PopTech Audio: PopCasts

ThinkUp co-founder and tech blogger Anil Dash questions what happens to our civic discourse when our online conversations occur under the terms of service of a small group of privately-owned tech companies whose sense of civic-mindedness is questionable at best? Are we part of the problem by not being part of the solution?

Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher walks us through the biology of love. From the importance of one-night stands to the solidity of marriage, Fisher shreds the common wisdom of what love is and isn’t in the 21st century.

MoMA curator Paola Antonelli takes on the “good girls” of design by complicating commonly accepted notions of what design is and does in the modern world. With exhibitions on video games, violence, and the beautiful lethality of everyday objects, Antonelli shows us the primary job of the curator is to provoke, not comfort.

Founder of Reverb Technologies, Erin McKean catches the PopTech audience up on the evolution of her unique online dictionary, Wordnik, since she first introduced it at PopTech 2008. She unveils the next phase of the Wordnik mission in this lively talk.

David Agus envisions a new era of preventative medicine based on hard data about what really ails us, and that employs research, genetics and health care designed to stave off disease before it starts. “I want doctors to be more like weather forecasters and not biologists.”

Jim Olson invented a potentially revolutionary “tumor paint” that locates and lights up tumor cells to show surgeons exactly what to excise. “In a few years, surgeons will have a hard time going back to surgery as they did it in the past.”

Dr. Jennifer Leaning is the director of the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and the FXB professor of the practice of health and human rights at Harvard School of Public Health. She travels the world researching human security. “I’m looking at the ways in which you can promote health and well-being through time in the setting of war and disaster.”

Ann Masten is a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies resilience in young people exposed to poverty, homelessness, migration, disaster, war and other adversities. “The most powerful protective system for a human child is a loving, caring family.”

Moran Cerf is a neuroscientist who has shown how to project patients’ thoughts onto a screen in front of their eyes by implanting electrodes deep inside their brains and reading the activity of cells. Oh, and he used to rob banks. “There are at least two people inside our mind.”

Sandro Galea is a doctor and epidemiologist who has researched the role of traumatic events in shaping population health; particularly the health of urban populations. “Ninety percent of people in this country will have a traumatic event in their lifetime.”

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His areas of research include time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He is a pioneer on the power of the unconscious brain. “Are we free to choose how we act? Is the mind equal to the brain?”

Brad Burnham is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Ari Jónsson is the rector of Reykjavik University, Iceland’s leading university in technology, business and law. They discuss the creation in Iceland of an ideal policy framework for innovation on the Internet.

Born without a right hand, Adrian Anantawan began the violin at nine and has since established himself as a rising star in classical music. He helped to create the Virtual Chamber Music Initiative at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehab Centre — a cross-collaborative project that develops adaptive musical instruments for use by young persons with disabilities within a chamber music setting.

Asenath Andrews founded the Catherine Ferguson Academy, an alternative public high school in Detroit for teen mothers that also provides early education services for their children. The school blends an innovative curriculum with urban farming and a healthy dose of high expectations. “If I expect that you are going to have a future, then you expect it.”

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy. For Time Magazine and the Atlantic, she has chronicled the stories of American kids and teachers alongside groundbreaking new research into education reform. “Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation.”

Revered as “The Sound of New York,” Young Guru has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s albums and officially became Jay-Z’s tour D.J. in 2010. He is also a leader in adapting to a challenging music business. “It is always vibe over money."

Revered as “The Sound of New York,” Young Guru has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s albums and officially became Jay-Z’s tour D.J. in 2010. Watch him borrow a beat from Al Green to show the fine line between art and piracy.

Jay Silver is an inventor who created Makey Makey, a kit that allows users to turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the Internet, like creating a piano out of bananas. He endorses art that is a “hodge-podge of different collections of contributions reflecting everyone’s own internal inspirations, kind of the way nature is, but for humans.”

Jer Thorp, who has launched The Office For Creative Research, explores the boundaries between science, data, art, and culture. His work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. “I come here today because I am excited about data, but also because I am terrified. I am terrified that we are having progress without culture in the world of data.”

