. Photo: Ryan Lash

Everyone knows Detroit is in trouble. The list of problems assaulting the once-mighty Motor City is long and, from a look at national newspapers, incessantly documented. Most recently, the city filed for bankruptcy; its former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was sentenced to 28 years in prison for public corruption. Since the booming 1950s, the city of Detroit has lost more than a million residents; the vacant lots that now speckle the city form a space about the size of Manhattan.

Toni Griffin: A new vision for rebuilding Detroit

Of course, Detroit’s economic collapse was not solely brought about by bad management, but is the result of larger global economic shifts. In a post-industrial economy, as manufacturing has evolved and established itself overseas, Detroit needs to figure out its new place in the new world.

Many people are optimistic it can be done. In today’s talk, architect and city planner Toni Griffin talks about how she and her team plan to rebuild the city from the ground up through an initiative they’re calling the Detroit Works Project.

“There is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now, and those that want to come,” she says in her talk. “Let’s not focus on what Detroit is, but what it can be.”

As part of this week’s “Invented Here” series, the TED Blog interviewed Griffin about the challenges that Detroit faces as it transitions to a post-industrial economy. The real key, she says: support local entrepreneurship and the burgeoning creative economy. An edited version of our conversation follows:

What’s your involvement with Detroit Works?

I worked on the whole planning piece, which is Detroit Future City, published in December 2012. It’s a series of strategies around six planning elements: economic growth, land use, neighborhoods, city systems, public land and civic engagement.

And where is that project now?

We have a series of strategies for each of these six elements, and now, Detroit Future City’s mission is to partner with the different agencies, nonprofit groups and businesses to implement those strategies. Every sector — from media organizations to corporate business to education — is developing a plan and implementing it.

Obviously there’s a lot going on right now related to the city’s bankruptcy and restructuring. Coming out of the bankruptcy, as difficult as that will be, there is hopefully an opportunity to reconfigure our operations and systems to better support the initiatives of Detroit Future City.

How can you do that?

As an example, we might reconfigure infrastructure such as transportation, water systems, and so on, so it’s better aligned with a more sustainable land-use pattern that promotes density. The goal is to enable neighborhoods in the areas where they’re most viable. What we need to do is realign service delivery, utility systems, transportation systems. For instance, let’s identify the neighborhoods that are dense and active, and make sure they get great bus service.

Detroit has become the poster child for urban decay. How can it build an economy that will survive and thrive in a post-industrial world?

For decades, Detroit has been a mono-economy city, focused on the automobile industry. The region is still very automotive-centered. Both domestic and international automakers have a presence in the Detroit metro region, including two automakers still within the city itself.

There is an opportunity to build on that — for example, by focusing on R&D as it relates to the auto industry and supporting existing small businesses and suppliers. But at the same time, we need to support creating new small businesses and suppliers as part of the larger regional economy.

One of the tenets of Detroit Future City is that it’s not so much about the land use as it is about the city’s larger strategy for economic growth. The key is to build that economic growth within the city limits, so that there’s more revenue generated in the city and for the city — and more opportunities for Detroiters to be employed within the city.

Remember, while Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since its peak in 1950, it’s experienced an even higher percentage of employment losses. We still have many more residents than we have jobs for them. We need to rebalance the ratio of jobs to residents of the city.

As a great step forward. Goldman Sachs just identified Detroit for its 10,000 Small Businesses program. That will link local Detroit businesses to supportive services and access to capital and capacity for growth.

How can Detroit become a meaningful player in the new global economy?

Well, Detroit has always been a member of the global economy as a real driver of the automobile industry. And that industry has never left the region. Parts of it have left the city, but not the region.

So Detroit is still an important international hub for the automotive industry, with international and domestic businesses located in the region.

What we want to remind people is that we need to re-root some of this industry back into the city itself. Detroit has some of the largest educational institutions in the region, as well as companies, including GM’s headquarters. That keeps Detroit as a viable place for continuing to attract business to the region and the city.

And how does your plan try to bring jobs back to Detroit?

One way is through supporting local entrepreneurship, because we believe that entrepreneurship creates a substantial amount of jobs. We’re also focusing on education. When we visited our sister city of Torino, Italy, another auto-industry town, we found it impressive that the educational sector of R&D there related to the innovation and technologies that create new advancements in the automotive sector. We can do the same with Detroit’s education system; it’s a great opportunity to link back to that larger auto industry.

