My Name is Kate

Anti-Valentine's Day Trends (and why I like Environics)

The content of this post is about 98% due to a fabulous consultant at Environics Communications, Nazia.  The pitch and follow-up response I received from her was interesting, fun and pretty relevant to what I write about.  Other PRs take note!  Also, did you know that Environics has a blog?  I didn't.  Nice.

A lot of people have pretty strong feelings about Valentine's Day.  Personally, I'm pretty ambivalent.  I didn't HATE it when I was single and I don't LOVE it now that I'm in a relationship.  It's nice that people acknowledge the significant-other in their lives, however, I do think it is extremely commercial and, in these economic and environmentally-aware times, a little wasteful.

Apparently, the tide of public sentiment - especially the sentiment of single folks and jilted lovers - is flowing more towards the practical than the romantic. eBay – an oft-used barometer of pop culture – expects to see a number of interesting trends this year and offers some useful tips for those without a sweetheart.  (Confession - it never occurred to me to use eBay as a trend barometer - very smart.)

One of the trends eBay expects is a spike in typical Valentines Day junk paraphernalia listed AFTER the Big Day. Which goes to show that if given a choice, no one really wants another plush bear. Canadians feeling the economic crunch are re-selling their Valentines Day gifts online for the sweetest gift of all – cash.   Nazia is going to get back to me after V-Day with some stats, but she was able to tell me a few Valentine's related tidbits about what's up there now:

• Total number of listings with “Valentine” as keyword in either title or description: 129,318
• Most popular Valentine category:  Jewellery and Watches with 16,750 listings
• Number of listings for Valentine lingerie: 2,931
• Priciest item suggested for Valentines Day gift: Hermes Crocodile Birkin “ROSY” at $116,867.76
• Total number of “love spells” for sale: 991 listings
• Oldest valentine: 1862 Lacey (sic) Victorian Valentine
• Tallest valentine plush toy: 8 Ft Tall Valentine Teddy Bear
• Number of heart-shaped food items: 11 (frosted flake, potato, soy chip, clementine, Lays BBQ- and regular-flavoured chips)

“Love’s Hangover” sales are another trend eBay expects this year in which jilted lovers re-sell keepsakes from relationships gone sour to men and women who are more deserving. Have you left personal items at an ex’s? Watch out – it might find its way on to eBay.

Thinking about the economy, black swans and becoming a belletrist

One of my must-read blogs these days is Boing Boing.  It's this perfect mix of quirk, geek and thought-provocation.  A recent post about an interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, is a case in point.  Cory Doctorow points us to an interview between Taleb and Bryan Appleyard that appeared in June 2008 in the Times Online.

Taleb is nothing if not provocative.  I saw him at TED last year.  His talk wasn't one of my favourite because I felt he didn't quite focus what he was trying to say.  He's definitely gotten better at making his point, especially for a lay audience (or maybe I've just gotten to a point where I can hear what he is trying to say).

TED hasn't posted his talk yet, but there is a great video of him on FORA.tv - giving an overview, at the Long Now Foundation, of the concept of the black swan and then being interviewed by Stewart Brand.  It's comprehensive and understandable and informative.  And now, almost a year later, provides an interesting lens onto our current economic climate. (Side note - that FORA.tv has it going on.  They provide a transcript that runs alongside the video - plus you can download it on its own.  And lots of great socializing tools.  Well done, FORA!)

Taleb's talk on FORA.tv is 90 minutes, so here is a 4 minute snippet which includes the definition of a black swan.

In the interview with Appleyard, Taleb gives his top 10 tips for living a life of dignity. As most good "top 10 lists" are, Taleb's is controversial - the comments are BoingBoing are definitely worth a scan.

Anyone Use Collactive.com?

I'm intrigued by all the monitoring tools out there.  Monitoring buzz, mentions, conversations, etc.  Though it does creep me out just a little when I see things like this in my MyBlogLog stats.

I wonder what the recommended action is for my blog :)

It's February ... Are We Still Talking about the Future?

I think Groundhog Day (Feb 2) officially marks both a) the last day of the year you should really say to anyone "Happy New Year" and b) the last day you should worry about last year's predictions for the year you're in.

But, that being said, I was busy on Groundhog Day, so I'm just getting around to posting this now.

