[["Annie Lennox Why I am an HIVAIDS activistI'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign, SING Campaign. In November of 2003 I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation. That is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country, that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand were dying on a daily basis, and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed -- when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, \"This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve.\" And so, subsequently, I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela, out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone one in the world respects Nelson Mandela. Everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now, and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very very fortunate, a couple of years later, to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool. This tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way, because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt, I say, \"Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet.\" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign, and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do, in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years. I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check, singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears, because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert, and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh, with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe. He's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal, but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman who is HIV positive, and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile. She goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone, because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus. She died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus. She was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously ... it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up, because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Do people agree that governments should be committed to fighting AIDS?\nAnswer:", " definitely yes"], ["Annie Lennox Why I am an HIVAIDS activistI'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign, SING Campaign. In November of 2003 I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation. That is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country, that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand were dying on a daily basis, and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed -- when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, \"This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve.\" And so, subsequently, I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela, out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone one in the world respects Nelson Mandela. Everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now, and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very very fortunate, a couple of years later, to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool. This tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way, because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt, I say, \"Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet.\" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign, and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do, in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years. I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check, singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears, because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert, and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh, with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe. He's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal, but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman who is HIV positive, and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile. She goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone, because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus. She died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus. She was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously ... it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up, because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Do people agree that governments should be committed to fighting AIDS?\nAnswer:", " definitely no"], ["Annie Lennox Why I am an HIVAIDS activistI'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign, SING Campaign. In November of 2003 I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation. That is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country, that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand were dying on a daily basis, and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed -- when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, \"This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve.\" And so, subsequently, I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela, out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone one in the world respects Nelson Mandela. Everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now, and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very very fortunate, a couple of years later, to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool. This tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way, because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt, I say, \"Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet.\" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign, and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do, in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years. I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check, singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears, because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert, and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh, with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe. He's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal, but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman who is HIV positive, and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile. She goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone, because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus. She died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus. She was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously ... it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up, because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Do people agree that governments should be committed to fighting AIDS?\nAnswer:", " unknown"], ["Annie Lennox Why I am an HIVAIDS activistI'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign, SING Campaign. In November of 2003 I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation. That is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country, that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand were dying on a daily basis, and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed -- when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, \"This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve.\" And so, subsequently, I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela, out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone one in the world respects Nelson Mandela. Everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now, and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very very fortunate, a couple of years later, to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool. This tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way, because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt, I say, \"Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet.\" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign, and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do, in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years. I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check, singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears, because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert, and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh, with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe. He's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal, but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman who is HIV positive, and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile. She goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone, because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus. She died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus. She was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously ... it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up, because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Do people agree that governments should be committed to fighting AIDS?\nAnswer:", " sometimes"], ["Annie Lennox Why I am an HIVAIDS activistI'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign, SING Campaign. In November of 2003 I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation. That is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country, that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand were dying on a daily basis, and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed -- when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, \"This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve.\" And so, subsequently, I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela, out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone one in the world respects Nelson Mandela. Everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now, and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very very fortunate, a couple of years later, to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool. This tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way, because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt, I say, \"Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet.\" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign, and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do, in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years. I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check, singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears, because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert, and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh, with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe. He's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal, but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman who is HIV positive, and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile. She goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone, because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus. She died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus. She was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously ... it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up, because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Do people agree that governments should be committed to fighting AIDS?\nAnswer:", " only one person agrees"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: What is a Rube Goldberg machine?\nAnswer:", " a simple system for performing a complicated operation"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: What is a Rube Goldberg machine?\nAnswer:", " a song which picks up complex emotion"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: What is a Rube Goldberg machine?\nAnswer:", " a complicated device for performing a simple operation"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: What is a Rube Goldberg machine?\nAnswer:", " any machine containing gold"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: What is a Rube Goldberg machine?\nAnswer:", " something watched on YouTube"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What does Rhodessa Jones do?\nAnswer:", " helps genomic scientists"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What does Rhodessa Jones do?\nAnswer:", " helps women in prison"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What does Rhodessa Jones do?