A third sector is to develop the creative class. There’s a great project now called the Tech Town, which is an incubator of creative R&D firms that have the potential to support all kinds of sectors, including automotive and healthcare. This incubator model is also something we learned from Torino, and it gives us an opportunity to expand and support other kinds of sectors.

What have you learned from rethinking Detroit?

What we realized is that Detroit is richer than one economy. In fact, it’s a network of economies. There’s been a lot of attention in the last year on how the downtown and midtown areas are starting to take on an exciting new life. We’re also seeing efforts to create more housing for new tenants to foster more residential living downtown and to bring more employees back into the city by renovating our classic office buildings.

There’s often a tension between encouraging local development and entrepreneurship and also trying to attract new residents to the city. How do you see these dynamics playing out in Detroit?

That’s always a tension in any city. That’s why we want to really highlight local entrepreneurship development, and I think that takes on a very broad scale. Entrepreneurs can be very small firms producing for the automobile industry — but they could also be a sole proprietor doing advertising and marketing or website development. Or they can be young and creative entrepreneurs who are thinking about new ways to be productive in the city.

Given that the city is 82% African-American, there was also an equity issue on the table about how we intentionally tried to reach out and into the local community to find ways to support those local businesses, from the established business in an office building or shopping strip to the sole proprietor working from home.

There’s always a tension between downtown and the neighborhoods, but it helps to have local business owners invest in their own downtown. What we hope to see is a model with opportunities for local neighborhood businesses and local homegrown entrepreneurs to have locations and visibility within the new downtown space.

When can Detroiters expect to start seeing these changes in action?

You’ll already see that if you walk through Woodward Avenue downtown. There are a lot of very local firms there, and we’re beginning to see some local retail stores. There’s an intentional move to bridge the gap between the downtown neighborhood tension and the outsider/insider tension of new local entrepreneurs.

And I think there really are opportunities to overcome that challenge. Shinola, the watch and bike company that I discussed in the talk, is one of those really great examples. The firm decided to move to Detroit, and in doing so, was committed to creating a staff predominantly made up of local Detroiters. That hopefully extends to how they think about their supply chain and how they’ll partner with other local entrepreneurs.

In the face of global crises like climate change and refugee migration, it seems sometimes that nation-states are hopelessly gridlocked and unable to act. At TEDGlobal 2013, political theorist Benjamin Barber laid out a counter-proposal: Go local. Big cities are demonstrating a remarkable capacity to govern themselves democratically and efficiently in networks, both locally and globally. They share certain unique qualities that can elude bigger entities: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, creativity and cooperation. Mayors implement practical change every day. So, Barber suggests, we should give mayors more power — including with big global issues.

In Barber’s 2014 book If Mayors Ruled the World. Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities he proposes the Global Parliament of Mayors, a global governance platform that brings together collective urban political power. Now, it’s become a reality. From September 10–12, some 100 mayors of major cities and representatives of urban networks will meet in The Hague.

In this Q&A, Barber shares details on the need for a Global Parliament of Mayors, the upcoming gathering, and what it took to turn this dream into a reality.

Professor Barber, give us the cheat sheet on the Global Parliament of Mayors: Why is it needed?

Traditional nation-states and international organizations have become less able to discharge their sovereign responsibility to secure the lives, liberties and property of their citizens, especially in the face of existential threats like climate change. It’s a sort of sovereign default, and it has left cities to carry the responsibility for sustainability and other global goods. For that, they need a global urban governance network that is both democratic and efficient — something that goes further than the urban networks we already have. Namely, a Global Parliament of Mayors that can offer cities a megaphone for their collective urban voice and a platform for common urban policy-making.

You are basically making a counterintuitive claim that, in a globalizing world, democracy’s best hope is not found in a global government, but locally in cities.

It is only counterintuitive if you assume local and global are antonyms. But in the new world of interdependence, local problems are global problems, and municipal goods are global goods. Think about refugees, pandemic disease, inequality, crime, markets, terrorism and of course, climate change; These are all global challenges that manifest themselves locally in cities. Problems and solutions today are “glocal”: at once both local and global. Indeed, the irony is that states tend to be bordered, insulated and parochial, while cities have become open, transactional, urbane and cosmopolitan — the carrier of universal values. That is why urban networks have been more successful in addressing global challenges than nation-states.

