A group of us spent the better part of today learning about HeartMath from Joseph Sundram (left, showing where his heart is) and Regan Caruthers (below right).

My first brush with HeartMath was in the aisles of some training conference, and the sales people in the booth weren't adept at describing what they had; I figured it was more galvanic skin response hokum. When Regan raved about HeartMath, I figured it warranted another look; it did. The simple techniques we learned can put stress back in its cage. I could feel positive change during the workshop and plan to practice the technique for a while.

HeartMath is yet another topic for my research on Informal Learning. My definition of informal learning has grown to encompass all forms of human adaptation except genetic inheritance and formal instruction. If an intervention improves performance, I'll be generous defining its fit with informal learning. HeartMath improves performance by reducing worker stress and frustration, improving decision-making and emotional control, inhibiting knee-jerk reactions, and encouring holistic thinking.

Driving past the headquarters of Sun Microsystems en route to the workshop, I recalled how even in the days of lavish perks, Sun rejected programs such as HeartMath as being too personal. Admitting that feelings and emotions shape our lives was not in keeping with Sun's warrior culture. Of course, I could hardly disagree more. I'll take a group of grounded, balanced, content teammates over a bunch of frantic, burned out, hell-bent aggressors any day. I look at HeartMath as a worthwhile business tool, not touchy-feely fluff.

Emotions have not evolved a whole lot since we lived in caves. People do nutty, childish things. It is within our power to have childlike peak experiences instead. Some choice: stupidity or ecstacy. People naturally choose the former. The rate of depression has doubled every generation since the 20s. 73% of doctor visits are stress-related. Life is 44% more complicated today than in the sixties. We're stressed by time pressure, frustration with others, unresolved conficts, anxiety, and perfectionism.

The way out of the vicious circle of habitual stress is to push the freeze-frame button on your internal mind-movie at the first sign of it. Shift your focus from what's in your head to what's in your heart. Recall a previous peak moment. Whatever you do, don't get trapped watching replays of the stressful situation. Use Heart Intelligence to recalibrate your assumptions and reach a new normal where heart and head are in sync.

HeartMath provides compelling metaphors, research findings, and bio-feedback to build confidence in its message. Joseph and I hope to talk about how this has worked in the corporate sphere in the next week or two.

And my book? Here's a sliver of what I have in mind:

Wednesday, October 5, 7:30 pm

Education theorist Edward L. Davis, author of Lessons for Tomorrow: Bringing America's Schools Back from the Brink, is a pioneer in computer-based instruction and in applying cognitive science to learning design. He is joined by Jay Cross, a leading theorist on computer-based education, to discuss how public education in America has become an obsolete, entrenched, bureaucratic machine, disconnected from our real educational needs, and how we should redesign our approaches to teaching both children and adults.

Around 3:30 pm today, an email arrived from Kaliya to alert me to a meeting of PlanetWork a few hours later in neighboring Emeryville. I showed up at 6:00 pm, having missed the fact that while the doors opened at 6:00, the actual event was to start at 7:00 pm. We met in a building that looked slummy on the outside but turned out to be a marvellous, modern open space inside. I had plenty of time to eat and schmooze before Eugene Kim called the meeting to order. A dozen of us sat in a circle to talk about the process of collaboration.

An hour and some minutes later, we turned to the main topic of the evening, Katrina FriendFinder, the grassroots response to the New Orleans disaster that showed that a couple of guys could pull together an impromptu team, the likes of which neither the Red Cross nor FEMA could do with a boatload of taxpayer dollars.

Kieran Lal read the situation and leaned on salesforce.com to provide the net infrastructuve. Ping Yee, a grad student at Cal who had brought together a similar response following 9-11, coded the software. Fighting bureacracy and recalcitrance at every step, they pulled it off. Katrina PeopleFinder became the ultimate source for getting word of who was alive and where.

Talking with Ping one-on-one, I asked if he had considered becoming a force for social good. Instead of FEMA hardwiring inadequate pre-packaged solutions to future uncertainties, the Feds need to develop the capacity to turn on a dime. I remember Ping from Bar Camp, the flash conference that came together in six days flat. Rather than wasting money on retainers for just-in-case disaster adminstrators, the Federal Government needs the phone numbers of a few Pings and a supply of hero medals and bonus payments to reward them.

