Program Description

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Using eight familiar objects as guides, Freinkel takes audiences on an eye-opening multimedia journey tracing the rise of plastic and touching on some of its more lasting impacts on the economy, culture, health, and the environment. Focusing on some of the interlocking themes explored in the book — the rise of throwaway culture and its environmental impacts; the new kinds of health risks posed by synthetic chemicals used in plastics, and the politics of regulating them — Freinkel explores both the benefits and problems stemming from our tight embrace of synthetics.

Moreover, Freinkel addresses the problem of plastic waste and pollution and the challenges of dealing with plastics at the end of their useful lives.  And, in doing so, she poses and attempts to answer some of the tougher questions to grow out of this discussion: Is recycling the answer?  Could bioplastics be the materials of the future, and do their benefits outweigh the risks?

Whether or not we as a species can come to grips with our reliance on, and addiction to plastic is a question that will play itself out over the decades to come, but Freinkel’s talk can help audiences better understand our role in perpetuating plastic’s ubiquity, and by the same token, give us the tools to attempt to create a more enlightened consumer future.

The American Chestnut: A Parable of Our Time

In her award-winning book American Chestnut: The Life Death And Rebirth Of A Perfect Tree, Freinkel details one of the worst ecological disasters to ever hit North America: the near extermination of one of the country’s most important forest trees.

Her lecture, based on the book, draws fascinating parallels between this early almost-catastrophe and the ecological problems of invasive species and loss of biodiversity afflicting American landscapes today.  Freinkel tells the story of the chestnuts’ near demise and the decades-long effort of various scientists and amateur botanists to save and restore this beloved tree.  Once one of the most plentiful trees in East Coast forests – source of sustenance for all living beings in its range, from hares to hogs to human and a cultural icon for mountain folk of southern Appalachia — the chestnut was driven to near-extinction by a virulent newly-arrived pathogen

Freinkel discusses the notion that while the natural world is constantly evolving and seeking it’s own equilibrium, we must be more vigilant stewards of our own environment.  If we don’t act responsibly, then we run the risk of setting events in motion that can’t easily be undone.

Bio

A science writer whose work has appeared in a variety of national publications including: Discover, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, The New York Times, OnEarth, Health, and Real Simple, Freinkel was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 2005, which allowed her to conduct much of the research for American Chestnut. The book won a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award.

A graduate of Wesleyan University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freinkel began her career as a reporter at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Wichita, Kansas.  Her interests run wide. She has covered subjects ranging from adoption to weight control, coyote hunts to mad cow disease, new psychiatric treatments to the quest to develop a blue rose — not to mention trees and plastic.

In Free Ride, Robert Levine, business journalist and former Executive Editor of Billboard, details how Congress helped create this situation, how tech companies convinced politicians not to regulate the online world, and how the media business can save itself (in spite of itself).

Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back

Piracy?  It’s only part of the problem.  While piracy obviously has an economic cost in addition to its cultural consequences, the real problem is that an Internet without restrictions is an Internet without a functioning market. Some technology pundits see this as progress – but many of them have made valuable businesses out of information and entertainment funded by the media companies that have been devastated by their actions. In the long term, this can’t last: Google won’t be nearly as useful without newspaper journalism, and Spotify won’t work without major label music.

Levine presents some revolutionarily new, yet simple ideas that could reverse the current situation — demonstrating how European Internet regulations present some hope for the media business, especially since countries like France and Germany aren’t afraid to regulate Google. But, ultimately, the solution is both as simple and as complicated as the fact that we can’t have an online economy without some kind of property rights – and some way to enforce them.

Program Descriptions

Free markets and free information: an anatomy of an unsustainable economy

The Internet promised an “information economy,” but information is worth less than ever. While the companies that move information are thriving, those that actually create it – movie studios, record labels, newspaper companies – are struggling. Over the long term, this can’t last: Google won’t be nearly as valuable if there isn’t as much professional content to search for.  Levine’s thesis is a simple but powerful one: We can’t have an working online economy without a market, we can’t have a market without property rights, and we can’t have property rights without some means of enforcing them. This isn’t just about protecting a few media businesses – it’s ultimately about preserving the value of the work that the prosperity of advanced economies depends on.

At what price success?

In 2010, when record companies raised the prices of the most popular songs on iTunes, most bloggers thought it would be a disaster, and sales declined more than 10 percent. But since the most popular songs were selling for about 30 percent more money, record companies made more revenue – and more profit. Although the digital world seems to demand lower prices, in order to hold back piracy, most of the evidence shows that this isn’t a good strategy. Instead, media companies need to adopt more flexible pricing and introduce different products aimed at different consumers – much as airlines do. Levine offers practical advice on how to maintain pricing power in the digital age.