Who will participate in the Hague gathering?

Because it is the inaugural convening of a new democratic governance body with a global compass, we are gathering representatives of more than 100 cities from around the world, North and South, developed and developing, wealthy and poor, large and small — as few as 200,000 residents. We also seek representation by mayors, rather than their deputies, so that the crucial decisions have the full legitimacy of mayoral participation.

What was the journey from the idea of the GPM to actually convening it?

I proposed the governance body in the final chapter of my book If Mayors Ruled the World. Almost immediately following its publication and my TED Talk in 2013, I began to hear from sitting mayors, including those in Seoul, Los Angeles, London, Hamburg, Boston and elsewhere, inquiring about the idea with interest and enthusiasm. This interest resulted in planning meetings in Seoul with Mayor Park Won-soon, in New York City with the publication CityLab and in Amsterdam with several mayors in The Netherlands, including Mayor Eberhard van der Laan, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and Mayor Jozias van Aartsen. In the summer of 2015, Mayor van Aartsen proposed that The Hague be the site for the inaugural convening in September 2016. The process, led by visionary mayors, was laborious but unwavering, animated by our small GPM team in New York and facilitated by our advisory committee and the City of The Hague.

How is the event structured? What kind of discussions will take place?

Over a three-day weekend, we will hold four parliamentary sessions, starting with three plenaries, on climate change (“The City and Nature”), refugees (“Arrival Cities”) and governance (“The City and Democracy”). Each plenary will aim to put a few key practical proposals for common action on the table. Proposals will call for opt-in by individual cities, rather than top-down imperatives, and will be prepared in advance by our Advisory Committee, with mayors debating and amending them with the assistance of experts from relevant urban networks, such as the C40 Climate Cities and EFUS (the European Forum for Urban Security). A final plenary session will offer the opportunity for formal ratification of agreed-upon proposals.

What do you hope happens during this inaugural gathering?

The two principal aims of the GPM are to establish the legitimacy and continuity of the new global organization of mayors as a governance body — including future meetings and a digital platform where mayors can meet online — and to demonstrate the capacity of cities to establish common policies in critical domains, such as climate change and refugees, that can serve their citizens when nation-states are gridlocked and unable to act. Cities have both a responsibility and a right to act on behalf of their citizens in critical areas of sustainability and liberty when states do not or cannot act. Some mayors are willing to act autonomously while others prefer a model of full cooperation with states. Yet in the end, citizens have a right to life and liberty and sustainability too, which means that cities have a right to govern on their behalf when that is the only road to sustainability. The argument is laid out in our document “Declaration of the Rights of Cities and Citizens.”

You have a new book coming out early next year. Can you give us a preview?

It will be titled Cool Cities: Urban Sustainability in a Warming World, from Yale Press. It is a kind of sequel to the previous book and looks at the role cities have played in combating climate change through existing urban networks like the C40 Climate and ICLEI and in the new Global Parliament of Mayors. It makes the case for mayors governing collaboratively to curb greenhouse gases and promote decarbonization. And it shows that they can go well beyond the COP21 agreement reached in Paris last December in getting real results.

Watch Benjamin Barber’s TEDGlobal talk proposing the Global Parliament of Mayors >>

Michael Metcalfe shares a shocking idea at TED@StateStreet: printing money to ensure we meet our goals for global aid.

“What corporate management team doesn’t say that they’re open to innovation?” says Michael Metcalfe, the senior managing director of State Street, the financial institution based in Boston.

In November, Metcalfe saw his company do something concrete about building a culture of openness among employees and sharing ideas across the organization. He found himself onstage in front of 350 of his colleagues at TED@StateStreet, delivering a talk on a daring idea: Governments should print money for aid to other nations. His talk, “We need money for aid, so let’s print it,” was published today on TED.com.

Michael Metcalfe: We need money for aid. So let’s print it.

