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Pop!Tech - And that’s a wrap 2007-10-20 22:03:58 The last three amazing speakers leave the stage, and there’s the sound of a marching band entering from the back of the auditorium. It’s the Hungry March Band, a group of musicians and burlesque-style entertainers, who take the stage in chaotic costume and play something between New Orleans funeral music and free jazz and seem to be having chaotic fun as everyone finds their bags and wanders out of the hall. And just like that, it’s over - another overwhelmingly full three days, and - if BBEdit can be believed - roughly 22,000 words from me. Wow. Thanks to anyone who’s been reading, commenting and saying nice things about conference blogging. The technorati tag PopTech2007 is pretty helpful for finding coverage of events, including in Popular Science Blogs, Next Billion and Underwire. Reading all these folks wouldn’t be the worst way to spend the rest of your weekend. Thanks, Pop!Tech, for another excellent conference. Looking forward to the next oine, som ...

Pop!Tech: Swift justice 2007-10-20 20:31:29 It’s a challenge to blog everyone who comes across the Pop!Tech stage. The pace isn’t quite as frenetic as at a conference like TED, but it’s pretty damned exhausting. I’ve been cheating by not mentioning most of the entertainers who’ve come across the stage. Two who I was really moved by were Kelly Joe Phelps and Vanessa German. Before lunch yesterday, Vanessa German brought the audience to its feet and some of us to tears with her poetry. She’s an astounding performer, animating her words with hand gestures so expressive they could be their own language. She projects energy as she talks about justice, freedom and race … and meeting her offstage, that energy and intensity is just as powerful as it is when she’s under the lights. (She also must be one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met.) Lt. Commander Charles Swift, a lawyer for the US armed forces, is pretty inspiring as well. He was the defense attorney for Salim Hamdan, ...

Pop!Tech: Zainab Salbi and Women to Women 2007-10-20 15:10:22 Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International, introduces herself as an Iraqi. “15 years ago, I came to US. When I told people I came from Iraq and they stepped back from me. Now they say, ‘I’m sorry’.” War, she tells us, is about fear. When growing up, her family had conversations about whether they should sleep in the same room so that a bomb would kill them all, or whether they should sleep in separate rooms, so that some family members would survive. These are the sorts of frontline discussions women have during war, about keeping life going. In Bosnia, Salbi tells us, she heard music from a music school during the siege. The school was staffed by women, who were keeping the music school going as an act of resistance. Women are bellweathers for societies - violence against women preceded war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We should see the hundreds of thousands of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo being raped as a clear sign that things ...

Pop!Tech: Elizabeth Streb - “I prefer the crash.” 2007-10-20 06:47:16 Choreographer Elizabeth Streb is obsessed with action. “Action is about the now, the present tense.” She wants to see “extreme action out in the world”, but do so working in an artificial medium, the proscenium stage. Human reference points are pretty simple - ground, water and air. “Given the minuteness of humans, I had to throw the bodies into this space,” to experience air. “I have always believed that humans could fly,” despite our solid bones and heavy musculature. “There’s another problem with flying - eventually you have to come down.” She reminds us a famous Evel Knievil quote: “I never had any trouble with the takeoff.” By changing the physical rules of the dance service, she asks questions about “body grammar - what is the grammar, the syntax, the declension. Are the knees and the hips similar?” A piece called “The Moon” is performed on a 20×20 frictionless surface, an ...

Pop!Tech: Green collar jobs 2007-10-20 04:54:15 Van Jones is best known as a civil rights activist and founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. But he takes the stage at Pop!Tech and introduces a new project, Green for All. He tells us that he’ll be offering “the powerpoint presentation Al Gore would do if he was black.” He knows we’re asking, “What’s a nice black guy like this doing in a green movement like ours?” The answer: “I just got tired of going to funerals.” Jones has been working on trying to get kids out of jail and into jobs. He tells us, “You might think of California as a liberal bastion, but we could call it ‘Calabama’ in terms of how we lock up children.” One of four people in prison on the planet are in the US, and they’re mostly black, latino and poor. When Jones was at Yale Law School, he tells us he would stand on a block and see kids at college do drugs, and kids in the housing projects do drugs. “Same block, same ...

