One way that newspapers and other media try to manage a lot of information is by making an infographic or diagram.

This visual “map” often helps the media to convey complex ideas more quickly and makes it easier for most of us to process.

Unfortunately many of the infographics are becoming more cluttered as they need to deal with much more information. The answer is – of course much better visualisations as a learning and development approach.

If we had the tools and training to convert our data sources into networks diagrams that we can colour code and sort by note and data point.

We can also decide which variables are relevant and important and which are not then we have a giant leap quantum leap into the future as informations consumers

More importantly this helps all of us put our ideas into action. When we change our relationship and connection to the data we can understand it with much greater clarity.

McCandless mentions some work from Tor Nørretranders who converted the senses into a bandwidth diagram metaphor to show us what visual data works much fasters / better than our other senses.

Here is that diagram. We can see that sight in the blue area is many, many times faster then touch, hearing, smell and taste.

Guess why the latest iPads have such great screens? Screens have 3048px resolution at 264 dpi and touch screens which will revolutionise learning tools.

For more on Nørretranders check out this reboot video

“David McCandless makes infographics — simple, elegant ways to see information that might be too complex or too big, small, abstract or scattered to otherwise be grasped.

In his new book, Information Is Beautiful (in the US, it’s being called The Visual Miscellaneum), McCandless and his cadre of info designers take a spin through the world of visualized data, from hard stats on politics and climate to daffy but no less important trends in pop music.

David says Data is the new soil in the beauty of data visualization “

I especially like this paragraph from David at about 10 minutes into the talk.

“If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. And that whole thing — it’s two languages both working at the same time.

We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective.”

So if we can start looking at these ultimate visual maps then we can start finding better answers to – well – everything is the short answer. ( Think knowledge compression=better answers.)

Last weekend besides TEDxSydney on the Sunday we had the delight to be part of TED@Sydney Talent Search.

20+ would be speakers did 6 minute versions of TED talks with the prize being a chance to do a talk on the main TED stage next Feb at the main event.

What I loved most about this event was seeing and hearing a group of mostly young ( average age 23*) Aussies pitch big ideas with confidence and for the most part they are all world changers which is the sweet spot for me. (* a few older – one was 73)

My personal motto is: change everything for the better and that is what gets me out of bed every day. These speakers were my kind of people for sure.

As audience members our task was to rate talks / speakers on a scale of 1-5. At the beginning it was hard to do since so many of them  were either 4 or 5 on the scale.

In the end I made up a higher level criteria for assessment based on world impact.

On that basis my top pick was Chantelle Baxter whose talk on world changing sanitary pads for Sierra Leone caused most of the guys in the audience to squirm a fair bit.

I heard that Chantelle did a great talk at TEDx McQuarie Uni . Chantelle Baxter is the brain and artist behind the One Girl branding and online presence.  “The Age’s – Top 100 Most Influential People in Melbourne.”

In September 2008, Chantelle raised $5,000 to build a primary school in Sierra Leone and spent one month working with 80 beautiful children in an impoverished rural community.

Upon her return, she couldn’t shake her desire to be make a difference, and in April 2009 she co-founded One Girl.

My number 2 pick was Linh Do also from Melbourne. Linh looks and sounds like she is still 16. Her enthusiasm for her projects and for the UN (gulp) was contagious.

Like many adults I have written off the UN as an actual force for good but if enough people like Linh can regenerate it then more power to them.  Linh Do – The Voice - according to a profile

“She spends her time advocating for sustainable development and better youth engagement. Linh is The Voice. She is a social media gun, and is passionate about inclusivity and community building. She keeps OurSay.org in touch with youth political advocacy.Super power: being more than one person at all times.”

I’m not sure how the voting went – but I wanted to give both Chantelle and Linh 6 our of 5 as they were exceptional when pretty much all of the speakers were very good so it was hard to rate them objectively.

One curiosity of the talks was that there were 3 science communicators in who gave talks. Derek Muller, Adam Spencer and James Bryne. They were different but I felt that their various projects overlapped somewhat.

I know in business we have this philosophy of creative destruction and competition but I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if the 3 of them joined forces or somehow combined their efforts rather than having 3 completely separate projects.

I know that is probably not practical but in NZ we have Science Media Centre and Sci Blogs and the blog network has 50 ish separate bloggers inside that network.