Metcalfe was one of 12 State Street employees, from all levels of the company, who delivered talks at TED@StateStreet, one of our TED Institute events, a TED-curated program that unlocks good ideas from inside our partner organizations. At TED@StateStreet, themed “Forces of Change,” graphic designer Joe Kowan serenaded the audience and shared his foolproof method for beating stage fright. State Street’s chief analytics officer, Roger Stein, talked about mitigating risk in unexpected situations in his talk, “A bold new way to fund drug research.” And information security manager David Grady brought to life the corporate epidemic of overcrowded meetings with a wry sense of humor — and shared what can be done about it.

Building a culture of innovation is an important aspiration, especially given a recent Gallup poll that found that two-thirds of employees feel dispirited and disengaged at work. While stale attempts to boost employee engagement can leave people feeling cynical, authentic ones can reinvigorate a sense of mission in the workplace.

Alison Quirk, State Street’s Chief Human Resources Officer who also spoke at TED@StateStreet, lays it out this way: “We think about employee engagement in two ways: rational commitment and emotional commitment.” If someone feels like the company is good for their career, they are rationally committed. But emotionally committed employees feel that their work contributes to a shared higher purpose. These employees are more likely to pursue new ideas and they tend to be more productive. Their intellectual buzz attracts more talent to the company.

State Street wants to attract intellectually curious employees, because customers want to trust the person who takes care of their money. As Scott Fitzgerald, an audience member who works in client relations, says, “The value of something like TED@StateStreet is that we’re a people business. [Our clients] deal with our folks on a regular basis. To see State Street investing in their people like that is very positive.”

At the end of TED@StateStreet, Quirk says, she felt a new sense of appreciation for her colleagues: “This is just a cross-section of State Street,” she says. “These are just examples of the kinds of things that people are thinking about that are genius, that are funny, that are so obvious that I wish someone would do something about it.”

Kowan, whose talk earned him a standing ovation, says that beyond what he learned about delivering a great presentation, his talk “has given me a conversation starter with people in the company who I might not have talked to before, from executives to lower levels.”

State Street hopes that conversations like these – between departments and across organization levels – will lead to fresh thinking. After all, a company is more than just 29,0000 employees; it’s thousands of people with individual stories to tell.

Read more about the TED Institute »

Watch all the talks from TED@StateStreet »

At the latest TED@BCG event at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris, a diverse range of speakers took on the theme “to boldly transform.” Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

The future is built by those who see opportunities for change and act on them. At TED@BCG — the latest TED Institute event, held on May 18, 2016, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris — speakers explored what it means to transform boldly. In three sessions of talks, curated and hosted by TED’s Editorial Director, Helen Walters, speakers shared insights about the future of our relationship with nature, the changing makeup of our organizations, the evolving interconnectedness of our economies and more, challenging preconceived notions and embracing change as the only constant.

After opening remarks from Rich Lesser, BCG’s president and CEO, the talks in Session 1 challenged us to look around to see how we might create change here and now, in our workplaces, teams and lives.

Develop a relationship with your curiosity. Not everyone has a friendly rapport with the question mark. Culture critic Laura Fox believes that to become intimately acquainted with knowledge, we must become comfortable with the words, “I don’t know.” By expressing ignorance and confronting our fear of judgement, she says, we can catalyze the painful, gritty task of admitting inexperience into growth — both personally and intellectually.

Want to get ahead? Be paranoid. Lars Fæste helps CEOs transform their businesses, and over the years, he’s noticed something troubling: Managers tend to settle with success instead of aggressively looking for ways to transform. With today’s unprecedented rate of change, transformation is the key to staying ahead of competition and volatile market trends. In other words, If it ain’t broke, fix it. “The paranoid, they thrive. Transformation is a necessity, not an option. Either you do it, or it will be done to you.”

Light made by bacteria. Designer Sandra Rey invites us to look to nature to find unique solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. As an example, she describes her own effort to change the way we produce light by using one of nature’s own superpowers: bioluminescence. Using DNA sequences ordered from DNA banks, Rey is developing a technology to create biological lamps by coding genes for bioluminescence in E.coli bacteria. These lamps could not only change the source of our light, says Rey, they could change the entire paradigm of light: how we produce it, buy it, distribute it, how we use it, and how we regulate it.

