Program Description

The Internet is a Brain:
Predicting the future of technology and business from the inside out

In his multimedia lecture, Stibel demonstrates how networks (professional, social and otherwise) have changed and what that implies for how people connect and form communities; What the Internet-and online business opportunities-will look like in the future; What the next stage of artificial intelligence will be and what opportunities it will present for businesses.

Addressing the forward-looking interactive aspects and potential predictive power of the Internet – which is evolving to mimic the brain’s own abilities – Stibel asserts that a more personalized Internet will emerge.  As Internet applications get to know the real “you,” the Internet will begin to tailor its opinions which will enable very personalized reviews and information, and it will be able to quickly match demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information.  And, as the Internet advances farther in this direction, the Internet will get better at interpreting subjective thoughts and opinions, and it will get better and better at making predictions and this will enable businesses to do a better job serving their customers.

Stibel also presents varied examples of how exceptional companies are using their understanding of the Internet’s brain-like powers to create competitive advantage – such as building more effective Web sites, predicting consumer behavior, leveraging social media, and creating a collective consciousness.

Even in such personal areas as healthcare, the Internet will be able to help medical companies like WebMD evolve to become a more interactive service, while significantly bringing down the cost of insurance.  The user’s experience will be more like being in a doctor’s office where the patient is being asked a series of symptomatic questions and offered medical advice.  People will have their own virtual doctors who will come to know them and their medical histories as well as their real doctors do.

Ultimately, Stibel predicts that the evolution of the Internet will fuel a new era of productivity where software advances will outpace the growth we previously saw in hardware; where intelligence will emerge not from brute force but from educated guesses — remember that the brain is a slow computer so we did not gain intelligence from sheer size or speed.  What makes us smart is that are brains are slow, and speculative in many respects.  When the Internet can no longer count on productivity gains from brute force or sheer peed, it will turn to other measures and that will surely come from mimicking the power of the brain.

Bio

Jeffrey M. Stibel is a brain scientist and entrepreneur who has helped build numerous public and private companies. He is currently President of Web.com, a public company that helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses on the Web. He is also Chairman of BrainGate, a brain implant company that allows people to use their thoughts to control electrical devices. He serves on the boards of a number of private and public companies, as well as academic boards for Brown and Tufts University. Stibel studied for his PhD at Brown University, where he was the recipient of the Brain and Behavior Fellowship, and studied business at MIT’s Sloan School of Business.

What do all of these people have in common? Facebook

Program Description

Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit

Having recently reached a milestone of over 350 million active users, Facebook has become not only a household staple spanning generations—from high school and college students, to their parents, and even grandparents, but Facebook, and social networking in general, represents a cultural revolution and massive shift in the way people conduct their personal and professional affairs. It’s opened up an international dialogue that didn’t exist five years ago, allowing members to connect in an efficient and technologically advanced way.

But what comes of these millions of connections? How can people better use this technology to their professional and personal advantage?

In her lecture/slide program, Liebert demonstrates how Facebook, in the short span of five years, has fostered an intricate web of amazing connections, the results of which have transformed people’s lives in ways they never imagined possible:  marriages, business successes, community service victories, and more.  Liebert addresses the ways in which commerce and communication are moving from traditional settings and onto the web, and how everyday people can use these tools to not only keep in touch with friends and make new ones, but to use those relationships to enrich their lives.  

Including separate interviews with with co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and co-founder Chris Hughes, Facebook Fairytales is a diverse collection of 25 of the most inspiring stories that have resulted from these connections.  The stories emphasize the real-life characters’ personal struggles and triumphs. Audiences will be able to personally relate to these stories and, at the same time, be inspired and by the possibilities of success resulting from a few clicks and the willingness to try.

Bio

Emily Liebert is an award-winning, internationally published author, writer, and editor. Her first book Facebook Fairytales: Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit will publish in April 2010. She is also hard at work finishing final edits on her debut novel, Conversations with Friends.  Most recently, Liebert served as editor for Kerry Kennedy’s New York Times best-seller Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talk About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning.  A graduate of Smith College, Liebert was Editor-in-Chief of The WAG magazine for five years and, prior to that, worked for ABC NEWS’ Peter Jennings Reporting. She received the Clarion Gold Award in Magazine Journalism and has made numerous television and radio appearances.

Three years ago Leonard began to focus, as a reporter/blogger/columnist, on the topic of “globalization,” using a fairly broad definition — anything that interconnects humans living on this globe is included. He is neither for it or against it — he only endeavors to understand it, and, hopefully, help explain it.

Program Description

How the World Works: The interconnections between globalization, energy policy, economics, the environment, and politics…and everything else in between

In his lectures, Leonard discusses how in the course of exploring the issues of trade, capital flows, battles over intellectual property, and the challenges of getting the world together to work on global warming, he gradually found his beat revolving around three absurdly large and inextricably interrelated axes — economics, the environment, and energy.  And, as his work has converged on those topics, the U.S. housing bust precipitated the greatest economic crisis the world has witnessed in our lifetime.  Leonard addresses the depth and breadth of the global financial meltdown, and digs deeper into the root causes and underlying interconnections that, unless broken, will continue to harm our future prospects.

Moreover, Leonard illustrates how one cannot understand the U.S. housing bust without understanding China. One cannot can fight global warming without understanding how U.S. politics work. One can trace connections from 17th century India to 21st century Berkeley, CA.  Trade-offs exist everywhere, and understanding emerges from nuance.

