This picture shows the end of a brutal boxing match between Ray Campbell and Dick Hyland. Take a look at the condition of the two fighters, battered, bloodied, bruised and staring down each other at the end of the fight. Boxing in those days was very different. There was no mandatory eight count. There was no neutral corner. If your opponent knocked you down, the second you get off your knees, you’re getting punched by a guy who’s been loading up his power shot for seconds (an eternity in the ring).
The report from the newspaper “The Call” of San Francisco: Ray Campbell, formerly of San Francisco, and a boxer who has established quite a reputation over the short distance route in the northwest during the last few months, came to the front in leaps and bounds today at Steveston, when he cleverly and clearly outpointed the famous “Fighting Dick” Hyland, a former world’s title aspirant in the lightweight ranks, in a 15 rounds bout, which proved to be one of the best ever witnessed around Vancouver. A left jab with a right cross that landed more often that it missed, won the bout for Campbell.
Boxing experienced a revival in Britain around the 17th century. Many bouts were fought with bare knuckles and with no standard rules. The modern boxing glove was invented in 1743, the brainchild of Englishman Jack Broughton. But Broughton’s gloves, or mufflers as they were then known, were at the time only used for practice; Broughton used to instruct men in self-defense and he used his mufflers to “effectively secure pupils from the inconvenience of black eyes, broken noses and bloody jaws”.
However, many boxers still chose to fight with bare knuckles until 1867 when gloves were mandated by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Mostly the gloves would be skintight rather than padded, and only weighing two ounces. Skintight gloves remained popular until the turn of the century.
The impact of gloves on the injuries caused during a fight is a controversial issue. Hitting to the head was less common in the bare-knuckle era because of the risk of hurting the boxer’s hand. Gloves reduce the amount of cuts caused, but British Medical Association research has stated that gloves do not reduce brain injuries and may even increase them, because the main cause of injury is acceleration and deceleration of the head, and fighters wearing gloves are able to punch harder to the head. Gloves may reduce the amount of eye injuries, especially if they are thumbless, but retinal tears and detached retinas still occur to boxers wearing modern gloves.
今天学习的是 Tim Cook 2010年在 Auburn University 做的毕业演讲：
Thank you for that nice reception and thank you, Virginia, for that incredible introduction. I thought some of it was about somebody else. It’s a tremendous honor and a privilege for me to be here with all of you. To be back to a place that really feels like home to me and to be back to a place that brings back so many fond memories. Auburn has played a key role in my life and continues to mean a lot to me, as anyone who comes in my office at Apple or my home in Palo Alto instantly discovers. I have so much Auburn memorabilia you might think it was a California outpost for J&M or Anders.
As thrilled as I am to be here I stand before you knowing that the lives of many people here and even more across our state and beyond are deeply affected by the tragedy off our shores. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and my family still lives there and I want you to know that my thoughts and hopes are with you.
Also as thrilled as I am to be here, I stand before you with a deep sense of humility, both because of how I got here and who is here. I am where I am in life because my parents sacrificed more than they should have, because of teachers, professors, friends, and mentors who cared more than they had to and because of Steve Jobs and Apple who have provided me the opportunity to engage in truly meaningful work every day for over 12 years. And I know that I’m offering words of advice in front of a faculty whose ideas and research positively impact our lives. And I do so in a gathering where the faculty is complemented by the hard-won wisdom of so many parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents that have been a source of incredible inspiration for today’s graduates. So bearing all that in mind I’ll share some personal discoveries with you that have at least served me well. Discoveries based on this most improbable of journeys that I have been on.
