TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT TPHCM

KHOA NGOẠI NGỮ

MÔN HỌC: INTERMEDIATE LISTENING AND SPEAKING

LISTENING PORTFOLIO

TP. HỒ CHÍ MINH – 2020

 TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM KỸ THUẬT TP.HCM
KHOA NGOẠI NGỮ
Giảng viên hướng dẫn: Mai Võ Trúc Phương
Học viên: Trần Huy Thịnh
MSSV: 20131193

Nhận xét của giáo viên

Ngày … tháng 12 năm 2020

Giảng viên chấm điểm
 Listening Portfolio – Week 10, 11, 12
Student Name: Trần Huy Thịnh
Student ID: 20131193
Course Code: 1202LISP240235_054566713
Intermediate Listening and Speaking Thursday 7h00 ->10h30

Material: “The four ways sound affect us” by Julian Treasure – TEDGlobal
2009
Transcript
00:10
Over the next five minutes, my intention is to transform your relationship with sound. Let me
start with the observation that most of the sound around us is accidental; much of it is
unpleasant. (Traffic noise) We stand on street corners, shouting over noise like
this, pretending it doesn't exist. This habit of suppressing sound has meant that our
relationship with sound has become largely unconscious. 

00:31
There are four major ways sound is affecting you all the time, and I'd like to raise them in
your consciousness today. The first is physiological. 

00:41
Sorry about that. I just gave you a shot of cortisol, your fight-flight hormone. Sounds are
affecting your hormone secretions all the time, but also your breathing, heart rate -- which I
just also did -- and your brainwaves. 

00:52
It's not just unpleasant sounds like that that do it. This is surf. (Ocean waves) It has the
frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute. Most people find that very soothing, and,
interestingly, 12 cycles per minute is roughly the frequency of the breathing of a sleeping
human, so there is a deep resonance with being at rest. We also associate it with being stress-
free and on holiday. 

01:11
The second way in which sound affects you is psychological. Music is the most powerful
form of sound that we know that affects our emotional state.This is guaranteed to make most
of you feel pretty sad if I leave it on. Music is not the only kind of sound, however, which
affects your emotions. 

01:27
Natural sound can do that, too. Birdsong, for example, is a sound which most people find
reassuring. There's a reason: over hundreds of thousands of years we've learned that when the
birds are singing, things are safe. It's when they stop you need to be worried. 

01:40
The third way in which sound affects you is cognitively. You can't understand two people
talking at once or in this case, one person talking twice. You have to choose which me you're
going to listen to. 

01:50
We have a very small amount of bandwidth for processing auditory input, which is why noise
like this ... 

01:56
is extremely damaging for productivity. If you have to work in an open-plan office like
this, your productivity is greatly reduced. And whatever number you're thinking of, it
probably isn't as bad as this. 

02:09
You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. I have a tip for you: if
you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like
birdsong. Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be. 

02:22
The fourth way in which sound affects us is behaviorally. With all that other stuff going on, it
would be amazing if our behavior didn't change. 

02:30
So, ask yourself: Is this person ever going to drive at a steady 28 miles per hour? I don't think
so. At the simplest, you move away from unpleasant sound and towards pleasant sounds. So if
I were to play this ... 

02:43
for more than a few seconds, you'd feel uncomfortable; for more than a few minutes, you'd be
leaving the room in droves. For people who can't get away from noise like that, it's extremely
damaging for their health. 

02:53
And that's not the only thing that bad sound damages. Most retail sound is inappropriate and
accidental, even hostile, and it has a dramatic effect on sales. For you retailers, you may want
to look away before I show this slide. 

03:07
They're losing up to 30 percent of their business with people leaving shops faster, or just
turning around at the door. We've all done it, left the area, because the sound in there is so
dreadful. 

3:16
I want to spend just a moment talking about the model we've developed, which allows us to
start at the top and look at the drivers of sound, analyze the soundscape and then predict the
four outcomes I just talked about. Or start at the bottom and say what outcomes we want, and
then design a soundscape to have a desired effect. At last, we've got some science we can
apply. And we're in the business of designing soundscapes. 

03:36
Just a word on music. Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately
deployed. It's powerful for two reasons: you recognize it fast, and you associate it very
powerfully. I'll give you two examples. 

03:50
Most of you recognize that immediately. The younger, maybe not. 

03:55
Most of you associate that with something! Now, those are one-second samples of
music. Music is very powerful, and unfortunately, its veneering commercial spaces, often
inappropriately. I hope that's going to change over the next few years. 

04:08
Let me talk about brands for a moment, since some of you run brands. Every brand is out
there making sound right now. There are eight expressions of a brand in sound: they're all
important. And every brand needs to have guidelines at the center. I'm glad to say that is
starting to happen now. 

04:26
This is the most-played tune in the world today -- 1.8 billion times a day, that tune is played. 

04:31
And it cost Nokia absolutely nothing. 