Leonard’s lectures are about the sense of connection and interrelatedness that is essential to globalization. It’s not always a positive relationship — just ask the Midwestern auto industry workers whose pensions and wages are being slashed as a direct result of foreign competition. And it’s not always an obvious connection: the digital technology advances (computers, the Internet) that push globalization are responsible both for vast intellectual property violations and the rise of the open source software movement (Linux, Firefox). They are flip sides of the same basic transformation. A core element of globalization is that information travels everywhere, more cheaply and more quickly than ever before. We’ve only just begun to understand the implications of this.  Leonard not only helps distill the ramifications of these changes, but more importantly helps us glimpse the the possibilities that the future may hold.

Bio

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.com who currently writes the hybrid blog/column “How the World Works” — a venue for exploring the interconnections between globalization, energy policy, economics, the environment, and politics. Prior to ‘How the World Works,’ he edited Salon’s Technology & Business department from 2000-2005. From 1996-2000 he was Salon’s lead technology reporter.

Leonard is the author of Bots: Origin of a New Species, published by HardWired in 1996, and described in a New York Times review as a “playful social history of the Internet.” His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Sierra Magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous other publications. Before becoming a journalist he studied Mandarin Chinese for ten years and lived and traveled extensively in East Asia.

His most recent career highlight came in early November 2008 when he was denounced by name on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senator James Inhofe, R.-Oklahoma.

In Economic Gangsters, Miguel and Fisman use economics to get inside the heads of these gangsters, and propose solutions that can make a difference to the world’s poor, including cash infusions to defuse violence in times of drought and steering the World Bank away from aid programs most susceptible to corruption.

These two sleuthing economists follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters around the globe, and invite audiences to witness ingenious black marketeers game the international system; follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia’s former dictator; see what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania…and much more.

Program Descriptions

Is It Africa’s Turn?:
Progress in the world’s poorest region

Miguel, whose main research focus is African economic development, has been teaching a course on this subject for 9 years, and has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India.  In his lectures, Miguel draws on his considerable depth of knowledge and on-the-ground experience to detail the ups and downs in Africa since independence.  In particular, he puts in context recent economic and political progress, which have raised hopes for the first time in decades. How long will this up-tick last, how will it affect/be affected by the global economy, and what part will  American, Chinese and Indian interests play in the outcome — especially in the face of the current economic crisis? Miguel addresses all of these crucial questions and more, as he pulls back the curtain on this least understood region.

Bio

Professor Miguel earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics.

In his multimedia “Inviting Disaster” lecture program, Chiles helps organizations assess risk and avoid catastrophe by examining the repeating patterns of past disasters, and applying the lessons learned to not only to the operation of complex, high-energy systems, but also to the daily processes that keep any workplace running smoothly and safely.

Program Description

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology –
Innovative Solutions for a Safe and Productive Workplace

To understand a fundamental pattern behind the huge variety of technological disasters, and the much greater number of close calls, consider how a piece of metal breaks over time. Under stress, cracks begin to grow out of tiny manufacturing flaws and damage during use; then at a critical point a crack spreads like a gunshot and the piece fails completely. As with metal, weak points appear in all systems. These weak points are human errors and machine malfunctions — or, “system fractures”. A good system is one in which people catch weak points early, before a string of them link up to a system fracture and catastrophe.

Chiles illustrates how the causes of disasters fall into repeating patterns, and nearly all technological disasters have been preceded by early warning signs, occurring days or weeks ahead — indications that serious flaws existed and were starting to link up.  The grid that supplies us with food, energy, transportation, and water is getting stretched tighter with economic troubles. That means we need to adopt new and better ways of catching system fractures early.

Using well-known historical examples, and proposing innovative solutions, Chiles not only demonstrates how noticing and acting on these precursors can help avert certain disaster, but he also provides organizations with the tools to improve their own internal processes and controls, enabling them to engender a forward-looking culture of efficiency and safety.

Companies and agencies that deal in high-energy, complex machines need to be aware that techno-disasters have a high and long-lasting cost. Aside from the obvious costs of deaths, damage, hikes in insurance costs, and months of business interruption, in some cases so much public mistrust follows that an entire segment of industry may be wiped out if the public comes to see it as both risky and optional.

Chiles brings the discussion current, highlighting the critical reality of our reliance upon technology, and reminding organizations of the fact that machine frontier contains complex and high-energy systems – some of which are subject to catastrophic, cascading failure – has not been lost on terrorists.  Their research shows strong interest in methods of technologically-boosted mass destruction. These are locations where large numbers of people would be at risk, where the system already holds energy that can be unleashed, and where a protracted crisis would attract intense media coverage over an extended time period.

Technological crises are inevitable in the course of all major projects. How well leaders handle unwanted crises is a very powerful determinant of whether a project ultimately succeeds or fails. Distilling lessons from those times of crisis, and having the lessons periodically refreshed, is critical. Even as computers take over routine operations that people do now, many important and unique tasks still will remain for people to carry out. This includes innovation, the exercise of judgment in the handling of problem reports, and above all, troubleshooting.

Bio

James R. Chiles, author of the acclaimed book Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (HarperCollins), writes chiefly on technology and history.  He has published over fifty features and columns in magazines including Smithsonian, Aviation Week, Texas Monthly, Audubon, Harvard, Air & Space, and Popular Science.

Chiles was the featured commentator for the History Channel television series based on his book, Inviting Disaster. And, he has subsequently appeared on six other History Channel programs, including “Katrina: American Catastrophe,” “Engineering Disasters,” and “Megadisasters.” He has also appeared on National Geographic Channel’s “Seconds From Disaster” and on numerous TV and radio outlets, including NPR, CNBC and elsewhere.  His second nonfiction book, The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks, The Story of the Helicopter (Random House), was named by Library Journal as one of the best science books of the year 2007, and Scientific American named it as a holiday book pick for 2007 as well.