🔴How NFTs are building the internet of the future?
NFTs are not a scam. NFTs are not a fad. In fact, NFTs are the building blocks of the internet of the future. But in order for us to see this future clearly, we first need to go back into the past. The year is 1992. The World Wide Web is only three years old. This is what it looks like. For the first time in human history, we share a global commons, where, irrespective of where we are in the physical world, we can convene and share information freely. Most people at that time couldn't see what it meant to be connected by a network of computers. In fact, many people thought the internet itself was a scam or a fad. But a few early internet pioneers saw the potential in this burgeoning technology. One of those early internet pioneers, John Perry Barlow, saw both the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in our new digital world. And, of early cyberspace, he posed a prescient riddle all the way back in 1992, that I'll paraphrase for you: "If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed across the planet without cost, how are we going to protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”
A lot has changed on the internet since 1992. The internet itself is an alive and evolving technology. And as predicted by its earliest champions, the internet has increasingly become our default context. Today, one's job, wealth, relationships, sense of self, are all often more mediated through our digital contexts than our physical ones. Yet, Barlow's riddle has remained vexingly unsolved. Concepts like property and ownership -- ideas that have been with us for centuries in the physical world -- have evaded us in our digital spaces. We’ve tried to foist copyright, DMCA, DRM and watermarks onto the internet to protect our ideas and to restrain their distribution. None of these approaches have worked. Why? Because, as Stewart Brand, another early internet pioneer, famously coined: information wants to be free. It wants to travel effortlessly, without hindrance, without encumbrance. This is what allowed the internet to succeed in the first place.
Since 1992, we've uploaded trillions of photos and videos and even cat memes to the internet for free. And what business model has allowed this information to be free? Advertising. Advertising is the internet's default business model, not because that's what we want, but because it's what pays the bills. Right now, the few large corporations that run the most effective ad networks control most of the value on today's internet, not the people creating its content. On today's internet, we don't get paid for the work we do with our minds. And what's more, the content we upload to these services is trapped there. These services not only make money from our content, they control it. Until NFTs.
NFTs are not a scam. NFTs are not a fad. In fact, NFTs are the building blocks of the internet of the future. But in order for us to see this future clearly, we first need to go back into the past. The year is 1992. The World Wide Web is only three years old. This is what it looks like. For the first time in human history, we share a global commons, where, irrespective of where we are in the physical world, we can convene and share information freely. Most people at that time couldn't see what it meant to be connected by a network of computers. In fact, many people thought the internet itself was a scam or a fad. But a few early internet pioneers saw the potential in this burgeoning technology. One of those early internet pioneers, John Perry Barlow, saw both the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in our new digital world. And, of early cyberspace, he posed a prescient riddle all the way back in 1992, that I'll paraphrase for you: "If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed across the planet without cost, how are we going to protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”
A lot has changed on the internet since 1992. The internet itself is an alive and evolving technology. And as predicted by its earliest champions, the internet has increasingly become our default context. Today, one's job, wealth, relationships, sense of self, are all often more mediated through our digital contexts than our physical ones. Yet, Barlow's riddle has remained vexingly unsolved. Concepts like property and ownership -- ideas that have been with us for centuries in the physical world -- have evaded us in our digital spaces. We’ve tried to foist copyright, DMCA, DRM and watermarks onto the internet to protect our ideas and to restrain their distribution. None of these approaches have worked. Why? Because, as Stewart Brand, another early internet pioneer, famously coined: information wants to be free. It wants to travel effortlessly, without hindrance, without encumbrance. This is what allowed the internet to succeed in the first place.
Since 1992, we've uploaded trillions of photos and videos and even cat memes to the internet for free. And what business model has allowed this information to be free? Advertising. Advertising is the internet's default business model, not because that's what we want, but because it's what pays the bills. Right now, the few large corporations that run the most effective ad networks control most of the value on today's internet, not the people creating its content. On today's internet, we don't get paid for the work we do with our minds. And what's more, the content we upload to these services is trapped there. These services not only make money from our content, they control it. Until NFTs.