There was a recent article in The Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine called  "2018: What will Canadian business look 10 years from now?"  It contains vignettes of Canada's short-term future by noted luminaries like Heather Reisman of Indigo, Peter Munk of Barrick Gold and Robert J. Sawyer - sci-fi author and blogger.

I found this piece a really amazing read ... unfortunately not all of the vignettes are online, however, my two favourite ones are.  The first is by Margaret Wente, a Globe columnist, entitled "Women will be the new men."  From the vignette ...

Back then, no one foresaw how big the gap would get. No one predicted that women would become vastly better educated than men. Nor did they foresee the rise of an underclass of angry young males who feel they are virtually shut out of large parts of the labour force. "When 75% of university graduates are women, and men make only 60% of what women make, it's obvious that we have widespread systemic discrimination," said Jason Harmer, chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Men.

...

The feminized economy is dominated by the services and non-profit sector. Virtually all the new jobs created in the past 10 years are in health and wellness, education, food services, high tech, recreation and entertainment, and most of the workers in these fields are women.  Women now lead most of our biggest public institutions—hospitals, universities and social services of all kinds. Their management style is perfectly suited to organizations that require strategic, inclusive, pragmatic leadership and a focus on team-building. No wonder today's bestselling business books have titles like How to Succeed by Thinking Like a Woman.

..

Of course, not all men are doing worse than women—only about 80% of them are. The aging feminists from the 20th century are right when they argue that the alpha males still rule the world: Men are still the leading politicians and the CEOs of the biggest private enterprises. They are still the biggest entrepreneurs, risk-takers and wealth creators. Wherever ambition, aggression and ruthlessness pay off in personal rewards—money, power and prestige—the world still has a masculine face. It turns out that all those people who believed that gender would one day cease to matter were wrong. Gender matters as much as ever. It just matters in different ways.

Obviously intended to be polarizing and controversial, the full piece discusses the improvement of women's lives through enabling technologies as well as a radical shift in how women shop for the family.  A powerful vision that made me stop and think.

The second vignette that really caught my eye was Chris Turner's (whose new book Geography of Hope I am really looking forward to reading) piece,  "Canada's Oil Capital Will Go Green" ...

Lots of people point to that fateful summer of 2009, and the drought that all but dried up the Bow and Sheep Rivers and left the Athabasca so shallow that half the tar-sands operations had to shut down for want of water. They talk about the ranchland invasion of that now-infamous fringed sage—the CO2-fed shrub too woody to feed even one steer—that nearly destroyed the cattle industry. More than that, people talk about how the provincial Liberals merged with the Greens to form the Sustainable Centre Party, the big tent that finally unseated the Conservative dynasty. And about how, in particular, the first thing the SCs did was start dumping 50 cents from every dollar in fossil-fuel royalties into the half-dormant Heritage Fund, and then funneled the interest and a chunk of the principle into a clean-tech R&D program.

...

Remember how Enmax, heretofore the city's quiet, competent municipal power company, started spinning off renewable-energy start-ups like a Silicon Valley research lab circa 1995? That brought Canada's first decentralized green-power program to the mass market, throwing up 50,000 micro wind turbines and then 100,000 thin-film solar roofs atop big-box warehouses and suburban McMansions alike. Sure, the solar-cell sheets came from California, but it was the whip-smart number-crunchers in Calgary who built the slickest software for managing those dispersed power plants as a single, efficient "energy Internet."

Two things .. I wonder what Rick Mercer would have to say about the merging of the Liberals and the Greens.  And second ... WOW, what an amazing vision for the potential of Western Canada!  Is there anyone with the foresight, will and momentum to make that happen?

All of the vignettes in this article are really worth a read - it's nice to take that step back and imagine our future, not in terms of what will be cool on the Internet or as a marketing tool ... but how we want to live in ten years and what kind of vision that will take now.

Speaking of trends and predictions, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a recent piece in Marketing Magazine that I contributed to: 10 Really Big (Consumer) Trends for 2008 (not sure if open access or not).  My predictions include a rise in focus on local production and buying (think farmer's markets, the 100 Mile Diet and eretailers like spud.ca who make it easy for customers to make decisions about purchasing locally grown and produced items) and the rise of the barter economy with sites like OurThreads.com.  My third prediction (which didn't make it to print - I blame Mitch Joel and Collin Douma, fellow trendspotters, for hogging all the space!) focused on "Expressing our Individuality" ...

