Leonardo Silva Reviewer's name Hello everyone. Because this is my first time at TED, I've decided to bring along an old friend to help break the ice a bit. Yes, that's right, this is Barbie. She's 50 years old and she's looking as young as ever.
But I'd also like to introduce you to what may be an unfamiliar face. This is Fula. Fula is the Arab world's answer to Barbie. Now according to proponents of the clash of civilizations, Barbie and Fula occupy these completely separate spheres. They have different interests, they have divergent values.
and should they ever come in contact, well, I gotta tell you, it's just not gonna be pretty. My experience, however, in the Islamic world is very different. Where I work, in the Arab region, people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western, nor are they traditionally Islamic.
I want to show you two examples. The first is For Shabab. It means for youth, and it's a new Arab TV channel.
Video clips from across the globe. The USA. I am not afraid to stand alone. I am not afraid to stand alone. If Allah is my Messiah.
I am not afraid to stand alone. Everything will be alright I am not afraid to stand alone The Airboat Music Farshabab has been dubbed Islamic MTV. Its creator, who's an Egyptian TV producer called Ahmed Abu-Heba, wants young people to be inspired by Islam to lead better lives. He reckons the best way to get that message across is to use the enormously popular medium of music videos.
Farshabab was set up as an alternative to existing Arab music channels, and they look something like this. That, by the way, is Haifa Wahby. She's a Lebanese pop star and pan-Arab pin-up girl.
In the world of For Shabab, it's not about bump and grind, but it's not about fire and brimstone either. Its videos are intended to show a kinder, gentler face of Islam for young people to deal with life's challenges. Now my second example is for a slightly younger crowd and it's called the 99. Now these are the world's first Islamic superheroes.
They were created by a Kuwaiti psychologist called Nayef Al Motawa and his desire is to rescue Islam from images of intolerance, all in a child-friendly format. The 99, the characters are meant to embody the 99 attributes of Allah. Justice, wisdom, mercy among others.
So, for example, there is the character of Noora. She is meant to have the power to look inside people and see the good and bad in everyone. Another character called Jami has the ability to create fantastic inventions. Now, The 99 is not just a comic book.
It's now a theme park. There's an animated series in the works. And by this time next year, the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman will have joined forces with The 99 to... beat injustice wherever they find it. The 99 and For Shabab are just two of many examples of this sort of Islamic cross-cultural hybridization.
We're not talking here about a clash of civilizations, nor is it some sort of indistinguishable mash. I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined. Now, while For Shabab and the 99 may look new and shiny...
there's actually a very long tradition of this. Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern. After all, it's the Quran which encourages us to do this.
We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another. And to my mind, those are pretty wise words, no matter what your creed. Thank you. Traffic is a global epidemic.
US traffic is creating 45% of the world's air pollution. In the UK, time wasted in traffic costs 20 billion a year. Would you pay for cleaner air and a faster commute? Stockholm put it to a vote. I voted for it, yes.
I voted for it. I vote for it. We're not old enough to vote.
Vote. We had to do something in Stockholm to improve... to improve the environment and to get a better flow in the traffic. We put a price on taking your car into the central parts of Stockholm and we call that congestion charges.
If you start a system like this and it doesn't work on the first day, then you will be in big trouble. It must be perfect from day one. There are 18 entry gates to the city.
Each is equipped with cameras. Pictures are taken of the rear and front license plates. These pictures are sent to a central system that identifies the license plates and makes sure that the right person pays for the right passages. One of the obstacles we overcame was the OCR, the optical character reading of the license plate.
We went out to IBM's global organization and the R&D centers and found a very good software we could use and we managed to implement it in two months time. This is the heart of the system where all images and passages are being processed. Over 99% of all pictures are correctly identified.
That is nice. This is how it should be all the time. Behind me you can see the traffic and the clock is 6pm.
Before we had the congestion charging the traffic was queuing up at this time of the day. I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea because I think that we should take care of the environment in the city.
The traffic went down with about 22% and the air pollution was about 14% better. It's a huge inter... national interest from different parts of the world, from the United States, from Latin America, from China, and it's really a pleasure to tell people not what we are planning to do, but what we actually have done in Stockholm. I voted for it, yes I did.
Not my husband, but I did. I think he is not thinking like me for the future. I'm thinking for the children and the grandchildren.