\nAnswer:", " helps singers"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What does Rhodessa Jones do?\nAnswer:", " helps young gangs"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What does Rhodessa Jones do?\nAnswer:", " helps playwrights"], ["Jose Abreu on kids transformed by musicChris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, \"Do I close the program or multiply these kids?\" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case -- Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles -- in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge -- the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me -- the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it's the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish -- I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Name two participants in El Sistema who are associated with famous orchestras.\nAnswer:", " Barquisimeto and Gustavo Dudamel"], ["Jose Abreu on kids transformed by musicChris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, \"Do I close the program or multiply these kids?\" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case -- Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles -- in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge -- the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me -- the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it's the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish -- I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Name two participants in El Sistema who are associated with famous orchestras.\nAnswer:", " Edicson Ruiz and Gustavo Dudamel"], ["Jose Abreu on kids transformed by musicChris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, \"Do I close the program or multiply these kids?\" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case -- Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles -- in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge -- the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me -- the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it's the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish -- I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Name two participants in El Sistema who are associated with famous orchestras.\nAnswer:", " Caracas and Edicson Ruiz"], ["Jose Abreu on kids transformed by musicChris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, \"Do I close the program or multiply these kids?\" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case -- Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles -- in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge -- the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me -- the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it's the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish -- I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Name two participants in El Sistema who are associated with famous orchestras.\nAnswer:", " Caracas and Barquisimeto"], ["Jose Abreu on kids transformed by musicChris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, \"Do I close the program or multiply these kids?\" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here you get in, you share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case -- Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed to the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing on the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles -- in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge -- the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me -- the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one, the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important for his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education being the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge, it's the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish -- I wish that you help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians passionate about their art and social justice and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: Name two participants in El Sistema who are associated with famous orchestras.\nAnswer:", " San Agustin and Venezuela"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: How much time has a student entering university already spent either online or playing games?\nAnswer:", " 20,000 hours"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: How much time has a student entering university already spent either online or playing games?\nAnswer:", " 10,000 hours "], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: How much time has a student entering university already spent either online or playing games?\nAnswer:", " 30,000 hours "], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: How much time has a student entering university already spent either online or playing games?\nAnswer:", " 20.7 hours"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: How much time has a student entering university already spent either online or playing games?\nAnswer:", " 23.8 hours"], ["Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in AfricaSo I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, and that AIDS is a disease of poverty. And that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic, using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign. They decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic. And then, actually, I'm also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. And to do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand, is: How do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like, then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, and they're being asked, \"Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?\" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change, in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it ... we see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.This seems puzzling, but I'm going to argue you shouldn't be surprised by this. And that to understand this, you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future -- even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough. At least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own -- even if they know everything about the disease -- they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, \"Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?\" You get on Google, you Google -- and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women. Which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year. Because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.And in the last few years, we've actually done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy, It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here: this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population -- but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent And these are not, you know, trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about actually how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectiveness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. That areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run -- that improving exports and improving development, it's not necessarily the case that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987, they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition and this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign, And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there's all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There's tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic, in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data -- and the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There's more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.\nQuestion: Why is AIDS called a disease of poverty?\nAnswer:", " as in areas with low income there are higher prevalence rates"], ["Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in AfricaSo I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, and that AIDS is a disease of poverty. And that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic, using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign. They decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic. And then, actually, I'm also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. And to do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand, is: How do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like, then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, and they're being asked, \"Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?\" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change, in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it ... we see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.This seems puzzling, but I'm going to argue you shouldn't be surprised by this. And that to understand this, you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future -- even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough. At least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own -- even if they know everything about the disease -- they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, \"Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?\" You get on Google, you Google -- and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women. Which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year. Because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.And in the last few years, we've actually done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy, It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here: this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population -- but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent And these are not, you know, trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about actually how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectiveness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. That areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run -- that improving exports and improving development, it's not necessarily the case that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987, they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition and this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign, And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there's all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There's tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic, in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data -- and the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There's more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.\nQuestion: Why is AIDS called a disease of poverty?\nAnswer:", " as only poor people are affected by it"], ["Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in AfricaSo I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, and that AIDS is a disease of poverty. And that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic, using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign. They decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic. And then, actually, I'm also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. And to do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand, is: How do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like, then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, and they're being asked, \"Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?\" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change, in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it ... we see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.This seems puzzling, but I'm going to argue you shouldn't be surprised by this. And that to understand this, you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future -- even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough. At least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own -- even if they know everything about the disease -- they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, \"Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?