HowardWright.com

Is where you think important II

I have just been reading that researchers at the Australia's National University have found that people are more creative and better at problem solving whilst lying down. They have found that being laid down inhibits the production of the stress hormone noradrenaline which is thought to inhibit flexible and creative thinking.

If true this explains why we wake up in the middle of the night with that great idea and why you can have some of your greatest moments whilst lying in the bath!.

Interesting!

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 4 Session 2

The last session of the conference is entitled 'Enquire Within'.

Dan Pink - "Bidding adieu to his last "real job"as Al Gore's speechwriter, Daniel Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace."

Candles, Carrots and the Future. At Law school he didn't do very well - he graduated in the bottom 10% of his class.  He is going to dust off his legal skills. He is going to make a case for rethinking how we run our businesses. He showed the candle problem - I bring you onto a room and give you a candle, some thumb tacks and some matches - not of the simple solutions work - the solution is to use the box from the thumb tacks to stick to the wall and put the candle in the box.

If you want people to work reward them - but when use use this technique with the candle problem the reverse happens. If you try and motivate people to solve the problem quickly they take longer than if you don't. there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. A similar candle experiment was done where the tacks were taken out of the box before the student was asked the question - in this situation the motivated students were significantly faster. 

The routine left brain work is being outsourced and given to machines to complete - the have a clear set of rules. What you need to solve the candle problem is a more right brain conceptual approach. " as long as a task only required a mechanical skill then rewards worked - when the task 'even rudimentary cognitive skills' a larger reward led to poorer performance - in eight out of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments higher incentives led to worst performance" (Dan Ariely 2005). " we find that financial incentives ... can result in negative impact on overall performance (LSE 2009)

We need a whole new approach to motivation. 

Autonomy 

Mastery

Purpose - the yearning to do what we do for a greater purpose

In the twentieth century we invented management - great if you want compliance, not if you want engagement. One company in Australia task there staff for 24 hours they are given time to do anything they want - they are called Fedex days as they have to deliver something overnight. Google are famous for gibing their staff time to do things they are passionate about.  An example Microsoft started Encarta - an encyclopaedia developed very professionally and tasked etc. - later an encyclopaedia started in Wikipedia with no purpose other than sharing knowledge and data with no rewards other than the value you are creating.

We need to bring our views of motivation into the 21st century and change our view of rewards and recognition to change the world maybe!

Itay Talgam - "After a decade-long conducting career in his native Israel, Itay Talgam has reinvented himself as a conductor of people in business."

When you go to see an orchestra the only person you don't hear is the conductor but when you see the CD the picture of of the conductor. When the conductor gets in front of the orchestra when it is tuning etc. he makes a small gesture and there is suddenly calm from the chaos. When we hear a great piece of music who is responsible - is it the players, is is the audience - what about the conductor he was happy! The joy is about from other peoples stories - the orchestra, the individuals, the audience. All the stories are being heard at the same time.

Some conductors are commanding - very different from the first example he shows. Some conductors use a finger - others use a fist! The second example was asked to resign from LaScale by the members of the Orchestra. Authority is not enough to make people your partners. It is about being in control in a very special way - the individual soloists are in control of their own world and the conductor is in control at a different level.

"If you love something give it away" 

Daniel Birnbaum -  "He works to reveal the nature of contemporary art -- and to explore the way art and philosophy underlie one another."

How does the experience of art push forward. What does a curator do - he puts things on display! He is doing an exhibition in Venice a beautiful city. He talked about what is art and it was initially thought that it was what was in a frame, however there is an exhibition in Vienna of frames - when seen in isolation the frame itself is beautiful. 

The framing device in exhibition such as in Venice is maybe the city itself. In the UK more people go to museums than soccer matches. 

Brother Paulus Terwitte  - "In a world laden with distractions and complications, Brother Paulus Terwitte is leading a new generation into a simple, contemplative spiritual life."

The first question is are you a real Capuchin monk - his answer is are you real! The second question is what do you do - his answer is nothing - he is trying to find the meaning of life. He was talking to someone at TED and as he was talking the others persons phone rang and the person walked away to answer the phone - Paulus waited for 5 minutes and then walked away, he felt that he was less important than the person on the phone.  We have become dependent on machines for information - we have forgotten to find out information from people. Is it possible that people can have 300 friends (outside Facebook) - what are we looking for? We have become primitive hunters and gatherers of information. What we have - that we are. What was the step we went from primitive hunter gathers - we painted what they saw, they painted the animals. They were happy because there was a long winter and they cold look at what they had seen on the world with the paintings.