Ping & Kieran

I dropped by TechLearn in Las Vegas this week because I wanted to witness the end of an era. I’ve been to TechLearn every year since 1998. This was the first year with no presence from founder Elliott Masie. I don’t expect TechLearn to last long without him.

Things kicked off Sunday night with a delightful cocktail reception on the back porch of the Bellagio. It was chock-a-block with old friends. Once the crowd was light-headed, we filed into the ballroom for the opening session. “This conference is all about networking with one another,” we were told. “That’s why we chose this venue, the magnificent Bellagio hotel.” Huh? It’s hard to imagine a place with more distractions. You have to walk past fine restaurants, clanging slot machines, buxom cocktail waitresses, live lounge acts, and half a dozen bars just to get to the Bellagio Conference Center.

TechLearn this year was combined with the much larger ICCM show for call contact centers because the two fields “have so much in common.” The two groups came together for keynotes but otherwise had no overlap (in spite of our commonality). Questex was the host of the event, not Advanstar, but no one mentioned the spinout which created Questex last April. Not a word was said about who these guys are and how they came to own TechLearn.

Ann Rhoades, a former executive and now board member of JetBlue who bills herself as a Culture Transformation Guru, gave an opening presentation on creating a value-driven organization. She advised us to let peers hire future members of their teams and to hire for values, not for experience. JetBlue’s best flight attendant is a 63 year old retired fireman. The call contact center people perked up upon hearing that turnover among JetBlue’s 700 home-based reservation agents is less than 12%. After what seemed like too long, Ann sat down, Josh Bersin took the stage, and despite pleas from the conference organizers, the call center people walked out, leaving perhaps 150 people in the ballroom.

Josh told us the “e” now stands for “enterprise,” and that industry revenue climbed 4.1% last year. He compared corporate universities to the old glass-house data processing departments that morphed into IT. The universities are becoming “learning services.”

Josh walked us through the results of a survey of two to three hundred companies. Their top priorities for learning are alignment with corporate strategy, improving program effectiveness, increasing usage, and cutting costs; these all strike me as fixing things that are broken more than building new capabilities. A third of the companies expect their eLearning to grow significantly; half expect slight growth.

eLearning is evolving to a higher level, “Learning on Demand.” My pal Eilif at SRI Consulting – Business Intelligence will be happy to learn he was six years ahead of his time in naming the latest trend. Learning on Demand includes performance support and RSS, which warms my heart; I don’t understand how this is positive for LMS vendors, since LMS do not track them.

With Peoplesoft, Docent, Thinq, Pathlore, and KnowledgeImpact losing their identities, more than half of all LMS customers own an LMS from a company that no longer exists. Only 56% of large enterprises have an LMS, 44% of medium enterprises and 12% of small to medium businesses. Josh and I must have a half empty/half full thing going on here. He says this shows there’s lots of LMS market left; it tells me lots of businesses have figured out they can live without an LMS. Almost half of LMS customers use them for tracking and reporting, twice as many as use them to manage enterprise initiatives or improve efficiency. I’ll take doing over reporting any day.

I like Josh’s taxonomy of learning governance: Soviet top-down, American federated, and anarchist. I turned in early so I’d have the energy to roll out of bed in the morning to hear John Cleese kick things off at 8:00 am. Unfortunately I had to hear a recap of the previous evening’s speeches before John came on stage. Wedged between two droll set-pieces, John recounted the message of Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind about taking time for reflection. Business culture so stresses snap judgment that stopping to think about something is easily mistaken for laziness.

TechLearn’s 51 exhibitors were squeezed into the back of the ballroom where the keynotes were delivered. Unlike Training or ASTD, the regulation 10x10 booths crammed together at TechLearn felt very small townish.

I took off for lunch at the bistro at Paris and then back to my room at the Monte Carlo to write. Monday's evening reception, this one on GeoLearn's tab, was another great chance to schmooze.