Disclosure: I work on the websites for both of those projects myself. Of course I’, also a huge fan of Symphony of Science project by John Boswell.

Special Mentions need to go to Pip Hall who went over from Auckland to talk about the Wet Hot Beauties water ballet project. I have personally never watched synchronised swimming and so I was ready to give Pip and Judy a 1 out of 5 but I was totally surprised.

Turns out that the project is much more about having fun and spreading joy than it is about any kind of syncronisation. Even better as I live in Auckland I can go watch them sometime or even join in. There are 66 members in that group now.

The other special mention goes to Rebekah Campbell of posse.com. Rebekah is clearly a high achiever in the music industry. Her TED audition was unusual in that it was less a worthy project and more of a business project.

However if she is correct and she has raised $5m+ to support Posse so far then it will change the music industry for the better and we all need that.

Update: this timelapse video has just been released.

Yesterday I was at TEDxSydney live at the Carriageworks and it was a completely mind-blowing, epic, energising and surprisingly musical day.

Unusually for me I left my twitter off and instead plugged straight into the equivalent of an 829 brain mega parrallel organic computer ( theatre attendees plus speakers) hive mind.

Seriously – it felt like being part of a giant self learning network with a ticket to the big bang – which is this case was a series of well organised and immaculately executed talks inside an amazing musical adventure.

As an event organiser myself  have long ago learned that the speakers and presentations at these events are real bonuses. It is a bit like pouring petrol on a burning fire when you already have 800 firestarters in the room.

Meeting and making real face to face (connections) is way better than facebooking as Sam Simmons so eloquently pointed out later in the day with his 1 man riot comedy routine that completely blasted away any and all boundaries but back to the start.

For me the the big surprise of the day was how music soaked the programme was and how seamlessly and  organic that felt in the moment. Jordan Verzar – the musical director deserves a huge shout out for his excellent work.

He collaborated with some brilliant musicians to generate a fertile musical landscape where every cadence and beat puntuated and stimulated the imagination into a series after series of brain bursting goodness.

I’m a big fan of Jools Hollands Later music programme where a handpicked selection of the worlds best musicians perform and this TEDxSydney 2012 was very much the musicale equivalent.

I have watched something like 300+ TED and TEDx talks and even though I am a musician at core I tend to avoid the musical clips for the most part. OTOH I’ve lost count of the number of times I watched Benjamin Zander’s shining eyes talk – music is an aural accelerant.

The first indication of musicale awesomess was when string quartet FourPlay paid a music tribute to the late Adam Yauch with their performance of Sabotage like you’ve never heard before. ( Updated with actual clip on 1st of June – this is when the event really caught fire)

But you’ve seen and heard nothing till you’ve seen Greg Sheehan master percussionist burst amazing music out of a table full of squeaky toys. This routine with kitchen utensils gives an idea but can’t wait for that clip to go live. OTOH – it was a party trick and could get stale very quickly.

All of the talks were incredible and it is hard to pick out high points but for me the talks that reasonated with me personally were the really unexpected and unaticipated moments.

Mandyam V. Srinivasans neuro science talk on bees where he managed to not mention neuro science but showed us brain images of bees and decoded there little waggle dances onscreen was a sheer delight.

Evan Kidd talked on the importance of play in schools and value of imaginary friends in a humourous but enlightening way. ( Note to education policy makers: – standardised testing just sounds useful but will in fact have the opposite effect.) Evan has the reasearch to show that more play and creativity in schools works way better.

Update: Fever Picture : Gavin Blake graphic – play matters – Evan Kidd

Somehow despite Sir Ken Robinson having visited NZ twice recently the message to education policy makers hasn’t got through. ( I wrote about this in Flipping the Classroom and Creativity & Innovation Linked)

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis was another surprise. He succintly pointed out that competition in politics does not get us the best outcomes but collaboration by random citizens – sort of like a rotating jury panel would actually work.

As an architecture nerd – I absolutely loved hearing Gerard Reinmuth & Anthony Burke put modernism in its place and talk about ways to re-connect architecture to the real world.

Katie Noonan was a musical revelation. I was thinking Natalie Merchant meets Gilian Welch and then some when she got us to do sing / breathe in her second song.

