Adventures in home working

Listen here.  In this talk David Brin, Ph.D. who has a triple career as scientist, public speaker, and author discusses Horizon Evaluation; a process for exploring what threats and opportunities may await us beyond the near term. It can suggest plausible scenarios for science fiction stories. It can also suggest ways to minimize threats and maximize opportunities. It may be particularly relevant for determining where to make investments. 

The talk rambles a bit, but don’t let that put you off.  To mitigate the rambling or disjointed nature I suggest that you listen when you are able to give it your full concentration, otherwise your mind will drift, and you will miss some great insights.

You can find a great write up on the talk on the Future Salon Blog.

David also has a infrequently updated blog and a more comprehensive web site.

Listen here.  This was a truly inspirational interview,  David Bornstein talks about a project to bring electricity to poor people in Brazil: single wires going to houses, grounded in the soil, low voltages. The project is also bringing solar panels to rural areas, renting them for what people generally pay for candles, kerosene, etc. He also talks about “child line” in India, now in 55 cities. It’s a number you can call if you see a child in distress. It started with one woman who spent 3 years trying to get the equivalent of an 800 number for it. It’s deeply affected India’s child protection policies.

There is one very touching story about a business man who rings the Child Line to report a naked two year old at the airport suffering from burns and left alone.  The Child Line organisation has enlisted the street children as its “runners” and by the time they arrive the child has been effectively kidnapped by a beggar aiming to use her to improve his trade!  The boys eventually prevail and the child is taken into care and eventually adopted.

I am amazed at the idea of using the street children to be the team in the field directed by the child line to help those very same street children.  The interview does not explain further but I guess they are probably ideal, being very street smart, know their way around and through involvement their self image and sense of community will improve.  I was also impressed by the fact that they use statistics gathered from their call management software to identify illness hot spots, areas where – for example – child abuse is a particular problem (tourists it turns out).

I was also taken by the concept of encouraging pension funds and the like to invest some of their money in Social Entrepreneurs, the ROI in real terms for the world would probably be immense!

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Want to know more:

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

by David Bornstein

Average Customer Rating: 4.9

 
Amazon.com Customer Comment:

A welcome explanation of revolutionary ideas. David Bornstein’s new book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas offers a superb introduction to the burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship, which has gained prominence in the past two decades but is still awkwardly explained. Rather than group radically different projects under the umbrella term “social entrepreneurship,” Bornstein goes to the root and describes what makes a social entrepreneur. While well-known figures such as Florence Nightingale and Unicef head James P. Grant are described, most of the individuals profiled in the book are active, independent entrepreneurs found through the network resources of Bill Drayton’s organization Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. Ashoka has broke new ground as a venture capital firm for social betterment, investing in carefully selected individuals and projects that promise long-term, sustainable returns – that is, positive social change – and more than any other organization promoting the ideas of social entrepreneurship around the globe.

It is telling that, on the surface, the entrepreneurs described have little in common. Vera Cordeiro, for example, grew up comfortably in the pampered upper strata of Brazilian society, while AIDS worker Veronica Khosa was orphaned at an early age in an impoverished village in South Africa. Fábio Rosa is a born tinkerer and engineer who built dams and irrigation systems in his backyard as a child, while Erzébet Szekeres was a mid-level tradesswoman who never considered the changing Hungary’s treatment of the disabled until the birth of her disabled son. The variety of conditions and approaches Bornstein describes may appear bewildering at first, but in fact this breadth is perhaps most effectively drives the book’s point home: Bornstein highlights the lateral thinking and tenacity of the entrepreneurs, who recognized and devoted themselves to solving problems others did not even acknowledge. Most of the entrepreneurs arrived at their methodologies through trial and error, never realizing at the time that others were engaged in analogous work in vastly disparate fields.

Many entrepreneurs conceive of projects in modular or franchise terms, eschewing top-down fixes by fiat. Creating a hotline and crisis center for street children in India and promoting rural electricity and irrigation in Brazil have little in common, but both Jeroo Billimoria and Fábio Rosa saw that sustainable, long-term solutions would have to incorporate local interests and involvement. In this way projects can maintain core principles while adapting to local circumstances and needs, and entrepreneurs who struggle for years with a particular local problem hammer out a replicable and portable model that spreads quickly. The results surprise Bornstein himself on occasion:

“When I read about [Tomasz] Sadowski’s work, my first thought was that Ashoka had made a mistake. If ever there was an idea that was destined to remain local, this was it. How many stable, self-managed, partially self-supporting homes made up of former prison inmates, alcoholics, and homeless people can you have? “The answer, as of early 2003, was twenty and counting.”

