What is a true hero ?

We ruin a lot of words. When we find a word we like, we use it, and misuse it, over and over until about all of its impact is ground out. One word that’s become nearly meaningless in recent years in this one… And it’s a shame, because this used to be such a great word !

There’s a big difference between someone who has a heroic moment and someone who’s a true hero. When Captain Sullenberger landed that plane in the Hudson, that was a heroic moment, it made him the Michael Jordan of plane ditching ! But the way he carried himself on “60 minutes”, that was a hero in the making ! ”We will be joined forever because of the events of January 15th, in our hearts and our minds. Goodbye.”

I think he deserves to be right there, among the few true time-tested heroes who really define the word. Heroes like Wesley Autrey. Wesley’s heroic moment came 2 years ago, when he jumped in front of a speeding New York city subway train to save a stranger who’d fallen on the tracks. Wesley has never forgotten the responsibility of being a hero.

“I got my two daughters, you know, who I love very very much, and you know, I have to protect my image.”

A real hero only makes news once.

“Yes, you don’t wanna tarnish that image.”

Thank you, Wesley, looks like the word’s coming back already !

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How two generations viewed Mandela

Two white South-African women at one time had wildly different opinions of Nelson Mandela, simply because they were at generations apart. My good friend Janice aged 50 grew up in apartheid South-Africa. Janice’s friend Amy aged 23 was born the year Mandela was released from prison. Janice : Growing up as a white South African, we were taught that he was in jail, that he was a traitor of the state.

Amy : I suppose you could say when I was growing in south Africa, he was my president and I was proud to be growing in a generation that had him as their president.

So you weren’t told as a child that this man was a villain ?

No, I was taught that he was a hero to be celebrated, who’d brought the country together , and united the rainbow nation of South Africa.

It was only when Janice left the white-ruled nation that an exchange student in Oregon, that she gained some perspective, and when she returned to South Africa, as a TV news producer, she met Nelson Mandela in what she describes as one of the highlights of her life.

The fact that he came out of jail after all those years, and all that hardship, and he extended a hand to all South-Africans, white and black and every colour, was really an incredible thing, and I think that will be his legacy. He didn’t want anybody to be left behind in the new South Africa.

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A woman searching for genetic causes of diseases

I never imagined that I would grow up to be a scientist, it actually really didn’t cross my mind.

I’m Ann Carpenter, I’m 3o years old, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I’m a research scientist.

My grandpa actually gave me a little science kit when I was really young, and I had this disgusting formaldeide frog that you were supposed to dissect and I just thought that was so foul, I didn’t want to touch it at all ! So, I was definitely not the inspired from the early age type.

I grew up on a farm, 111 acres, in rural Indiana, I didn’t get into town, except for soccer practice once a week or so, so I really just read a lot of books. It wasn’t till I hit college that I started to see sciences as a lot more interesting, and I think it was actually learning about the molecular biology, learning about DNA, and about ?? intricate mechanisms, that make our cells work, and in turn make our bodies work.

I’m the director of the imaging platform at the Broad Institute, which is a collaborative institute between Harvard and MIT. The institute’s director is Eric Lander, he was involved in sequencing the human genome, probably the greatest scientific accomplishment of the last century, and that’s really the focus here, going forward, it’s how we can take the information that we know about , or the genetic material that makes human beings, and really use it to understand how the body works, and how we can help the body to work better, in the cases when it’s succumb disease.

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Revising asleep

To use it, you would listen to whatever music you like to listen to, and we pre-record that association with that and what you study, so if you’re studying vocab words, and listening to Drake, we record that association, and when you wanna reinforce that memory, we replay it right, and it works because… When you’re cooking, an association… like, people think of smell as a long-term memory. You smell a smell and it takes you back to a person, who reminds you of a person, takes you back to a place. In this case, with shorter memories, we’re creating little associations between sounds and specific memories, and during the phase of sleep, when long-term memories are being formed, we’re evoking those memories through that association of the sound, and it’s increasing the chance that it comes along from memory. This is a prototype of what you need to wear in bed, it has Bluetooth, so it talks to your mobile device, it has a sensor that measures heart rate, we’re big in picking up little changes in your heartbeat, how regular-timed it is. And that changes a lot. The nervous system when you’re working on memory, the part of your nervous system that handles regulating heart-rate and respiratory rate, that sounds a little, so we pick that up, and that happens actually a couple of different times, but if we also look at how much you’ve moved, and when the last time you moved and stuff like that, we can find these very specific events very accurate. Journalist : So, do you think in a short-while, there’ll be students all over the world thanking you guys for making their exam prep a lot easier ? I hope so, I hope the students will have a lot of fun and worry less about just staying there and studying, but you know, they’re listening to music, and it’s also a good excuse for students to tell their parents that it’s okay to listen to music while they’re studying, and it’s actually helping them too.