Lynette Wallworth’s Coral Rekindling Venus – a major art installation for full dome planetariams was gobsmacking enough and then she topped that off with a beautiful song called Rise by Antony & the Johnsons. Lyn managed to connect art, science and music all at the same time.

Chris Anderson (from big TED) was respectfully introduced by Julian Morrow who then managed to top that by saying “lets face it TED is a bit like a cult and so a visit by the leader could be time to drink the kool aid” or words to that effect.

However Chris @TEDchris whose opening lines were “Teachers are heroes” showed us once again that TED & TEDx is now a movemnet that is truly changing the world by education means nececessary.

Arguably Sir Ken Robinsons first talk helped launch the TEDiverse and now Chris Anderson pairing of teachers and presentation experts + technology for uber scaling we have full lift off.

What I call TEDucation is now in full stream ahead mode and that is an idea worth spreading.

Extra special thanks to Remo & family, Annette Higgins, Felicity MacDougal, Alan Jones and all the other wonderful people that I met again or for the first time.

Special shout outs to Kath Purkis, Alex Zaia and the many others that I met. It is especially great to meet very bright young people who are up for changing their worlds.

I also loved meeting other TEDx organisers – here I am with Jason & Clare Conroy from TEDx Canberra. Also got to hang out with Kaila Colbin TEDxEqcChCH did some more planning with Ben Irving for TEDxAuckand ( coming in August this year.) Photo credit below: Tony Hollingsworth @hollingsworth

TEDxSydney 2012 was so musicalicios I’m heading back there today for TED@Sydney Event on Sunday.

Last week I heard a fascinating story about a project where conservation staff have developed a remote controlled microphone to record bird calls especially Kiwi in the wild.

What was really fascinating to me about the story was how they wrote some software to scan all of the sounds and be able to more easily zoom in on the ones that were most important to them.

The simple version is that the sounds get converted to Spectrograms which the computer programme can recognise the shape of. You can see a spectrogram at left and for more detail on that image look at  the orginal kiwi vocalisation data over here.

As you can see the patterns are very distinctive but when you have hours of data that is still going to take a while.

So to make it much easier colour coded the spectrograms so that a person can review the data in a time shifted way and at speed.

That means they converted an audio signal into a visual image and then used an image recognition algorithm in the software that they wrote which is what really excited me about the story. Going from sound to visual image is the answer to all of those ” what do we do with all this data questions”.

Visual mapping allows us to get a kind of data compression which uncovers the most significant patterns in any kind of data.

In fact the more data points we have the easier and better we can see those patterns. You get the idea though. If we can trun a whole lot of data (big data) into a visual image we can flip it over and do a sort like Eric Benlow showed in the clip from my blog post earlier this week.

BTW -if anyone has the audo link to that programme on Radio NZ Nat Radio about 18th May? – will add it here

Sean Gourley is one of the flying kiwis* I wrote about Sean back in 2009 as he was a TED fellow and is probably the only New Zealander to speak at a TED conference so far.

It was my very great pleasure to meet Sean in San Francisco in May 2010 and talk with him about what he was up to. The plan was to interview him for a magazine called idealog but after talking we both realised none of those conversations could be published due to commercial sensitivity.

So Sean really is a rocket scientist from Christchurch & a very smart guy changing the world of big data. Happy to say that is one of my TED stories and I love what he is doing over at Quid.com

(* seriously why do we have a bird who cant fly as a mascot.)

It’s TEDxSydney this weekend and I’m in the theatre and so delighted to be part of the live show this year. If you are there / here my twitter id is @dialogCRM so come and say hi if you are around.

Especially looking forward to Chris Anderson, Anthony Burke, Tarsha Finney, Geoffrey Garret, Jeremy Heimans, Katie Noonan, Gerard Reinmuth. All the talks will be good and some will be great – ideas worth spreading. I’m expecting to be surprised by greatness and spending the day with a bunch of fire starters is also a wonderful thing.

TEDxSydney is being live (26th of May) streamed so tune in or follow along on twitter at #TEDxSydney.

So Sean is onto something very big ( sorry about the pun) watch the clip and it will blow your mind.

It has been great looking at big data this week but mostly we are still stuck with dragging a mouse around a screen. That is another limit that needs to go. It would be great to be able to manipulate data on a screen in other more tactile ways.