Expressing Our Individuality
With manufacturing methods becoming more accessible and the ability to do "one-off's" easier than ever, consumers will look for ways to apply their own design sense to typically mass produced products.  Several mainstream manufacturers allow individual customization whether for laptop bags, bedding or even creating a unique blend of tea or wine.   Also, fab labs" like Ponoko will also continue their slow steady growth where budding artists and designers can outsource the production and manufacture of their designs and then subsequently sell those designs on niche marketplaces like Etsy.com.

So, there you have it .. no more prognostication!  Until the cycle starts again for 2009 which will be, oh, about St. Patrick's Day?!?

Photo Credits: ~Sage~, eszter, ecstaticist and mica2tw

Is it time for BlogHer North?

ElisaC over at Worker Bees Blog posted about the dearth of women speakers at the upcoming Mesh Conference in Toronto:

Billed as Canada's Web 2.0 Conference, Mesh wants to be hip, but sorry, I don't think any confernece that can only find about 6 slots for women in a speaking roster over 50 strong qualifies as anything but old-school, Web 2.0 or not.

Usually tech (read: O'Reilly) conferences trot out the excuse that they're looking for deeply geeky presenters, and while I would argue that deeply geeky women abound, I agree that deeply geeky men are the low-hanging fruit. Of course, I've already established that I believe it's the conference organizer's job to seek out representatives of diverse perspectives, not the other way around, but let that go for the moment.

She makes the point that if this kind of trend continues, BlogHer won't be passe in her lifetime.  I, unfortunately, agree with her.

We've seen this before: misbehaving.net has a SpeakerWatch thread and I wrote about this issue both with the TED conferences and with the Canadian Marketing "Hall of Legends".

So, this isn't a "pick on Mesh" post; they have a super line-up with some great discussions planned and I'm thrilled that it's finally starting to happen here in Canada.  Kudos to the five guys who pulled it together.  Planning any kind of conference is a pain in the butt, and they seem to have pulled it off.

But even with Mesh, there is still a gap.  There are a lot of women bloggers out there who are looking for a community to connect with.  Maybe its tech-tips, maybe its writing techniques, maybe its about design.  How to promote your small business, or run your local political campaign, or update the other parents in your daughter's soccer league.  It's not about prominent, sexy, "newsworthy" speakers.  It's about a community coming together to forge relationships.

How do I know this?  Because of the emails I get.  From the young lesbian designer just finding her way in an agency.  From a writer who wants to make the switch from offline to online writing.  From the museum fundraiser who thinks that she could increase donations by starting a blog.  All passionate articulate women trying to find a voice.  Who have as much to offer as they do to learn.  And who would benefit from seeing their role models, their mentors, women like them on stage talking about their accomplishments.

 

So.  Here's the deal:  Canadian women bloggers (oh heck, eastern US women bloggers too .. you Buffalo Yanks c'mon up!), are you interested in a BlogHer North?  If you are, I will take this on and talk to the good folks at BlogHer to see how we can make this happen.  But I need you to let me know!  How?

1. Email me and let me know you're interested
2. Leave a comment
3. Blog about it and trackback here
4. Tag your post BlogHerNorth

Let's give it a week and see what happens.

And to the great gals of BlogHer - I promise that if we make this happen, I will not do the logo design.

Technorati Tags: BlogHerNorth, BlogHer, conferences, mesh06, women+speakers, women+bloggers, Canadian+bloggers, Web2.0

TED 2006 - Day 1

The day started with my sessions at TED University.  TED U is new this year - 15 minute sessions taught by fellow TEDsters.

History & Impact of WWII Radar Research
Ben Tannen.  Extrapolates issues from development of radar to general issues of moving a product from research to development.  Key issues (inferred from cathode ray problems): (1) manufacturing (anytime you ask a manufacturer to mass-produce something that was experimental technology, it is problematic for the manufacturer); (2) noise (sometimes the only solution is to turn the technology off); (3) information/interface design (there is always a disconnect that will need to be overcome between those who design a technology and those who ultimately use it).

How to Create an Origami Napkin Rose
Eric Glassy
Mission accomplised!