Tuesday I decided to take John Cleese's advice and stayed in my room to write and reflect. I got an automatic late checkout (the hotel's computers were down and they had no idea who was in what rooms). Around 2:00 pm I left for McClaren. I had set myself a new record: I did not attend a single breakout session. That hardly qualifies me to assess the event, but of course, I will do so anyway.

I think people will flock to Learning 2005 for networking and experimentation. Shoppers will crawl the aisles at ASTD. Shoppers who dislike immense crowds will go to Training instead. Online Educa in Berlin will continue to prosper. And within a couple of years, TechLearn will be no more. That's just my opinion. I might be wrong.

Jason Fish and his bride

P.S.

More and more, I believe that speaking person to person, in an honest voice, with sincerity and feeling, trumps advertising bombast and doublespeak. How can you trust someone who comes up with double helpings of BS like this?

Bigger and better than ever, the year’s most important and anticipated gathering of learning and training professionals is back, with the most actionable, practitioner-led program in its ten-year history.

TechLearn 2005 focuses with laser-like precision on your most pressing technology, process, and people-related issues. The insights and advice you’ll gain during the conference sessions – combined with the products and services you’ll find in the Learning Showcase – offer a cohesive and compelling set of solutions to your most mission-critical challenges.

Your performance -- and your ability to positively and measurably improve organizational performance through learning -- is TechLearn’s single most critical goal. We hope you’ll join us!

What a turn-off.

I'm trying to build a conference agenda collaboratively with a dozen people in eight countries. It's a natural application for a wiki. The problem is that most of the people in the group have never seen a wiki, much less posted entries to one, though all are quite computer-literate. I'm having a tough time recruiting people to dive in.

Has anyone found a compelling pitch for getting people to participate in a wiki?

Here are the words I'm emailing the group today.

Wikis going mainstream
New to wikis? You are not alone. This is the first time for most of us. Until this year, wikis were a tool for geeks and early adopters. Now wikis are becoming mainstream. At four of the last five successful conferences I've attended, wikis have proven useful for planning, coordination, keeping people up to date, and capturing feedback from participants. "Why a wiki?" has become "Where's the wiki?"

Problems in the past
I used to hate wikis because they seemed so intentionally bare bones. Formatting text involved learning arcane commands. Wikis did not accommodate graphics. It was very easy to get lost.

Simple as peanut butter
We're using PB Wiki. *PB* is short for peanut butter. The concept is that creating a wiki should be as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich. Formatting is simple, putting brackets around its URL inserts a graphic, and a sidebar clarifies navigation. Click AllPages and you'll see there's even a SandBox page to practice on.

Great for collaboration
Just as a word processor is designed to serve one person at a time, wikis were made for working with others. Everyone has access to every page. The content of the wiki is our shared responsibility to create and improve. It's a more direct way of collaborating than the old method of trading documents back and forth.

Transparency
Our world becomes more interconnected day by day. Doing things out in the open makes it easier to forge new links. "All of us are smarter than any of us" but we can't take advantage of that unless we show more of ourselves and the wiki is a vehicle for doing just that.

Out of your comfort zone
Bottom-up tools like wikis can play a vital role in educational reform. You can't offer the best advice to others if you have no experience with it yourself. If you're a bit uncomfortable with the process, that's means you have an opportunity to try something new. Please participate in planning our agenda on the wiki.

More about wikis

When I fired up Firefox today, it asked who I was logging in as. I figured a new version was kicking in. Then I was ushered to the default Google start page instead of my home page. My bookmarks were gone. My extensions had disappeareed. My memorized passwords are missing. This browser is as bare as the day it was born.

Probably missing a config file, eh? I searched my hard drive for user.js. No such file.

Can anyone tell me how to put things back in order?

When Austin was in grade school (he's now a senior at SF State), I took him to hear Don Norman speak at Cody's Books in Berkeley. I did not want him to go through life blaming himself for mistakes made by designers. Don's canonical example of design gone wrong was the typical configuration of controls on a cooktop

You'd think even the slowest designer in the pack would figure out that it's best to mirror the layout of the burners in the layout of the controls.