The Capuchin Monks are doing nothing to find the inner point of all the difference. We have this week seen many different ideas and concepts. When have you thought about this alone? It is hard to think about this - human beings are now taught to go away - gather all the things you can gather. At the end, no-one knows where the end is, you can gather all the things you can - you can decide what you want to do. The most important things you found were the small things that flashed by.

We have to change our mind - we can't take the whole world in our hand - we need to have the inner sense of the world in our lives. If you take 15 minutes a day for meditation, to be alone, go on holiday without your mobile, one day without the Internet - See what the world has given to you. You will realise that it is not enough to take many things and to gather many things but to see what the world truly is.

Tom Rielly - "Traditionally, Tom Rielly closes the TED Conference with a merciless 18-minute monologue,  skewering all the speakers with his deadpan delivery, spot-on satire and boundary-less performance (complete with PowerPoint, pratfalls and partial nudity)"

This the end of the TED Global 2009 - it has been a great event although my own thoughts are that it was not quite as good as some of the US ones I have attended. The presentations were not quite as deep as those from the US in Palm Springs in February this year or Aspen the year before. I will blog on my thoughts from TED and comment on what I got from it as the information filters through my head.

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 4 Session 1

One of the great things about TED is the people that you get to meet in breaks and over meals. I have met entrepreneurs who are using their money to plough back into philanthropic services, a theoretical physisist who is a world expert on quantum computing, many inventors and people with amazing ideas who carry their prototypes in their pocket or on the laptop. What they all have is an innate curiosity and a passion to find out more - to expand their minds and see the world through other peoples eyes - oh and not to forget the film stars and TV personalities! I don't know where else you could meet these sort of people - this is a unique forum and a great simulative environment.

The first session of the day is entitled Cities Past and Future.

Eric Sansderson - "Armed with an 18th-century map, a GPS and reams of data, Eric Sanderson is re-plotting the Manhattan of 1609, just in time for New York's quadricentennial."

He grew up out west and studies landscape ecology - the study of how does the land make space for plants and animals. On his trips back he returns to New York - how does the city of New York make space for plants and animals - people like us. New York was the first Mega city. He came across a map of New York made by the British at the end of the American Revolution. There are features on the map that no longer exist. He decided to geo-reference this map and find these hidden and lost features.

He wanted to look underneath the streets and buildings and see how the city functions as an ecological landscape. He mapped the 55 different ecological landscape types - Manhattan had more ecological areas than any of the more famous National Parks such as Yosemite. He has rebuilt a map of the landscape of Manhattan 400 years ago - look at the ecosystem the animals and plants that you would find there. he showed some amazing images of how the landscape would have looked.

He is using these maps to understand how we can look to the past to build a model for future sustainability for the city of New York.

Constanza Ceruti is a high altitude archaeologist - when we think about ancient cities in South America we  think about Machu Pichu. the heart of the Inca civilisation was Cusco and the Inca Priests would start their processions from here into the mountains to perform their rituals and sacrifices. Her role is to study these high altitude archaeological sites - in very remote areas - sometimes having to walk 100 of kilometres to get to the sites. 

In Argentina they excavated an Inca platform at 22,000 - the worlds highest archeology site where they discovered 3 frozen bodies of Inca children which are considered the best preserved Inca mummies in existence. They performed a variety of non-invasive analysis - with just one hair they can find out what the children were eating in the last weeks of their lives.

Climate changes are affecting all these high altitude sites and the people who live in the areas and use them as part of their religious ceremonies are no longer to be performed.

I don't climb to be higher - I climb to be closer.

Carolyn Steel "Food is a shared necessity but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel, and it offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved"

Why are cities designed the way they are? How do you feed a city? We take it for granted that if we go into a shop there will be food available. Its remarkable that cities get fed at all as the infrastructures required to provide and dispose of the food resources is incredible. It takes 10 times as much grain to produce the meat  we eat than it does to feed a human.

• 19 million of hectares of rain forest lost each year
• Half the food produced in the US is thrown away
• It takes 10 calories to produce each calorie that we consume

As we move into cities we are adopting a Western diet. What can we do about it? 