My most significant discovery so far in my life was the result of one single decision, my decision to join Apple. Working at Apple was never in any plan that I’d outlined for myself but was without a doubt the best decision that I ever made. There have been other important decisions in my life, like my decision to come to Auburn. When I was in high school some teachers advised me to attend Auburn, other teachers advised me to attend the University of Alabama and well, like I said some decisions are pretty obvious. The decision to come to Apple which I made in early 1998 was not so obvious. Since most of you graduates were 10 years old at the time you may not realize that the Apple in early 1998 was very different than the Apple of today. In 1998 there was no iPad or iMac or iPhone; there wasn’t even an iPod; I know it’s hard to imagine life without iPods. While Apple did make Macs, the company had been losing sales for years and was commonly considered to be on the verge of extinction. Only a few months before I’d accepted the job at Apple, Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Computer, was publicly asked what he would do to fix Apple, and he responded “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” In making this statement what distinguished Michael Dell was only that he had the courage to say what so many others believed.
So Apple was in a very different place than it is today, and my employer at the time, Compaq Computer, was the largest personal computer company in the world. Not only was Compaq performing much better than Apple, it was headquartered in Texas and therefore closer to Auburn football. Any purely rational consideration of cost and benefits lined up in Compaq’s favor, and the people who knew me best advised me to stay at Compaq. One CEO I consulted felt so strongly about it he told me I would be a fool to leave Compaq for Apple.
In making the decision to come to Apple, I had to think beyond my training as an engineer. Engineers are taught to make decisions analytically and largely without emotion. When it comes to a decision between alternatives we enumerate the cost and benefits and decide which one is better but there are times in our lives when the careful consideration of cost and benefits just doesn’t seem like the right way to make a decision. There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate, when a particular course of action just feels right and interestingly I’ve discovered it’s in facing life’s most important decisions that intuition seems the most indispensable to getting it right.
In turning important decisions over to intuition one has to give up on the idea of developing a life plan that will bear any resemblance to what ultimately unfolds. Intuition is something that occurs in the moment, and if you are open to it. If you listen to it, it has the potential to direct or redirect you in a way that is best for you. On that day in early 1998 I listened to my intuition, not the left side of my brain or for that matter even the people who knew me best. It’s hard to know why I listened, I’m not even sure I know today, but no more than five minutes into my initial interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple. My intuition already knew that joining Apple was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work for the creative genius and to be on the executive team that could resurrect a great American company. If my intuition had lost the struggle with my left brain, I’m not sure where I would be today, but I’m certain I would not be standing in front of you.
This was a surprising lesson. I recall how uncertain I was at my own commencement about where my life would lead. There was a part of me that very much wanted to have a 25-year plan as a guide to life. When I went to business school we even had an exercise to do a 25-year plan. I found mine, now 22 years old, in preparing for this commencement address. Let’s just say it wasn’t worth the yellowed paper it was written on. I didn’t understand it then, as a young MBA student, but life has a habit of throwing you curve balls. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to plan for the future, but if you’re like me and you occasionally want to swing for the fences you can’t count on a predictable life. But even if you can’t plan, you can prepare. A great batter doesn’t know when the high hanging curve ball is going to come, but he knows it will and he can prepare for what he will do when he gets it. Too often people think about intuition as the same as relying on luck or faith. At least as I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. Intuition can tell you that of the doors that are open to you, which one you should walk through but intuition cannot prepare you for what’s on the other side of that door. Along these lines a quote that has always resonated with me is one by Abraham Lincoln. He said “I will prepare, and some day my chance will come.” I have always believed this. It was this basic belief that led me to Auburn to study industrial engineering, led me to co-op alternating quarters while attending Auburn, led me to Duke to study business, and led me to accept so many jobs and assignments that are too numerous to mention.
