Pop!Tech – Camden Maine – Oct07

When you need to get rid of cobwebs in your brain I recommend a few things

• A long dinner with friends with a conversation repertoire
• A long walk in the Sydney bush – in particular the ones with vast views to the water
• A long canoe journey along the Sydney foreshore(s)
• A week skiing with friends and family
• A cottage in Finnish Lapland [winter] or by the lakes [summer]
  ……
• And then there is Pop!Tech

Pop!Tech happened already some weeks ago but I have really had to digest it for a while to write about it.

I had never been to Maine before, nor to Camden. It is a gorgeous New England town by the Atlantic. Timing was perfect as the fall [autumn] leaves were getting to their joyous colors. My flight in was in a jumpy commuter plane from Boston to Rocklands. I had charming chat company in a man who is local to the Maine coast and was sharing insights about the area and the night coastline as we flew in.

From the airport I took a taxi to Camden and a motel very close to the Camden Opera House where the event was held.

As a pre-event extra I had booked myself to a workshop discussing mobile solutions in Africa. It was eye opening to see how the technologies are used when you have to be innovative to make it work. The solutions go from business tool related solutions [sales tool] to being a part of the health care system to community assistance.

The next day the show was full on.

I met with some wonderful people from the West Coast of the US, Seattle and San Francisco who became my guardian angels. For a newbie to Pop!Tech I got lucky as I was shown to a coveted seat out front, thank you Buzz, Pat and Brian . Every conversation I had with some 50 out of the 500 total attending was worthy of some stage time, everyone had something to say, a great business they were running or building or research they were doing etc – so many wonderful people and so little time. Lucky girl!

Pop!Tech has a mixture of presenters: artists, researchers, published authors, inventors, not for profits, religious leaders, technologists, community leaders.

Each presentation was a culmination of talent, persistence, belief, passion, dynamism wrapped up in 20 minutes of self-controlled or less so outpouring in the form of visual, performance, voice, texts, presence, storytelling, themes….

You can see the presentations on Pop!Tech site but what you have to be there for are the discussions you have

• with the presenters who for the most part take their turn in the audience to be wowed by the other presenters and
• with the audience which is also vetted to attend.

The idea as I see it is to form a large conversation to move things forward, to engage people who have ideas, means, energy and contacts to offer.My take aways and impressions

• Africa is enterprising
• Mobile is growing in millions of niches
• Solar has great future potential
• Creating the system is hard
• Youth is ready for green leadership and roles
• Light is fundamental is villages without electricity – there is a solution
• Worlds first not for profit pharmaceutical company was founded a few years ago
• Now biotech company joins nfp pharma and gets Gates Foundation to join to eradicate some illnesses
• Artists Association should become the new Ministry of Defense [Vanessa German - you gotta see the argumentation]
• We disgard a lot of cans, bottles, printed paper if you have trouble with the numbers go see it visualised by Chris Jordan
• Storytelling is an old art form, at Pop!Tech we were delighted with digital storytelling from Alaska and other [Jonathan Harris]
• Africa has a values and culture issues from years of hardship and misery – how to work on that while at the same time treating the symptoms
• Language is a tricky bedfellow, we screw up so much in life by an inability to converse more directly without ‘feeling like’ we’re losing face, potentially [Pinker, I am about to start reading his book which we found in our goodie bags] – I always preferred direct talk, hard as it might be at times to receive and give, makes for a better relationship
• Men and women, yes it is such a fun topic and when delivered with humor it had us cracking up – we’re just wired differently. Who is smarter than the other? I [dj] think we have to know which smarts we’re talking about [Louanne Brizendine on brain]
• What we communicate with our skin – a la modern anthropology
• Eating al desko is one modern issue – until we all embrace slow living – what is it that we’re in so big a hurry to get to, I don’t think many even know, it is just churning wheels and feeling important
• Affordability is not an economic problem, it is an engineering and design problem
• Microfinance works real well in many countries
• “Money is a sign of poverty” Ian Barks {?}
• ML King did not change the world by saying, “I have a problem”
• Fast trends get all the attention and slow trends make all the change [Brand in 06]
• Mass observation from the 1930s, recording daily lives, citizen journalism
  my own addition to this is history will never be the same, not formal, not as rewritten by the victorious, but tells us how we thought, felt, appreciated, hated, commented, understood, …on a daily basis and recorded [Google and other projects??] for generations to come
• Living in cities is a form of consensual hallucination. London has food for 3 days, fragile?
• Participatory sensory mapping has fascinating potential – need to talk to Christian Nold more about that
• Making toys is art and science – beauty of blending the two
• Harvesting the ambient RF already out there for wireless power
• We need some things to be present to threatening change: a face of terror, speed/abrupt change, visceral to us, morality of change. All these lacking in climate change and we sit and wait….

