Kenyan Pundit

1) Speaker: Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic magazine - love it!, author, lecturer).
- For more background read “Why People Believe Weird Things?” Kind of like the print version of Mythbusters (anyone watch that show…what a day job!).
- His presentation was not really blogabble..but pretty neat about how easy it is to fool human beings.

Interlude: Stew, love the bio. Sharp sharp humor.

2) Speaker: Pastor Rick Warren (author of the second bestselling hardback nonfiction book in history, The Purpose Driven Life).

Rick Warren
- Lot of people lacking in spirituality.
- There’s more to life than just existing.
- When the book became a best-seller, he had his own crisis. It brought in lots of money and lots of attention. When he started his church, he never wanted to be a celebrity preacher. He asked himself what is the purpose of this?
- He began to think about the stewardship of affluence and the stewardship of leadership.
- Most people never establish/codify your worldview. What do you believe in? What’s important to you? What you believe determines your behavior, and your behavior determines what you become. The test of your worldview is how you act in the tough times.
- The good life is not about looking good, feeling good and having the goods, it’s about being good. He believes that human beings find significance when they give..
- Rick and his wife made 5 decisions on what to do with the money: 1) They decided not to use the money for themselves; 2) He had his church stop paying him a salary; 3) He paid back to the church all the money he’d been paid; 4) Set up three foundations focusing on the world’s big problems; 5) They became reverse tithers – now give away 90% of what they make.
- Chapter in the bible – Psalm 72. When you read it, it sounds very selfish but read the whole chapter – why is he asking for all this influence? To assist the marginalized in society. Moral of the story, the purpose of influence is so that you can speak up of those who have no influence.
- Ask yourself, what’s in your hand? What do you have in your life that you’ve been given..ideas? money? Networks? Creativity? Influence? What are you wired to do and what are you doing about it.
- God smiles when you be you.
- Some people have the misguided that God is only happy when you do “spiritual things” but the truth is that God is happy when you are doing what you were wired to do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Theme: The World Flattens

1. Speaker One: Roger Mandle
- First slide featured Juliet Serem a Kenyan student a RISD - she represented the future ” a citizen of the world” and Tom Friedman’s the world is flat.
- Design for the future is about responsible and responsive design. Also design as process, education, art & craft, economic development strategy, meaning.
- Spoke about Dan Pink and the coming dominance of the “age of creativity.”
- We are entering the age of consilience: integration of the elements of the left and the right brain – of arts and science.
- What is consilience design? Ultimate example is Leonardo da Vinci and nature. Design in nature is elegantly economical – continuously evolving toward greater refinement.
- Spoke about RISD’s new projects along these lines including the Universal Kitchen Design and sustainable design projects.
- Recommendations: teach art and design throughout kindergarten to high school; teach integrative curricular; set up a national design council.

2) Speaker: Mena Trott (co-founder of Movable Type)
- She’s a blogger www.dollarshort.org
- She started in 2001, was working in design but unhappy, English major in college and missed writing. When she started her blog, her goal was to be famous to people on the internet and to win an award because she’s never won an award before and she did. Her blog was about her personal stories and that’s what interests her about blogging, people that tell stories.
- Blogs, so what? They are records of who you are, you’re person and records of other people. Think about it on a global scale especially as more people get access – these are historical records and this is about the world flattening.

3) Speaker: Richard Baraniuk
- Working on Open source tools and content for education.
- E.g. engineering professors working on a super-engineering text book that can be shared around the world.
- Working with Teacher Without Borders to develop teaching materials. But focusing on more than providing free content – goal is to contextualize and make it locally relevant.
- Spoke about “Burn” - publishing on demand based on the repository at Connexions. Community-authored materials that are modular/customized and that are available at a very low cost. Changes the economics of publishing and about cutting out the middleman.
- What are the enablers/what’s making this happen? 1) Technology – XML in particular, provides a common framework for sharing…think about it as Lego blocks, allows customization, allows interconnectivity. 2) Intellectual Property – ability to mix, share, and burn. Availability of framework that makes sharing safe – Creative Commons.
- What are the challenges: 1) Quality control – anyone can contribute anything. Solution = peer review. They are now designing social software for individual peer review process.

4) Speaker: Peter Gabriel (Genesis band member, now solo artist, founder of Witness - a site that trains human right defenders to document and film instances of human rights abuse).
- Motivation behind Witness – to prevent the denial and burial of abuse. These stories must not be forgotten.
- Goal is to now integrate camera phones since technology is more user-friendly and cheaper.

Popularity: 3% [?]

First, Ethan and Bruno are also liveblogging TED and doing a much more comprehensive job than I am so be sure to check them out.

Then yesterday, I forgot to mention Jeff Han and his uber-cool multi-touch interaction thingy. Be sure to check out the video.

The first session was focused on life sciences.
Speaker 1 - Alan Russell (from my alma mater!).
Was late for this so couldn’t blog it, but he’s doing really neat stuff with regenerative medicine.

Speaker 2: Joe Derisi (molecular biologist with focus on infectious diseases and developer of the virus chip
Focus of his talk was on using technology to improve diagnosis.

Eh, I think I need some caffeine in my system.