In business as in sports, the vast majority of victories are determined before the beginning of the game. We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation. I feel Lincoln’s quote is especially appropriate now, given the state of the economy and the worry that I suspect a number of you must feel. I had the same worry when I graduated in 1982 Yes; I am prehistoric, for the record. But as many of the parents here will remember, the economy then bore some strong similarities to the economy today. The unemployment rate was in the double digits; we didn’t have the collapse of Wall Street banks but we did have the savings and loan crisis. I worried, as many of my classmates did, what the future held for them. But what was true for Lincoln was true for those of us who graduated in ’82, and it is true for those of you graduating today. Prepare and your chance will come. Just as all previous generations have done you will stand on the shoulders of the generation that came before you, the generation of mine and your parents, and you will achieve more and go farther. The fact that you are here now at this great institution, in this great state, at this great moment for both you and your families is a testament to the fact that your preparation has begun. Continue to prepare yourselves as you have at Auburn, so when your gut tells you “this is my moment,” you are without a doubt ready.
If you are prepared when the right door opens then it comes down to just one more thing, make sure that your execution lives up to your preparation. At least for me the second sentence of the Auburn creed, “I believe in work, hard work” really resonates here and has been one of my core beliefs for as long as I can remember. Though the sentiment is a simple one, there’s tremendous dignity and wisdom in these words and they have stood the test of time.
As current events teach us, those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves, or worse, deceive others. I have the good fortune to be surrounded by some brilliant, intuitive thinkers who create the most elegant and extraordinary products in the world. For all of us intuition is not a substitute for rigorous thinking and hard work it is simply the lead-in. We never take shortcuts. We attend to every detail. We follow where curiosity leads, aware that the journey may be longer but will ultimately be more worthwhile. We take risks knowing that risk will sometimes result in failure but without the possibility of failure, there is no possibility of success. We remember Albert Einstein’s words, “insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.” When you put it all together, I know this, intuition is critical in virtually everything you do but without relentless preparation and execution, it is meaningless.
So those are my discoveries on the significance of intuition, preparation, and hard work. For me they give rise to a simple principle for the most important decisions in your life trust your intuition and then work with everything you have to prove it right.
Logic probably dictates that I end my remarks here but as I’ve said sometimes logic shouldn’t prevail and so I have one last brief discovery to share with you. I think it is misleading to talk about success without also referencing failure. I know of no one who has achieved something significant without also in their own lives experiencing their share of hardship, frustration, and regret. So don’t believe that something in your past prevents you from doing great work in the future. To all of you who doubt yourselves, I have been there too and although today I’ve spent time talking about a great decision, I’ve made some that are far from it. And like many of you I’ve had my share of life’s personal challenges and failures but after many miles on my journey I recognize that each of these difficult periods of life passes and with each we exit stronger and wiser. The old saying “This too, shall pass.” has certainly proven true for me and I’m sure it’ll hold true for anyone who believes it.
So paint in your mind the most grand vision where you want to go in life. Prepare, trust in, and execute on your intuition and don’t get distracted by life’s potholes. Congratulations class of 2010, this is your day. This is your moment. You’ve received a first class education, from a first class institution. Congratulations to your families and friends who have supported you. And as important as this day is, make sure that you carry the Auburn spirit with you in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Let your joy be in your journey, not in some distant goal. And regardless of where your particular journey may lead you from this moment forward, thank you for allowing me to play a small part in today. Godspeed.
今天学习的 TED 是 Ken Robinson 的 Do schools kill creativity? 这个 TED 是目前官网所有视频中点击量最高的一个：
Good morning. How are you?
It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
There have been three themes running through the conference which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.
If you work in education, you're not asked.
And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God," you know, "Why me?"
"My one night out all week."
But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's marvel, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
Thank you.
That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.
So, 15 minutes left.
Well, I was born... no.
I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will, in a minute."
When my son was four in England -- Actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.
If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?
No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.
"Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was.
Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?
How annoying would that be?
"Must try harder."
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now! And put the pencil down."
"And stop speaking like that."
"It's confusing everybody."
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month.
Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He was really upset on the plane, he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly --
Because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.
And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night.
And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.
Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often, thankfully.
No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here."
"Give me a break."
Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition.
People weren't aware they could have that.
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about the problems Gillian was having at school. Because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said, "I've listened to all these things your mother's told me, I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.
There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.
Thank you very much.