NFTs are a technological breakthrough. They offer us the opportunity to break away from that broken system. So you're asking yourself: What is an NFT? It's a certificate of ownership registered on the blockchain for everyone to see. It's not too dissimilar to the deed you get when you buy a house in the physical world. But instead of a house, an NFT denotes ownership of a file on the internet. And unlike copyright or watermarks, which are ancient technologies rooted in bygone eras, NFTs are internet native. They are born of the internet for the internet. And NFTs don't simply port our existing model of ownership from the physical world, they improve it. In the physical world, ownership actually fences people out. It precludes others from enjoying what you own. I wouldn't expect to feel welcome in your home uninvited. Digital space, however, is expansive. It's home to the infinite, the exponential, the instantaneous. NFTs offer a system of ownership that reflects this expansiveness. With NFTs, my owning something doesn't preclude others from enjoying it. In fact, it's the opposite. The more an NFT is seen, appreciated and understood, the more possibility it has to increase in value.
Let's take an example: Nyan Cat, a wildly popular, instantly recognizable cat meme. Since it was uploaded to the internet a decade ago, it has accumulated hundreds of millions of views. And precisely because of that virality, when it was auctioned as an NFT, it sold for 300 ETH, or the equivalent of over 600,000 dollars. And the person who now owns this NFT, they're not preventing anyone from liking, resharing or remixing Nyan Cat -- Nyan Cat is free to travel the internet as it always has. What's different now is that, as Nyan Cat's popularity continues to grow, so can the value of the NFT.
Because of NFTs, Chris Torres, Nyan Cat's creator, has received direct compensation for his creation. But what's more is he'll continue to receive compensation every single time the NFT is resold. This is because of the royalty system baked into the smart contracts that govern NFTs. NFTs are software; they can be programmed. And with something as complicated as royalties, which require enormous amounts of legal and manual labor to implement in our analog world, we can now express them in a few simple lines of code. This represents a breakthrough innovation for any industry predicated on royalty payments, such as publishing or music. And just as blogs and MP3s re-architected, these industries in decades past, NFTs will catalyze their next evolution.
The internet dissolved our geographic boundaries. NFTs dissolve economic boundaries. Yatreda, an Ethiopian artist collective, created these beautiful portraits of heroes and heroines from Ethiopia's past. They sold them as NFTs, and in one weekend, they made 13 ETH, or the equivalent of over 40,000 dollars. And they were paid out instantly. No customs, no foreign exchange, no international wire transfers. An artist collective based out of Addis Ababa has the same economic tools at their disposal now as an artist in LA, New York or London. And while the NFTs for Nyan Cat and Yatreda were created and sold on the same platform, they're not confined there -- remember: information wants to be free. And unlike the current internet, where information is made available through proprietary apps and platforms, NFTs are portable. Instead of living on a company's private servers, They live on decentralized infrastructure that is peer to peer, open and transparent.
Let's take an example: Nyan Cat, a wildly popular, instantly recognizable cat meme. Since it was uploaded to the internet a decade ago, it has accumulated hundreds of millions of views. And precisely because of that virality, when it was auctioned as an NFT, it sold for 300 ETH, or the equivalent of over 600,000 dollars. And the person who now owns this NFT, they're not preventing anyone from liking, resharing or remixing Nyan Cat -- Nyan Cat is free to travel the internet as it always has. What's different now is that, as Nyan Cat's popularity continues to grow, so can the value of the NFT.
Because of NFTs, Chris Torres, Nyan Cat's creator, has received direct compensation for his creation. But what's more is he'll continue to receive compensation every single time the NFT is resold. This is because of the royalty system baked into the smart contracts that govern NFTs. NFTs are software; they can be programmed. And with something as complicated as royalties, which require enormous amounts of legal and manual labor to implement in our analog world, we can now express them in a few simple lines of code. This represents a breakthrough innovation for any industry predicated on royalty payments, such as publishing or music. And just as blogs and MP3s re-architected, these industries in decades past, NFTs will catalyze their next evolution.