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Anuradha Koirala – A woman’s fight

I admire our next hero because of the brave and serious work she does. Every day, this woman confronts the worst of what humanity has to offer. She says “Stop ! Stop selling our girls !”. She saves girls from being sold into the sex trade where they are repeatedly raped for profit, tortured, and enslaved. Since 1993, she has helped rescue more than 12000 women and girls. Through her organization, she has provided not only a shelter for these girls and young women, but she has created a home, a place for them to heal, to go to school, learn a skill, and for who are infected with HIV/ AIDS, a place to spend their days where they’re surrounded by love. This is why I admire our hero, Anuradha Koirala. So until we live in a world where everyone knows that real men don’t buy girls, we have a hero fighting to free them with every beat of her heart.

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Maya Angelou talks about Doctor King

It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life, because the young men and women are tempted to believe : “Well, if he was that great, he’s inaccessible, and I can never try to be that, or emulate that or achieve that. The truth is Martin Luther King was a human being with a brilliant mind, a powerful heart, and insight, and courage, and also with a sense of humor. So he was accessible. I mentioned courage, and I would like to say something else about that. Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently, you see. You can’t consistently kind, or fair, or humane, or generous, not without courage, because if you don’t have it, sooner or later, you’ll stop and say “Hu, the threat is too much, difficulty is too high, the challenge is too great”. So, I would like to say that Doctor King, he was also a funny man, and that’s nice to know.

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A wheelchair friendly hotel ?

Frank was shot while working for the BBC in Saudi Arabia 8 years ago. Six bullets left him partially paralyzed. He describes himself as a backpacker at heart, but his disability has forced him to review the way he travels. His destination : the Scandic Victoria Tower Hotel., which claims to be one of the most disabled-friendly in Europe. “Ah ! You’ve even got a mini-sized desk here !” “Apparently, this opens automatically ! Ah, okay… Here we go !” “No view ! That is incredibly frustrating !” “The bed raises up…, which is nice, actually, it’s nice to have that. I mean, it’s a hospital bed, but it doesn’t feel like a hospital, so that’s good.” “Somebody has thoughtfully left out a kettle here… and there is no sign of what on earth I plug this into !” “Lovely ! Very nice indeed ! Mean, I don’t actually need these things, but obviously lots of people do, so… Ah, that’s nice, they stay up there !” “I have the general impression that this feels like a room designed by somebody standing up, and I don’t think… it doesn’t feel like it was validated by somebody in a wheelchair. I’m only saying all this because this hotel so prides itself on being wheelchair friendly, and they have made a real effort, but they’re not quite there yet.”

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Are translation apps up to the job ?

As distance becomes an inconvenient rather than an insurmountable obstacle, globalisation means communicating in only one language just isn’t good enough. Hundreds of people spend hours each day learning languages the traditional way, but as accuracy improves, maybe they shouldn’t bother… The question is “Are the apps up to the job ?” The system has to recognize the words that you’re pronouncing, that’s called voice recognition, and that’s a really hard problem in itself, independently of translation, so you’ve got two really hard problems. What seems obvious for people, we do it naturally, without thinking, recognising words out of a sound stream, and putting them together into sentences. And grasping a phone as you chat is hardly natural, so maybe there could be some wearable tech to the rescue. This is google glass, which is basically a connectic computer which you can wear on your face. It’s got a built-in camera, a microphone, and speaker, so it should provide you with everything you need for a bit of translation. So, if I want to do a basic translation, this is what I do : “Okay, glass, google “Hello, how are you,” in French.” I can now hear that it’s “Bonjour, comment allez-vous ?”. Pretty cool, and that was just the prototype ! Many translation apps need to be online to work, though, and that data could end up being pretty expensive if you’re abroad, where you’re likely to need translation the most…