\" You get on Google, you Google -- and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women. Which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year. Because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.And in the last few years, we've actually done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy, It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here: this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population -- but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent And these are not, you know, trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about actually how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectiveness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. That areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run -- that improving exports and improving development, it's not necessarily the case that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987, they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition and this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign, And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there's all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There's tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic, in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data -- and the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There's more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.\nQuestion: Why is AIDS called a disease of poverty?\nAnswer:", " as it is a political issue"], ["Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in AfricaSo I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, and that AIDS is a disease of poverty. And that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic, using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign. They decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic. And then, actually, I'm also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. And to do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand, is: How do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like, then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, and they're being asked, \"Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?\" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change, in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it ... we see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.This seems puzzling, but I'm going to argue you shouldn't be surprised by this. And that to understand this, you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future -- even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough. At least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own -- even if they know everything about the disease -- they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, \"Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?\" You get on Google, you Google -- and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women. Which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year. Because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.And in the last few years, we've actually done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy, It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here: this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population -- but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent And these are not, you know, trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about actually how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectiveness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. That areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run -- that improving exports and improving development, it's not necessarily the case that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987, they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition and this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign, And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there's all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There's tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic, in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data -- and the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There's more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.\nQuestion: Why is AIDS called a disease of poverty?\nAnswer:", " as Uganda is mostly affected by it"], ["Emily Oster flips our thinking on AIDS in AfricaSo I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, and that AIDS is a disease of poverty. And that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic, using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign. They decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic. And then, actually, I'm also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. And to do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand, is: How do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like, then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, and they're being asked, \"Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?\" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change, in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it ... we see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant.This seems puzzling, but I'm going to argue you shouldn't be surprised by this. And that to understand this, you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future -- even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough. At least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own -- even if they know everything about the disease -- they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, \"Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?\" You get on Google, you Google -- and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women. Which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year. Because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.And in the last few years, we've actually done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy, It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here: this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population -- but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent And these are not, you know, trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about actually how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectiveness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. That areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act, or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run -- that improving exports and improving development, it's not necessarily the case that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987, they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition and this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign, And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there's all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There's tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic, in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data -- and the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There's more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.\nQuestion: Why is AIDS called a disease of poverty?\nAnswer:", " as babies are mostly affected by it"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What are two difficulties associated with attending a live performance?\nAnswer:", " jeans and set curtain times"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What are two difficulties associated with attending a live performance?\nAnswer:", " parking and set curtain times"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What are two difficulties associated with attending a live performance?\nAnswer:", " internet and set curtain times"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What are two difficulties associated with attending a live performance?\nAnswer:", " customisation and set curtain times"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What are two difficulties associated with attending a live performance?\nAnswer:", " body types and set curtain times"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: In what sort of building was the film of the Rube Goldberg machine made?\nAnswer:", " warehouse"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: In what sort of building was the film of the Rube Goldberg machine made?\nAnswer:", " house"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: In what sort of building was the film of the Rube Goldberg machine made?\nAnswer:", " Home Depot"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: In what sort of building was the film of the Rube Goldberg machine made?\nAnswer:", " television shop"], ["Adam Sadowsky engineers a viral music videoHi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is \"This Too Shall Pass\" -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, \"Here It Goes Again.\" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters that -- you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the \"10 commandments,\" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is \"No magic.\" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000 sq. ft. warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about, sort of, what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, \"Well, that would be a really good thing to use.\" And ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right.What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, \"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.\" I think our enemy was physics, (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, \"This Too Shall Pass.\"Thank you very much.\nQuestion: In what sort of building was the film of the Rube Goldberg machine made?\nAnswer:", " hotel"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What can a fourteen-year-old girl do?\nAnswer:", " make a film"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What can a fourteen-year-old girl do?\nAnswer:", " sing a song"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What can a fourteen-year-old girl do?\nAnswer:", " write a book"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What can a fourteen-year-old girl do?\nAnswer:", " play a DVD"], ["Ben Cameron: The true power of the performing artsI am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod, an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aquilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the \"Twilight\" tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video-on-demand and a lot of television. For me, \"Law and Order: SVU,\" Tine Fey and \"30 Rock\" and \"Judge Judy\" -- \"The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.\" Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for \"Judge Judy,\" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.You know, frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization, or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen see every single day. We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five yeas ago, Gen-X'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen-Y'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games, a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like -- simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices, many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, \"Are we next?\" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in \"Dreams of a Common Language\" wrote, \"We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years.\" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with, indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor and chief of Wired magazine and author of \"The Long Tail,\" really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, mini cams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Bros. or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie? (Laughter) Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Bros., RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing, as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the \"pro ams,\" amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined, not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood, I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity, not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too short-sighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist, who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage, but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more, not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she, or he, is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange, a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, a collective of artists that, after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with young gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely. I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience, we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who, all too often, are subjected bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now, in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day-in, day-out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, \"Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you,\" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think, by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and godspeed.