The internet dissolved our geographic boundaries. NFTs dissolve economic boundaries. Yatreda, an Ethiopian artist collective, created these beautiful portraits of heroes and heroines from Ethiopia's past. They sold them as NFTs, and in one weekend, they made 13 ETH, or the equivalent of over 40,000 dollars. And they were paid out instantly. No customs, no foreign exchange, no international wire transfers. An artist collective based out of Addis Ababa has the same economic tools at their disposal now as an artist in LA, New York or London. And while the NFTs for Nyan Cat and Yatreda were created and sold on the same platform, they're not confined there -- remember: information wants to be free. And unlike the current internet, where information is made available through proprietary apps and platforms, NFTs are portable. Instead of living on a company's private servers, They live on decentralized infrastructure that is peer to peer, open and transparent.
But understanding this complex decentralized infrastructure is not a prerequisite to understand what NFTs unlock for the human experience. Once digital value and ownership are no longer the sole domain of a few corporations, radical new possibilities emerge. In other words, 30 years later, NFTs finally solved John Perry Barlow's riddle. And this isn't science fiction; the technology already works. NFTs are already being used by the next generation of internet pioneers. And in the coming decade, NFTs will reshape the internet as we know it, with property rights baked into its code. So what does the internet of the future look like with NFTs as its building blocks? An internet where economic control rests in the hands of creators, not platforms. An internet where our ideas and creativity can be directly supported. An internet where information can be free, but where we get paid for the work we do with our minds.
Thank you.
#Cryptocurrency #Blockchain #Art #Technology #Future
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Thank you.
#Cryptocurrency #Blockchain #Art #Technology #Future
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توصیه شده برای داوطلبین آزمون در تمامی سطوح.
♦️عضویت رایگان👇👇
https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEwcBjgWyJ1Rm3PLqQ
www.bestielts.ir
توصیه شده برای داوطلبین آزمون در تمامی سطوح.
♦️عضویت رایگان👇👇
https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAEwcBjgWyJ1Rm3PLqQ
www.bestielts.ir
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🔴4 ways the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we sleep
#Health #Science #Sleep #Human_Body #Pandemic
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#Health #Science #Sleep #Human_Body #Pandemic
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🔴 4 ways the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we sleep
The COVID pandemic has changed sleep in at least four different ways: quantity, quality, timing and dreaming.
[Sleeping with Science]
The first is sleep quantity. A study conducted across Europe, as well as the US and Asia, found that on average people were sleeping around 25 minutes more each night during the pandemic.
Second, there has been a change in sleep quality. Now, sleep has of course been a real challenge for many of us during the pandemic. And indeed, in the US, almost 60 percent of people felt that the quality of their sleep had become worse during the pandemic. However, 40 percent of the people didn’t feel that their sleep was any worse, so there seems to be quite a difference in the response across individuals when it comes to sleep quality and the pandemic.
The third change we’ve discovered concerns sleep timing. Since many people didn’t have to commute to work or get the kids to school in the morning, on average, people were going to bed later and waking up later during the pandemic. And I think this is a case of “Revenge of the Night Owls.” And I see it as one of the positive consequences that came out of the pandemic.
The fourth change is that people reported dreaming more and also having COVID-related dreams. And this is likely due to the fact that people were sleeping later into the morning, which is the time when we get most of our dream sleep, and the fact that dreaming helps us deal with emotional trauma.
However, there are many essential questions that still remain. One that I am particularly interested in answering is whether or not a lack of sleep before getting your COVID shot, or your COVID booster in the future, changes the effectiveness of that vaccination, just as we know it does with your annual flu shot.
What we do know for certain though is this: your sleep health is intimately related to your immune health. Said simply: sleep is a life support system.
#Health #Science #Sleep #Human_Body #Pandemic
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The COVID pandemic has changed sleep in at least four different ways: quantity, quality, timing and dreaming.
[Sleeping with Science]
The first is sleep quantity. A study conducted across Europe, as well as the US and Asia, found that on average people were sleeping around 25 minutes more each night during the pandemic.
