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.

Program Description

Back to the Future of Agriculture:
Steps Toward a Robust Food-Economy and a Sustainable Society

In his lectures, Philpott addresses the core economic, political and agricultural issues affecting the current state of food quality, availability and safety in America and throughout the world.  He also makes the case for sustainable methods of farming, processing and manufacturing by drawing on his own experience at Maverick Farms, and presenting examples of individuals, communities and governments who have demonstrated that sustainability can ultimately lead to healthy, cost-effective and profitable solutions.

Philpott details the major environmental and economic effects of industrial agriculture — its destruction of soil, its mammoth effect on climate change, and the way it creates dead zones in coastal ocean areas across the globe. In all of these examples, the way we grow food now threatens our capacity to grow food in the future.  The whole system depends on farmers being able to crank out huge amounts of crops that can be transformed into livestock feed to create cheap meat; into sweeteners for cheap sodas; and into additives for all the convenience fare we find at the supermarket and in the fast-food chains. In this system, farmers don’t grow food for people to eat, they grow industrial inputs that corporations transform into food.

He also argues that by eating and drinking, we literally embody the land by ingesting what grows from it. Since this relationship is so intimate, it isn’t surprising that the health of landscapes and the health of people are directly linked — landscapes such as the vast fields devoted to one crop, dependent on artificial fertilizers and a variety of poisons. Almost completely depopulated and devoid of diversity — indeed, at the whim of entire industries that exist to eradicate their biodiversity — these brutalized landscapes, it can be argued, are brutalizing our bodies in turn.  Healthy, beautiful agricultural landscapes tend to engender healthy, beautiful people. Unhealthy, ugly agricultural landscapes, by contrast, tend to create disease and dysfunction.

So, if food, our daily, inevitable link to the land, can be used to extract wealth from communities and enfeeble bodies – which our giant food-processing and agribusiness companies have certainly demonstrated – can’t it also be used to build wealth and health within communities?

Philpott answers this question and tackles many of the other crises and dilemmas we currently face. The challenge, as he sees it, is to move away from a food-production system designed to deliver minimal nutrition, as cheaply as possible, to a vast low-wage workforce, and to move toward a future where we’re all invested in contributing positively to both the physical and economic health of our country and the rest of the world.

Bio

Before moving to the farm in 2004, Philpott worked as a financial journalist in Mexico City and New York City, most recently holding the title of equity research editor for Reuters, where he wrote daily dispatches on the stock market. His work on food politics has appeared in Gastronomica, The Guardian, Mother Earth News, New Farm, and Sojourners.  Philpott serves of the board of directors of the Boston-based Chef’s Collaborative, a nationwide group that seeks to push the restaurant business in more sustainable directions; and on the board of advisers at the Austin, Texas-based Sustainable Food Center.

He and Darius prove that idealism and creativity can result in tangible progress. Part revolution, part revelation, this film proves to people of all ages how life, even when imperfect, is always worth the ride.

In this multi-award-winning documentary, fifteen-year-old Darius Weems and eleven of his best friends set off across America with the ultimate goal of getting his wheelchair customized on MTV’s Pimp My Ride. The result is a rarely seen testament to the explosive idealism of today’s youth, as well as a vivid portrayal of adventure, of brotherhood, and of the character and strength it takes to shed light on an uncertain future.

Not only does Darius Weems bravely face his own inevitable fate with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), but through his unflinching humor and his extraordinary laugh, he sparks a revolution in the lives of everyone who crosses–and then shares–his courageous path.

]]> http://verbatimlectures.com/smalley/feed/ 0 http://verbatimlectures.com/chiles/ http://verbatimlectures.com/chiles/#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:56:36 +0000 admin http://verbatimlectures.com/wordpress/?p=280 Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology, Chiles, a renowned technology and history writer, helps organizations assess risk and avoid catastrophe by examining the repeating patterns of historical and contemporary disasters, and applying the lessons learned to each organization's daily processes.]]> In the course of 30 years of writing for Smithsonian, Air & Space, Popular Science, Invention & Technology, Harvard, and other magazines, James R. Chiles has visited oil rigs, a nitroglycerin factory, electricians who maintain high-voltage power lines while hovering in helicopters, tunnels deep under New York, air traffic control centers, firefighters in training exercises, and many other industrial locations. His research on technology in action led him to the concept of the “system fracture,” one of the central ideas in his book Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology.

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.