04:34
I'll leave you with four golden rules, for those of you who run businesses, for commercial
sound. First, make it congruent, pointing in the same direction as your visual
communication. That increases impact by over 1,100 percent. If your sound is pointing the
opposite direction, incongruent, you reduce impact by 86 percent. That's an order of
magnitude, up or down. This is important. Secondly, make it appropriate to the
situation. Thirdly, make it valuable. Give people something with the sound, don't just
bombard them with stuff. Finally, test and test it again. Sound is complex; there are many
countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to
eat it and see what happens. 

05:12
So, I hope this talk has raised sound in your consciousness. If you're listening
consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for
your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living
in the world. I'll leave you with more birdsong. (Birds chirping) I recommend at least five
minutes a day, but there's no maximum dose. 

New words
1. Physiological (a): relating to the way in which the bodies of living things work
2. Auditory (a): of or about hearing
3. Incongruent (a): not suitable or not fitting well with something else
4. Countervailing (a): having equal force but an opposite effect

Material: “The riddle of experience vs. memory” by Daniel Kahneman –

TED2010

Transcript

00:03
Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with
"happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and
there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among
researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people
happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of
make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. 

00:37
And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople
thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about
happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. The first of these
traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a
useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one
particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll
have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. The
second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being
happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two
very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. And the third is
the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any
circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real
cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right. 
01:49
Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer
session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story -- He said he'd been
listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the
recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite
emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the
memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious
music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was
ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. 

02:37
What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in
terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the
present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the
experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt
now when I touch you here?" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self
is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor
approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" or "How was your
trip to Albania?" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the
experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the
mess about the notion of happiness. 

03:37
Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our
memories -- it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell
stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a
story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients
undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it
was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain
every 60 seconds. Here are two patients, those are their recordings. And you are asked, "Who
of them suffered more?" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more -- his
colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and
more. 

04:39
But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" And
here is a surprise. The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the
colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a
very critical part of the story is how it ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or
great -- but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than
the other. And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a
bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and
much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" And it was much worse for A than
for B, in memory. 

05:32
Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From
the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could
do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does
work -- you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in
without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much
less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing
self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better
off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What
defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of
the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and
endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. 

06:47
Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after
the other. And you can ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really
straightforward: They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I
calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that
means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are
about 600,000 -- most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the
remembering self. And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what
happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're
spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is
not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. 

07:45
So, we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite
distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of
view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as
the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the
way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week
vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories
added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical
variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little
impact on the story. 

08:37
Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one
that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with
two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is
the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The
experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between
experiences; we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the
future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as
anticipated memories. And basically, you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the
remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the
experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. 

09:38
I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go
on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. And this is a bit
hard to justify, I think. I mean, how much do we consume our memories? That is one of the
explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about
that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best
vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other
vacations. And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would
say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the
600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. Now, that is three weeks, and that is at
most an hour and a half. There seems to be a discrepancy. Now, I may be a bit extreme, you
know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of
this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the
weight that we put on experiences? 

10:56
So, I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that for your next vacation, you
know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an
amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same
vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between
your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually
not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you
think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we
do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves? 

11:49
Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of
happiness that we can apply, one per self. So, you can ask: How happy is the experiencing
self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's
life? And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the
emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good
idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the
remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person
lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her
life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up
the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been
messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. 

12:57
The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the
remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure
the two separately. The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million
people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their
experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. So, in recent years, we have
begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson I think that we have
learned is they are really different. You can know how satisfied somebody is with their
life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and
vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. What that
means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much
would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but
there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody
ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they
are with their experiencing self. So, the correlation is low. 

14:17
We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that
money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being
satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other
pleasures, but this is dominant. So, if you want to maximize the happiness of the two
selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said
here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a
completely different notion. 

14:56
Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not
attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. So, if you ask the
simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct
answer. When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say,
you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in
California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that
contrast, say, is in climate. Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the
experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy
people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up -- some people
may end up moving to California. And its sort of interesting to trace what is going to
happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their
experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen: They
will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how
horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. 
16:29
It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of
how difficult it is. 

16:38
Thank you. 

16:43
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. Thank you so much. Now, when we
were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting
result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a
few moments left now? 

17:02
Daniel Kahneman: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup
survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to
the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings, vary with
income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans -- and
that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample
-- below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... 

17:35
CA: 60,000. 

17:37
DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively
unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely
seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential
happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that
misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different
story. The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions. 

18:16
CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness. If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside
down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. Is there any
chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and
run public policy based on it? 

18:41
DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public
policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in
the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that
they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It's going to take a
while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or
whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. How to
enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you
think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. This is going to influence
policy, I think, in years to come. In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the
experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or
two, part of national statistics. 