Second, there has been a change in sleep quality. Now, sleep has of course been a real challenge for many of us during the pandemic. And indeed, in the US, almost 60 percent of people felt that the quality of their sleep had become worse during the pandemic. However, 40 percent of the people didn’t feel that their sleep was any worse, so there seems to be quite a difference in the response across individuals when it comes to sleep quality and the pandemic.
The third change we’ve discovered concerns sleep timing. Since many people didn’t have to commute to work or get the kids to school in the morning, on average, people were going to bed later and waking up later during the pandemic. And I think this is a case of “Revenge of the Night Owls.” And I see it as one of the positive consequences that came out of the pandemic.
The fourth change is that people reported dreaming more and also having COVID-related dreams. And this is likely due to the fact that people were sleeping later into the morning, which is the time when we get most of our dream sleep, and the fact that dreaming helps us deal with emotional trauma.
However, there are many essential questions that still remain. One that I am particularly interested in answering is whether or not a lack of sleep before getting your COVID shot, or your COVID booster in the future, changes the effectiveness of that vaccination, just as we know it does with your annual flu shot.
What we do know for certain though is this: your sleep health is intimately related to your immune health. Said simply: sleep is a life support system.
#Health #Science #Sleep #Human_Body #Pandemic
🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜
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🔴How to make stress your friend
#Body_Language #Health #Psychology #Mindfulness
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#Body_Language #Health #Psychology #Mindfulness
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🔴 How to make stress your friend
I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?
How about a moderate amount of stress?
Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.
But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died.
Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.
Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.
That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.
You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress.
Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this.
Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.
Okay.
I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go!
Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.
Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again.
You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.
I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?
How about a moderate amount of stress?
Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.
But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died.
Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.
Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.
That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.
You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress.
Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this.
Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.
Okay.
I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go!
Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.
Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again.
You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.
Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.
Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social.
To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in.
Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.
Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.
Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social.
To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in.
Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.
Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart.
And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.
I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.
Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But -- and I hope you are expecting a "but" by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.
And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.
Thank you.
Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense?
KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.
CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool.
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And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.
I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.
Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But -- and I hope you are expecting a "but" by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.
And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.
Thank you.
Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense?
KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.
CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool.
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🔴How AI is making it easier to diagnose disease
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🔴How AI is making it easier to diagnose disease
Computer algorithms today are performing incredible tasks with high accuracies, at a massive scale, using human-like intelligence. And this intelligence of computers is often referred to as AI or artificial intelligence. AI is poised to make an incredible impact on our lives in the future. Today, however, we still face massive challenges in detecting and diagnosing several life-threatening illnesses, such as infectious diseases and cancer. Thousands of patients every year lose their lives due to liver and oral cancer.
Our best way to help these patients is to perform early detection and diagnoses of these diseases. So how do we detect these diseases today, and can artificial intelligence help? In patients who, unfortunately, are suspected of these diseases, an expert physician first orders very expensive medical imaging technologies such as fluorescent imaging, CTs, MRIs, to be performed. Once those images are collected, another expert physician then diagnoses those images and talks to the patient. As you can see, this is a very resource-intensive process, requiring both expert physicians, expensive medical imaging technologies, and is not considered practical for the developing world. And in fact, in many industrialized nations, as well.
So, can we solve this problem using artificial intelligence? Today, if I were to use traditional artificial intelligence architectures to solve this problem, I would require 10,000 -- I repeat, on an order of 10,000 of these very expensive medical images first to be generated. After that, I would then go to an expert physician, who would then analyze those images for me. And using those two pieces of information, I can train a standard deep neural network or a deep learning network to provide patient's diagnosis. Similar to the first approach, traditional artificial intelligence approaches suffer from the same problem. Large amounts of data, expert physicians and expert medical imaging technologies.
So, can we invent more scalable, effective and more valuable artificial intelligence architectures to solve these very important problems facing us today? And this is exactly what my group at MIT Media Lab does. We have invented a variety of unorthodox AI architectures to solve some of the most important challenges facing us today in medical imaging and clinical trials.
