This is the second part in my coverage of TEDx Berkeley 2013.   Read Part 1 here.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I found the speakers somewhat underwhelming.  I felt that most of the talks would have been better if they were much shorter.  There was a lot of  personal storytelling that I guess is supposed to be a hallmark of TED type talks, but the message of the stories often seemed arbitrary and not germane to the topic of the event: “Catalyzing Change.”

Mallika Chopra, daughter of Deepak Chopra, gave a touching at times, but meandering account of her family’s history.  Her topic was ostensibly about the importance of intention and she opened her talk with this powerful quote from the Upanishads:

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

― Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

I don’t think she did a great job expanding on that idea, but I am grateful to her for bringing it forth nonetheless.  She also led a meditation at the end of her talk in which she had the audience breathe and self-affirm by repeating the phrase “I am” while she asked questions: “Who am I?” “What do I want?” “How can I serve?”

The “How can I serve?” question calls to mind Seligman’s concept of Meaning from his PERMA model.  But I was most interested in this question of “What do I want?”  It seems incredibly important to first know one’s own desires.  Desires imply goals.  From there, it seems obvious that one should consider how one’s own plans and actions are furthering or detracting from those goals.  Here’s a perfectly reasonable set of instructions for living.  But I confess that I don’t do this very often.

Next up was Dan Millman, author of the Way of the Peaceful Warrior.  He did a handstand.  He is 68.  He trotted out some platitudes: live in the moment, be the change you want to see in the world, yadda yadda yadda.  I did like his comment that we don’t have a spam filter in our heads referring to a common tendency toward negative thoughts.  And I must say, he did pull out some good quotes:

“I’ve suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.” –Mark Twain

 

“The lesson is simple, the student is complicated.” – Barbara Rasp

 

He admonished the audience to “Just Do It” and to pay attention to the quality of each moment as these will aggregate to define the quality of your life.  That’s all well and good, but I was left with the impression of having sat through an infomercial for a down-to-earth, athletic, new age guru’s self-help products.

Berkeley professor, Ananya Roy spoke next on the topic of “(un)knowing poverty.”  She started her talk by audaciously declaring that she lived in public housing.  Her point being that the government spends twice as much on the mortgage tax deduction for middle class homeowners than it does on the entire Department of Housing and Urban development.  So in her view the rich get state help while the poor must rely on self help.  Roy disparaged the idea that poverty could be alleviated by donating $5 toward micro-loans in the Whole Foods checkout line, calling it hubris.  She asserts that there are underlying systems in place whereby poverty is produced and privilege is maintained.

Roy told a moving story of her travels to India in which she was confronted with the unbridgeable gap between wealthy westerners and the poor of the global south.  “How much does a domestic help worker make in the US?” she was asked.  The ridiculously low (by Bay Area standards) figure of $500 per month was suggested. But domestic help workers in the Indian slums she was visiting make the equivalent of $13 per month.  This shouldn’t be surprising given that half the world lives on less than $1000 per year.  Think about that for a minute, fellow Global Notherners.  That’s friggin’ brutal.  Roy mocked those Berkeley folk who are more comfortable aiding poverty in distant places that aiding the homeless on the streets of the Bay Area.  But the poorest of the poor here barely qualify as poor by global standards, so I am conflicted about that.

Roy went on to relate that a certain fellow living in this Indian slum told her that there should be no homelessness in the US since no citizen should be denied a home.  The US should permit the poor to build shacks on unused land.  So this person living on perhaps $13 a month took solace and pride in the fact that he was not homeless.  Sadly the government came and razed the shanty town he was living in soon after.   Roy was justifiably outraged that nearby middle-class developments were left intact in spite of the fact that they violated the same zoning rules that justified the removal of the shanties.  In fact these communities were touted as examples of economic development.  The rich get state help, the poor get self help.  Learn more at #GlobalPOV.