New words:
1. Cognitive (a): connected with thinking or conscious mental processes
2. Entity (e): something that exists apart from other things,
having its own independent existence
3. Colonoscopy (n): a medical examination of the colon (= the lower part of
the tube that takes solid waste out of your body)
4. Endow (v): to give a large amount of money to pay for creating a college, hospital,
etc. or to provide an income for it

Material: “A robot that eats pollution” by Jonathan Rossiter

Transcript

00:10
Hi, I'm an engineer and I make robots. Now, of course you all know what a robot is, right? If
you don't, you'd probably go to Google, and you'd ask Google what a robot is. So, let's do
that. We'll go to Google and this is what we get. Now, you can see here there are lots of
different types of robots, but they're predominantly humanoid in structure. And they look
pretty conventional because they've got plastic, they've got metal, they've got motors and
gears and so on. Some of them look quite friendly, and you could go up and you could hug
them. Some of them not so friendly, they look like they're straight out of "Terminator," in fact
they may well be straight out of "Terminator." You can do lots of really cool things with these
robots -- you can do really exciting stuff. 

00:53
But I'd like to look at different kinds of robots -- I want to make different kinds of robots. And
I take inspiration from the things that don't look like us but look like these. So, these are
natural biological organisms, and they do some really cool things that we can't, and current
robots can't either. They do all sorts of great things like moving around on the floor; they go
into our gardens and they eat our crops; they climb trees; they go in water, they come out of
water; they trap insects and digest them. So, they do really interesting things. They live, they
breathe, they die, they eat things from the environment. Our current robots don't really do
that. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could use some of those characteristics in future
robots so that you could solve some really interesting problems? I'm going to look at a couple
of problems now in the environment where we can use the skills and the technologies derived
from these animals and from the plants, and we can use them to solve those problems. 

01:52
Let's have a look at two environmental problems. They're both of our making -- this is man
interacting with the environment and doing some rather unpleasant things. The first one is to
do with the pressure of population. Such is the pressure of population around the world that
agriculture and farming is required to produce more and more crops. Now, to do that, farmers
put more and more chemicals onto the land. They put on fertilizers, nitrates, pesticides -- all
sorts of things that encourage the growth of the crops, but there are some negative
impacts. One of the negative impacts is if you put lots of fertilizer on the land, not all of it
goes into the crops. Lots of it stays in the soil, and then when it rains, these chemicals go into
the water table. And in the water table, then they go into streams, into lakes, into rivers and
into the sea. Now, if you put all of these chemicals, these nitrates, into those kinds of
environments, there are organisms in those environments that will be affected by that -- algae,
for example. Algae loves nitrates, it loves fertilizer, so it will take in all these chemicals, and
if the conditions are right, it will mass produce. It will produce masses and masses of new
algae. That's called a bloom. The trouble is that when algae reproduce like this, it starves the
water of oxygen. As soon as you do that, the other organisms in the water can't survive. So,
what do we do? We try to produce a robot that will eat the algae, consume it and make it safe. 

03:23
So that's the first problem. The second problem is also of our making, and it's to do with oil
pollution. Now, oil comes out of the engines that we use, the boats that we use. Sometimes
tankers flush their oil tanks into the sea, so oil is released into the sea that way. Wouldn't it be
nice if we could treat that in some way using robots that could eat the pollution the oil fields
have produced? So that's what we do. We make robots that will eat pollution. 

03:53
To actually make the robot, we take inspiration from two organisms. On the right there you
see the basking shark. The basking shark is a massive shark. It's non carnivorous, so you can
swim with it, as you can see. And the basking shark opens its mouth, and it swims through the
water, collecting plankton. As it does that, it digests the food, and then it uses that energy in
its body to keep moving. So, could we make a robot like that -- like the basking shark that
chugs through the water and eats up pollution? Well, let's see if we can do that. But also, we
take the inspiration from other organisms. I've got a picture here of a water boatman, and the
water boatman is really cute. When it's swimming in the water, it uses its paddle-like legs to
push itself forward. 

04:39
So, we take those two organisms, and we combine them together to make a new kind of
robot. In fact, because we're using the water boatman as inspiration, and our robot sits on top
of the water, and it rows, we call it the "Row-bot." So, a Row-bot is a robot that rows. OK.
So, what does it look like? Here's some pictures of the Row-bot, and you'll see, it doesn't look
anything like the robots we saw right at the beginning. Google is wrong; robots don't look like
that; they look like this. 

05:10
So, I've got the Row-bot here. I'll just hold it up for you. It gives you a sense of the scale, and
it doesn't look anything like the others. OK, so it's made out of plastic, and we'll have a look
now at the components that make up the Row-bot -- what makes it really special. 

05:25
The Row-bot is made up of three parts, and those three parts are really like the parts of any
organism. It's got a brain; it's got a body and it's got a stomach. It needs the stomach to create
the energy. Any Row-bot will have those three components, and any organism will have those
three components, so let's go through them one at a time. It has a body, and its body is made
out of plastic, and it sits on top of the water. And it's got flippers on the side here -- paddles
that help it move, just like the water boatman. It's got a plastic body, but it's got a soft rubber
mouth here, and a mouth here -- it's got two mouths. Why does it have two mouths? One is to
let the food go in and the other is to let the food go out. So, you can see really, it's got a mouth
and a derriere, or a -- 

06:14
something where the stuff comes out, which is just like a real organism. So, it's starting to
look like that basking shark. So that's the body. 