In the example I shared with you today, we had two goals. Our first goal was to reduce the number of images required to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Our second goal -- we were more ambitious, we wanted to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients. So how did we do it?
For our first goal, instead of starting with tens and thousands of these very expensive medical images, like traditional AI, we started with a single medical image. From this image, my team and I figured out a very clever way to extract billions of information packets. These information packets included colors, pixels, geometry and rendering of the disease on the medical image. In a sense, we converted one image into billions of training data points, massively reducing the amount of data needed for training.
For our second goal, to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients, we started with a standard, white light photograph, acquired either from a DSLR camera or a mobile phone, for the patient. Then remember those billions of information packets? We overlaid those from the medical image onto this image, creating something that we call a composite image. Much to our surprise, we only required 50 -- I repeat, only 50 -- of these composite images to train our algorithms to high efficiencies.
Computer algorithms today are performing incredible tasks with high accuracies, at a massive scale, using human-like intelligence. And this intelligence of computers is often referred to as AI or artificial intelligence. AI is poised to make an incredible impact on our lives in the future. Today, however, we still face massive challenges in detecting and diagnosing several life-threatening illnesses, such as infectious diseases and cancer. Thousands of patients every year lose their lives due to liver and oral cancer.
Our best way to help these patients is to perform early detection and diagnoses of these diseases. So how do we detect these diseases today, and can artificial intelligence help? In patients who, unfortunately, are suspected of these diseases, an expert physician first orders very expensive medical imaging technologies such as fluorescent imaging, CTs, MRIs, to be performed. Once those images are collected, another expert physician then diagnoses those images and talks to the patient. As you can see, this is a very resource-intensive process, requiring both expert physicians, expensive medical imaging technologies, and is not considered practical for the developing world. And in fact, in many industrialized nations, as well.
So, can we solve this problem using artificial intelligence? Today, if I were to use traditional artificial intelligence architectures to solve this problem, I would require 10,000 -- I repeat, on an order of 10,000 of these very expensive medical images first to be generated. After that, I would then go to an expert physician, who would then analyze those images for me. And using those two pieces of information, I can train a standard deep neural network or a deep learning network to provide patient's diagnosis. Similar to the first approach, traditional artificial intelligence approaches suffer from the same problem. Large amounts of data, expert physicians and expert medical imaging technologies.
So, can we invent more scalable, effective and more valuable artificial intelligence architectures to solve these very important problems facing us today? And this is exactly what my group at MIT Media Lab does. We have invented a variety of unorthodox AI architectures to solve some of the most important challenges facing us today in medical imaging and clinical trials.
In the example I shared with you today, we had two goals. Our first goal was to reduce the number of images required to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Our second goal -- we were more ambitious, we wanted to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients. So how did we do it?
For our first goal, instead of starting with tens and thousands of these very expensive medical images, like traditional AI, we started with a single medical image. From this image, my team and I figured out a very clever way to extract billions of information packets. These information packets included colors, pixels, geometry and rendering of the disease on the medical image. In a sense, we converted one image into billions of training data points, massively reducing the amount of data needed for training.
For our second goal, to reduce the use of expensive medical imaging technologies to screen patients, we started with a standard, white light photograph, acquired either from a DSLR camera or a mobile phone, for the patient. Then remember those billions of information packets? We overlaid those from the medical image onto this image, creating something that we call a composite image. Much to our surprise, we only required 50 -- I repeat, only 50 -- of these composite images to train our algorithms to high efficiencies.
To summarize our approach, instead of using 10,000 very expensive medical images, we can now train the AI algorithms in an unorthodox way, using only 50 of these high-resolution, but standard photographs, acquired from DSLR cameras and mobile phones, and provide diagnosis. More importantly, our algorithms can accept, in the future and even right now, some very simple, white light photographs from the patient, instead of expensive medical imaging technologies.
I believe that we are poised to enter an era where artificial intelligence is going to make an incredible impact on our future. And I think that thinking about traditional AI, which is data-rich but application-poor, we should also continue thinking about unorthodox artificial intelligence architectures, which can accept small amounts of data and solve some of the most important problems facing us today, especially in health care.