Andri Magnason is an Icelandic writer who co-directed the documentary film Dreamland, about a massive industrial project in Iceland that exposed some ugly truths about politics, industry and so-called green energy. He studies what seem like cycles of endless growth simply for growth’s sake. “I was wondering about how rational we are as humans. Where does this come from? Where does this need, this addiction come from?”

Bill Shore is the founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit that is working to end childhood hunger in America. “Those of us who are passionate about social change and social innovation, we have got to find ways to break the rules. I believe it is a strategic necessity and a moral imperative.”

Revered as “The Sound of New York,” Young Guru has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s albums and officially became Jay-Z’s tour D.J. in 2010. “When we study hip-hop we are actually studying the history of piracy. If we go back and study all piracy, we see that most things that were created in the world are a remix of something else.”

Dean Karlan is President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems, and works to scale-up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. He is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. “There are some problems that we can solve. But we have to be pragmatic about it and figure out what is actually working and what is not.”

Peter Kareiva is the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Kareiva is often noted for his emphasis on nature’s resiliency, rather than its impending doom. “Totally unnecessarily we get into a conversation where it is farmers versus conservation, where it is loggers versus conservation, where it is fishermen versus conservation.”

Vicki Arroyo is the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center. She studies preparedness and resiliency with respect to climate-related catastrophes. “Traditional models of who is in charge in a disaster do not necessarily operate when you have a real disaster.”

Kelly Benoit-Bird, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, applies acoustics to the study of ecosystems in the open ocean. “When we look more deeply at the ocean, we are given new insights on how we interact with that ocean, and what we can do to effectively protect it.”

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, MD and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch, Ph.D., founded Threshold GlobalWorks to explore a neurobiological approach to social resilience. “We are all wired with it, in case you did not know that,” says Leitch. “We are born neurologically wired for resilience because our system is survival-based.”

Eiríkur Hrafnsson calls his new company, Green Qloud, the world’s first green cloud computing company, bucking a frightening trend. “ It is not far-fetched to imagine that in 30 or 40 years, 50 percent of our energy will be spent on IT.”

Yossi Sheffi explores the various flavors of redundancy, simplicity, flexibility and communications strategies businesses employ to make themselves resilient. “These are the most dangerous things; the things that have severe consequence and low probability…These are the events one worries about when one has to run a large organization.”

Climate change is exacerbating flooding in waterlogged Bangladesh. Already, hundreds of schools get wiped out during the monsoon season. Mohammed Rezwan builds floating schools, healthcare facilities and libraries. “If 20 percent of the land goes under water, which may happen in the next 10 to 20 years, where will these people go? We don’t have enough space, enough land. People have to live on the water in some way.”

Víðir Reynisson, head of the National Commission of Icelandic Police, coordinates the country’s response to natural disasters, including the infamous Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and oversees the country’s search and rescue teams. Iceland has developed a nimble crisis management model. “With all disasters, with all crises, comes opportunity.”

George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology, mines massive data sets for surprising revelations about how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity. “There isn’t one thing that predicts resilience. It’s not two things. It is not necessarily in us.”

Didier Sornette is a professor of entrepreneurial risks in Zurich. He explores data patterns to help predict crises and extreme events in complex systems, like global financial crises.

Alyson Warhurst is CEO and founder of the risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft, the leading source of extra-financial risk intelligence for the world’s largest multinational corporations, asset managers and governments. “We can really start telling a story in terms of predicting risk in the future…We are actually able to engage in policy change to be able to shape the future growth environment and prevent disaster.”

Dr. Kári Stefánsson is recognized as a leading figure in human genetics who studies the fuzzy relationship between genetic mutations and environmental factors. “Where is the line of distinction between nature and nurture? Where is the line of distinction between genes and environment? It really doesn’t exist.”