06:22
The second component might be the stomach. We need to get the energy into the robot, and
we need to treat the pollution, so the pollution goes in, and it will do something. It's got a cell
in the middle here called a microbial fuel cell. I'll put this down, and I'll lift up the fuel
cell. Here. So instead of having batteries, instead of having a conventional power system, it's
got one of these. This is its stomach. And it really is a stomach because you can put energy in
this side in the form of pollution, and it creates electricity. 

06:52
So, what is it? It's called a microbial fuel cell. It's a little bit like a chemical fuel cell, which
you might have come across in school, or you might've seen in the news. Chemical fuel cells
take hydrogen and oxygen, and they can combine them together and you get electricity. That's
well-established technology; it was in the Apollo space missions. That's from 40, 50 years
ago. This is slightly newer. This is a microbial fuel cell. It's the same principle: it's got oxygen
on one side, but instead of having hydrogen on the other, it's got some soup, and inside that
soup there are living microbes. Now, if you take some organic material -- could be some
waste products, some food, maybe a bit of your sandwich -- you put it in there, the microbes
will eat that food, and they will turn it into electricity. Not only that, but if you select the right
kind of microbes, you can use the microbial fuel cell to treat some of the pollution. If you
choose the right microbes, the microbes will eat the algae. If you use other kinds of
microbes, they will eat petroleum spirits and crude oil. So, you can see how this stomach
could be used to not only treat the pollution but also to generate electricity from the
pollution. So, the robot will move through the environment, taking food into its
stomach, digest the food, create electricity, use that electricity to move through the
environment and keep doing this. 

08:15
OK, so let's see what happens when we run the Row-bot -- when it does some rowing. Here
we've got a couple of videos, the first thing you'll see -- hopefully you can see here is the
mouth open. The front mouth and the bottom mouth open, and it will stay opened
enough, then the robot will start to row forward. It moves through the water so that food goes
in as the waste products go out. Once it's moved enough, it stops and then it closes the mouth
-- slowly closes the mouths -- and then it will sit there, and it will digest the food. 

08:47
Of course, these microbial fuel cells, they contain microbes. What you really want is lots of
energy coming out of those microbes as quickly as possible. But we can't force the
microbes and they generate a small amount of electricity per second. They generate
milliwatts, or microwatts. Let's put that into context. Your mobile phone for example, one of
these modern ones, if you use it, it takes about one watt. So that's a thousand or a million
times as much energy that that uses compared to the microbial fuel cell. How can we cope
with that? Well, when the Row-bot has done its digestion, when it's taken the food in, it will
sit there, and it will wait until it has consumed all that food. That could take some hours, it
could take some days. A typical cycle for the Row-bot looks like this: you open your
mouth, you move, you close your mouth, and you sit there for a while waiting. Once you
digest your food, then you can go about doing the same thing again. But you know what, that
looks like a real organism, doesn't it? It looks like the kind of thing we do. Saturday night, we
go out, open our mouths, fill our stomachs, sit in front of the telly (TV) and digest. When
we've had enough, we do the same thing again. 

09:57
OK, if we're lucky with this cycle, at the end of the cycle we'll have enough energy left
over for us to be able to do something else. We could send a message, for example. We could
send a message saying, "This is how much pollution I've eaten recently," or "This is the kind
of stuff that I've encountered," or "This is where I am." That ability to send a message saying,
"This is where I am," is really, really important. If you think about the oil slicks that we saw
before, or those massive algal blooms, what you really want to do is put your Row-bot out
there, and it eats up all of those pollutions, and then you have to go collect
them. Why? Because these Row-bots at the moment, this Row-bot I've got here, it contains
motors, it contains wires, it contains components which themselves are not
biodegradable. Current Row-bots contain things like toxic batteries. You can't leave those in
the environment, so you need to track them, and then when they've finished their job of
work, you need to collect them. That limits the number of Row-bots you can use. If, on the
other hand, you have robot a little bit like a biological organism, when it comes to the end of
its life, it dies and it degrades to nothing. 
11:04
So, wouldn't it be nice if these robots, instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were
made out of other materials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to
nothing? That changes the way in which we use robots. Instead of putting 10 or 100 out into
the environment, having to track them, and then when they die, collect them, you could put a
thousand, a million, a billion robots into the environment. Just spread them around. You know
that at the end of their lives, they're going to degrade to nothing. You don't need to worry
about them. So that changes the way in which you think about robots and the way you deploy
them. 

11:39
Then the question is: Can you do this? Well, yes, we have shown that you can do this. You
can make robots which are biodegradable. What's really interesting is you can use household
materials to make these biodegradable robots. I'll show you some; you might be
surprised. You can make a robot out of jelly. Instead of having a motor, which we have at the
moment, you can make things called artificial muscles. Artificial muscles are smart
materials, you apply electricity to them, and they contract, or they bend, or they twist. They
look like real muscles. So instead of having a motor, you have these artificial muscles. And
you can make artificial muscles out of jelly. If you take some jelly and some salts, and do a bit
of jiggery-pokery, you can make an artificial muscle. 