Sandra Rey wants to use bioluminescence to change the way we light our homes and cities. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

The fourth manufacturing revolution. Imagine a world where you can buy a custom-made product that’s exactly what you want, with the features you need, the design you prefer, at the same price as a product that’s been mass-produced. According to industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre, a revolution in manufacturing will soon make that possible. Scalabre predicts that new convergences of industry and technology will boost worldwide productivity by a third — and will make consumer proximity the most important factor in manufacturing. “If we play it right,” Scalabre says, “we’ll see sustainable growth in all of our economies.”

Why we must safeguard interconnectivity. The 2008 global financial crisis left much of the world reeling — markets went under, millions of jobs were lost and economic security was deeply compromised — in only a few days. IMF economist Min Zhu urges us to open our eyes to the effects of globalization, and the idea that a country’s size does not equate to economic influence; a small blow in one country can cause lasting damage worldwide. Zhu asks that we protect international financial security by working to understand the complex world around us.

Hallucinatory art, created by a neural net. Can computers create art? Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a principal scientist at Google, where he works with deep neural nets for machine perception and distributed learning. Agüera y Arcas breaks down the equation of perception, showing how computers have learned to recognize images through an iterative process. But when you turn the equation around, asking the computer to generate an image using the same neural network built to recognize them, the results are spectacular, hallucinatory collages that defy categorization. “Perception and creativity are connected,” Agüera y Arcas says. “Anything able to do perceptive acts is able to create.”

What happens when computers learn to do art? Google’s principal scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas showed the TED@BCG audience how computers that were created to recognize images can also now create art. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

In Session 2, speakers recognized that it isn’t enough to just acknowledge and anticipate the changes coming our way, but that we have to face them head on.

An Arab woman’s advice for fellow professionals. The poor, oppressed Arab woman — this tired and derogatory yet popular narrative doesn’t discourage Leila Hoteit. Instead, she uses it as fuel to prove that professional Arab women like her are their own role models, pushing boundaries every day while balancing more responsibilities than their male counterparts. Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother in Abu Dhabi, she shares three lessons: Convert other people’s negative judgment into motivation, actively manage your life to leave work at work — and support fellow women instead of blindly competing against them.

Tracing her career as an engineer, advocate and mother, BCG partner and managing director Leila Hoteit shared three inspirational lessons for professional women. “Success is the best revenge,” she says. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

A DNA revolution. Using DNA, we can create new medicines or make sure our food is safe to eat, but DNA technology has been confined to the ivory tower, until now. “We are living in the era of personal DNA technology,” says Sebastian Kraves, a molecular neurobiologist committed to bringing DNA analysis to the masses. From a truffle farmer analyzing his mushrooms to make sure they are not knockoffs to a virologist mapping the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Kraves shares examples of individuals using personal DNA technology to ask questions and solve problems in diverse fields and environments. “Revolutions don’t go backwards,” he says, and this one is “spreading faster than our imagination.”

Who says change needs to be hard? When transforming your organization, put people first. Change expert Jim Hemerling lays out 5 simple rules to convert company reorganization into an empowering, energizing task: inspire through purpose, go all in, enable people to succeed, instill a culture of continual learning and lead through inclusivity. By following these steps, he suggests, adapting your business to reflect today’s constantly-evolving market will feel invigorating rather than exhausting.

Dark and delicate, chaotic rumble. Classical pianist Naufal Mukumi centered Session 2 with a selection of pieces by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Opening with a dark and delicate melody, he slowly progressed to a chaotic rumble, expertly creating an elegant surrealist tone. Mukumi’s performance was a perfect, soothing intermission for an exciting session.

Naufal Mukumi performs a selection of works by Alexander Scriabin at TED@BCG. Photo: Richard Hadley / TED

The corporate immune system. “Where better to turn for advice than nature — that’s been in the business of life and death longer than any company,” asks BCG’s own Martin Reeves. In his second turn on the TED@BCG stage, Reeves identifies six features — redundancy, diversity, modularity, adaptation, prudence, embeddedness — that underpin natural systems, giving them resiliency and endurance. Applying these principles can mean the difference between life or death for a company too. But in order to think more biologically, we need to change our business mindset and focus less on goals, analysis, efficiency and short-term returns. We need to ask ourselves not only “how good is our game?” but “how long will that game last?”