Margrét Pála is a preschool management specialist in Iceland who advocates sex-segregated classes, natural play material instead of conventional toys, and a long-forgotten belief in discipline to develop optimism, courage, and resiliency in young children. “Feel the cold! I even take them into the snow — and then the lava. Scream a little bit! But continue! And enjoy it!”

Steve Lansing, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, discusses the Byzantine system for the distribution of water from a volcanic lake in Bali to over two hundred farming villages. It’s worked since the 12th century, it’s egalitarian and it’s still-sustainable. “It’s one of the few functioning, ancient democratic institutions that we know about. It’s kind of beautiful.”

Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, shows how he is hooking a new generation of kids on computer programming. “I remember sitting down with my wife for dinner…and we had this sudden, appalling realization that we had promised 600,000 people that we would build them a $25 dollar computer.”

Social critic John Thackara argues that the current human paradigm of endless growth is obviously unsustainable, so we should consider the brilliance of the Brazilian Jequitiba tree, which soaks up four tons of water a day. “I am a proper tree hugger, as well as a lichen hugger.”

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, explores how resiliency can empower even the most destitute and vulnerable communities. “When the World Bank was planning to invest $100 million dollars in upgrading the slums in Nairobi, these slum-dweller leaders were represented at the table.”

Consumer psychologist Simonetta Carbonaro implores us to think differently about consumption. A consumer-hungry outlook for cheaper and faster has gotten old. We now know that consuming and producing less, in fact, creates more jobs, more free time, and more happiness.

From the Icelandic food store chain, Bonus, to the midnight sun, everyday Iceland inspires activist poet Andri Magnason. His poetry and children’s books reflect his deep connection to his homeland as does the way he’s schooled himself—and the public—on preserving Iceland’s beauty and natural resources.

Icelandic five-piece band amiina takes the PopTech stage with a glockenspiel, a musical saw, a couple of violins, drums, and a laptop. They got their start as the string section for the legendary Sigur Ros and have gone on to play complex music that’s sweetly innocent.

Silja Ómarsdóttir was one of 25 people tapped to rewrite Iceland’s constitution after the country’s financial meltdown in 2008. She details how the citizens of Iceland reacted to the bank collapse and the eventual response from the government, which included updating the country’s constitution. Ómarsdóttir explains the constitution creation process and what it meant to overhaul the constitution, with considerable public input, in four months.

In her talk, “Why Whales are Weird,” energetic, articulate anatomist Joy Reidenberg presented an amazing array of fact about the beloved mammal (Whales evolved from deer-like creatures! Their spinal movement is more like galloping in the water! They don’t actually spout water! They have mustaches!). She took us through the story of evolution using whales as a model, explaining that evolution is the process to mediate resilience and thus, survival.

Economic commentator and author Tim Harford presented a creative, challenging perspective on financial systems, drawing upon examples from oil rig explosions to nuclear disasters to make his point. He believes that by studying the triggers of major engineering accidents, we can draw lessons on how to help prevent crises in the financial world.

Johanna Wellington was inspired to go into a technology career because she loves math like other people enjoy doing crossword puzzles. She started off at GE as an intern, went on to be a Combustion Design Engineer, and held several other positions before joining the Research Center in her current role as Advanced Technology Leader for Sustainable Energy where she is an expert in clean energy technologies.

Arun Majumdar was a high school student during the global energy crisis of the 1970s and became interested in engineering because of energy. Currently he’s the first director of ARPA-E, the country’s only agency dedicated to technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store, and utilize energy. Majumdar explains that disruptive energy innovation must focus on scale, be cost effective, and provide an energy service.

Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, grew up on a farm in Nebraska where his father raised corn. He decided to apply his past to what he’d been doing for years, engineering microbes to produce chemicals. He’s turned his attention to solving the world’s energy crisis, using plants to engineer clean-burning fuels that will replace oil.

Unity Dow, a lawyer, high court justice in Botswana and novelist, describes seismic generational shifts between pre- and post-independence Africans. She asks how the identity shifts of the next generation will change the dynamics of the world stage and what that means for Americans, many of whom are working with outdated paradigms in a world rebalancing.