#PopTech2011 Highlights

This year’s PopTech conference in Camden, Maine focuses on the theme of “Rebalancing”; it reflects the time of extreme transition we’re in as a global society and the turbulent reevaluation our systems and institutions are undergoing –whether it’s taking place in the environment or education, the economy or the media, healthcare or design.

But using the verb rebalancing almost implies that there was equilibrium in the first place. As speaker and author Stephanie Coontz pointed out at the beginning of her talk, “rebalancing is not something you do once, it’s a way of life.”

In another way to reshape the way we interact with media, the tinkerers behind the New York Time’s (NYT) Research and Development Lab took the stage to announce and demo their new Media Memory Map. The App asks users to input basic personal information in order to gain access to a personalized visual tour of their lifetimes, as presented by articles, images, and other content from NYT.

Stephanie Coontz discusses the relationship between gender rights and the labor and economic systems. photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

There are no rock stars at PopTech, no household names. But this annual conference in coastal Maine is a hub for super-smart people, a chance to get a look into ideas and technologies that soon will change the world.

Here's a quick look at five of them, chosen from many.

You can see the full list of PopTech presenters and fellows on the group's website.

Intro to PopTech 2011 | October 19 - 22 http://poptech.org/world_rebalancing

There are two ways to become a biochemical engineer. Study hard to earn your PhD, or play video games.

The latter is thanks to Adrien Treuille and his collaborators, the radically innovative creators of FoldIt, a game to optimally configure hard-to-fold proteins that is already yielding groundbreaking results that we described last month.

Treuille, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, is now turning his attention to an even trickier problem: revealing the structure of genetic molecules known as RNA, which govern cellular processes and encode proteins. Understanding better how RNA works could unlock a host of potential cures for diseases, and gamers are Treuille's central strategy to reaching this new understanding. EteRNA, a collaboration with Stanford University, demolishes the divide between computer science, genetic engineering, biology and gaming. In the process, it creates something new and perhaps revolutionary: crowdsourcing the creation of scientific knowledge.

Adrien Treuille is the creator of two online games -- Foldit and EteRNA -- that put video gamers to work solving epic scientific puzzles.

Video gamers spend tons of time -- for many it's 10,000 hours by age 21 -- battling mythic monsters, shooting aliens and rescuing princesses from digital castles. Adrien Treuille wants to put those efforts to better use.

The Carnegie Mellon computer scientist is the creator of two online games -- Foldit and EteRNA -- that put video gamers to work solving epic scientific puzzles. His aim is to make super-boring-sounding scientific mysteries like "protein folding" and "RNA synthesis" fun and challenging for gamers.

photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

I am sitting on the third floor of Camden, Maine’s lovely public library, looking out on a view of sun-sparkled water and trees flashing green-to-red-to-orange-to-yellow-to-bare in a display not quite neon-sign quick, but close. The Poptech conference gets going in earnest here tomorrow, an annual fall parade of inspired ideas, sobering realities and copious thinking, with round-robin lunches, acoustically-challenged parties and plenty of traipsing up and down the long stairways of this small town’s signature opera house.

Some of the best connections seem to be made on those stairways, especially on days when the weather inevitably turns cold and spitty and attendees instinctively huddle into a mass, the brilliant-and-accomplished shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us, waiting for the doors to open. Layered in polartec and flannel, wearing hats and gloves pulled from summer storage for the trip, there is a comradery. Inside, the discussions are about problems mostly far away. Outside, we are all ducking the same fierce wind…

Over the last few years, President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson has seen disasters both financial and environmental wrack his tiny island nation of Iceland. The Nordic country was at the center of the economic meltdown in 2007, when each of its three major banks collapsed. Since then, Iceland made international headlines when it nationalized its banks in response to the crash, when a massive volcanic eruption grounded airplanes around the world, and for its continued strides towards a 100% clean energy.

Needless to say, that's a hectic couple of years for a nation whose entire population is no larger than 350,000 people. President Grimsson discussed what can be learned from Iceland's example -- chiefly, the importance of putting people before markets and developing a clean energy economy -- in his rousing talk at Poptech 2011.

In a coup d’etat of DIY, designer Thwaites set about building a toaster from scratch. And we mean scratch. Thwaites reverse engineered a seven dollar toaster into 400 separate parts and then set about recreating steel from iron ore rocks, plastic from microwaved potatoes and copper from homemade bromide mush. The result is a hilarious examination of the industrial materials and processes surrounding our lives.

Historian Stepanie Coontz talks about rebalancing of genders, the theme of this year’s PopTech Conference.