In History it was the Temples that distributed the grain and the harvest that sustained the Cities. How did Rome feed the citizens - it had ancient food miles - Rome waged war on neighbouring countries to get hold of their grain stores. Rime used to import Oysters from London. Typically carried over the sea and rivers as the roads were longer and more prone to attack and damage. 

the way Cities were design were around the food distribution and the routes that were taken to get it into the cities. The Industrial revolution - particularly rail changed the way Cities were developed. They were no longer governed by geography and could grow. After trains came cars and then the city was no longer governed by the food distribution as we can just go to get food in our cars. We don't really value food anymore. Cities have actually distanced us from nature - for the food we eat.

Definition of Utopia - 'Good Place" or 'No Place' She has come up with a new word Sitopia = 'Food place'

What does this look like? Family centric food - we need people who can recognise food - food is part of the social part of the city. there are many projects that are trying to reconnect us with our food - particularly connecting our children with where food comes from. We need to understand how food needs to shape the cities of the future.

Bjarke Ingels 'Theory meets pragmatism meets optimism in Bjarke Ingels' architecture. His big-think approach is informed by a hands-on, ground-up understanding of the needs of a building's occupants and surroundings.'

He has investigated how can you tell the stories behind the scenes of architectural projects and he came up with the concept of a comic book - 'Yes is more' . Question the idea that the Architect is always rebelling against the establishment - rather than revolution he is thinking about evolution. Darwin is a good model for the way the designers and architect works - through a process of architectural evolution the design emerges. Gradually an idea evolves and solidifies.

Sometimes a mutant idea forms and these are put on a shelf for reuse later. How can a sustainable city enhance our lives rather than hurt it - a typical neo-Protestant view. He looked at the parallels between Copenhagen and Shanghai - both are have relied on bicycles and in the Danish Pavilion at an Expo they proposed to put 1000 bikes on the stand so people can visit the other stands - they also decide as they were both port towns and he proposed to take water from the Copenhagen harbour to the Expo so people at the expo can take a plunge in fresh, clean water.

A project in Copenhagen, The Mountain, provides a new look at an apartment block by integrating car parking and south facing apartments with gardens and outside space to provide a take on sustainable living. They used the size of holes in the cladding in the building to represent artwork of an image of Everest.

Ideas evolve from one project to the next and develop into new concepts.

Magnus Larsson - He hopes to build new structures in the desert -- by using bacteria to turn shifting sand into a solid mass.

He is proposing a 6000 mile wall of compressed sand across the desert of Africa. 1 Billion grains of sand are born everyday from the mountains and sandstone's of the world. Dry areas cover 1/3rd of the worlds surface - we are facing desertification af many lands, particularly Africa and China and it is threatening the lives of many people. This leads to forced migration and border disputes and wars the Sahara is swallowing arable land at 1 metre per day currently. Sand dunes only cover 1/5th of our deserts. Green wall Sahara is a project to plant a wall of trees across North Africa to stop this desertification, however the challenge of this is that the people who live there are so poor that they chop down the trees to raise an income.

His proposal is to create a solidified wall of sand - one challenge is how to glue the sand particles together. His proposal is to a bacteria to stick the grains together and creates a form of sandstone. How much with this cost - for each cubic metre of concrete it would cost $90 - if we use the bacteria it would only cost $11. These new solid 'dunes' can be habitable and also provide a home for shade and food plants and trees. His wish is to build a long narrow city in the desert.

"Nothing is built on stone, everything is built in sand but we must build if the sand is stone"

TED Global 2009 - Oxford - Day 2 - TED session 3

The second day of the TED Global conference session 3 is on Connected Consequences

Johnathan Zittrain -The day starts on the topic of the Kindness of Strangers by asking how many people have hitchhiked and 60% of the audience put there hands up and then the question how many people have done  this in the last 10 years and the number went down to around 5%!

The inventors of the internet (ARPANET) had no constraints - it had no business plan and they didn't have to make money. As late of 1992 IBM were questioning whether the Internet could never work - TCP/IP would never support a corporate network.

The internet operates on co-operation between nodes in the net. It depends on this co-operation and the nodes only know what is near them - they know nothing about the bigger picture but just pass data on to the next node.

One example he used is Wikipedia - an idea which is totally stupid - it was actually a by-product of the original NewPedia idea - Wikipedia was a back-room to suggest new ideas for people to write articles on. Wikipedia keeps afloat by people wanting to keep it going - it is a calling for people, people have a calling and a passion to do it. 