How to Change Your Life by Joining a Commune
Bruce Johnson
Lessons learned from living in a commune: other people are a mirror to the positive and the negative in your own character; you *can* quit what you hate, do what you love, and stil manage to come to TED; living in a commune is an intentional choice, consequently you must be open to new multi-perspective ways of being in the world. Intentional Communities

Standards and Tyranny of Qwerty
Howard Gutowitz
Current keyboard design comes from the piano; designers were obsessed with it.  What do we need to address today?  How do we actualize a synthesis between tiny keys with single function (e.g. blackberry) and larger keys but cumbersome multi-function (e.g. current cell phone).  One example, see below.

What's a CO2 Diet and how to Do It in a Cool Green Way
Wendy Brawer
Climate is in chaos.  What we can do to bring down our CO2 output. www.greenatlas.org

How to make those you encounter believe they're the most interesting people in the world
Sunny Bates
Attempt to create moments of delight/grace/intimacy.  Requires three elements: head (intentional - you must want to connect - can't fake it); body (postioning and carriage of your body communicate a lot; be aware); heart (this is what helps you make the intimacy leap).

TED U was a great idea and a great success.  I met a number of fellow TEDsters prior to the main conference starting.  Some good conversations and interesting insights into what matters to people.

Session 1: History's Arrow

ERIK PETERSON - Futurist
7 Revolutions are driving our future:

1. Population (8.1 billion by 2025)
2. Strategic Resource Management (food, water energy)
3. Technology (computational power, Biotech & genomics, nanotech)
4. Information (how do we manage it and the impact it is having globally, on soverign nations, on intellectual property rights)
5. Global Economic Integration (BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) will overtake G6 by 2040 AND 225 wealthiest people in the world have wealth = 2.7 billion)
6. Conflict (need to figure out how to react appropriately to asymetric warfare)
7. Challenge of Governance (what happens when global corporations overtake nations)

ROBERT WRIGHT - author, NonZero
To have a successful future, we need some substantial moral progress.  We need to lessen hatred.  Need to understand that morality comes about from economically correlated fortunes (hence ZeroSum Game).

This was one of my favourite sessions of Wed.  Great, wry, understated sense of humour.  I'm looking forward to reading his book.

NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE - founder MIT Media Lab
Overview of $100 Laptop Project.

HANS ROSLING - Professor
gapminder.org
We need a better way to visualise complex data.  Our mental models depend on it.  Current population often holds outdated models and prejudices because we don't understand or can't visualise the new data.

Session 2: A Sharp Intake of Breath

LISA RANDALL - physicist
PAUL BERG - father of genetic engineering

OK, I didn't understand a lot of either of these presentation (very science-y).  However,  I get that Lisa was talking about extra dimensions (beyond 4, the three usual spatial ones and time) and how do we prove their existence.  And Paul was talking about genetics and the info that is encoded in our genomes - there's more going on there than we realise.  Identical twins start life off with identical genomes, but as they get older, their genomes diverge (epigenetics).  OK.  So, what if the extra genetic info that paul is looking for is encoded in our genes, but on an extra-dimensional level?  Lisa and Paul clearly need to talk!!

BILL JOY - founder of SUN, now venture capitalist
New 200 million dollar fund for pandemic research.  Our global pandemic preparedness is substandard.

CHILDREN OF UGANDA
Amazing performance by AIDS orphans from Uganda.

Bonus Session - Al Gore
Oh, too late tonight to blog this one.
All I can say is that the US, the world and history lost when Gore had the 2000 election stolen from him by the Supreme Court.  His talk, his passion were inspiring.  I was lucky enough to snag one of the 100 tickets to bfast with him tomorrow.  More on Gore then.

Technorati Tags: ted2006

Why does working.com suck so bad?, or Context is King

[Note to my current colleagues .. don't freak out because I was on a job site.]

This week I received an email from Marketing Magazine [paid reg required to access most of site] telling me about a new newsletter product they have: Careers in Marketing.  Finally, a career newsletter for Canadian Marketers' I love Marketing Sherpa's Career Climber but they rarely have Canadian positions.

Marketing magazine's Custom Publishing division is pleased to introduce its first electronic magazine, Careers in Marketing. Careers in Marketing has been developed as a resource for aiding marketing professionals in their career sourcing and development. The e-zine examines the who, the what, the where and the how of today's marketing job market. We hope you find the new format convenient and easy to read, and we welcome your feedback.

I didn't actually know Marketing Mag had a Custom Publishing division (it's not listed on their site).  In any case, looks like they have some interesting articles in this issue.  Sample titles: Breaking with Tradition and How Can Branding be the Answer to Finding People.  I would provide a link to the main page of this issue, but there isn't one.