Thank you very much.
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I believe that we are poised to enter an era where artificial intelligence is going to make an incredible impact on our future. And I think that thinking about traditional AI, which is data-rich but application-poor, we should also continue thinking about unorthodox artificial intelligence architectures, which can accept small amounts of data and solve some of the most important problems facing us today, especially in health care.
Thank you very much.
#Medicine #TED_Fellows #Technology #Medical_Imaging #Future
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🔴What Wikipedia teaches us about balancing truth and beliefs?
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🔴A brief history of Spanish
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🔴A brief history of Spanish
Beginning in the 3rd century, before the coming era, the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This period gave rise to several regional languages in the area that's now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan and Galician. One of these would become Spanish— but not for another 1,500 years. Those years tell the origin story of what’s become a global modern language.
During the Roman occupation, colloquial spoken Latin, often called “Vulgar Latin,” mixed with Indigenous languages. Approximately 75% of modern Spanish comes from Latin, including syntactic rules. For instance, verbs are conjugated in a similar way as in Latin. And like other Roman languages, nouns have gender: el sol, the sun, is masculine, whereas la luna, the moon, is feminine.
After the Roman Empire collapsed, a series of other powers conquered the region. First came the Visigoths starting in the 5th century of the common era. They spoke an eastern Germanic language that would eventually become part of German and lent a few words to the language that would become Spanish. Then the Umayyad Caliphate ousted the Visigoths. They spoke Arabic, which left a strong mark on modern Spanish: over a thousand words come from Arabic. These often have a starting “a” or “z” sound, and sometimes include an “h.”
In 1492, the Catholic Church consolidated its power through two monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, expelling Muslims and Jews, combining the distinct regional kingdoms into one nation, and adopting one of the local languages as the official state language. That language was Castellano, or Castilian, from the Kingdom of Castile, which was centrally located in Spain and home to Madrid. Thereafter Castellano became Español, or Spanish.
But the Spanish of 1492 was Old Spanish, very different from Spanish today. That same year, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, marking the start of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The Indigenous population of the Americas spoke an estimated 2,000 different languages. Over the next few decades, most of them were forced to adopt Spanish at the expense of their own languages. Still, words from Indigenous languages became part of Spanish. From Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, came words with “ch” and “y” like “chapulin” and “coyote.” From Quechua, a language spoken in the Peruvian Andes, came words with “ch” like “cancha,” “chullo,” and “poncho.” Some of these words describe things that hadn’t existed in the Spanish lexicon before, while others replaced existing Spanish words even in Spain.
By the time Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of “Don Quixote” in 1605, the language was arguably more similar to modern Spanish than plays of one of his contemporaries, William Shakespeare, were to modern English. Starting in the 18th century, French language and culture were extremely fashionable in Spain, and later Hispanic America. While the two languages already had commonalities from their shared roots in Latin, Spanish gained new words from French during this period.
In the 19th century, all over Central and South America, people revolted to gain independence from Spain. In the newly sovereign nations, people continued to speak the language of their former oppressors. Today, there are approximately 415 million inhabitants of Hispanic America. Spanish is the official language of 21 countries and Puerto Rico. As of 2021, only English, Mandarin, and Hindi have more speakers.
Beginning in the 3rd century, before the coming era, the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This period gave rise to several regional languages in the area that's now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan and Galician. One of these would become Spanish— but not for another 1,500 years. Those years tell the origin story of what’s become a global modern language.
During the Roman occupation, colloquial spoken Latin, often called “Vulgar Latin,” mixed with Indigenous languages. Approximately 75% of modern Spanish comes from Latin, including syntactic rules. For instance, verbs are conjugated in a similar way as in Latin. And like other Roman languages, nouns have gender: el sol, the sun, is masculine, whereas la luna, the moon, is feminine.