Regulation in an age of free information (and free access)

Technology executives often say that the Internet can’t be regulated, that the spread of open communications technologies is inevitable. But that’s not exactly true: While technological advances are inevitable, the ways we use them are up to us – specifically, network designers and the governments that mandate what they can do. In the case of the Internet, we have an open system with no enforceable rules. Ultimately, that’s not nearly as good for users as it is for technology companies – which are running rampant over copyright, but also privacy, antitrust, and consumer protection laws. Levine takes audiences through the history of network regulation, and, more importantly, lays down a blueprint for what its future should look like.

Bio

Robert Levine has been covering pop culture, technology, and the awkward dance between them for 15 years. Most recently, he was the executive editor of Billboard, charged with running the influential music business trade magazine. He has also been a features editor at New York magazine and Wired. His first job was at HotWired.com, the Wired Web publication, where he was hired several months after it sold the first online banner ad.

His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Fortune, Rolling Stone, and the arts and business sections of the New York Times. He has offered commentary on the media business for CNN, CNBC, and VH-1, and spoken at the CMJ music conference and the World Copyright Summit in Brussels. He holds a B.A. in politics from Brandeis and an M.S.J.  from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

His first book, Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back (Doubleday), was called “brilliant if depressing” by the Times (U.K.) and garnered praise from the Guardian and the Financial Times. He now covers the culture business from New York and Berlin.

Workman, who served as an advisor shaping national and global policy under US Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Nelson Mandela, addresses this complex riddle in a dramatic and compelling multimedia lecture program.

Program Description

H2Ownership: A Fresh Approach to Unlocking the Three Paradoxes of Water

For all of the loud talk about “efficiency” and “conservation,” natural resource managers are confounded by three profound and deeply entrenched paradoxes when it comes to water: Value, Efficiency, and Monopoly.

Water is priceless in use, and yet worthless in exchange. The more efficiently we use water – drip irrigation, timed sprinklers, low-flush toilets, high-pressure nozzles – the more water we actually use.  And, ironically, saving water eats into utilities’ revenue, forcing them to ‘punish’ conservation by charging more per unit to recover costs.

In his lectures, Workman draws on a decade of experience with the last free Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who inspired his award-winning book Heart of Dryness, and his new business that translates the Bushmen’s proven coping mechanisms into a Web 2.0, online exchange platform for earning, owning, accumulating and trading water efficiency credits, or EcoShares™.

The resilient Kalahari Bushmen have inspired a bold new approach that is unlocking a more responsible and egalitarian approach to water. H2Ownership replaces top-down rationing and restrictions with secure and equal incentives in which all metered customers can earn, track and exchange water efficiency credits, or EcoShares. This form of creative capitalism can motivate a widespread race to conserve and make today’s vulnerable cities increasingly ‘climate-proof.’

Workman has come to realize that “water scarcity” comes not from a shortage of supply but an excess of demand, and that the real “experts,” the only “water managers” who really matter, are the 6.8 billion untrained end users: the locals – i.e. all of us.

How this works, in practice

Workman anchors water security – and unlocks the paradoxes — via a new yet timeless concept: H2Ownership™. Families and firms no longer must depend on rent-controlled monopolies that unilaterally dictate who deserves how much water for which uses at what rates. Instead, each of us can ‘own’ a virtual and equitably defined and tradable ‘share’ of water. In this way water at last has value in exchange. Efficiency reduces overall use. And scarcity motivates all parties to eliminate waste in a widespread race to conserve.

In pilot demonstration projects in the West, AquaJust™ unlocks water conservation through equitable local ‘click’ markets within a utility’s natural ‘brick-and-mortar’ monopoly. Median accounts who consume all their EcoShares pay nothing; profligates over the threshold pay higher tiered rates. But frugal consumers now earn and accumulate unused shares, tracked on AquaJust, where they can save, donate or sell them to firms or families who want more. The approach replaces rationing and restrictions with fair and voluntary incentives in which all metered customers benefit from choices, conservation incentives, political momentum for raising rates, and AMI technology that can meet their growing demand for real time data and feedback.

Because when we reduce demand we erode revenues needed to improve our water supply. With no choice, competition or incentives to conserve, our ‘natural monopoly’ welcomes overuse yet punishes families and firms who save water. No politician promises voters he’ll deliver higher water, food or energy bills, so we ensure pipes leak and waste worsens. A vicious cycle hardens demand, escalates conflict and erodes trust. Democracy pits water utility vs. customers vs. nature.  This is a battle with no real winners.  A new, enlightened and collaborative solution must be put forward.  With Workman’s example, we may have finally found the answer.

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.  Currently Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, Stibel was 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.