When Don and I met last week to talk about informal learning, I was quite interested in the look of his stove. This is what I found:

I chuckled. The stove had come with his condo. Don pointed out that the knobs for the back burners were slightly closer to the back than those for the front. Better this than controls in a straight line along the side.

One of Don's sons works for Toyota. In Japan. Don told me how new management-track hires are brought into the company. First come two months of classroom. (Oh, no, I thought. I didn't want to find out that the world's greatest automaker relied on formal instruction.) Then came two months working on the assembly line. (Whew.) After that, two months selling for a dealer.

Don was going to make a presentation to Toyota's senior board, so he invited his son to attend. He didn't want to take part. How would this look? Dad twists his arm. As participants arrive, cards are exchanged. Don's boy pulls out his card. It is the dealership's card. No printed name. Snickers and chuckles. Then one executive says that he sold cars at that dealership when he first joined Toyota. Another inquired which plant Don's son had worked in. That exec had worked on the same line. He was one of them; the top and the bottom of the organization were members of the same community.

More to come...

We learn by venturing out of our comfort zones, and conversation is probably the most effective learning medium ever invented. My mind is still reeling from attending the Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford last weekend. Scientists, mathematicians, and very deep geeks are not my usual conversational partners.

Here's a quiz. Where would you guess people from these places are coming together?

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning
Giunti Interactive Labs, Italy
IBM Center for Advanced Learning, USA
INSEAD, France
Internet Time Group, USA
Intrallect, UK
LIFIA & FuturEd, Canada
Ministry of Education, Bahrain
PAAET, Kuwait
Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP), Portugal
School of Business "Career", Russia
Swedish Net University Agency
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Switzerland
The Learning Federation, Curriculum Corporation, Australia
Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
Warsaw School of Economics, Poland

Here is the full answer. More.

Ray Kurzweil presented the thesis of his new book, The Singularity is Near, at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference this weekend. During the presentation, slides appeared on screen as if erupting from an AK47. I couldn't keep up. Happily, the graphics are so good that you can devine Ray's story from the graphs alone if you're visually inclined.






Everything you can shake a stick at is progressing exponentially.





Ray is not the only one to find this broad exponential growth of evolution.



By 2040, computer processing power will surpass total human intelligence. (I know, you're skeptical. Look at Ray's full presentation, especially the part about reverse-engineering the human mind.)







This is all coming on VERY fast.



Learning takes place when you depart your comfort zone. I've learned a lot from Ray.

DAY TWO

Mark Finnern
SAP Developer Network

SAP Developer Network …points for recognition. Hiring pool. SAP overall: 12 million users. 88,700 installs. 1500 partners. 28,900 employees. Focus now more on product life cycle and business process change as well as business process change. (Cf. Shai Agassiz talk at Accelerating Change 2004).

Walter J. Freeman, on the Poetry of Brains at the August Future Salon, said we focus too much on the individual brain instead of on the collaboration of groups of brains.

Still working to fulfil Doug Engelbart’s vision: As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for copying with complex, urgent problems.

Theme: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

A World that would work for all of us. Martin Luther. Even if the world would end tomorrow…

Richard Branson’s mother asked her young son, “Do you know the way home?” He thought so. He let him out to make his own way home. Ah-ha. On the way home, he realized he was responsible for his life.



In the break area, I hailed a fellow passing by to ask him, “How does your purple hair play at Microsoft?” He told me he had been working on the team for a product named Indigo. Now Indigo has become Windows Communications something-or-other. He’s only been on board six months, so because his on-boarding is still fresh in his mind, I asked him about becoming acclimated to Microsoft. He described an avalanche of information and meetings. Too much email. Everyone at Microsoft complains about getting too much email – it’s the downside of being transparent.

Note to self: check WFF: Workflow Foundation, a new element release last week in beta.


Tom Malone
Future of Work

Today’s topic is intelligence amplification. Tom will talk about amplification by organizing the intelligence of many humans.

The Technology Stack
Organizations ?
Application software
System software
Hardware

Wikipedia. Stated 2001. Already over 730,000 articles.
We are in the early stages of an increasing in human freedom in business…that may be as important as the change to democracies has been for governments.