A giant pile of data deserves something that is more like a dump truck and bulldozer than the spade and shovels / pen & pencil approcah we currently use.

“Remember the data interface from Minority Report? Well, it’s real, John Underkoffler invented it — as a point-and-touch interface called g-speak — and it’s about to change the way we interact with data” – as he shows us.

Here is a giant floating cube of images which John directs around the screen with special gloves and a few almost Tai Chi moves as he navigates data and other content in 3D.

“That’s the old way, that’s the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. Well, that doesn’t really cut it anymore.” (John Underkoffler)

and again – how to interact with the data much more visually.

Watch the full clip below. Perhaps the best part of the clip is when he uses his interface to drag charcters from various films onto a separate workscreen and combine them. Film makers and editors will love that whan it becomes available.

Also impressive was John’s insistence that most or all of this technology would just come embedded in our computers within the next 5 years.

As this talk was in 2010 I supect that the Kinect interface on Xbox uses very similar ideas and we have already seen some of what he demonstrated.

Hopefully this means that the other features and capabilities are coming soon to a bigger screen near you.

Back in 2006 Jeff Han showed us a cheap, scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click.

Since then he has founded a company called Perceptive Pixel. Go over to their site to wacth a short clip of the 27″ touch and pen capable screen.

If you are a designer I can see that would be a very transformational interface. Perceptive Pixel also have 82″ screens “world’s largest projected capacitive, optically bonded multi-touch display.” More about Jeff Han here

Ok – so big data AND a better UI ( user inteface) I’d like to use one of those – I’d also like a 27″ giant iPad that I can use to remix music or edit video and it looks like much of this is coming.

The other great thing is that when something like touch & kinetic controlled screens are commercially available (xbox is there already) we reinvent the ways we can interact.

At first uses are fairly prosaic and most are virtual reruns of familiar activities. It gets much more fun when we can take the new UI to another level and leverage the greater power of big data with much more powerful interactivity.

Finding great answers always starts with great questions – however in today’s world we are often overwhelmed by enormous amounts of data.

If only we knew the “right questions” we would be so much closer to a better understanding of the world around us and our interconnectedness.

Eric Berlow shows us that “complex doesn’t always equal complicated” and “simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity”

What would happen if we could more easily sort through some of the data with good visualisation tools to better spot the underlying patterns and linkages.

What matters the most will show up in a visual form that our brains can more easily deal with. Here is what that might look like.

I have slightly enhanced a screenshot from the video to show more of the nodes but the real power of this is the when you watch the network on the video and can flip it around to isolate and determine which data is the most useful.

Eric goes on in this data visualisation to show us that most of this data can be sorted into actionable and non actionable and and so on. What he shows us is that simple answers may indeed emerge.

There are other ways of understanding the data and in this scenario much of the content came from a newspaper infographic which was overwhelmingly complicated but not really that complex if we have visualisation tools.

Eric Berlow is an ecologist and network scientist who specializes in not specializing. He helped found, and directs, the University of California’s first environmental research center in Yosemite National Park. More bio on Eric over here Eric is on twitter @ericberlow

This gives rise to a whole new set of questions and by using these better questions and being able to more easily understand and sort through the complexity we find much more clarity and simplicity on the other side.

Jer Thorp creates beautiful data visualizations to put abstract data into a human context. At TEDxVancouver, he shared his moving projects, from graphing an entire year’s news cycle, to mapping the way people share articles across the internet. He is thinking about data in a human context.

“Jer comes from a background in genetics, his digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art and shows us again how a more visual view of the data helps us to decode and simplify and understand meaning on a more human scale.”

Imagine you never stopped learning and that every so often a friend, educator, health professional or heaven forbid – some bloke on Facebook gives you feedback on something that they think you need to change – what do you do?

Lets assume this is medical information and that changing your lifestyle will improve your life quality. So that means it is important and you really want to change because you know that it is good for you.

We are faced with this types of questions all the time but the information we are presented  doesn’t make it easy to understand or – more importantly to act and make the changes we often should make.

I was recently given the results of some routine medical tests and as a comparatively highly educated professional used to dealing with huge amounts of data I was shocked at how little use the lab tests really are.