I clicked thru and read one of the articles.  Good summary of the issue (that a company's brand is important in atttracting talent), but no attribution.  Another article includes the line "For us at Capital C to need an eclectic combination of individuals ..." but the article itself is not signed/attributed.  Is this Tony Chapman's Capital C?

They also provide a selection of job openings from Working.com (who seems to co-sponsor the newsletter): marketing and creative jobs that seem relevant to the target audience.  I've never really checked out Working.com, so I thought I would click through.  First is a Director of Marketing in Vancouver.  Goes right to the job posting.  Great.  Interesting job, but not for me.

Next link: Head, Creative Partners in Toronto.  Cool, I'm in Toronto.  Click through.  One of the first things at the top: "Position Posting End Date: Nov 16, 2005".  But its Dec 2.  Why am I seeing this?  So is the job active or not?

I click on the "home" button to poke around some more.  I am taken to the "Toronto" home.   How do I get to the real home?  I have to edit the URL.  Aargh.  The "real" home is a big map of Canada.  Didn't we stop using maps for primary navigation in the late 90's?

OK, I have friends and family in Victoria .. let's check out what's happening there.  I click on Victoria and get a very busy page.  But there are some career streams at the top.  "Executive" sounds good. (Dream big!)  I click.

There is a small listing of further executive streams at the top (CEO, CIO, VP Technology, etc.) but the bulk of the page is taken up with "executive news".  Or, more accurately, news about executives.  Inspiring stories like Conrad Black's legal woes and CIBC revamping its outrageous CEO compensation package.  WHY am I being distracted from my primary functional task at this site?  Aside from the headlines, this is a very b'zizy site.  Tiny ads, big ads, lots of mice type.  Seriously.  I'm supposed to be here to find a job.  I'm starting to feel a little tense.

OK.  Focus.  Ooo .. VP Marketing.  I can do that.  Click.

And here's why working.com truly sucks.

Victoria (supposedly) has 1 job that is for a VP of Marketing.  Not bad, Victoria isn't known to be the epicentre of Marketing VP's.  However, the job isn't  for a VP of Marketing.  Yes, it has the words "VP" and "Marketing" in the ad.  But the job is for a temporary Sales Accountant.  If I am a VP Marketing candidate, I have so clicked over to Workopolis.  This lack of contextual search on a site that is already contextual is truly poor customer and brand experience.  It's insulting to job seekers and to advertisers.  Now some of you might say, "Oh, search is in its infancy" or "are you sure you formatted the search correctly?"  To the first, I answer "bullshit".  To the second I answer, "but working.com formatted this search for me.  Shouldn't they know better?"  Workopolis is a perfect example of how to do it right. And it all comes down to context.

The pre-canned search for a VP Marketing on working.com:
http://workingvictoriajobs.canada.com/js.php?q=VP%20Marketing&qField=All
&lookid=victoria&qCity=Victoria&qState=BC&qCountry=Canada&qMiles=50

The pre-canned search for a VP Marketing on Workopolis:
http://search.workopolis.com/jobshome/db/work4.process_job?pi_vertical=MARKETING
&pi_search=Vice-President,+Marketing&pi_msg=&pi_keyword=(vp+or+v-p+or+vice-$president)
+and+(marketing+or+mkt+or+mrkt+or+mrkting)+not+assistant
&pi_smart=N&pi_employer=ALL-------&pi_category=ALL------------&pi_industry=ALL---------------
&pi_location=ALL-----------&pi_language=EN&iaction=Go&pi_post_date=&pi_title_only=Y&pi_sort_col=+

Now search phrases are not pretty to look at and casual users should never have to worry about it, but hang in there.  There are three things I want to point out:

1. working.com - the focus is on the location.  In today's mobile marketplace and tendency towards a 7-9 career work-life, physical place is likely not the best place to start.  Yes, let me filter by place, but don't make it the primary term, particularly at the sacrifice of useful information.

2. workopolis knows that not all job ads are equal.  It builds into the query variants on search terms both for VP and for Marketing.

3. workopolis understands context.  See that small "+not+assistant" in the third line?  That is everything.  It knows that if I am looking for a VP Marketing job, that I do not want to see jobs for Marketing Assistants, jobs for assistants to VP's or especially temporary sales accountant jobs.

