Google.org's Five Core Initiatives

I’ll tell you a little bit now about our five core initiatives. We started off with those 10,000 ideas. We boiled them down to 900 concrete initiatives, and then we held the equivalent of a mock court which went on for about six months, where anyone who wanted to bring forth an initiative that we should do had to bring it to trial, and the other people who thought they had a better idea were the judges, and we fought pretty hard about that. We've come up with five. One of them is to redevelop renewable energy at a price cheaper than coal, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that. Accelerate the commercialization of plug-in vehicles. To try to create systems which predict and prevent novel communicable diseases that could become pandemic; to find them early and to stop them. Then, hopefully, to develop some techniques that could be used to do the same thing for famines and for floods and for droughts; early warning systems. To inform and empower and a way to improve public services for the poor. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. To try to create jobs, mostly in Africa and South Asia, for people living in the poorest countries. So first of all, in the last three decades, there have been 30 novel emerging communicable diseases that had not existed in the form we see them now, before. Seventy five percent of them were zoonotic diseases that jumped species because of this population and animal pressure. It has led to a whole new concept called One World One Health, where the health of the environment, the health of the animals, and the health of the insects and the health of humans are all looked at the same way, bringing veterinarian epidemiology and human epidemiology together. Do you know what an epidemic curve is? How many of you know what an epidemic curve is? OK. It's pretty easy to figure out what it is by its name, but if you were looking at the number of cases of diarrhea disease following a picnic, you would see that over time...