So the first idea here is that if we can change the format of the med tests that will be easier for the health staff to communicate and easier for us to change. Thomas Goetz takes a look.

“Your medical chart: it’s hard to access, impossible to read — and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it. At TEDMED, Thomas Goetz looks at medical data, making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it.”

Another related  idea is the way we learn is very influential in what changes, outcomes and skills we can acquire. It seems like that gaming activity as a popular pastime has managed to engage huge numbers of us in a way that educators would love to do.

Again there is an idea here that the way we engage with the content and the efficacy of that learning experience can make a huge difference.

“Gamers often commit great feats of persistence, dedicating hundreds of hours to complete marathon quests all while learning complex, nuanced skills. At TEDxCMU, John Riccitiello calls on educators to harness the resolve video games can inspire to build new learning tools for the next generation of kids.”

Riccitiello makes the point that a student studying for a an engineering degree course takes 1680 hrs to complete over the 3 years that it takes.  At the same time he estimates that a gamer would invest 1724 hours in a single year to advance in their game. That level of commitment, interest and determination is often lacking in the educational context.

Perhaps one of the reasons that gaming creates new learning is because the presentation of the data is much more immersive and conducive to changes of all kinds.

What would happen if someone took those medical results and then represented that data as a life changing game?

Goalpost.it in Wellington is doing exactly this. Behavioral change supported by social gaming style interaction and the trigger event is the need to quit smoking As they make clear on their web site

“Want to quit smoking?

We’ll help you! Goalpost makes it social by connecting you with friends, expert advice and game play! We’ll keep you on track with challenges and rewards and supporters to cheer you on. You can do this!”
Goalpost is a 12-week game. You’ll have daily tips, tasks and challenges that give you points and rewards! win win!

Personally I believe that we can change our behaviours at any time.

• It definitely makes a big difference to how successfully we do that if the data is easier to understand
• and when the learning experience is more engaging
• plus the gaming element gives us social support which also improves our chances of success.

See also

Ali Carr-Chellman: Gaming to re-engage boys in learning

Is Kaki King a guitar god or not? The really interesting thing about music and other art is that we as viewers get to spin off in a multitude of directions and the real answer is that all of those opinions are correct and valid. There is no right answer to the musical question – there are only opinions about who we like better at the time.

I wrote this post as a comment after watching the video below.

“Kaki King, the first female on Rolling Stone’s “guitar god” list, rocks out to a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, “Playing with Pink Noise.” Jaw-dropping virtuosity meets a guitar technique that truly stands out.”

I once watched Leo Kottke in concert and while he is technically brilliant for me it was kind of sterile and neither the music nor the songs connected with me. Kaki is clearly one to watch as she is youngish and by the sound of it has some new music since this performance.

I have seen other virtuoso players before and so maybe this is not so surprising as it is to those for whom this style is a new thing.

Technical excellence is a great starting point for a musical conversation. Last year I watched Rufus Wainwright in concert and

I wanted him to hit some wrong notes so I knew I wasn’t watching a hologram.

He did make some connections but sometimes he was just playing the piano (fantastically well.) I was there for the songs – & not the tricks. That video eye thing in the first half was a bit much and the Elizabethan dress was OTT but we never got a good look at it really.

Regarding Rufus – his concert was gobsmacking nonetheless and his new album Out of the Game is his best yet – but I digress.

When we listen to music the brain makes instant associations and connections with our prior experiences so we all come to new musical experiences with our own filters & comparisons. That is how we are wired. Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Levitin have great research into this type of thinking.

Kakis mentor Preston Reed would say he is influenced by John Fahy & others who are largely forgotten by the music business. It seems surprising that no one has mentioned Bruce Cockburn who has been playing for 50 years now and is famous not because of his guitar style which is impressive but because he has written songs that make meaningful connections with many. ( Below is Bruce with Ali Farka Toure)

I’m personally more of a blues fan and that is a great clip. BTW Ali Farka Toure made 76 on the list. Bruce didn’t make any of these lists but is a personal favourite of mine – I actually got to have dinner with him a long time ago so that was a bonus.

There are other RS lists and Bonnie Raitt ( “Hello I’m the 89th best guitarist in the world” sounds more like a line from a future episode of Flight of the Conchords.