The future of money. There’s no reason why a coin or a dollar bill needs to have value, except that we’ve decided that it should, says Neha Narula, director of research at the Digital Currency Initiative, a part of the MIT Media Lab. Money is really about the relationships we have with each other; it’s a collective story about value by society, a collective fiction. Analog money, like cash, and digital money, like credit cards, both have some built-in impediments that slow them down (like needing to print or mint hard cash). Now, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Stellar, we’re moving towards a time of programmable money, where anyone can securely pay anyone else without signing up for a bank, asking permission, doing a conversion or worrying about money getting stuck. “Programmable money democratizes money,” Narula says. “By democratizing money, things are going to change and unfold in ways we can’t even predict.”

Finally, in Session 3, speakers laid down the gauntlet to status quo thinking, encouraging us all to do more in whatever ways we can.

A whole-body music composition. Producer, songwriter, beatboxer and vocal arranger MaJiKer uses his whole body to express himself through music. At TED@BCG, he premiered a new piece that combines piano (occasionally played with his foot and head) with beatboxing to craft a catchy, experimental composition.

Harnessing nature’s own designs. Unlike the mere 200-year timespan of modern science, nature has perfected its materials over three billion years, creating materials superior to anything we have managed to produce by ourselves, argues nanobiotechnologist Oded Shoseyov. Shoseyov walks us through amazing examples of materials found across the plant and animal kingdoms in everything from cat fleas to sequoia trees — and the creative ways his team is harnessing these materials for applications as widespread as sports shoes and medical implants.

Transforming the future of two million children. Education innovator Seema Bansal forged a path to public education reform for 15,000 schools in Haryana, India, by setting an ambitious goal: By 2020, 80 percent of children should have grade-level knowledge. The catch? The reforms must be scalable for each school, and function within existing budgets and resources. Bansal and her team found success in low-cost, creative techniques — such as communicating with teachers using SMS group chats — that have measurably improved learning and engagement in the past year.

The commodity of trust. “Every now and then, a truly stellar new technology emerges, and it always takes us to places we never imagined,” says blockchain specialist Mike Schwartz. We witnessed this type of revolution with the combustion engine, the telephone, computers and the Internet, and now blockchain promises to be the next to transform us. Blockchain will commodify trust in the way that the Internet commodified communication, so that “people with no knowledge of each other can interact with confidence and without relying on a trusted third party to do so.” But as with any new technology, there is a steep learning curve and it will take a lot of trial and error to make that future a reality, “In order to shape this future you need to participate. Those organizations that learn how to play in more open and collaborative ecosystems will survive and thrive. Those that don’t probably wont.”

A tiny forest you can grow in your backyard. Forests don’t only have to be far-flung nature reserves, isolated from human life. TED Fellow Shubhendu Sharma brings small, diverse forests back to urban life by flipping the script on engineering: Instead of taking natural resources and turning them into products, he engineers soil, microbes and biomass to kickstart nature’s uninhibited processes of growth. By mixing the right native tree species, Sharma has created 75 dense, thriving man-made forests in 25 cities worldwide.

Reinventing modern agriculture with Space Age technology. How will agriculture expand to feed our growing world in a way that doesn’t deplete resources? Lisa Dyson is working on an idea developed by NASA in the 1960s for deep-space travel — adapting it for use here on Earth. Dyson is using microbes called hydrogenotrophs — super-charged carbon recyclers that can produce nutrients in a matter of hours without sunlight and in small spaces — to create a virtuous, closed-loop carbon cycle that could sustain life on earth. These microbes can produce the building blocks of foods like pasta and bread as well as oils needed for industry. “Let us create systems that keep planet Earth, our spaceship, from not crashing, and let us develop ways of living that will be beneficial to the lives of the 10 billion that will be on this planet by 2050.”

Lisa Dyson wants to use super-charged carbon recycling microbes to change the way we feed the world. Photo: Richard Hadley/TED

Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals — with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy‘s site:

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg — and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about “the bottom billion.”

See the full list of 100 >>

Image: Kelsey Flora, National Geographic Society

Why explore? Why leave the safety of the familiar for the dark and dangerous unknown? The answer is simple: We explore the outer reaches of space, the depths of the ocean and everything in between because they are there. If you have this insatiable curiosity and hunger for a new frontier — no matter your profession or vocation — you are an explorer.