Now, to be fair, I could recreate this search on working.com.  But I have to check a couple of special boxes on their "advanced search" page.  Essentially, I have to provide my own context.  Which is unreasonable in that they implied that they were giving me context:

This looks like context to me.  If they had just said "search for jobs" at the outset, I *might* be more forgiving.  Some of you are probably asking, "Dude, why does this piss you off so much?"  And it frustrates me because it just doesn't have to be this shitty.  This is not a technical issue.  If the designer or the strategist or the marketer who put this thing together just thought about their customer a bit more, it would be a way better experience.  As an advertiser, I would be excited that you were supporting my brand; as a job seeker, I would be delighted by my experience and recommend the site.  Reg Braithwaite had a similar rant at TorCamp: it (applications) doesn't have to suck.

He's right.  It doesn't.  If we would just all pay a bit more attention to our customers and their context.

Technorati Tags: context, marketing, experiencedesign

Women Speakers at Tech & Marketing Conferences

I finally signed up to Misbehaving.net's feed and was catching up on their recent posts.  Liz Lawley commented on the dearth of women speakers at Web 2.0: 8 out of the overall 107.  Some say "Oh, its the tech world .. it's 'male-dominated' so of course there will be more male speakers."

Maybe.

But I've been frustrated with this for a while and not just a "tech" conferences.  I went to TED last year.  48 speakers (not counting ensembles); 7 of them women.  And three of those were performers.  (I posted about this in February during TED.)  I hope that this year there will be a more diverse program: gender-wise and race-wise.  I'm pleased to note that one of the winners of the TED Prize this year is a woman, Jehane Noujaim.

But this issue of women speakers hits closer to home.  The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (disclosure: I sit on the Advertiser's Council) had its Interactive to the Max one-day conference recently here in Toronto.  The three keynotes: all men.  To be fair, 50% of the panel moderators were women and women were represented on the panels.  But not on the keynotes.  Same thing with the CMA's Digital Marketing Conference.  The keynotes and "standalone" presentations - all men.  Again, women moderated a number of the panels.  (I promise I won't go on about the idea that women play a strong "facilitation" role which is why they are good moderators .. blah, blah, blah).

It's not like we don't have successful, knowledgeable women in Toronto.  Wendy Muller from Google Canada comes to mind.  Paula Gignac, executive director of the IAB.  Dawna Henderson of henderson-bas.  Terry Costantino from Usability Matters.

Though then I read Marketing Magazine's article about its new inductees in Canada's Marketing Hall of Legends (seriously .. Marketing Hall of Legends?).  All men.

What does this all mean?  That we need (*I* need) to encourage my peers and my mentors to speak up and speak out.

The Subtext of Stock Photography

I was recently sourcing an image from GettyOne for an article on home heating tips.  This article contains info about increasing the efficiency of your furnace, making your home better insulated and lowering your thermostat -- all good advice if you're trying to lower your energy bill.  I've been searching for specific images (e.g. a furnace, a thermostat), but the visual style requirements of the site require that people be included in the image.

After trying a variety of specific search terms, I decided to let Getty's "concept search" try to come up with a recommended photo.  As a search, this got reworded as: "Home Interior (Building Structure)" and "Heat (Concepts)"

Browsing through the five pages of results, I saw a number of fireplaces, a couple of thermostats and several shots of a woman with a cold hugging a hot-water bottle.  None of them really surprising (or what I was looking for).  But interspersed though all of these were these pictures of this very happy, congenial, gay couple.  Sitting on the couch with their dog, sitting on the porch, drinking coffee in the kitchen.

I was a bit surprised to see these nice men turn up in my search.  After a bit of digging it turns out that they are filed under "Heat" as a concept.

Seriously?

Maybe two scantily clothed men making out in front of the fireplace.  But two gay stockbrokers with their chihuahua?  Hardly.

Again .. the politics of language and imagery.  As I ranted about in a previous post about language, why is it that "gay" in all of its forms implies a licentiousness or luridness.

On the gay-positive side of things, the above image comes from a collection that Getty carries called Queerstock which is a collection of gay and lesbian stock photography.  They have other great images like this one.  How cute are these gals??

TED2005: Pre-conference EDGE Lecture

This is a moved post.  I'm including the comments from the old site at the bottom.