Musicianship is not really a competition and those lists by magazines are just easy ways to write a story that the magazine can sell ads around. I did have a look at a list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time” on Rolling Stone and was amused to see that Joni Mitchell came in at 72 and Joan Jett was at # 87 (the only women in the list) – all of which tells us more about Rolling Stone than it does about music.

Joe Sullivan thought so to. Robert Johnson at 71 is just plain wrong.

Obviously the guy making the list never saw Jennifer Precious Finch play in L7 and there are many other female guitarists who should be on these lists but they are mostly only good for Bill & Ted style pub quizzes.

In my book Joni Mitchell’s work with open tunings and with Jaco Pastorius in particular marked her as a standout on any list. I had the very great pleasure of hearing Jaco play live but according to her wikipedia entry Joni is now

“A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in 2007. Now based in British Columbia, she describes herself as a “painter derailed by circumstance.”[6]

Is Kaki anywhere on that scale? Not in my view but she is one to watch as the video above dates from 2008. Enjoy.

There are not many ( if any) lists of ”painters derailed by circumstance” but there are a lot of other lists. Here is a top 15 acoustic guitar  players list (video.) More context for Kaki whose tapping is really not that unusual when seen in this group – she is #11 on this list.

(On this acoustic guitar list: Petteri Sariola 15. Kotaro Oshio 14. Justin King 13. Erik Mongrain 12. Kaki King 11. Peppino D’Agostino 10. Antoine Dufour 9. Andy Mckee 8. Stephen Bennett 7. Steven King 6. Don Ross 5. Chet Atkins 4. Lenny Breau 3. Tommy Emmanuel 2. Michael Hedges 1.)

The parliamentary elections in NZ last year will be remembered for having the lowest voter turnout since 1887

At the time a lot of commentators opined that this was the result of Labour Party voters staying away in droves because they knew they couldn’t beat John Key & the Nats.

“A total of 3,070,847 people were registered to vote in the election, with over 2.2 million votes cast and a turnout of 74.21%^[4] – the lowest turnout since 1887.^[5] The incumbent National Party, led by John Key, gained the plurality with 47.3% of the party vote and 59 seats, two seats short of holding a majority.”

Except that low voter turnout and “too close to call” elections are also happening in the UK, Australia and other places. Political parties now are so au fait with focus groups and polling that they have swapped a genuine passion for change and inclusive public policy thinking for facsimile results and so end up holding cardboard elections.

Many voters see through the card board characters and have lost faith in the voting process.

Somehow PM John Key has interpreted this as a big win* and is now proceeding on an idealogical path of asset stripping and other exploitation of natural resources.

Have a look at Partial privatisation numbers ‘don’t add up’

“Sustento director and economist Raf Manji said. It was admirable for the Government to lower debt, but the numbers around selling stakes in energy firms to do so did not add up, he said.

New Zealand debt servicing was at record lows and the energy firms were trading well, returning between 5 and 11 per cent, he said. It looked like the nation was heading into a prolonged period of low interest rates, he said.

“It’s never been so cheap for the Government to borrow money and the demand for Kiwi debt has never been higher. If the New Zealand Government was a business, there would be absolutely no reason why it would be selling.”

Diluting the public’s hold on the firms would risk lower investment in power generation infrastructure and higher prices, he said. No more important public good existed than energy, as it was essential to people and businesses, so it was dangerous to raise the firm’s focus on profits.”

Rafs Sustento website is over here and he is on twitter here @rafmanji

One Big Voice would be very useful in helping to change the governments mind about those asset sales. I’m old enough to remember Capital Markets and the BNZ fiasco / bailout.

Shortly after that the heroes scurried off to Switzerland to roll around in the cash they got from the NZ government. It is another story for another day but please excuse me when I say John Key is a former money market trader and a leopard does not changes its spots.

“1989: Government reduces its share to 51% by selling 34%; with 30% sold to Capital Markets Ltd, and the remainder to the general public”

It is time to make politicians accountable.

What to do about this?

A local Grey Lynn based project is helping to make it easier to to make your elected representative more transparent, accountable and responsive to you, the people that put them in power. It is called One Big Voice and it represents a new way for citizens to show politicians what we really care about.

“Have you ever felt you weren’t being listened to?