Karen Sokal-Gutierrez spoke next on the world pandemic of tooth decay.  If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, take a look at some of the pictures of little kids whose teeth have rotted right out of their heads.  Horrid.  But the insidious part about this is the link that she drew between cheap junk food and tooth decay in the Global South.  She recounted scenes of parents putting soda into baby bottles.  I saw Food Inc. so, you know, I was already disgusted by the perverse folly of farm subsidies and their negative impact on public health.  But it never occurred to me how this junk food problem would impact the developing world.  Here we have unsophisticated consumers being bombarded with false advertising and starting to face economics where junk food is cheaper than healthy food.  According to Sokal-Gutierrez, this toxic food is even making it’s way into remote rural villages.  Unbelievable.

I will continue my coverage of TEDx Berkeley 2013 in further posts soon.

I attended TEDx Berkeley 2013 today and it was my first TED type event.  I was largely unimpressed by the talks and felt somewhat isolated in the sea of twenty-somethings that attended the Zellerbach Hall event on the UC Berkeley campus.  Nonetheless, I will try to share some shards worthy of interest.

The event was divided into three programs entitled Dream, Create, and Impact.  Being a night person, of course I missed the entire Dream section which occurred from 10:00 – 11:30 am.

Louann Brizandine, author of the Female Brain, was the first speaker that I was able to see.  Her basic thesis being that men’s and women’s brains differ biologically, largely due to hormonal influences.  She gave a folksy presentation light on facts.  Better writers than I have beaten up on her previous work for this tendency.  She referred to babies as “marinating” in hormones and included a photo of a large breasted woman in her slides to grab the attention of straight men (and presumably some gay women?).  She indulged in what I like to call “evolutionarily adaptive storytelling” by telling the audience that evolution has shaped men to be attracted to large breasted females since large breasts are a signal  of high estrogen levels and thus fertility.

I don’t mind this sort of storytelling, but it’s more interesting if some empirical evidence is shown.  This particular story suggests that smaller breast sizes would be evolutionarily maladaptive, and it’s not clear that this is true.  Of course, these stories certainly oversimplify evolution.  Intuitively, it has long seemed to me that nonadaptive but neutral traits should survive in populations as long as they aren’t specifically maladaptive.  Organisms that maintain a variety of these neutral traits would appear to be more robust since a neutral trait for one environment might turn out to be life-saving under changed circumstances.    Setting my own confirmation bias aside, I have found some evidence to suggest that evolution is less driven by adaptation than some may think.

But I am digging deeper than Brizandine delved during her talk.  She went on to touch on the differences between how boys and girls like to play.  Here she did cite Eleanor Maccoby’s work which suggests that socialization has a limited impact on gender roles. Brizandine described girl play as being relational in nature while boys prefer rough physical play. She suggested that brain circuits are powered by hormones, and cited the anecdotal story of a transgendered person going from female to male who experienced a drop in tolerance for converstations with his female friends.  This example makes her arguments more palatable to me.  Determinist though I am, I get annoyed by arguments biased toward nature in nature vs nurture discussions.  I am attracted to theories of behavior that allow for change and allow for agency.  I like the idea that a biological woman that really, really, wanted to think more like a man could take hormones and achieve some aspect of that.  That’s why epigenetics is also fascinating to me.  Give me the wisdom to know what I can change…

Read Part 2 of my TEDx Berkeley 2013 coverage here.

I went to see Mickey McManus plug his latest book, Trillions, at the Bay Area Future Salon held at SF Tech Shop last week on April 9th.  McManus heads Maya, which is a “design consultancy and technology research lab.”  I’m coming to believe that the more meta your business is, the more important you are.  What the hell do these guys actually do?  Well, they built an “information-centric environment” for DARPA called Visage for one thing.  McManus made some bold claims about this being based on the idea of digital DNA but, you know, actual DNA is pretty hardcore technology, so I have my doubts.

