Tag: TED

Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More

Posted on by robbie

 
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example,  you can see it visually represented on a map.

How A Venezuelan Program Inspired Massachusetts to Save the Music

Posted on by robbie

Across the country school budget cuts have led to diminishing music programs, but Massachusetts is borrowing an idea from Venezuela to carry on the tune.
The Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) announced plans this week to set aside funding for a program inspired by El Sistema, a free, music-education program founded in Venezuela, making it the first state to do so in the United States. The new program, SerHacer, translates to “to be is to make.”
El Sistema, which focuses on “intensive ensemble participation” from as early as pre-school, was founded in 1975 by Dr. Jose Antonio Abreu to help poor Venezuelan children learn to play music, according to its website. More than three decades later, the program has transformed into a philosophy that’s gaining international traction. In 2009, Dr. Abreu was awarded the TED Prize for his mission to expand the program. Venezuela’s El Sistema reaches more than 500,000 students with plans to increase that number to 1,000,000 annually.
MCC Executive Director Anita Walker began supporting the idea after a visit to Venezuela with the New England Conservatory and Longy School of Music, two higher-education programs that practice the philosophy. The Council plans to award $55,000 toward the initiative, according to Erik Holmgren, who is leading up SerHacer.
The first batch of recipients in Massachusetts include programs such as Sistema Somerville, the Cape Conservatory in Hyannis and the social service Kids 4 Harmony, according to WBUR. The state plans to open free instrument lending libraries to students while also conducting studies on the benefits of music education.
For schools like Springfield High School of Science and Technology, the benefits are obvious. Music director Gary Bernice tells WBUR 99 percent of his 500 students, most of which hail from low-income neighborhoods, had no experience with instruments before joining band.
“It’s no secret that our dropout rate and graduation rate in urban centers is not great. But for students who are in our band…for more than one year, they are almost twice as likely to graduate high school than their peers,” he says.
MORE: Music and Mentorship: How an Austin Org Is Helping Foster Kids Survive the System

How Vacation Incentives May Be the Best Spark for Creative Thinking

Posted on by robbie

It’s no secret that unconventional company policies are a good way to retain employees and increase workplace productivity. From Google to Facebook, Silicon Valley’s tech industry has illuminated the benefits of good employee benefits.
Which is why thinkPARALLAX, a creative agency with 11 employees in California, recently launched a program to award its staff with a $1,500 travel budget to take a trip anywhere in the world.
The caveats? Each employee must choose a location they’ve never been to, travel between September and December and blog about the experience. So far the firm’s website features tales about trips to New Zealand, Peru, Holland and Germany.
“Rather than send employees to conferences or a local museum, we thought, what if our whole team is ‘forced’ to travel to a place they’ve never been, to immerse themselves in a new culture and gather inspiration?” the founders write on their website.
In fact, around 40 percent of Americans do not take their allotted paid vacation time, while 41 percent do not intend to use their paid time off (PTO) even though it’s included in their compensation, according to a survey from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK. Returning after vacation to piles of work or concern over leaving projects unfinished leads Americans to forego their vacation time, and most continue to work even when they’re on vacation: A recent TripAdvisor survey found that over the past year, 77 percent of Americans worked while they were on away.
“When you don’t put a timeline behind things, people tend not to do them,” says Jonathan Hanwit, a co-founder at thinkPARALLAX. “It also forces everybody to realize that they can pick up the slack and creates a more cohesive work environment.”
The creative agency is one of many companies joining the creative benefits band wagon. Airbnb employees receive a $2,000 travel credit to use on Airbnb while TED gives employees a compulsory summer vacation. More recently, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group announced unlimited vacation for the company’s staff in London, New York and Geneva. Netflix also offers unlimited holiday. Other examples include Patagonia, which offers flexible hours for its employees to surf and take advantage of the day’s best waves, as well as Evernote, which gives its employees a $1,000 bonus to take a whole week off.
MORE: This Organization is Sending Business Students on Road Trips for Change

Meet the Engineer Who Got a Boston Marathon Bombing Survivor Dancing Again

Posted on by robbie

Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer, suffered a devastating and potentially career-ending injury in the Boston Marathon bombing. Haslet-Davis and her husband, Adam Davis, a U.S. airman, were on the sidelines watching the marathon when the bomb went off. “We sat up and I said, ‘Wait, my foot hurts,’” Haslet-Davis recalled to ABC News a week after the tragedy. The blast from the bomb had torn off her left foot, and as a result, her leg needed to be amputated at mid-calf.

Despite the devastating loss, Haslet-Davis, a ballroom instructor at Boston’s Arthur Murray Studios, was determined to dance again. And last week, less than a year after the tragic bombing, she did.

During a TED2014 Talk by Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Haslet-Davis was invited on stage, along with her dance partner Christian Lightner. She wore a short, white, flowing dress, but her best accessory was her new, state-of-the-art bionic limb designed and created especially for her by MIT researchers.

MORE: The Inside Story of the Most Amazing Victim Relief Effort in American History

Haslet-Davis and Lightner performed an intricate rumba to the tune of Enrique Iglesias’s “Ring My Bells.” She moved perfectly, unhindered by her prosthetic. And that was the point. Herr — a double-amputee himself — met Haslet-Davis at a Boston rehab hospital and immediately wanted to use his knowledge of prosthetics to build her a bionic limb. For 200 days, Herr’s team studied the dynamics of dance and tweaked the prosthetic so that it would move seamlessly during performance. ““Bionics are not only about making people stronger and faster,” he said. “Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into our electromechanics.”

Herr lost both of his legs after getting frostbite during a rock climbing accident in 1982, but even then, he didn’t view his body as broken. “I thought: Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate,” he said. “This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology to the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately the disabilities of others.”

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Through his work at the Center for Extreme Bionics at the MIT Media Lab, Herr and his team have developed prosthetics that allowed him to return to rock climbing. He boasts that he’s even better at it now than he was before. They’ve focused on addressing three areas of improvement: mechanical, dynamic and electrical. They’ve reengineered how prosthetics attach to the body, how to make them “move like flesh and bone”, and how to connect them to the nervous system. The result has been the most innovative prosthetics out there. Now, Herr’s greatest challenge is getting his creations to the masses — and at an affordable cost.

“The basic levels of physiological function should be part of basic human rights,” Herr said. “It’s not well appreciated, but over half the world’s population suffers from some kind of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition. Every person should have the right to live without disability, if they choose to.”

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