Interlude feature this Amazing African grey parrot - Einstein.

Speaker 3: Neil Gershenfeld (blogged about him before during Poptech).
- We’ve won, we have the digital revolution. What comes next after computers?
- Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to both computers and science because it froze computation in the fifties.
- Neil and his colleagues at the Center for Bits and Atoms are trying to figure out how to move forward. The link covers the first part of his talk.
- Neil started teaching a class called “How to Make (almost) Anything.” Focus is on personal fabrication. Technology for the market of one. As part of the programs outreach requirement, started Fab Labs – cost is about $25,000. They exploded around the world; this wasn’t expected. For all the attention to the digital divide, they’d find unused computers in all these places. Labs about empowerment-> education -> problem solving -> job creation -> invention. Eight year olds in Ghana are inventing designs that are better than those by MIT students on their own.
- Barrier is getting development community to think about letting people create technology rather than consume technology. They all want to talk about the work Neil is doing but won’t fund it. Social engineering and organizational engineering is required. Technology is seen as top-down mega projects. Message coming from Fab Lab aren’t that the rest of the world can create their own projects.

Speaker 4: Penelope Boston (cave researcher).
- Should life forms be transported to Mars?
- Chance of life in Mars is one in four. Thinks life is underground.
- How do you look for ET-life and how do we know when you find it?
- Why would Martian life be hard to find? Probably microscopic, probably hiding, may be very different in its fundamental chemistry – size, chemistry, speed of activity. We are guided by our limited experience. Talked about using experience with cave research in Mars.

Popularity: 2% [?]

- Intro: “I am Al Gore, I used to be the next President of America.” Audience laughs. Gore, “I don’t think that’s funny.”
- We are facing a planetary emergency. Collision btwn civilization and resources. There’s an old cliché that the Chinese word for crisis has two characters – one signifying danger and the other opportunity. We are presented with the possibility of turning the global crisis to an opportunity.
- The assumption that the earth is so big that we can’t have any significant impact on it is dangerous.
- The ten hottest years on record have occurred in the last fourteen levels. Essentially carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a crazy all time high. Ocean temperature levels are also at an all time high. These has resulted in stronger storms. 2004 record year for tornados in U.S. Japan all time record for typhoons in 2004. Katrina = perfect example of where global warming is leading us. Three weeks after Katrina, Rita hit then Wilma, which was the strongest hurricane over. Then they ran out of names and had to move to Greek names for the first time ever. (He showed lots of dramatic slides showing the effects of global warming).
- Ironically, global warming causes more flooding and more drought. Effect is most dramatic in Africa. Warm air doesn’t just raise water levels that result in flooding it also sucks moisture out of the soil leading to drought. Also changes in seasons that have impact on surrounding ecologies. We are also in the midst of the sixth extinction crisis and witnessing a crop of new diseases e.g. avian flu, SARs (this depressing enough yet???).
- The two canaries in the minefield –cracks in the Artic ice cap and Antartica.
- What are the biggest misconceptions about this issue: 1) That there is confusion about whether global warming is a fact or theory – it’s a fact!; 2) That there is tension between economic growth and addressing global warming – but what happens when there is no planet…zero growth; 3)problem is to big to solve – lots of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing to see what can be done about the problem.
- United States should be leading the world on this issue – we need to ask how can we the skills, opportunities, democracy we have to address this problem.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Just shared an elevator with Al Gore over the break. He introduced himself to me…I played it cool, like I share elevators with former American V-Ps all the time. My mother won’t appreciate the fact that I didn’t try and get a photo-op.

1. Speaker One - Lisa Randall (Theoretical Physicist). Eh, this one went completely over my head.

2) Speaker Two - Paul Berg (”Father of Genetic Engineering” / Led Human Genome Project.
- Spoke about the informational basis of heredity.
- Epigenetics is the new frontier for genes. Basic genome sequence remains unchanged, but subtle changes influence the genome including environmental changes/exposure – this phenomenon is called imprinting. Studies focus on identical twins who have been raised in different environments and long-term studies of twins (which find that genome patterns have changed as they grew older and led separate lives).
- Imprinting is thought to be a leading cause of cancer.

3) Speaker Three - Bill Joy (Engineer Turned Futurist, largely responsible for UNIX and creator of TCP/IP)
- First read this.
- Bill Joy is focusing on innovations that address big global problems through venture capital at Kleiner, Perkins.
- 3 things he is particularly excited about: 1) Education – projects like the One Laptop per child, also nanotechnology will reduce the cost of computing. The challenge is whether tools will be developed (e.g. software) that use powerful computing well. Sees the $100 computer as the future; 2) Environment – Moore’s law trend that is driving the ability to address environmental problems is new materials e.g. carbon nanotubes and new ways of making ethanol. Kleiner have dedicated $100 million to this area. 3) Pandemics and bio-defense – have raised $200 million fund specifically for this. Focus is on bio-terrorism (wonder if they are looking at malaria and AIDS – he didn’t mention them).

That’s it for the day’s sessions. There’s a special speech by Al Gore in a bit, but not sure if I’ll be able to cover that.

Popularity: 2% [?]