Last week, TED Fellows Asha de Vos, Jedidah Isler, David Lang and Genevieve von Petzinger were named 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorers. This program recognizes explorers of all kinds — educators, storytellers, innovators and scientists alike — who are making a positive impact on the world. Each explorer is awarded $10,000 for their research that covers subjects such as ….

Stopping illegal wildlife trafficking
Turning recycled waste into construction materials
Cracking the dynamics of supermassive, hyperactive black holes
Cataloguing Ice-Age-old cave art
Using 3D surveys to study ancient Egypt
Creating underwater robots for citizen scientists

Read more about each TED Fellow included in this year’s Emerging Explorer class:

Asha de Vos (Watch her TED Talk) is a marine biologist who studies blue whales on the shores of her native Sri Lanka. She specializes in the “unorthodox” kind of whales: small pygmy blue whales that are 1.5 feet shorter than average, feed in warm tropical waters (instead of cold) and have their own distinct acoustic dialect. The northern Indian Ocean contains one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, which makes these whales especially vulnerable to ship strikes and pollution, threatening their survival. One of the biggest obstacles de Vos faces in protecting them? Lack of awareness: “The ocean is very much a vocational space and not a recreational space. The connection to and fascination about the ocean is largely missing,” de Vos says in conversation with Christina Nunez for National Geographic. “People from around the world, but mostly Sri Lankans, write to me and say, ‘I didn’t know we had whales in our waters.’”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Asha de Vos. Photo: Bret Hartman

Jedidah Isler (Watch her TED Talk) is an astrophysicist who studies blazars (blazing quasars): supermassive, hyperactive black holes that weigh up to 10 billion times the mass of the sun. By looking at the physical mechanisms that spur their central jets — powerful particle streams that move at 99.99 percent of the speed of light —  she hopes to uncover some of the fundamental processes of the universe. Jedidah has another passion: increasing diversity in STEM (Watch her TED Talk on the subject). She advocates for early interventions to counteract structural disadvantage. “There are practices and traditions that are currently alive and well in our system that are designed to create an uneven playing field,” she says to Nunez. “I think a lot of things need to happen, from the very top in terms of institutional, systemic change all the way down to very simple family-level, neighborhood-level interventions that can help one find and persist on a path.”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Jedidah Isler. Photo: Ryan Lash

David Lang (Watch his TED Talk) is a maker who wants to create a network of citizen ocean explorers. He co-founded OpenROV, a company working to distribute low-cost underwater robots, and OpenExplorer, a digital platform that allows anyone to document their own adventures. More important than tangible discoveries, Lang says, is fostering a spirit of adventure. “What’s really important to me is just people getting up to the starting line. More people getting that enthusiasm, building this confidence to start exploring,” he says to Nunez.

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer David Lang’s OpenROV underwater robot. Photo: Courtesy of David Lang

As a paleoanthropologist, Genevieve von Petzinger (Watch her TED Talk) is like an art historian who, instead of critiquing van Gogh, studies cave art from the Ice Age. In art-rock sites across Europe, von Petzinger looks at the often-neglected geometric shapes that surround images like animal drawings. She has the catalogued these oddly recurring shapes, creating the first-ever relational database that she hopes to make open source one day. Her studies, she says, may also help her understand exactly when in history humans like us became, well, humans like us. “200,000 years ago, there were people who looked like us and had our brain size, but they didn’t seem to quite be thinking like us yet. I’m trying to understand: When did these people truly become us, and how far back does that actually go?”

TED Fellow and 2016 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain. Photo: Courtesy of Genevieve von Petzinger

In her research, she also hopes to team up with David Lang to potentially explore art in ancient caves that are now under water.

Congratulations to Asha, Jedidah, David and Genevieve!

Parag Khanna speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

It wouldn’t be a conference about dreams without an ode to John Lennon. In this session, we take a cue from his iconic lyric and imagine a world without borders. Get ready for talks on mega-cities and online museums, as well as on the global movement to end poverty, Islamophobia and climate change.

Recaps of the talks in Session 7, “Imagine There’s No Countries,” in chronological order.