She talks about when and how women not just in this country but worldwide, started to rebalance the power between sexes.

It starts happening between genders when women not just started to work but got paid to work. After they get into the workforce, literacy goes up, they get a choice of who they got to marry, and then labor laws changed among other things.

If you think about it, the countries with the lowest rights for women are the countries where women have the lowest access to the labor force. Sexual harassment didn’t come force in the U.S. until 1993.

photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Who’s afraid of the informal economy? journalist and author Robert Neuwirth asks the PopTech audience. He is known for his book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. His latest — Stealth of Nations – is focused on street traders around the world.

He notes that 80% of the working people are not in the informal economy, but something he refers to as System D, aka the Self Reliant economy, which he pirated from the African speaking Africa and Caribbean world.

Half the people in the world are working in System D, which means that the total value of System D around the globe is around $10 trillion. “If this was combined in a single political entity, let’s call it Bizzare-istan,” he says with a smile, “it would be the second largest economy in the world.”

The PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows are high-potential early- and mid-career scientists working in areas of critical importance to the nation and the planet. They represent a corps of highly visible and socially engaged scientific leaders who embody science as an essential way of thinking, discovering, understanding and deciding.

Katherine Kuchenbecker explains developments in haptic science - incorporating the sense of touch into various existing technologies. photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

The President of Iceland describes how his country encountered social and democratic upheaval after the economic crisis of 2008. Over the last three years, by combining wide-scale systemic inquiry into governance and judicial systems as well as a long-standing investment in clean energy and technology, Iceland has been able to bounce back with a remarkable economic vitality.

Social Innovation Fellow Paul Needham discusses his company Simpa Networks, which offers affordable, pay-as-you-go solar energy service, and becomes "unlocked" once paid off. photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Michael Zimbalist, vice president of research and development at the New York Times, introduces their news memory map application photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

This year's PopTech conference in Camden, Maine is exploring how the world is "rebalancing" from volatile times to a new equilibrium, one we can't quite predict or grasp just yet. So naturally, organizers built a slick new iPad app to help us sort it all out.

Andrew Zolli, the head of PopTech, unveiled the app this morning, telling the audience that there is a data revolution underway, and "one of the things it is transforming is the way we tell stories."

The app was built with some heavy hitting partners, including the United Nations and The New York Times.

http://poptech.org/class2011

Cuddy revealed that we can actually change feelings we have about our own status through the physical positions we take with our bodies. Her research participants had higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol after only two minutes in a “power pose”. Cuddy asked if such findings can have wider implications for empowerment training.

photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Please join us on Friday, October 21st from 8:30 am – 11:00 am at the Voice of America as we host PopTech’s only satellite event in DC!

The BBG celebrates "Parazit’s" appearance Live from PopTech and will also feature Live Ignite Presentations from iStrategyLabs, Heritage Foundation, RFA, RFE, MBN, OCB and VOA!

Please RSVP (free tickets required!) and see you Friday.

Arvind Subramanian, Anand Giridharadas, and Shahidul Alam answer questions from the audience after their presentations during the Re:balance session on Thursday morning, October 20.photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech

Can’t believe its all over! Wow did those 3 days go by fast. Loved it, fantastic, awesome, etc etc etc… I had a great time :)

Thank you Leetha and everyone at Pop! Tech for letting us have our blog and getting us an extra ticket. Thanks CHRHS for hooking me up with a ticket. Finally thank you Pop! Tech again for giving me the opportunity to volunteer which allowed me to attend all 3 days.

Speaking of volunteering, it was a lot of work (well worth it), now compressed into 2 minutes. Here it is, the StrikeLapse!

Timelapse I shot of myself, volunteers and the Pop Tech AV crew striking the Opera House after 3 awesome days at Pop Tech.
Turned out alright for my first timelapse. For anyone curious, I used a Canon 60D with magic lantern firmware's built in intervalometer. Camera was on the balcony railing secured with the neck strap and gaff tape.

Prestigious innovation conferences are either invitation-only or too damned expensive for a guy with a new baby to spring for. So when I saw that PopTech had released an iPad app to accompany its latest conference in Camden, Maine (which wrapped up last Friday), I licked my chops at the chance to be there without actually being there. It includes an impressive-sounding interactive visualization created in collaboration with the New York Times Research & Development Lab, which connects significant eras in your personal life with news events from the newspaper's digital archives -- like Facebook's Timeline feature, but not as navel-gazing.

Data tells stories. The World Rebalancing, PopTech’s new iPad app, and companion to the 2011 conference, uses data visualization to explore important global shifts happening around the world today.

by Patrick Meier