…..and much more

Thank you!!!!!

Teleportation

The molecule road or the parallel universe road

My friends and loved ones are all over the world. I have a number of day dreams about how to be closer to those people more often.

One of those dreams is to have a place in France where we will host a month of open doors for friends and family to stay with us. I think many of these friends would have a hoot meeting each other. So that’s in the plans for 2009…stay tuned….

The other dream is to be able to go to these friends and family at a moment’s notice when I feel like a chat, a hug, to say hi. What if they did the same thing at the same time to come to me… you know how that happens sometimes when you think of someone they think of you at the same time. In the current teleportation situation that would be a nice problem to solve. We’re not quite there yet.

On Thursday 20th of September Ray Kurzweil was virtually teleported from Boston to an event at CSC [Computer Sciences Corporation] in Sydney. He does this with very specific equipment which makes the experience well beyond the usual flat video screen.

At question time I had to ask the obvious question. I see now from the net that I am not the only one with that question for him. Surprise surprise. I asked whether I would be able to teleport in my lifetime.

Ray provided us with a two sided answer. One was about the virtual progress and how quickly that experience is changing and where it could go. Including having our brains on the net. I get the concept but have these weird visual ideas of a squishy thing… anyway. The other side of the answer was about teleporting matter and how complex that was.

Besides the rapidly progressing virtual technologies to ‘just like being there’, I am still wanting the real thing and be there. Be there quickly without the airports, the security checks that get more and more complex every time I travel, the immigration. There we go. Here is the reason why it would be terrible for the world. Lose control? Well that depends on how it all works.

That same day Ray spoke to us we had a lively and entertaining dinner at a manor house. As we were getting to the dinner hall from cocktails I had a chat with our CTO about the teleportation matter, no pun intended. I had two things bugging me and wanted to share those with someone. Thanks Derek.

One is that if the IT or ICTI technologies are like I believe they are an avalanche coming your way no matter which industry you’re in because they are so fundamentally altering the experience of business due to the accelerating exponential pace of improvements in what you can do with the technologies.

If we use it to solve the genome a lot faster than most people thought we could and it can be used to solve the brain mapping too. This acceleration should become a means to solve the teleportation dilemma too. Shouldn’t it?

The other thing I was wondering was. If we think the molecule approach isn’t going to be solved in a hurry. What about the parallel world approach?

I could not believe the next day 21st of September the New Scientist had an article on that very point and I found other accessible references like this one article in the telegraph about the Oxford research.

Serendipity is wonderful.

Language and brain

Bilingual fun….

Neuroscience is coming up with some fascinating pointers to what goes on when one speaks more than one language.

I have been puzzled by what happens to me when I type and out comes a word in a different language or a word I use a lot.

The research, a combination of neuroscience and psychology has found this dilemma too with some idea of where things occur. This does not make things easier for me yet. Of course the article treats the matter as if all of us bilinguals are ‘patients’……

Automatic typing fingers

Brain and the wonders of it

Languages spin magic with me. I speak a number of languages. Depending on the environment I am in, how much I’ve spoken a language, how many years I studied it etc these languages are at different ‘call-out’ levels. So for example I studied Swedish and German for about the same amount of time at school. I haven’t actively used either of those languages for many years. When I now try to recall either of those, the other language seems to pop up into my mind. It is like layers where languages can be at similar levels causing confusion, and then again this may just be me.

…Often .. as I busily type in English suddenly a word of Finnish goes into the text without me noticing immediately. The flow of thinking carries on in English and yet my fingers type a Finnish or sometimes French word.

The other way in which this happens is that there are some English words I type a lot and sometimes I am typing something close to that often typed word, and it just comes out as the often typed one.

Maybe somewhere there is a scientific explanation to how this works.