After the Roman Empire collapsed, a series of other powers conquered the region. First came the Visigoths starting in the 5th century of the common era. They spoke an eastern Germanic language that would eventually become part of German and lent a few words to the language that would become Spanish. Then the Umayyad Caliphate ousted the Visigoths. They spoke Arabic, which left a strong mark on modern Spanish: over a thousand words come from Arabic. These often have a starting “a” or “z” sound, and sometimes include an “h.”
In 1492, the Catholic Church consolidated its power through two monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, expelling Muslims and Jews, combining the distinct regional kingdoms into one nation, and adopting one of the local languages as the official state language. That language was Castellano, or Castilian, from the Kingdom of Castile, which was centrally located in Spain and home to Madrid. Thereafter Castellano became Español, or Spanish.
But the Spanish of 1492 was Old Spanish, very different from Spanish today. That same year, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, marking the start of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The Indigenous population of the Americas spoke an estimated 2,000 different languages. Over the next few decades, most of them were forced to adopt Spanish at the expense of their own languages. Still, words from Indigenous languages became part of Spanish. From Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, came words with “ch” and “y” like “chapulin” and “coyote.” From Quechua, a language spoken in the Peruvian Andes, came words with “ch” like “cancha,” “chullo,” and “poncho.” Some of these words describe things that hadn’t existed in the Spanish lexicon before, while others replaced existing Spanish words even in Spain.
By the time Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of “Don Quixote” in 1605, the language was arguably more similar to modern Spanish than plays of one of his contemporaries, William Shakespeare, were to modern English. Starting in the 18th century, French language and culture were extremely fashionable in Spain, and later Hispanic America. While the two languages already had commonalities from their shared roots in Latin, Spanish gained new words from French during this period.
In the 19th century, all over Central and South America, people revolted to gain independence from Spain. In the newly sovereign nations, people continued to speak the language of their former oppressors. Today, there are approximately 415 million inhabitants of Hispanic America. Spanish is the official language of 21 countries and Puerto Rico. As of 2021, only English, Mandarin, and Hindi have more speakers.
How does a language with so many speakers around the world not break apart into new languages the way Vulgar Latin did? There's no easy answer to this question. Other languages that spread through colonialism, like French, have mixed with Indigenous languages to form entirely new ones. Some would argue that Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, is a distinct language or on its way to becoming one. But although a person in Buenos Aires occasionally might use words that aren’t fully intelligible to someone in Bogotá or Mexico City, Spanish retains enough unity of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary to remain one language.
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🔴How innovation and technology can fight global hunger?
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🔴How innovation and technology can fight global hunger?
When you think about innovation and technology, you're most likely thinking about the latest app on your smartphone, or maybe you think about rockets going into space. But what about some of the world's biggest challenges, like global hunger or climate change? They can seem overwhelming or, you know, maybe you just think there should be a nonprofit organization that takes care of that. But why is it that we think so traditionally about some of the world's biggest challenges?
I believe innovation and technology can help tackle some of the world's biggest challenges. The barrier is our own thinking. And there's something about this where big global challenges are no different than big global business challenges. So let's change that.
Let's talk about one of those topics, global hunger. Hunger may seem like a remote problem for you, but the effects of it are pretty drastic. Hunger means you do not have enough calories on a daily basis to live a healthy life. And there is up to 811 million people on the planet who are hungry. So what can we do about it?
I think innovation and technology is the answer. A couple of years ago, a friend and I realized that United Nations World Food Programme can feed a child for a full day for only 80 cents. We were shocked. We thought, if more people knew about this, if we made it easy, imagine you were having dinner with your friends and you're enjoying yourselves, wouldn't you want to share your meal with a child in need? And that's exactly why we founded an app called Share the Meal. It's so simple. With one tap on your smartphone, you can share your meal with a child in need for only 80 cents.
And I'm excited to tell you it's working. Over 130 million meals have been shared so far by six million app users across the globe. And Share the Meal was even an app of the year in 2020 by both Apple and Google.
When we started Share the Meal, we had to push really hard to make it a reality. There just weren't so many support mechanisms out there to support social entrepreneurs, when you compare it, for instance, with the number of start-up accelerators for for-profit ventures. Coming from that inspiration, I got the opportunity to start the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator, exactly with the goal of replicating what Silicon Valley does well, but for global social impact. It's a start-up accelerator that supports start-ups and nonprofit innovations globally and helps them scale to disrupt global hunger.