Connectivity is destiny. Parag Khanna has brought a new map of the world with him to TED — one defined by connected megacities, not by political borders. “I want you to re-imagine how life is organized on Earth,” he says. “We can start by overcoming some ancient mythology.” That mythology — that geography is destiny — no longer applies because an equally powerful force, one of our own making, is sweeping the planet: connectivity. “We can no longer even think of geography as distinct from it,” Khanna says. “In fact, I believe the two forces are fusing together into what I call ‘connectography.’” This fusion manifests itself in massive investments in infrastructure and the construction of megacities — not dots on a map but vast archipelagos of development stretching hundreds of kilometers. “All of these networks are devoted to one purpose, mankind’s number-one priority in the 21st century: sustainable urbanization,” Khanna says. Transferring knowledge and policy between cities has started to reduce their carbon intensity, and it has the potential to make the world more peaceful. In Asia, the same countries that are building the world’s fastest-growing militaries are also investing billions in each other’s infrastructures and supply chains. “They are more interested in each other’s functional geography than in their political geography,” Khanna says. “By wrapping the world in such seamless physical and digital connectivity, we evolve towards a world in which people can rise above their geographic constraints.”

6 million pieces of art, free to view on your computer. It’s amazing to see masterpieces of art in museums: “When we get access to them, we’re blown away. We fall in love,” says Amit Sood. But for many in the world, it’s impossible to travel to Paris, London, New York and other cultural institutions. Instead, there’s Google’s Art Project, presented today by Sood with help from artist Cyril Diagne. In a joy-filled demo, Sood and Diagne zoom through 6 million images of cultural heritage in high resolution. They show the 211 Vincent van Gogh works in the database, zooming in the details of three versions of a bedroom, held in Amsterdam, Paris and Chicago; they show how, if you want to physically see all 500 Rembrandts in the system, you’ll need to travel 53,000 kilometers (and use 10 tons of CO2 emissions); they show a particularly fun application that captures a face and shows a portraiture match of angle and expression in real time. This project, says Sood, exists because, “You don’t really see kids excited about portrait galleries.”

Amit Sood speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

The real representatives of Islam. Dalia Mogahed hopes that when people look at her in her headscarf, they see a social policy expert and woman of faith. But she knows that many see someone who is “oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist — or just an airport security delay.” Mogahed says her decision to wear the hijab was “a feminist declaration,” and that putting the focus on her inside over her outside felt exhilarating. But then came September 11, 2001. “In a flash, someone else’s actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect.” Mogahed is scared of terrorists too, but she stresses that the generalized fear of Muslims is not only unwarranted — but distracting and dangerous. “People talk about my community kind of like we’re a tumor in the body of America,” she says. If it’s malignant, remove it; if it’s benign, watch it carefully. “But Muslims like all other Americans aren’t a tumor … we’re a vital organ.” Mogahed points out that attendance at a mosque is actually associated with greater religious tolerance — and that the radicalization process begins with isolating people from their communities. “ISIS has as much to do with the Koran as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity,” she says. “We would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people.”

A global network of engaged people. When Hugh Evans was in high school, he took a transformative trip to the Philippines, where he befriended a young man named Sunny Boy. Sunny Boy lived in a landfill, and one night Evans lay in the slum with him and his family on a concrete slab, half the size of Evans’ bedroom back home in Melbourne. “Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much?” he thought. That empathetic teenager became the head of a movement that mobilizes the kind of person Evans calls a “global citizen,” “someone who self identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, tribe or nation, but as a member of the human race.” The Global Citizen network is for people, says Evans, who want to make their social passion part of their identity. And it has clearly resonated with its tens of millions of members. Says Evans, “It’s not that people don’t want to act, it’s that they don’t know how to take action or think it will take no effect.”

Impossible isn’t a fact, it’s an attitude. Shortly after Christiana Figueres was tapped by the UN to lead its international climate talks following the spectacularly failed summit in Copenhagen in 2009, a reporter asked her if she thought we could ever get a global climate change agreement. Her response: “Not in my lifetime.” Find out how she overcame her skepticism and helped the world achieve the most important climate agreement in history in a full recap of her talk.

Dalia Mogahed speaks at TED2016 – Dream, February 15-19, 2016, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED