IdeaFestival

Today's IdeaFestival All-Access Pass winners

2009-07-09T14:16:21-04:00

In a random drawing from approximately three gadzillion entries earlier today, Austin Stair Calhoun of Minneapolis and John J. Guthrie in Louisville won All-Access Passes to attend IdeaFestival '09. Congratulations!

And if anyone has some imaginative thoughts for giving away the final two passes in August, let me know. I'd love to hear your ideas.

Wayne

Lessons of Climates Past

2009-07-09T08:50:03-04:00

Although he does not comb DNA to chart migratory patterns, British Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Exeter Chris Turney is similarly focused on the human journey encoded in physical history. His two books listed on the rights side of the blog - Bones, Rocks and Stars and Ice, Mud and Blood - track, as he says, what happened, when. Check him out at the 2009 IdeaFestival, where he'll talk about "lessons of climates past."

Wayne

Wikipedia: Physical Geography

physical geography

Two FREE All-Access Passes available to good homes

2009-07-08T08:59:53-04:00

Let's double the fun. Email me at whall@ideafestival.com by 9a EDT, Thursday (July 9). I will randomly choose two winners from all the email entrants received by that time, then blog and Twitter the news. Good luck!

The IdeaFestival will give away a total of two more all-access passes by the middle of August, so if you don't win tomorrow, stick around. We'll do it again.

Wayne

The economics of trust

2009-07-07T10:51:39-04:00

Like the biology of happiness and perspective-taking, the economics of trust is another of those cross-over studies with an important human dimension. How important? Quoting from a Tim Harford column in Forbes, Jonah Lehrer blogs that trust could be "responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest".

Recalling a study that recorded the brain activity of subjects playing an economic game that rewarded trust, Lehrer points out that based on the results of the game, trust is also an observed mental calculation, "an expectation of reward" rooted in areas of the brain that, not coincidentally, play a role in addiction and the anticipation of pleasure. The bottom line: it's rewards, not glib economic or policy promises, that build trust.

And this: past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Wayne

Jonah Lehrer

The Future of Money

2009-07-07T09:27:47-04:00

Stowe Boyd has begun a new series on the future of money that interviews a variety of people about what makes for an effective currency. Dull? Hardly. The lineup of interview subjects looks perfectly normal - if you've ever attended an IdeaFestival. Boyd:

I am launching a new interview series examining the future of money. I plan to be talking with all sorts of people: artists (like today's Christian Nold), futurists (like Jamais Cascio), writers (Bruce Sterling interview later this week, and Steven Berlin Johnson in the near future), economists, philanthropists, and all sorts of other people interested in where this is headed.

Having grown from about 100 to over 4,000, "complimentary currencies" could be one future.

Boyd also interviews Christian Nold, an artist, who, like former IdeaFestival speaker and physicist Dirk Brockmann, experiments with money-as-media. To demonstrate our social and emotional connection to it, Nold tracks our biological and emotional responses to create an "emotional cartography".

Check out the series if you get the chance.

Hat tip: Putting People First

Wayne

currency , money, Stowe Boyd

Street Farmer, Will Allen

2009-07-06T08:55:17-04:00

Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, "street farmer" and IdeaFestival participant this year, Will Allen was recently featured in New York Times. Check this out:

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites — through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

Discounted All-Access passes are on sale now for IdeaFestival '09. The first 85 to purchase them will get the chance to meet with another food critic, Anthony Bourdain.

Wayne

Will Allen

Time before time

2009-07-03T08:58:16-04:00

Cocktail Party Physics writes up a very nice summary of a panel of some of the world's top physicists discussing time at the recent World Science Festival in New York City, describing the differences between relativistic and quantum versions of time, why it appears to move in only one direction and what might have come before the big bang. Sean Carroll, who has a forthcoming book on the subject, was a panelist and had this to say on that:

Scientists have gotten used to the idea that when people ask us 'What happened before the big bang?' we give St. Augusta's answer: we say there was no such thing as before the big bang. But in very recent times, beyond Einstein, we're realizing that we have absolutely no justification for saying that that's true. We have to more beyond Einstein to understand what happened at the big bang. And the answer might be that the universe can into existence at the big bang: there's nothing before. Or it might not. There could be something before the big bang...cosmologists, people who are working on quantum gravity, are very interested in what we've learned since Einstein to answer these questions and go back and answer St. Augusta's question.

Incidentally, the World Science Festival was co-founded by former IdeaFestival presenter, theoretical physicist and a favorite author of mine, Brian Greene, who has a few words to say on the subject in The Fabric of the Cosmos. I highly recommend it.

Have a wonderful time if you're celebrating the Fourth of July this weekend!

Wayne

Cosmology, David Albert, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, George Ellis, Michael Heller, Roger Penrose, Sean Carroll

"Tales from the Encrypt"

2009-07-02T09:21:10-04:00

Could our final wishes be stymied by the secrets that protect our increasingly digital lives?

Fatherhood has changed Cory Doctorow. But in pondering how fantastically successful he has been at keeping his data private, he wonders if the people closest to him might be equally as successful in unlocking it. Granted some of us have much more at stake in the orderly unwinding of our affairs, but his problem in devising a way to keep his private data secure, now and then, struck a thoroughly modern chord. As it turns out, we're really, really accomplished at locking data down. Still,

What I found surprising all through this process was the lack of any kind of standard process for managing key escrow as part of estate planning. Military-grade crypto has been in civilian hands for decades now, and yet every lawyer I spoke to about this was baffled (and the cypherpunks I spoke to were baffling – given to insanely complex schemes that suggested to me that their executors were going to be spending months unwinding their keys before they could get on with the business of their estates, and woe betide their survivors, who'd be left in the cold while all this was taking place).

Give the whole Guardian piece a read.

Wayne

"What's very dangerous is not to evolve"

2009-07-01T09:04:14-04:00

In touting his new hit product, Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may indeed be channeling his inner Steve Jobs. The device could do for text what the iPod has done for music. But there's a much bigger lesson to be learned, according to Fast Company, which offers a description of the future of books that pits the two biggest media titans against each other in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Except for consumers there are no winners - yet. It may even be early in the game. But "what's very dangerous," Bezos concludes, "is not to evolve."

Wayne

Coding deception

2009-06-30T10:11:48-04:00

If chess is the measure of the mind, what's an artificially intelligent machine have to do to be considered a human equal? After all, in 1997 machine defeated former grandmaster Garry Kasparov using brute computation, and AI has since conquered draughts, Othello, backgammon and Scrabble according to the Financial Times article, "Machines that can outwit the smartest brains." Though the mind doesn't, obviously and thankfully, use strict logic, coding rules-based actions has become sufficiently advanced that the best human players of tactical board and card games have fallen prey to cleverly coded synthetic intelligence. Only the human play at the ancient game of Go remains unconquered.

AI is clearly making progress.

Ever since HAL was sonorously creeping out everyone in the theater, we've had this tendency to move the goalposts to avoid the idea that an artificial intelligence might someday match our wetware. "It is," the main organic character in the FT piece says, "whatever computers can't do yet."

If that's the case, then I wonder if coding deception might be the last synthetic frontier.

Wayne