12:20
We've also shown you can make the microbial fuel cell's stomach out of paper. So, you could
make the whole robot out of biodegradable materials. You throw them out there, and they
degrade to nothing. 

12:33
Well, this is really, really exciting. It's going to totally change the way in which we think
about robots, but also it allows you to be really creative in the way in which you think about
what you can do with these robots. I'll give you an example. If you can use jelly to make a
robot -- now, we eat jelly, right? So, why not make something like this? A robot gummy
bear. Here, I've got some I prepared earlier. There we go. I've got a packet -- and I've got a
lemon-flavored one. I'll take this gummy bear -- he's not robotic, OK? We have to
pretend. And what you do with one of these is you put it in your mouth -- the lemons quite
nice. Try not to chew it too much, it's a robot, it may not like it. And then you swallow it. And
then it goes into your stomach. And when it's inside your stomach, it moves, it thinks, it
twists, it bends, it does something. It could go further down into your intestines, find out
whether you've got some ulcer or cancer, maybe do an injection, something like that. You
know that once it's done its job of work, it could be consumed by your stomach, or if you
don't want that, it could go straight through you, into the toilet, and be degraded safely in the
environment. So, this changes the way, again, in which we think about robots. 

13:48
So, we started off looking at robots that would eat pollution, and then we're looking at robots
which we can eat. I hope this gives you some idea of the kinds of things we can do with future
robots. 

New words
1. Predominantly (adv): mostly or mainly
2. Microbial (a):
relating to microbes (very small living things, especially ones that cause disease)
3. Biodegradable (a): able to decay naturally and in a way that is not harmful

Material: “This country isn’t just carbon neutral – It’s carbon negative” by
Tshering Tobgay

Transcript

01:02
Bhutan is a small country in the Himalayas. We've been called Shangri-La, even the last
Shangri-La. But let me tell you right off the bat, we are not Shangri-La. My country is not one
big monastery populated with happy monks. 

01:22
The reality is that there are barely 700,000 of us sandwiched between two of the most
populated countries on earth, China and India. The reality is that we are a small,
underdeveloped country doing our best to survive. But we are doing OK. We are surviving. In
fact, we are thriving, and the reason we are thriving is because we've been blessed with
extraordinary kings. Our enlightened monarchs have worked tirelessly to develop our
country, balancing economic growth carefully with social development, environmental
sustainability and cultural preservation, all within the framework of good governance. We call
this holistic approach to development "Gross National Happiness," or GNH. Back in the
1970s, our fourth king famously pronounced that for Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is
more important than Gross National Product. 

02:35
Ever since, all development in Bhutan is driven by GNH, a pioneering vision that aims to
improve the happiness and well-being of our people. 

02:50
But that's easier said than done, especially when you are one of the smallest economies in the
world. Our entire GDP is less than two billion dollars. I know that some of you here are worth
more -- 

03:05
individually than the entire economy of my country. 

03:12
So, our economy is small, but here is where it gets interesting. Education is completely
free. All citizens are guaranteed free school education, and those that work hard are given free
college education. Healthcare is also completely free. Medical consultation, medical
treatment, medicines: they are all provided by the state. We manage this because we use our
limited resources very carefully, and because we stay faithful to the core mission of
GNH, which is development with values. Our economy is small, and we must strengthen
it. Economic growth is important, but that economic growth must not come from undermining
our unique culture or our pristine environment. 

04:06
Today, our culture is flourishing. We continue to celebrate our art and architecture, food and
festivals, monks and monasteries. And yes, we celebrate our national dress, too. This is why I
can wear my gho with pride. Here's a fun fact: you're looking at the world's biggest pocket. 

04:36
It starts here, goes around the back, and comes out from inside here. In this pocket we store all
manner of personal goods from phones and wallets to iPads, office files and books. 

04:57
But sometimes -- sometimes even precious cargo. 

05:05
So, our culture is flourishing, but so is our environment. 72 percent of my country is under
forest cover. Our constitution demands that a minimum of 60 percent of Bhutan's total land
shall remain under forest cover for all time. 

05:30
Our constitution, this constitution, imposes forest cover on us. Incidentally, our king used this
constitution to impose democracy on us. You see, we the people didn't want democracy. We
didn't ask for it, we didn't demand it, and we certainly didn't fight for it. Instead, our king-
imposed democracy on us by insisting that he include it in the constitution. But he went
further. He included provisions in the constitution that empower the people to impeach their
kings and included provisions in here that require all our kings to retire at the age of 65. 

06:23
Fact is, we already have a king in retirement: our previous king, the Great Fourth, retired 10
years ago at the peak of his popularity. He was all of 51 years at that time. 

06:42
So, as I was saying, 72 percent of our country is under forest cover, and all that forest is
pristine. That's why we are one of the few remaining global biodiversity hotspots in the
world, and that's why we are a carbon neutral country. In a world that is threatened with
climate change, we are a carbon neutral country. 