Now possible to have the economic benefits of large organizations without giving up the human benefits of small ones (freedom, creativity, etc).

Lower communication cosgts mean many people have enough information to make more decisions for themselves. What will dirve these changes is what people really want.

eBay. 430,000 people make their living from selling on eBay. If they were employees, eBay would be the second largest company in the nation.

Bands (Decentralized, unconnected) ? Kingdoms (Centralized) ? Democracies (Decentralized, connected)

Business 1900, 1950, 2000. Small, local businesses ? Large, centralized corporations ?Empowerment, outsourcing, networked organization

People making their own decisions are more motivated and have more fun.

Central-----------------------------------Decentral
Loose hierarchies Democracies Markets

Linux, AES, R&D, Movies, buildings
Consulting VISA, Mondrago

Cinematrix for group flying sim

Cheap communication is making feasible whose new regions of the design space for organizations. To take advantage of these new possibilities, we have to invent them.

You probably have more choices than you realize. To make the choices wisely, you need to think about what really matters to you.

Answers can only go from our own inner world.

Small is beautiful

“What can I actually do? The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology…but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.” Small is Beautiful, 1973.

Dileep George
Numenta
www.numenta.com

Understanding and Modeling the Neo-cortex…to accelerate our understanding of intelligence

1 mm thick cortex. All memory, six layers of neurons.

Common cortical algorithm. The neo-cortex is everywhere functionally uniform than hitherto supposed to and its avalanching enlargement in mammals and particularly in primates has been accomplished by replication of a basic neural module.”

“There is nothing intrinsically motor about the motor cortex….
Neo-cortex atop this
Reptilian brain. Senses in, behavior out.

Drifts into Hawkins’ Intelligence theory


SPECT and the Future of Mental Health
Daniel Amen, MD
Change Your Brain; Change Your Life
Making a Good Brain Great

Three years in marital therapy
• Furniture factory worker
• “He’s an asshole”
• Being fumed to death

Standard of care
Brain imaging in clinical practice is the next major advance in psychiatry

Your brain has to do with everything you do
Who you are as a spouse, friend, parent, manager

When your brain works right, you work right
When your brain doesn’t work right, you have trouble

Descartes was wrong
Society figures free will is zero or 100%
Give us a couple of drinks and it’s 50%

Healthy, happy, effective, consistent, successful
Unhealthy, sad, troubled, inconsistent, unsuccessful

Your brain is really complicated
100 billion neurons, trillion supporting cells
2% of body’s weight, uses 20-39% of kcals
More connections than stars in universe
A piece of brain tissue size the of grand of sand contains 100000 neurons

Brain is very soft
Consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard or between an egg white and jello
Skull is really hard. Many sharp ridges
Brain injuries matter
Kids should not play football

Care more about our faces, boobs, bellies, butts than our brains

Most problems are not simple disorders. 13% family doctors oversimplify. ADD or depression is not single or simple disorders.

Imaging is important in clinical psychiatry
It’s as if an orthopaedist took a history, then recommended surgery…
Or a mechanic who talked about your car’s problems, then told you needed a new carburettor without raising the hood

You can change your brain. Right interventions help; wrong interventions hurt.

Myth of the perfect brain. We all need a little help.

Brain is not completely developed until age 25. We need to take care of young brains. Early brain injuries, drug abuse, many colleges, malnutrition are disasters for brain development.

SPECT = single photon emission computed tomography.
Opens the mind to other treatments—medical, nutritional, supplemental, and psychotherapeutic elements.

Brain envy.
You can tell nine years before Alzheimer’s becomes apparent

Why are shrinks the only medical specialists the only doctors who don’t look at what they’re treating?

How to Optimize the Brain. Protect. Feed. Nourish. Work. Exercise. Coordinate. Thinking skills. Making love. Supplements. Early treatment.

When I remember all the crap I learn in high school, it’s a wonder that I can think at all.

We can change our brains and our lives. You have a choice: which brain do you want?


Panel
Ruzena Bajcszy
Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society, UC Berkeley

Citris
Alan Kaye, Croquet, (1) Take images & video to create your own gallery. (2) Have built a library with 42 cams that can digitize whatever you are doing. See video.