\nQuestion: What can a fourteen-year-old girl do?\nAnswer:", " paint a picture"], ["David Byrne How architecture helped music evolveThis is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: \"A Clean Break (Let's Work)\" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: \"Wenlenga\" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: \"Spem In Alium\" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key. The notes are long. There's almost no rhythm whatsoever. And the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: \"Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde\" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate -- and it works. (Music: \"Sonata in F,\" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's from around the same time. I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But, Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: \"Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III\" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet, no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: \"Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major\" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, \"Play that part again.\" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: \"Royal Garden Blues\" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for -- that's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the twentieth century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him, went even further. (Music: \"My Funny Valentine\" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever. And the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So there early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet, sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: \"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For\" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: \"Who U Wit\" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems, works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. That the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tananger, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the east coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west, (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: When music diverged, what were the two paths?\nAnswer:", " live music and jazz"], ["David Byrne How architecture helped music evolveThis is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: \"A Clean Break (Let's Work)\" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: \"Wenlenga\" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: \"Spem In Alium\" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key. The notes are long. There's almost no rhythm whatsoever. And the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: \"Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde\" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate -- and it works. (Music: \"Sonata in F,\" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's from around the same time. I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But, Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: \"Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III\" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet, no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: \"Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major\" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, \"Play that part again.\" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: \"Royal Garden Blues\" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for -- that's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the twentieth century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him, went even further. (Music: \"My Funny Valentine\" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever. And the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So there early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet, sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: \"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For\" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: \"Who U Wit\" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems, works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. That the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tananger, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the east coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west, (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: When music diverged, what were the two paths?\nAnswer:", " discos and sound systems"], ["David Byrne How architecture helped music evolveThis is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: \"A Clean Break (Let's Work)\" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: \"Wenlenga\" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: \"Spem In Alium\" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key. The notes are long. There's almost no rhythm whatsoever. And the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: \"Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde\" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate -- and it works. (Music: \"Sonata in F,\" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's from around the same time. I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But, Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: \"Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III\" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet, no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: \"Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major\" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, \"Play that part again.\" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: \"Royal Garden Blues\" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for -- that's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the twentieth century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him, went even further. (Music: \"My Funny Valentine\" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever. And the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So there early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet, sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: \"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For\" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: \"Who U Wit\" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems, works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. That the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tananger, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the east coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west, (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: When music diverged, what were the two paths?\nAnswer:", " live music and recorded music"], ["David Byrne How architecture helped music evolveThis is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: \"A Clean Break (Let's Work)\" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: \"Wenlenga\" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: \"Spem In Alium\" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key. The notes are long. There's almost no rhythm whatsoever. And the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: \"Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde\" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate -- and it works. (Music: \"Sonata in F,\" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's from around the same time. I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But, Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: \"Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III\" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet, no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: \"Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major\" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, \"Play that part again.\" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: \"Royal Garden Blues\" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for -- that's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the twentieth century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him, went even further. (Music: \"My Funny Valentine\" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever. And the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So there early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet, sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: \"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For\" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: \"Who U Wit\" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems, works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. That the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tananger, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the east coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west, (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: When music diverged, what were the two paths?\nAnswer:", " jukeboxes and bars"], ["David Byrne How architecture helped music evolveThis is the venue where I, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: \"A Clean Break (Let's Work)\" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: \"Wenlenga\" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: \"Spem In Alium\" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key. The notes are long. There's almost no rhythm whatsoever. And the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: \"Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde\" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate -- and it works. (Music: \"Sonata in F,\" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's from around the same time. I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But, Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast. So he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: \"Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III\" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet, no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: \"Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major\" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, \"Play that part again.\" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: \"Royal Garden Blues\" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for -- that's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the twentieth century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him, went even further. (Music: \"My Funny Valentine\" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ear. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever. And the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So there early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet, sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: \"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For\" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: \"Who U Wit\" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems, works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too. That the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tananger, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the east coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west, (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view. The romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)\nQuestion: When music diverged, what were the two paths?\nAnswer:", " jazz and recorded music"]]