The same phenomena is being seen in Blogs - one of his favourites is catsthatlooklikehitler.com.  

The third example of Hitchhiking is alive and being reframed in the US in sites such as the Craigslist Rideshare and Couchsurfing. His thought the internet is not just a pile of information - noun not a verb - if you listen and it saying - lets march.

THe second speaker of the day is Evgeny Morozov  who comes from former soviet state of Belarus and has always been interested in how new media can promote democracy. He has studied how the Internet can stifle democratisation in difficult places - Blogs are the new Faxes. Must like fax machines in the 80s changed business and society, blogs and social networks are changing society today. 

Connectivity x Devices = Democracy.

One of the logic is Drop Ipods not Bombs and we will encourage democratisation - could be one option. What is actually being seen is that Governments are using the internet for propaganda purposes - he calls this the Spinternet - Censorship doesn't work as well as Spinning - the more you block the more people want to access it. The Chinese government are actively recruiting bloggers to visit prisons etc. and getting them to blog about what they see - this is having a positive effect and reducing negative blogging about issues.

Governments are using the social networks and other online services to gather information about how activists are connected and communicating. In China there are 42% of teenagers who are addicted to the web in comparison 18% of US teenagers. 

We have to stop thinking about Ipods per capita and focus on how we can liberate the activists and leading thinkers in these difficult countries.

The third speaker of the day is an Anthropologist Stefana Broadbent - a lot of the impact we are seeing is the democratisation of intimacy - breaking imposed isolation that schools, work etc. gives. For 20 years she has been looking at the new media channels are changing society - all these channels are strengthening out core relationships. Looking beyond the hype - people are communicating on a regular basis - Facebook as an example an average user has 120 friends but has 2 way communication with 4 - 6 people only. Eighty percent of calls on cellphones etc. are to 4 people.

People are using the technology to reinforce their relationships - people are using Skype to connect with family and friends. Dinner parties are arranged with big screens at both ends and they have dinner across the world. There is a lot of parenting of Philippine children by migrant workers abroad using Skype.

In the US the military are researching the use of the social media tools to maintain contact with their family and friends and the impact it has on them. 

Two short technology demonstrations were next on the program. 

The first the future of the browser by Aza Raskin from Mozilla. Ninety percent of the feature requests for Microsoft Word are actually in there but nobody can find them. The question he is looking for is how to reintroduce language back into computing - natural language input into your browser in any language. This is an open source project and requires no programming for the user. Using the computer is still very difficult and typically uses a multi-step process - we need to add back language. As a designer you need to think about what you want not how you want to do it. You-Centric computing is the concept - use the Web how you want to use it.

The second technology demonstration is around how to use Flash by Carlos Ulloa. He is demonstrating interactive 3D environments in Flash - user modified images and environments - participating in the images/environments. the system is Papervision and is an amazing open source service.

The sixth speaker/performer of the day is Imogen Heap a multi-instrument musician. The first song is about getting her family to get along for one day at Christmas using Multi layering of phrases and sounds to create an amazing mix of sounds. She gave an example of how the power of twitter can be used to protect people. She sent a promo copy of her latest album out to a group of journalists and one of the copies ended up on Ebay for £80. She got so annoyed she called on her Twitter followers to try and increase the bidding to such a point that Ebay would spot it and take it off - in 2 hours the price had gone up to £10 million and the auction was taken down.

Her success to some degree has come from the power of the Internet - she has never been played on the Radio but has a huge following on the Internet. 

The last speaker of this session Rory Sutherland from OgilvyOne on the Substance of things not seen or when photons are better than protons. Intangible values typically get a bad rap. Engineers have an obsession with solving problems of reality - what is wrong with Placebos? They seem to work well, have no side effects and any they have are imaginary. What about Placebo education - it gives you a sense of superiority and makes you very successful in later life.

To solve the environmental problem all convicted Child Molesters must drive a Porsche Cayenne!

When you look at Coca Cola the intrinsic value is higher than the real value - the president of the United States cant get a better Coke than the guy on the street. Agriculture us actually User Generated Content. Every country has a contextual drink - Italy has Pernod - tastes great in the boundaries of the country but awful outside it.

We have never created impulse savings (consumerism needlessly postponed) only impulse selling. He gave  the example of Diamond Shreddies they had created a whole campaign around rotating the Shreddie - creating real intangible value - they came up with a compromise the Combo Pack of diamond and square Shreddies.

Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar really new.