Group interactions in Tele-immersion: meeting in the virtual space.

Shun-Jie
Journal of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Only university with required course in future studies. First private university in Taiwan.
How to be a country….


Sr. Denise Lawrence
Brahma Kumana World Spiritual Organization

The Role of Meditation in Intelligent Learning

What meditation has done for me.
Non-religious, no guru, practical, run by women, allied with United Nations.
Able to have better control of myself. When I change, the world changes.

Conventional learning. Based on conventional scientific methods, relies upon externally acquired data. Input limited to the five senses. Disregards the world of consciousness: intuition, association, memory, inspiration, subjective analysis, etc. Influenced by prevailing ideas.

Intelligent learning. Based on CS, cog sci, AI, educational learning theories, and multi-agent approaches. Ideally incorporates social and emotional intelligence. Promotes learning with understanding and transfer.

How does medication add to this mix: Meditation alters the quality and process of thought. Thought processes become influenced by inner stillness, intuitive clarity, creative insight, and innate moral wisdom. This is reflection, looking at how I think. Meditation gets you in touch with yourself. Understanding acquires depth and is viewed in context. Intelligent learning comes out of the box and into consciousness. Meditation is experienced: it’s more than information.

How does this happen? Deep silence. Becoming a listener. Taps your well-spring of original thought. Your thinking becomes focused, disciplined, coherent and contiguous. Enhances and brings healthy balance to your personal and professional life, if practiced regularly.

Incorporate into intelligent learning environments. Still inner environment. Reflective breaks.

Responding to a question: The self was the most neglected aspect of his life before meditation. Is he selfish? Yes. Should he be? Yes.

Robin Raskin
Digital Mom
Responsible Computing
Rearing Digital Kids

De-celerating change 2005.

Things done maliciously. Unethically. Theft.

Recent emails
Parents of suicidal children
Teachers of kids who’ve violated online space of others

We can’t accelerate tech change without social change

Cyberworld is the last outpost of freedom in overscheduled lives.

Risk beyond XXX
Social networks: Counting friends exponentially, social activities migrate to workplace, reputation-building: differentiating low-value, low-trust relationships. Online bar scene equivalent. Dangers of interpretation. Spin the bottle. Rate your teacher.

Notions of privacy: Schools are clueless about the net. 40%
Handheld everything
Theft: music 10:1, plagiarism, truth (?)

Effect on workplace behavior
Intelligent, informed choice of best communications medium.
Non-private, malleable discussion.
Audit trail that goes un-audited
One word, out of context decision-making from crackberries

Jayson Blair…
Global Crossing, Tyco, WorldCom, etc
Email the culprit

Solutions
Systems that build good behavior
Money for education programs. Industry tithes,
Graduated internet driver’s license

Dichotomy of Design & Evolution
Steve Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurvetson


4999 early drawings
299 dedicated design work
19 brought to market
1 works

Hotmail, ICQ – what is so special with these network companies zooming up into growth. Skype. Kazaa. Zero to ten million users in 14 months.

Ecosystems of innovative dreams, networked memes, libraries of genes

Vetter does genome of 1 millimeter of sea water, seeking the DNA of an ecosystem

Biological Muse to computer science
Algorithms: evolving complex systems, nanotech futures, AI and IA
Libraries: interface questions



Technology Exponentials
Evolution, computation, storage, bandwidth, internet, genes mapped, MRI scan resolution. “Technology is the evolution of evolution itself.” Kevin Kelly

Open Evolutions
Genes, Memes, Blogs, Ecosystems, Volume

Evolved systems
Emergent layers of abstraction
Subsystem inscrutability: bubble sort, neural networks, wisdom of crowds
Computational Equivalence – no simple shortcuts

Dichotomy

Design Evolution
Control
Brittle Out of control
Robust, resilience
Simple problems Complex
Subsystems clarity
Portability
Modular reuse Inscrutable subsystems
Hierarchical subsumption
Path dependence (sensory I/O, AI, algorithm survival)
Co-evolutionary


Implications
Bifurcation of approach? Blending? Sequencing? Theory? Quantum Computational Equivalence

Portability
Co-evolutionary islands
Path dependence; algorithm, senses
Alien I
AI vs IA


Jurvetson.blogspot.com



Blake Ross
Firefox

People want a simple, easy-to-use browser. How do you progress? Openly.