Pop!Tech - Victoria Hale and nonprofit drug companies 2007-10-20 04:19:49 Dr. Victoria Hale is one of the founders of the US’s first non-profit drug company, One World Health. Her work focuses on diseases you’ve probably never heard of in places you’ve never been. The first disease her firm focused on was Kala-azar, or black fever, or Leishmaniasis. It’s a parasitic disease that affects the desperately poor, some of the poorest people in the world. The parasite is spread by sandflies, and affects bone marrow, supressing white blood cell production. It presents in ways similar to anemia and HIV. It’s cureable, but the established treatment costs $300, which isn’t possible for families that earn under $1 a day. Her firm is now running clinical trials in the Bihar state of India using Paromomycin, an antibiotic that had been heavily used the middle of last century, but became less popular when it went off patent and because it’s injectable, not oral. But it’s quite effective, and the medicine is now being tested ...

Formula 1: Waiting For The Final Showdown 2007-10-20 02:49:27 This year has been far more interesting than any other season and its the Final Showdown at Brazil that will determine the champion for 2007. It is by far the most interesting race in the history of Formula 1. Hamilton leads the pack with 107 points with Alonso trailing him by 4 points at 103 and Raikkonen a further 7 points behind at 100. GigStream - requires you to download their software wwwiTV - requires Real Media Player or Windows Media Player installed on your PC CentralDesktop - Online streaming provided Technorati tags: Formula 1, F1, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumaker, Kimi Raikkonen, online F1, free F1 online Copyright © 2007 Techie Buzz. All rights reserved. From:Techie Buzz ...

Pop!Tech: Jay Keasling and synthesizing the future 2007-10-19 22:21:13 Jay Keasling is a pioneer synthetic biology, the process of hacking microbial DNA to produce ultra-low cost fuel and drugs. His talk, in part, is about just how difficult this hacking process is. The same thing, he tells us, is true in the chemical industry. If you want to synthesize styrene, it’s possible to build a factory from “off-the-shelf” evaporators and fermenters, connected with pipes. Those pipes work together because someone took the time to set the pitch on pipe threads, establishing a protocol. This is not how we manufacture biologicals, unfortunately. Keasling is interested in manufacturing Artemisinin. Artemisinin is the latest weapon in the battle against malaria, a disease that effects 300 to 500 million people a year, killing 1-3 million of them. 90% of the people the disease kills are children under five years old. The economic impact of malaria is profound - nations effected are estimated to lose up to 50% of their GDP due to productivity losses fr ...

The Top 35 Rule Just Kills The Joy of Qualifying Day 2007-10-19 20:03:13 With all the clouds coming in I would have sworn Boris Said was racing at Martinsville this weekend, but they did manage to get qualifying in so I guess ol’ Boris wasn’t around after all. Jeff Gordon’s team is really turning it on in the Chase, they grabbed the pole for this weekend’s race. To be honest, that wasn’t too much of a surprise as Jeff Gordon really likes running there, and drivers and their teams seem to put a little extra into tracks that they like to run at. What really is notable though is that 3 of the DNQ’s actually ran faster than Kyle Petty and Bill Elliott, but because of the Top 35 rule and the Past Champion’s Provisional these guys got to stay while Sam Hornish, Brian Vickers and Joe Nemechek all had to go home. Does anyone rally enjoy qualifying anymore? Not me, I already know 35 of the teams that will be in the race anyway so why bother watching or even going? It is the Top 35 rule and the elimination of second day quali ...

Pop!Tech: Enric Sala and pristine reefs 2007-10-19 19:08:11 He offers this analogy - imagine you’re an alien from outer space. You come down to earth and encounter a rusted, broken-down car. The engine doesn’t work, but there’s a slight charge left in the battery, and the wipers work. You’d conclude that the purpose of a car was to allow you to comfortably observe the outdoors, even in the rain. If someone told you this vehicle could be driven thousands of kilometers, you’d be amazed. This, Sala argues, is how we’ve been studying coral reefs. We began studying them long after they were degraded. 99.9% of all studies are of reefs that are recovering. But Sala has been focusing on studying remote, uninhabited, unfished coral reefs. He’s recently been studying the Line Islands, which include the Christmas Atoll, discovered by Captain Cook on Christmas day in 1777. Cook was generally a very reliable narrator, and he declared that the Atoll was “filthy with sharks”. That atoll, which now houses 5 ...