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Tribute to a pioneer

“That’s one small step for a man, …one giant leap for mankind” The tributes have been coming in for the man who inspired a whole generation. President Obama said he was among the greatest of American heroes, not just of his time, but of all times. A man who delivered a moment of human achievement that will never be forgotten. Buzz Aldrin was with him that day in 1969, the second man to set foot on the moon. “That’s very sad indeed that we’re not able to be together as a crew on the fiftieth anniversary, we sure have been looking forward to that in 2019, and I think the entire space world will be very saddened to hear this news. To me, we’re missing a great spokesman and leader in the space program.” There were many tributes to the 82-year-old who died of complications following heart surgery. In remembering his life, Neil Armstrong’s family ask for one thing : honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink. “A man from Planet Earth, first step from upon the moon”

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CNN hero Diane Latiker

There’s a force in the city of Chicago, she moves to her beloved Roseland neighborhood, in search of young people who have gone down the wrong path. When she finds them, she takes them by the hand, and with the roar of a lioness, she says “I will not give up on you”. Diane Latiker is the mother of 8, grandmother of 13, and the proud keeper of Kids off the block. She offers gang members, trouble kids, and good ones too, a safe place to go, where they can and be safe, study and make music. For everyone in those 1500 kids, today was a good day. “The memorial is a tribute to young people killed by violence from 24 years down. But those stones over there, they don’t say whether you’re a man, do they ? What makes you a man ? They don’t have a clue… because they haven’t had a chance to be a kid ! They grew up with their uncles and father selling drugs, and now guess what ? They’re in the same thing !” “If our young people knew how much power they had, they would be unstoppable !” Song : ♪ “Evreything is alright, everything is okay..”♫

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CNN heroes Taryn Davis

I know that when men and women like me serve this country, we ask a lot from our family. They give up so much, so that we can do the job that we have to do, they are brave, and strong, and we carry their pictures in our pockets to help us get back home. But not all of us do. Taryn Davis is a widow. She lost her husband Michael in Iraq just 17 months after they said “I do”. She reached out for a community of other widows like her, but couldn’t find one, so she created the American Widow project where 900 young women gather in person and on Facebook to support one another and remember.

When you have lost the one person that made you feel like you’ll never be alone, and you understand that person’s gone, it’s hard to find a reason to live. When I thought about a widow, I thought about a ninety-year-old woman in black, knitting a sweater for one of her hundred cats. I wanted to embrace the title. I knew that title represented Michael’s sacrifice, and my own.

I went on to Google and I typed in “widow”, and it came back with the response “Did you mean window ?” (chuckles), and it was the catalyst to me creating what the American Widow project is now.

She’s showing us that we can still live, and that’s saving lives, maybe we’re not gonna die from being sad, but we’re not gonna be living.

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Gap Year in India

India ! Long a haven for hippies and backpackers, is now a major destination for British gap year students. Student chanting for Indian children : All together “A”, the children repeat, “B”… The travel industry is reporting a surge in bookings for foreign charity and community-based projects. It’s thought that the increase has been in part fueled by this year’s shortage of university places. “G !” A couple of my friends didn’t get the office they wanted from the universities they wanted to go to, so they withdrew the u class and just got a year to go travelling, but I personally differed my entry originally, co’s I knew I wanted to have a year out and to travel, see the world, and no worry about money and work, and just chill out and relax. But travelling abroad isn’t always without its drawbacks, the consulate team at the British High Commission in Delhi urged caution. My advice to gap year students would be to prepare one in advance. The sort of problems that we see here, would be road traffic accidents, there are the dangers leading into drugs, and there is a little bit of sexual harassment for young girls as well. A great source of information would be the Foreign Office, a sponsored website called gogapyear.com, there you will find a wealth of information about staying healthy, making sure that your kids are properly looked after, then you know, quite a lot about the customs in the country, then you can actually fit in better as well. So, the message from India is this : if you’re contemplating taking a gap year, plan it carefully. If you do, then the rewards of reaching out to foreign communities could benefit you long beyond your stay.

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Why study abroad ?