Microsoft sees value in the Internet
Tamgotchies -------------
Tickle Me Elmo-------------
Internet---------------------------------------------------------------

AOL killed Netscape. Put a Shop button on the toolbar. Optimize for one site.

Feel the pain.
Jane says: #(&$#^!
Marketing says: Can we synergize voiceover XML based RSS podcasts?
Developer says: Marketing’s drunk again
Usability Lab says: User 12b experienced mild discomfort with…

2001 Microsoft disbanded the IE team.

Fixing open source
• Open source developers have egos the size of Manhattan
• The first thing we did was rip off the competition
• Open source is about more than developers. Projects are wasting talent!

SpreadFirefox!

Second Life
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab Video.



Panel: the ASF Core Team
John Smart, President
Jerry Paffendorf, Community director
Iveta Brigis, ASF Board
Jim Turner, Executive Director


Jim Turner


Jerry Pallendorf

Incorporated 2002
Acceleration Studies Foundation


Panel: What next?

Alex Lightman
Kids learn more from adults than from other children. Being in business is almost a spiritual pursuit. What is the one thing all this is representative? They are all learning curves. In terms of this weekend, what value did you bring? Tell people about it. Start your own Future Salon.

Steve Jurvetson
Lot of ideas that don’t yet have a theory. Think biology & the messiness of it all.

Cecily Summers
Push Institute. Accelerating change, accelerating chaos. Forgot to bring cell phone charger. Realize how tech is reorganizing us as people. Track human nature as well as tech.

Joi Ito
Venture capitalist. On the board of every group you’ve ever heard of. Open Source, Mozilla, Creative Commons, etc. Monopolists at work: Hollywood, phone companies that want to make the net into a cable t.v. network. Brazil Russia India China (BRIC): they don’t give a shit. The world is a lot more international than it was. Linux, IRC.

Beth Noveck
Intellectual property form. Lot of discussion about the brain, individual and collective. Group > individual. Institutions fear the mob. Interface to help us see ourselves and the tech. Have to direct tech and groups in support of social justice. How to pull all the smart minds together.

George Gilder
All the exponential curves are experience curves. The Education of Henry Adams started it all with the acceleration curve of human progress. Learning has to do with information. The laws of chemistry and physics not information-rich to the extent of biology. Proteome follows genome. Learning in the future will occur in processes of synthesis and integration. Life is information: that’s what differentiates life from other forms. The reason all information is migrating to the electro-magnetic spectrum is because the spectrum is low-entropy.

Rudy Rucker
One of the few Wolframites aside from Stephen Wolfram. The Lifebox, The Seashell, and The Soul. As Bucky said, I seem to be a verb. Assuming we advance in hardware as predicted, where are we going to get the software? The new hardware comes with a blank hard drive. Will is unpredictable, therefore free. Hive Mind. The dream of the universal library. | The world is a computation…


Accelerando.org? Singularity science fiction.

Jay: I’m math-challenged, and value gut feel over calculation. Joel Garreau wrote Radical Evolution. Ray Kurzweil is the rosy optimist, Bill Joy the doomsayer, and Jaron Lanier between the two. What do you guys think?

Alex: Rivers of Time, Brin. All three are true. Sudan to become a Chinese pumping station. America will be in the middle

John Smart: Avatars. Peace, justice, all the time we want.

Steve: Near-term: g-fear. 50-50 odds > Club of Rome disaster. More wealth in fewer hands.

Beth: It depends. On our willingness to take control of the situation. What are the structures that will get us there? Tom Malone: what do we mean by democracy? How do we structure the architecture? How can we make humanities and tech converge? Law has focused on the dark side; and we become the tools of our tools?

George: Capitalism overcomes inequality and poverty. We’ve just enriched a billion Asians.

Finale

Iveta Brigis


John Smart

The Thinker, Futurist version

Sibley Verbeck, StreamSage