07:06
Turns out, it's a big deal. Of the 200-odd countries in the world today, it looks like we are the
only one that's carbon neutral. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Bhutan is not carbon
neutral. Bhutan is carbon negative. Our entire country generates 2.2 million tons of carbon
dioxide, but our forests, they sequester more than three times that amount, so we are a net
carbon sink for more than four million tons of carbon dioxide each year. But that's not all. 

07:50
We export most of the renewable electricity we generate from our fast-flowing rivers. So
today, the clean energy that we export offsets about six million tons of carbon dioxide in our
neighborhood. By 2020, we'll be exporting enough electricity to offset 17 million tons of
carbon dioxide. And if we were to harness even half our hydropower potential, and that's
exactly what we are working at, the clean, green energy that we export would offset
something like 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. That is more CO2 than what the
entire city of New York generates in one year. 

08:36
So, inside our country, we are a net carbon sink. Outside, we are offsetting carbon. And this is
important stuff. You see, the world is getting warmer, and climate change is a reality. Climate
change is affecting my country. Our glaciers are melting, causing flash floods and
landslides, which in turn are causing disaster and widespread destruction in our country. I was
at that lake recently. It's stunning. That's how it looked 10 years ago, and that's how it looked
20 years ago. Just 20 years ago, that lake didn't exist. It was a solid glacier. A few years ago, a
similar lake breached its dams and wreaked havoc in the valleys below. That destruction was
caused by one glacier lake. We have 2,700 of them to contend with. The point is this: my
country and my people have done nothing to contribute to global warming, but we are already
bearing the brunt of its consequences. And for a small, poor country, one that is landlocked
and mountainous, it is very difficult. But we are not going to sit on our hands doing
nothing. We will fight climate change. That's why we have promised to remain carbon
neutral. 

10:13
We first made this promise in 2009 during COP 15 in Copenhagen, but nobody
noticed. Governments were so busy arguing with one another and blaming each other for
causing climate change, that when a small country raised our hands and announced, "We
promise to remain carbon neutral for all time," nobody heard us. Nobody cared. 

10:42
Last December in Paris, at COP 21, we reiterated our promise to remain carbon neutral for all
time to come. This time, we were heard. We were noticed, and everybody cared. What was
different in Paris was that governments came round together to accept the realities of climate
change and were willing to come together and act together and work together. All countries,
from the very small to the very large, committed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. The
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says that if these so-called intended
commitments are kept, we'd be closer to containing global warming by two degrees Celsius. 

11:37
By the way, I've requested the TED organizers here to turn up the heat in here by two
degrees, so if some of you are feeling warmer than usual, you know who to blame. 

11:55
It's crucial that all of us keep our commitments. As far as Bhutan is concerned, we will keep
our promise to remain carbon neutral. Here are some of the ways we are doing it. We are
providing free electricity to our rural farmers. The idea is that, with free electricity, they will
no longer have to use firewood to cook their food. We are investing in sustainable
transport and subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. Similarly, we are subsidizing the
cost of LED lights, and our entire government is trying to go paperless. We are cleaning up
our entire country through Clean Bhutan, a national program, and we are planting trees
throughout our country through Green Bhutan, another national program. 

12:47
But it is our protected areas that are at the core of our carbon neutral strategy. Our protected
areas are our carbon sink. They are our lungs. Today, more than half our country is
protected, as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. But the beauty is that
we've connected them all with one another through a network of biological corridors. Now,
what this means is that our animals are free to roam throughout our country. Take this tiger,
for example. It was spotted at 250 meters above sea level in the hot, subtropical jungles. Two
years later, that same tiger was spotted near 4,000 meters in our cold alpine mountains. Isn't
that awesome? 

13:49
We must keep it that way. We must keep our parks awesome. So, every year, we set aside
resources to prevent poaching, hunting, mining and pollution in our parks, and resources to
help communities who live in those parks manage their forests, adapt to climate change, and
lead better lives while continuing to live in harmony with Mother Nature. 

14:16
But that is expensive. Over the next few years, our small economy won't have the resources to
cover all the costs that are required to protect our environment. In fact, when we run the
numbers, it looks like it'll take us at least 15 years before we can fully finance all our
conservation efforts. But neither Bhutan, nor the world can afford to spend 15 years going
backwards. 

14:48
This is why His Majesty the King started Bhutan For Life. Bhutan For Life gives us the time
we need. It gives us breathing room. It is essentially a funding mechanism to look after our
parks, to protect our parks, until our government can take over on our own fully. The idea is
to raise a transition fund from individual donors, corporations and institutions, but the deal is
closed only after predetermined conditions are met and all funds committed. So multiparty,
single closing: an idea we borrowed from Wall Street. This means that individual donors can
commit without having to worry that they'll be left supporting an underfunded plan. It's
something like a Kickstarter project, only with a 15-year time horizon and millions of tons of
carbon dioxide at stake. Once the deal is closed, we use the transition fund to protect our
parks, giving our government time to increase our own funding gradually until the end of the
15-year period. After that, our government guarantees full funding forever. 