I would recommend for any international student to study outside of their home country. I myself participated in study abroad, from Ireland, and I studied in Caen, in Normandy, in France, and I always have had it on my resume, my curriculum vitae, that I studied abroad, and it has always gotten me noticed in interviews and job applications. More so than almost any other item, I think. Many people are coming to the job market today with degrees and master’s degrees, so you do need to make yourself stand out a little bit more above the crowd. A semester of study abroad, a year of study abroad, shows that you’re willing to take on a challenge, you’re willing to be brave, you’re willing to be open to living in a different culture, meet new people, and it takes a lot of courage to do that, to move away from family and friends in a comfortable environment, and throw yourself into an environment that you don’t know a lot about. So it says a lot for a person to study abroad, especially if English is not their first language, and they go to live in an environment where a second language is required, that’s particularly challenging. The student has to perfect English very quickly in a stressful environment, in the sense that they’re pressured to learn the second language.

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Fishy Food

Turning heads around Washington ! They’re half vegetable, half fish, and they’re getting people talking about genetically modified foods. They’re fishy food cars. “So, fishy, not meaning made of fish, but fishy meaning like something fishy…
  Meaning suspicious, yeah !
  Okay.” GMO ingredients are in 80% of the food on supermarket shelves, but fishy food car driver Nikolas Schiller says without labels, it’s hard to tell. “The first ingredient is corn, it’s likely genetically engineered corn ; butter milk, probably came from cows that have been fed genetically engineered food,.” And Schiller suspects that GMOs are bad for your health. “Our grandparents and previous generations didn’t eat this, and now all of a sudden we’re seeing higher incidences of food and health issues, and so if they’re saying “Oh, everything’s safe, but nothing is labelled”, so we really can’t trace the safety. Any time you have a veil over something, people are gonna want transparency, they’re gonna want sunshine, and as long as you withhold that, people are gonna think this is kinda fishy. This is suspicious.” Cathy Enright heads the industry sponsored Council for Biotechnology Information. She says the sunshine is about to breakthrough. “We’ve been asked “Show us your data.”, so that food safety information is going to become available.” They will soon be online for the first time at a new website gmoanswers.com, she says. It’s part of a new pledge of openness and dialogue that Enright says is overdue. “We should have been talking about this for two decades.” So now GMOs seem fishy.

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The future of clothes

We wear clothes to keep us warm, protect us from the sun, and of course, look good. But in the future our apparel could do more than that, turning our clothes into electric chargers for our personal electronics. At the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Li- Wei Lin and his team are trying to make clothes more intelligent. Outfitted with the latest technologies, his lab is working on a way to intertwine electric generators into clothing fibers, so one day we’ll be able to harvest energy through our normal body movements. Professor Li- Wei Lin : the idea is that a human is very efficient in terms of energy generation. We eat food, and exercise, so our long-term goal is that since human is so efficient, we still need to move, and we want to scavenge energy out of a human. One way is actually putting the energy generation onto the clothes. It starts by creating nano-electric fibers so small they’re invisible to the naked eye. This is the foundation for Lin’s nano-generator. Lin estimates by just walking, the clothes people wear might be able to produce enough power to keep their mobile phones continually charged. The future of clothes, making wired garments a perfect fit for the digital age !

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CNN hero cleans river

Mississippi river is one of the most famous rivers in the world, historically, it helped build the country. It’s almost like a huge National Park. I grew up right on the river, and I was taken for granted. Everything you can imagine winds up in the river somehow. We’re talking millions of pounds of garbage. As I got older, I realized, this should not be like this. And if no one else is doing anything about it, I will ! First year, this is myself, a boat, a river, and a lot of trash. “Look at that !” I was just pumped up to do it. Now here we are, fifteen ships later, we went from boat loads to barge loads. “You guys ready ?” –“Yeah !” Basically, we’re creating an opportunity for people to go out on the river and do something positive. “Hey guys, it’s amazing in two hours how much stuff we get.” We gather up all these volunteers, we go out there, we just sweep it clean. It’s either freezing cold out, or super hot. “It’s cool workout !” This is hard backbreaking work. People wanna have fun, and do wanna make a difference. We’ve removed over 7 million pounds of garbage since we started. Close to 90% of everything brought in is recycled. This is a problem that people created, but a problem that people can fix.