So let's look at two of those examples. The first one is about blockchain. Now, when you think about blockchain, you may think about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but that's not how we think of it. We use blockchain technology so that refugees can go into stores and purchase food. It's an innovation called Building Blocks. And why blockchain? Blockchain helps because it's not my blockchain or your blockchain, it's the neutral blockchain network. And that way it makes collaboration among aid organizations much easier. And how does it work? Every month, aid organizations transfer money to individual blockchain accounts, and then that individual can go into a store, shop for the groceries and at the checkout they pay with the iris scan or with another authentication method. That innovation had first been submitted to us by a World Food Programme finance officer who participated in our innovation boot camp. He then developed a prototype and tested it only two months after starting, in Pakistan with about 100 people, and the next pilot was already with 10,000 refugees in Jordan. And that was so successful, that that solution scaled to over 100,000 people within seven months. And right now, Building Blocks is reaching about one million people, transferring over 300 million dollars of cash to people in urgent need of food.
When you think about innovation and technology, you're most likely thinking about the latest app on your smartphone, or maybe you think about rockets going into space. But what about some of the world's biggest challenges, like global hunger or climate change? They can seem overwhelming or, you know, maybe you just think there should be a nonprofit organization that takes care of that. But why is it that we think so traditionally about some of the world's biggest challenges?
I believe innovation and technology can help tackle some of the world's biggest challenges. The barrier is our own thinking. And there's something about this where big global challenges are no different than big global business challenges. So let's change that.
Let's talk about one of those topics, global hunger. Hunger may seem like a remote problem for you, but the effects of it are pretty drastic. Hunger means you do not have enough calories on a daily basis to live a healthy life. And there is up to 811 million people on the planet who are hungry. So what can we do about it?
I think innovation and technology is the answer. A couple of years ago, a friend and I realized that United Nations World Food Programme can feed a child for a full day for only 80 cents. We were shocked. We thought, if more people knew about this, if we made it easy, imagine you were having dinner with your friends and you're enjoying yourselves, wouldn't you want to share your meal with a child in need? And that's exactly why we founded an app called Share the Meal. It's so simple. With one tap on your smartphone, you can share your meal with a child in need for only 80 cents.
And I'm excited to tell you it's working. Over 130 million meals have been shared so far by six million app users across the globe. And Share the Meal was even an app of the year in 2020 by both Apple and Google.
When we started Share the Meal, we had to push really hard to make it a reality. There just weren't so many support mechanisms out there to support social entrepreneurs, when you compare it, for instance, with the number of start-up accelerators for for-profit ventures. Coming from that inspiration, I got the opportunity to start the World Food Programme’s Innovation Accelerator, exactly with the goal of replicating what Silicon Valley does well, but for global social impact. It's a start-up accelerator that supports start-ups and nonprofit innovations globally and helps them scale to disrupt global hunger.
So let's look at two of those examples. The first one is about blockchain. Now, when you think about blockchain, you may think about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but that's not how we think of it. We use blockchain technology so that refugees can go into stores and purchase food. It's an innovation called Building Blocks. And why blockchain? Blockchain helps because it's not my blockchain or your blockchain, it's the neutral blockchain network. And that way it makes collaboration among aid organizations much easier. And how does it work? Every month, aid organizations transfer money to individual blockchain accounts, and then that individual can go into a store, shop for the groceries and at the checkout they pay with the iris scan or with another authentication method. That innovation had first been submitted to us by a World Food Programme finance officer who participated in our innovation boot camp. He then developed a prototype and tested it only two months after starting, in Pakistan with about 100 people, and the next pilot was already with 10,000 refugees in Jordan. And that was so successful, that that solution scaled to over 100,000 people within seven months. And right now, Building Blocks is reaching about one million people, transferring over 300 million dollars of cash to people in urgent need of food.
❤1