On Wednesday, I attended the pre-TED EDGE Lecture: "SCIENCE AT THE EDGE: REBOOTING BIOLOGY -- Three of the World's Leading Scientists Ask Each Other the Questions They are Asking Themselves" The three scientists are: Rodney Brooks, Ray Kurzweil, J. Craig Venter; the panel was moderated by John Brockman. Overview, bios, etc. can be found on the EDGE website.

I don't want to simply regurgitate what these fellows said. Chances are I would get it not-quite-right. I'm interested rather in what *wasn't* talked about (or even dismissed out of hand by the moderator) and in some thoughts that occured to my while they were talking.

1. Scientific Drivers.
The personal (individual) fear of death drives a lot of scientific development, particularly in the Western world. And we all thought that scientists were doing this for the good of humankind. Some are. But some aren't. And that's OK, but we need to understand that personal agendas drive scientific ones.

2. Implications.
The technology and of course, ultimately, the PROMISE of the technology is incredible but no one is talking about the implications of the technology. There are HUGE social implications and environmental implications to us living for 20% longer (or more) as well as having extended fertility. WHO gets to live longer is a big question. I have a hard time believing that the technology will be exported to Africa or other third world countries. Mainly because the West will own these technologies and it will be Western values that are used to make judgment calls about whose quality of life is more deserving of extension. There are obviously environmental implications as well. Are we really meant to inhabit and take over the planet in this way? Our environmental technology and policies need to catch up before we are ready to deal with that.

3. Social Engineering.
An audience member asked a great question about social engineering as a priority -- why when a plane crashes do we send mechanical etc. engineers to swarm over the site and figure out what went wrong but when we have a Pol Pot or some other social situation, we invest very few resources in addressing the situation and trying to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Great question (dismissed by the moderator). Relates to Bono?s comments about the relationship between poverty and terrorism. From a social point of view, we know these things are related ? with as much certainty as we know the physics of a plane in flight.

Random Observations
The arrogance of blogging is that we often record random observations, unfinished (and often unoriginal) thoughts with no care for the reader. That's what happens when we all are a publisher and a broadcaster :-)

- Biology as metaphor. Seems to be systems-thinking plus chaos theory. Everything is a pattern, but most are patterns larger than we can see. Hopefully not larger than we can imagine, though.

- "Telemeers"? Kurzweil mentioned this. Am not familiar, must look up.

- I think I am naive, but even if we can reduce everything to a mathematical equation (which means that we can model it) I still think there is an element of "magic" to life, to consciousness. Perhaps this is the quality of adaptability. Can we really put adaptability into a mathematical equation and then build it? In the same way that the flatworms that Brooks talked about adapt when their brains are cut out and reinserted in a different position?

- Identical twins ... are really identical in appearance only. Their brainwaves are different, their fingerprints are different. Longterm, how will these differences that are not naked-eye-visible change our perception of identity and ultimately, our perception of beauty?

- Kurzweil commented that ultimately biology is quite sloppy and inefficient. There is a lot of redundancy built into biology, perhaps in ways we don't need it. Is this a result of the material nature of our biology; that we are atoms (not bits) and that we are often involved in unpredictable circumstances? Does this redundancy enhance our adaptability?

- Brooks mentioned that the model for the brain has always been based on our most complex technology at the time, e.g. when the steam engine was the most complex tech, that is what the model for the brain was. Now, it's a computational model. But we need to get beyond that. Perhaps quantum?

COMMENTS ON ORIGINAL BLOG POST

Kate,
To aid in the lookup, he word from Kurzweil was Telomere (or Telomerase):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
http://www.genlink.wustl.edu/teldb/tel.html

I think biology will drive the future of intelligence and information technology ? not literally, but figuratively and metaphorically and primarily through powerful abstractions.

Many of the interesting software challenges relate to growing resilient complex systems or they are inspired by other biological metaphors (e.g., artificial evolution, biomimetics, neural networks for pattern recognition, artificial immunology for virus and spam detection, genetic algorithms, A-life, emergence, IBM?s Autonomic Computing initiative, meshes and sensor nets, hives, and the subsumption architecture in robotics). Tackling the big unsolved problems in info tech will likely turn us to biology ? as our muse, and for an existence proof that solutions are possible.

some blog writings on the biological metaphor:
http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/11/giving-thanks-to-our-libraries-bio.html

Posted by Steve Jurvetson at February 26, 2005 11:08 PM