McManus’ thesis is that economics will make it cheaper to embed computation into objects than to forgo it.  This vast internet of things will contain trillions of computers, dwarfing the current internet.  It will quickly make today’s techno-catch phrases of clouds and webs seem quaintly antiquated.  I have to like anyone who refers to cloud computing as a sunset technology.  So refreshing.  And he can certainly turn a nice phrase here and there.  This trillions-scale internet of things will “turn the sock inside out.” Instead of data being “in the computer” we ourselves will be living “in the data” so to speak, since our entire environment will be completely interwoven with computation and data.  And this is a done deal as far as McManus is concerned. The markets dictate it and so it shall be…within 5 years.

McManus trotted out another nice phrase to describe this internet of things: unbounded malignant complexity.  Nice!  Soon everything around you will be a potential vector for cyber-attack.  Imagine your refrigerator getting infected with malware, or your medical prosthetics.  Of course I have riffed on this theme before, and Vinge imagines that this future will have all the stability and permanence of the financial markets.  McManus suggests we look to nature for solutions to this complexity problem: biomimicry for information systems.  He characterizes nature as being organized into hierarchies of layered complexity where simpler components form foundations for more advanced structures.  Cells make up bodies which form families which form communities, etc.

It’s not clear to me how this model can be applied to information systems in a novel way, but that’s why McManus makes the big bucks.  I got a copy of the book, I will read it and get back to you.  In the meantime, you can check out this article that McManus published about nature’s “generative frameworks” on the techonomy site.  This seems like it might be an interesting site by the way.  They put on conferences in Tucson and Detroit.  I think I will try to get myself invited to one.  Kurzweil is speaking at their Tucson conference this year.  Lord knows I can’t get enough Kurzweil.   In that techonomy article he admonishes business to create frameworks that allow their users to create inventions.  But I am skeptical of this generative framework jargon.

Sure, Apple did it with apps on the iphone.  Web 2.0 is all about harvesting user generated content and data.  This isn’t really new stuff, but again, jargon-meister McManus gives us a new name for a familiar phenomenon: exhaust data.  The era of trillions is going to push big data to even bigger bigness.  All of these devices will be generating unimaginable yottabytes of “exhaust data” and the savvy business hustlers of today should be positioning themselves to find those opportunities for data exhaust recycling.  Because nature wastes nothing, don’t you know.

McManus also delved into this idea of data liquidity and suggested that some analog of shipping containers was needed in the information systems world.  As shipping containers led to an explosion of international trade by providing a common API for physical transport, McManus envisions an informational equivalent to make the internet get even more crazy with the sharing and whatnot.  He asserts that DNA plays some similar role and is actually nature’s currency.  Which strikes me as a weird thought – the economics of trading DNA? Nature is the best example of market dynamics?  Really?  This is good stuff.  And of course it follows that the oceans can be thought of as nature’s backup drive providing the ultimate in data resiliency.  Actually maybe referring to the oceans as nature’s central banks is a better analogy.

Again, I have a hard time seeing how this plays out in information systems.  But then, I lack vision.  McManus suggested that Maya’s Visage system for DARPA which I referred to earlier makes use of this data containerization concept.  He also talked about the fact that most disagreements are identity disputes and that matter unlike data always has a unique identity and doesn’t require Universally Unique Identifiers.  Was he trying to hint at where this ubiquitous computing could go?  The ultimate merging of bits and atoms?  I cannot say, but it’s an intriguing thought.

Over all, McManus was upbeat.  He sees a world of limitless possibilities, rife with business opportunities.  What unimagined synergies will these trillions of computing devices facilitate if the right connections are made?  Maybe you can’t picture why your sock drawyer should communicate with your stereo, but then again, when Jobs cut an early deal with the Beatles, he agreed not to take Apple into the music business.  Ha, talk about lack of vision.  Er, wait, this is Jobs we are talking about.  Anyway, McManus admonishes would-be entrepreneurs to seek out unlikely partnerships today because the trillions will make all connections possible…or something.