16:11
We are almost there. We expect to close later this year. Naturally, I'm pretty excited. 

16:23
The World Wildlife Fund is our principal partner in this journey, and I want to give them a
big shoutout for the excellent work they are doing in Bhutan and across the world. 

16:55
I thank you for listening to our story, a story of how we are keeping our promise to remain
carbon neutral, a story of how we are keeping our country pristine, for ourselves, our
children, for your children and for the world. But we are not here to tell stories, are we? We
are here to dream together. So, in closing, I'd like to share one more dream that I have. What
if we could mobilize our leadership and our resources, our influence and our passion, to
replicate the Bhutan For Life idea to other countries so that they too can conserve their
protected areas for all time. After all, there are many other countries who face the same issues
that we face. They too have natural resources that can help win the world's fight for
sustainability, only they may not have the ability to invest in them now. So, what if we set up
Earth for Life, a global fund, to kickstart the Bhutan For Life throughout the world? I invite
you to help me, to carry this dream beyond our borders to all those who care about our
planet's future. After all, we're here to dream together, to work together, to fight climate
change together, to protect our planet together. Because the reality is we are in it
together. Some of us might dress differently, but we are in it together. 

New words
1. Holistic (a): dealing with or treating the whole of something or someone and not just
a part
2. Emission (n): the act of sending out gas, heat, light, etc.

Material: “Why jobs of the future won’t feel like work” by David Lee

Transcript
00:09
So, there's a lot of valid concern these days that our technology is getting so smart that we've
put ourselves on the path to a jobless future. And I think the example of a self-driving car is
actually the easiest one to see. So, these are going to be fantastic for all kinds of different
reasons. But did you know that "driver" is actually the most common job in 29 of the 50 US
states? What's going to happen to these joabs when we're no longer driving our cars or
cooking our food or even diagnosing our own diseases? 

00:39
Well, a recent study from Forrester Research goes so far to predict that 25 million jobs might
disappear over the next 10 years. To put that in perspective, that's three times as many jobs
lost in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And it's not just blue-collar jobs that are at risk. On
Wall Street and across Silicon Valley, we are seeing tremendous gains in the quality of
analysis and decision-making because of machine learning. So even the smartest, highest-paid
people will be affected by this change. 

01:10
What's clear is that no matter what your job is, at least some, if not all of your work, is going
to be done by a robot or software in the next few years. And that's exactly why people like
Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are talking about the need for government-funded minimum
income levels. But if our politicians can't agree on things like health care or even school
lunches, I just don't see a path where they'll find consensus on something as big and as
expensive as universal basic life income. Instead, I think the response needs to be led by us in
industry. We have to recognize the change that's ahead of us and start to design the new kinds
of jobs that will still be relevant in the age of robotics. 

01:49
The good news is that we have faced down and recovered two mass extinctions of jobs
before. From 1870 to 1970, the percent of American workers based on farms fell by 90
percent, and then again from 1950 to 2010, the percent of Americans working in factories fell
by 75 percent. The challenge we face this time, however, is one of time. We had a hundred
years to move from farms to factories, and then 60 years to fully build out a service
economy. The rate of change today suggests that we may only have 10 or 15 years to
adjust, and if we don't react fast enough, that means by the time today's elementary-school
students are college-aged, we could be living in a world that's robotic, largely unemployed
and stuck in kind of un-great depression. 

02:36
But I don't think it has to be this way. You see, I work in innovation, and part of my job is to
shape how large companies apply new technologies. Certainly, some of these technologies are
even specifically designed to replace human workers. But I believe that if we start taking
steps right now to change the nature of work, we can not only create environments where
people love coming to work but also generate the innovation that we need to replace the
millions of jobs that will be lost to technology. I believe that the key to preventing our jobless
future is to rediscover what makes us human, and to create a new generation of human-
centered jobs that allow us to unlock the hidden talents and passions that we carry with us
every day. 

03:20
But first, I think it's important to recognize that we brought this problem on ourselves. And
it's not just because, you know, we are the one building the robots. But even though most jobs
left the factory decades ago, we still hold on to this factory mindset of standardization and de-
skilling. We still define jobs around procedural tasks and then pay people for the number of
hours that they perform these tasks. We've created narrow job definitions like cashier, loan
processor or taxi driver and then asked people to form entire careers around these singular
tasks. 

03:52
These choices have left us with actually two dangerous side effects. The first is that these
narrowly defined jobs will be the first to be displaced by robots, because single-task robots
are just the easiest kinds to build. But second, we have accidentally made it so that millions of
workers around the world have unbelievably boring working lives. 

04:15
Let's take the example of a call center agent. Over the last few decades, we brag about lower
operating costs because we've taken most of the need for brainpower out of the person and put
it into the system. For most of their day, they click on screens, they read scripts. They act
more like machines than humans. And unfortunately, over the next few years, as our
technology gets more advanced, they, along with people like clerks and bookkeepers, will see
the vast majority of their work disappear. 