Governments have vast economic and political resources which means they set the agenda. The average citizen on the other hand has one vote, no real voice and few other ways to exert any influence over what goes on in the world. In short, if you don’t have the means to make yourself heard your needs are often overlooked or ignored altogether.

That just doesn’t seem fair to us so we’re on a mission to help place the power to shape the world back into the hands of the people. Yep, we know it’s a ridiculously grandiose ambition but we really want to help make the world a better place to be for everyone.

To get the ball rolling we’ve chosen to focus on improving the quality of communication between voters and their elected representatives.”

or you can watch the video below.

The team says

“We’ve researched our idea, figured out how to make it work and finally we’re at the stage where it’s ready to build. So far we’ve donated our time for free, that’s what you do with love projects, but to develop it further and start coding in earnest we need financial support.”

Pop on over the One Big Voice page on indiegogo and login with your Facebook id to get involved.

You can find OBV on twitter at  @oneBIGvoice or on http://www.facebook.com/oneBIGvoice

P.S Your question is- OBV looks just like Standup which is another excellent changemakers project They also would love your support as they need to find a new name for Standup.

“we believe we can come up with an even more descriptive and unique name for our organisation using ‘the power of the crowd’ Feeling creative? Suggest some other names for us>>> Help us choose a cool new name ”

What if David Attenborough could sing? How about Stephen Hawking? Brian Cox? Well thanks to John Boswell at Symphony of Science they can and the results are surprising, delightful, educational and musically inventive.

When my daughter was younger we watched hours of Attenborough to the point that she talked about David as if he were a member of the family. We replaced TV time with documentary time instead and we still watch plenty of docus today from TED and other sources.

Of course it would be just wrong not to watch Big Band Theory but we have the DVD’s right next to our Flight of the Conchords DVDs because they are very much mockumentaries in our world.

As brain researchers uncover more about the brain and learning we discover from Donald Ford in an article called How the Brain Learns”

“What does this neuroscience research suggest about learning?

We need to ensure that learning engages all the senses and taps the emotional side of the brain, through methods like humor, storytelling, group activities and games. Emphasis on the rational and logical alone does not produce powerful memories.

A third recent discovery at the University of Michigan’s Biopsychology Program confirmed that the brain behaves selectively about how it processes experiences that enter through our five senses. The brain is programmed to pay special attention to any experience that is novel or unusual. It does this by making comparisons between the new information brought through the senses and existing information stored in our brain’s long-term memory. When the brain finds a match, it will quickly eliminate the new memory as redundant.

When new information contradicts what’s already stored in memory, however, our brains go into overdrive, working hard to explain the discrepancy. If the new information proves useful to us, it becomes a permanent memory that can be retrieved later. If this new information does not seem useful or if we do not trust its source, we are likely to forget it or even reject it altogether, preferring to stick with the information we already possess.

Since learning inherently requires acquisition of new information, our brains’ propensity to focus on the novel and forget the redundant makes it a natural learning ally.

In fact, our brains are hard wired to learn, from the moment we are born. Our native curiosity is driven by our brain’s inherent search for the unusual in our environment. “

Ok lets skip to the video now – so here you are…

“[David Attenborough]
All life is related
And it enables us to construct with confidence
The complex tree that represents the history of life

Our planet, the Earth, is as far as we know
Unique in the universe; it contains life
Here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers
That we still have not even named all the different species

Darwin’s great insight revolutionized the way in which we see the world
We now understand why there are so many different species”

And so it goes.

We also like Physics so here is one called “The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” Just so you can say you’ve seen Stephen Hawking sing. By the way almost no one read that book of his but it was the Harry Potter of it’s day and they did make a movie of it called “A Brief History of Time”.

Want to see Brian Cox & Morgan Freeman sing about “atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see”. Try “Symphony of Science – the Quantum World!”

What do you think NZ teachers, musicians, educators and other creatives – should we be mashing up the curriculum into musical brain sized memes ?

Do check out the other Symphony of Science clips as well.

“The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public, in a novel way, through the medium of music. Science and music are two passions of mine that I aim to combine, in a way that is intended to bring a meaningful message to listeners, while simultaneously providing an enjoyable musical experience.”

Onward to the Edge! + Yoda – Feel the Force (Yoda Remixed)

Enjoy learning and “love the questions themsleves.”