Pop!Tech - Bill Shannon gets around 2007-10-19 14:27:59 Bill Shannon takes the stage on crutches, though he can clearly walk on two legs. It’s disconcerting to see him - is he walking on crutches to make an artistic statement? To explore a four-legged dance style? Because he’s faking? He knows you’re asking this question, so starts his talk with medical validation, “Until I validate, you won’t really be looking at me. I have to tell you why I’m using crutches.” Shannnon has a bilateral hip deformity - his hips aren’t round, and puting pressure on them creates swelling. It’s possble to have hip surgery, but that requires new surgeries every ten years. Instead, Shannon has raised walking on crutches to an amazing art form. He demonstrates what club dancing looks like on his rocker bottom crutches. As people in the club watch him, some end up saying, “I think he might be faking it.” His response, he tells us, is “the faker squared, faking to the second power, faking fakin ...

Pop!Tech: Claire Nouvian and the deep ocean 2007-10-19 14:20:08 Claire Nouvian is a journalist and filmmaker fascinated by the world’s oceans. She’s got a lot to be interested in - she points out that while 75% of the world’s surface is water, 99% of the world’s volume is water. We’ve explored only 0.5% of the ocean’s surface since the 1960s, and have barely explored the deep seas. There are numerous potential threats to deep sea ecosystems. Many species depend on whale carcasses to support their ecosystems - as the whales die and drop to the floor, they feed hundreds of other species. If whales continue to die off, they’ll affect huge swaths of undersea ecosystems. Other threats include exploration for oil, which now occurs as deep as 2 kilometers, and will likely keep expanding until we’re seeking oil 7 kilometers below the surface. Deep sea mining and dumping have huge effects. CO2 sequestration, which we’re starting to experiment with, may have serious adverse effects on the deep seas, as mi ...

Pop!Tech - Backing up global agriculture 2007-10-19 13:47:35 The post-lunch session at Friday’s Pop!Tech is called “sustaining the future”. Andrew explains that it could be called, “the improbables”. The speakers in this session are all concerned with finding solutions to problems that may be improbable, but would be catastrophic if they occur - Andrew thinks of them as “comic book” problems. He asks us to estimate how many varieties of rice exist, telling us that most people guess between ten and twenty. The answer is 150,000, which is pretty amazing, given that there are only 400 breeds of dogs. “These varieties are as different as a beagle and a Great Dane.” We see photos of a diversity of beans, carrots, and of sorghum, a popular crop in Africa. Many of the sorghum varieties have a “crook neck”. They’ve been bred for this trait, so that they can be hung from a rope in huts, drying away from the birds that would eat the seeds. “Agricultural plants have been co-evolv ...

Pop!Tech: Nina Jablonski - our skin makes us human 2007-10-19 12:39:16 Anthropologist Nina Jablonski praises us as an audience for being, “an exceptional and alert group of primates.” (I will be more exceptional and alert with a bit more coffee.) She invites us to begin her talk by being quite primate and spend twenty seconds touching the skin of someone else in the room. She’s unsurprised when many people don’t participate in this activity - we’ve moved away from this behavior in human society, but it’s incredibly important to ourprimate ancestors. Humans encounter the world primarily through our vision, folowed by our touch, hearing and, least, from our sense of smell. There’s a huge amount of our brain dedicated to processing touch information. She points out that our skin is quite remarkable - it’s very sensitive, mostly naked, comes in a range of colors, is often sweaty, can be decorated and adorned. “We gather an enormous amount of information about our environment from our skin,” especial ...

Active Learning - Reflection 2007-10-19 10:02:33 Take notice and describe the experience There are three ways to do this actively in a clinical setting: 1. Videotape Videotaping teamwork and patient interactions provides an artifact of the encounter that can be examined later to check perceptions and assumptions about an event. 2. Written records Patient records, student encounter cards, diaries, blogs can record both immediate information and patterns over time. 3. Feedback Asking the student to state what they did well, could improve and want to know more about before they receive feedback from peers and faculty provides an opportunity for students to reflect on their knowledge/skill/understanding. Analyze the experience Two clinical teaching techniques could prove useful in helping students become more reflective: Precepting Using MicroSkills (one minute preceptor) http://www.practicalprof.ab.ca/teaching_nuts_bolts/one_minute_preceptor.html and Chart Stimulated Recall http://www.practicalprof.ab.ca/teaching_nuts_bolts/chart ...