04:44
To counteract this, we have to start creating new jobs that are less centered on the tasks that a
person does and more focused on the skills that a person brings to work. For example, robots
are great at repetitive and constrained work, but human beings have an amazing ability to
bring together capability with creativity when faced with problems that we've never seen
before. It's when every day brings a little bit of a surprise that we have designed work for
humans and not for robots. Our entrepreneurs and engineers already live in this world, but so
do our nurses and our plumbers and our therapists. You know, it's the nature of too many
companies and organizations to just ask people to come to work and do your job. But if you
work is better done by a robot, or your decisions better made by an AI, what are you supposed
to be doing? 

05:32
Well, I think for the manager, we need to realistically think about the tasks that will be
disappearing over the next few years and start planning for more meaningful, more valuable
work that should replace it. We need to create environments where both human beings and
robots thrive. I say, let's give more work to the robots, and let's start with the work that we
absolutely hate doing. Here, robot, process this painfully idiotic report. 

05:58
And move this box. Thank you. 

06:01
And for the human beings, we should follow the advice from Harry Davis at the University of
Chicago. He says we have to make it so that people don't leave too much of themselves in the
trunk of their car. I mean, human beings are amazing on weekends. Think about the people
that you know and what they do on Saturdays. They're artists, carpenters, chefs and
athletes. But on Monday, they're back to being Junior HR Specialist and Systems Analyst 3. 

06:31
You know, these narrow job titles not only sound boring, but they're actually a subtle
encouragement for people to make narrow and boring job contributions. But I've seen
firsthand that when you invite people to be more, they can amaze us with how much more
they can be. 

06:47
A few years ago, I was working at a large bank that was trying to bring more innovation into
its company culture. So, my team and I designed a prototyping contest that invited anyone to
build anything that they wanted. We were actually trying to figure out whether or not the
primary limiter to innovation was a lack of ideas or a lack of talent, and it turns out it was
neither one. It was an empowerment problem. And the results of the program were
amazing. We started by inviting people to reinvasion what it is they could bring to a
team. This contest was not only a chance to build anything that you wanted but also be
anything that you wanted. And when people were no longer limited by their day-to-day job
titles, they felt free to bring all kinds of different skills and talents to the problems that they
were trying to solve. We saw technology people being designers, marketing people being
architects, and even finance people showing off their ability to write jokes. 

07:41
We ran this program twice, and each time more than 400 people brought their unexpected
talents to work and solved problems that they had been wanting to solve for
years. Collectively, they created millions of dollars of value, building things like a better
touch-tone system for call centers, easier desktop tools for branches and even a thank you
card system that has become a cornerstone of the employee working experience. Over the
course of the eight weeks, people flexed muscles that they never dreamed of using at
work. People learned new skills, they met new people, and at the end, somebody pulled me
aside and said, "I have to tell you, the last few weeks has been one of the most intense, hardest
working experiences of my entire life, but not one second of it felt like work." 

08:28
And that's the key. For those few weeks, people got to be creators and innovators. They had
been dreaming of solutions to problems that had been bugging them for years, and this was a
chance to turn those dreams into a reality. And that dreaming is an important part of what
separates us from machines. For now, our machines do not get frustrated, they do not get
annoyed, and they certainly don't imagine. 

08:54
But we, as human beings -- we feel pain, we get frustrated. And it's when we're most annoyed
and most curious that we're motivated to dig into a problem and create change. Our
imaginations are the birthplace of new products, new services, and even new industries. 

09:12
I believe that the jobs of the future will come from the minds of people who today we call
analysts and specialists, but only if we give them the freedom and protection that they need to
grow into becoming explorers and inventors. If we really want to robot-proof our jobs, we, as
leaders, need to get out of the mindset of telling people what to do and instead start asking
them what problems they're inspired to solve and what talents they want to bring to
work. Because when you can bring your Saturday self to work on Wednesdays, you'll look
forward to Mondays more, and those feelings that we have about Mondays are part of what
makes us human. 

09:49
And as we redesign work for an era of intelligent machines, I invite you all to work alongside
me to bring more humanity to our working lives. 

09:57
Thank you. 

Reflection:
I started listening to TEDTalk video at week 4 of the course, I watched and listened to
them almost everyday of these past weeks. While I was listening, I also took note of
ones that are interesting or have many words I can not make out clearly. After that, I
would go online and search for the transcripts of those videos. From the transcript I
once again took note of the word that I could not hear clearly the first time while I was
listening to the video again. Many of the first videos are very interesting because they
have a lot of new words which are very complicated and hard to hear. But aside from
those ones there are also some which are very easy to hear but hard to keep up with
because they are telling a long story. I believe the reason why they used less
complicated words is to make their long story more comprehensible (easier to listen
and understand) to the audience. The purpose of listening to this kind of video is for
me to imitate the way the presenters talk about their topic. I think they are confident
and their skill in choosing the right word to describe the topic is very worth to learn
from. But to be honest, I don’t think I have much luck in obtaining these skills. At first
look they are very easy to understand but when I put it into practice, it’s very hard to
imitate even for a small part.