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Anne Malhum’s idea

Sometimes, an idea is just so crazy it has to work. A young woman from Philadelphia walks into a local homeless shelter and says : "I wanna take some people running". Right there, in the middle of a place where the forgotten and the downtrodden struggle to get through the day, where the outcasts and the addicts sit without their dreams, where the rejected and the ignored believe the whole world has turned its back on them, in walks a woman filled with such a profound belief that running can be a healing force. She says : "I wanna take some homeless people running". And that’s just what Ann Malhum did. So they laced up their shoes together, they put on their new hats and T-shirts and ran a mile together. They started slow, then the group got bigger and they ran further, and some kept right on running. They kept running toward a new job, they kept running toward the life they had always imagined. That is why, on any given morning, before the sun rises, you can see a group of runners, and right in the middle of this group is Ann Malhum, our hero, with her amazing idea.

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Mandela Day

I was ten years old when Nelson Mandela walked out of what was then called the Victor Verster Prison, when he was holding hands with his former wife Winnie Madikizela Mandela, and I grew up in a family where it has always been instilled in us about the importance of the struggle, the importance of why people like Nelson Mandela fought and liberated South Africa. I had been... it was a Sunday, and I had been sent to the shops on that day. When I came back, I found my mother staring at the TV screen and she was crying. And I said to her : “But why are you crying ? What’s wrong ? What’s wrong ?”” And for a good fifteen twenty seconds, she did not answer me, and she held me, and she shook me, and she said to me : “This is the day you will never forget for the rest of your life. You are now free !” That, to me, I’m constantly reminded of that, each time I see the beauty of South Africa, and all its flaws. Nelson Mandela to a lot of South Africans stands for peace, he stands for reconciliation when a lot of black people were calling for revenge when he was released. He was the one who preached peace. He had said in one of his speeches : “I studied the Afrikaners, for all the 27 years that I was in prison. I am going to beat them at their own game. I am preaching forgiveness, and that is how you defeat them your enemy.

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From New York’s social housing project, to Wall Street banker and lawyer, to community crusader

Journalist (off) : Everybody has a story, but most don’t think their story matters. That’s what Villy Wang wants to change.
Villy Wang : “We grew up in the midst of violence.”
Journalist (off):Villy is the classic example of the American success story. Villy Wang : “I grew up in the housing projects in New York, I had a really inspiring Mom, who was an immigrant, Chinese woman who came from China, not speaking the language, didn’t have a job, and basically was a single mom who had to raise two kids on her own.”
Journalist (off):Joe Wei juggled many day jobs, put herself through night school, got a fashion degree, and opened up her own business.
Villy Wang : In the very beginning, we worked the sweatshops for somebody else, but then I got to work with my Mom in her own business, in her factory. Journalist : In New York ?
Villy Wang : “In New York, made enough money, to basically buy a house, and move us out of the housing projects. When I ended up being a banker and a lawyer, she was very very proud.”
Journalist (off) : By society’s standards, she had it all : the big title and pay check. Despite her mom’s dreams for her, the fabric of her own life didn’t bring her joy.
Villy : “And I decided to give up being a lawyer, and she totally freaked out ! “What ? Are you crazy ? How could you give up a stable job ?”.”
Journalist (off) : Fashion wasn’t Villy’s passion. What enlivens her ? Giving back to underserved youth in a different art form. More than 7 years ago, Villy created an outlet for herself and these kids, then her Baycat team have been educating, inspiring and employing thousands of kids.

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Ruby Bridges visits President Obama and her portrait

Pdt Obama (to Ruby Bridges) : indistinct chatter then "I might not be here, and you would not be here either ! So..." RB : Just having him say that meant a lot to me, and it always has. But to be standing, shoulder to shoulder with History, and viewing History, that’ just once in a lifetime ! The painting, the piece where I walk into William Frank School integrating Public School systems in 1960. Pdt Obama : "Can you stop with your head back and -indistinct-" RB : Abolutely ! Odt O : "You can still that ?" RB : And I do ! Every day ! The girl in that paintin at 6 years old, knew absolutely nothing about racism. I was going to school that day. But the lesson that I took away that year in an empty school building, was that none of us know anything about disliking one another when we come into the world. That’s something that’s passed on to us. So every time I see that, I think about the fact that I aws an innocent child that knew absolutely nothing about what was happening that day, but that I lerned a very valuble lesson. And that is that we should never look at a person and judge them by the color of their skin. That’s the lesson that I learned in first grade.

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