Bornstein’s writing is brisk and energetic, using a wry wit to strike a fine balance between the gravity of the work and the infectious energy of the entrepreneurs. This style of writing befits the entrepreneurs themselves, who do not dress up their language in niceties when bluntness is more effective. The reader is struck with both admiration and amusement, for example, reading how Indian disability activist Javed Abidi took advantage of physicist Stephen Hawking’s visit to India to excoriate the government’s reluctance to promote widespread disability access.

“I would be absolutely grateful to Dr. Hawking,” Abidi told reporters, “if he would want to go to different parts of Delhi, like Janpath, Connaught Place, the public loo, and to any of the government offices or shopping centers and hotels and embarrass the authorities.”

In this way the book avoids the pitfalls of excess piety and preachiness and instead reads like a collection of exciting and incredible life stories. Bornstein wisely lets the entrepreneurs’ works and words speak for themselves whenever possible, and thus the book feels genuinely moving and inspirational rather than overwrought.

I would recommend this book to anyone involved in policy-making or curious about the global potential of individual action. The ideas discussed in the book appear to be gaining momentum on a global scale, not merely that social entrepreneurship is an idea whose time has come, but because selfless and driven social entrepreneurs are bringing the idea to our time.

Listen here.  In this interview Dr. Moira Gunn interviews James Stewart, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Den of Thieves.” His latest endeavours have been a look inside the wonderful world of “Corporate Disney.” 

I found this interview interesting, largely because of Moira’s insightful comments and questions, but the subject matter is not hugely important to me.  A few snippets of the interview stood out. 

• the fact that most executives at Disney have to go through the experience of dressing up and acting out the part of a Disney character
• the fact that James Stewart tried it,  after considerable preparation, and found it to be a very moving experience
• Walt himself was never a senior officer of the company, preferring instead to concentrate on the creative side of the business
• it was interesting to see that the company lost its way the more powerful its CEO became, in another IT conversations interview on leadership the sweet spot for a leader to be in place is considered to be about 7 years.

Listen here.  I am trying to broaden the subjects I listen to on IT conversations, so “big Cotton” seemed to fit the bill.  In this interview Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with journalist Stephen Yafa about a crop that has been with us for over 5,000 years: cotton. It’s also a crop which continues to significantly impact the environment. Moira also speaks with Stephen about his new book “Big Cotton — How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map”.

As always the interview was excellent and Stephen Yafa was a great speaker.  I was fascinated to hear about how the expansion of cotton growing in the South of the US was the tripping point for the Civil War and horrified by the level of environmental pollution and soil erosion caused by Cotton growing.  Even worse was the way that America provides massive subsidies to the cotton growers, effectively allowing them to dump cotton on the global market, crippling the cotton growers on the developing world.  If you want to know more you can check out Stephens Book – Big Cotton and also these web sites:

Sustainable Cotton, which is about The Sustainable Cotton Project, which was founded to search for, develop and promote ways to grow clean, chemical and pesticide free cotton

The National Cotton Council of America The National Cotton Council of America’s mission is to ensure the ability of all U.S. cotton industry segments to compete effectively and profitably in the raw cotton, oilseed and U.S.-manufactured product markets at home and abroad.

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Want more – read on :

The humble fiber here has a grand history, from its first domestication over five thousand years ago to its current genetic modifications. Cotton may not actually be historically as all-powerful as Yafa makes it seem; like any book that casts an intense regard on a limited subject, _Big Cotton_ can make it seem as if cotton is really more important than, say, coal or sugar, which have in their turn inspired innovation and greed. Nonetheless, this is an excellent world-wide history, and by the end, Yafa has fully justified his subtitle. First domesticated independently on different continents around 5,500 years ago, the family _Gossypium malavaceae_ bears protective lint around its seeds, fibers that can be spun into fabrics. The original cotton introduced to Europe came from India in the seventeenth century. What made chintz an irresistible fad was that the Indians had found ways to die the cotton with brilliant colors that were slow to fade as the cloth was used or washed. Consumers so prized chintz that they ignored import bans, and eventually English inventors built factories to take production to an industrial scale. The resulting mill system was enormously lucrative, and also famously cruel, employing children as young as eight for thirteen hour days in hot, dangerous factories in which they constantly inhaled cotton fibers, producing what was eventually known as byssinosis, or brown lung disease. The American version, begun by Francis Cabot Lowell, who used his photographic memory to steal details of the British machines, was more paternalistic, but economics ensured that American mills, too, became hellish sweatshops. The aftereffects of the Civil War caused the large plantations to be divided into smaller units that were toiled upon by sharecroppers. It was a shameful system that impoverished white farmers and black; cotton production, however, did not flag until the boll weevil crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1892 and proceeded inexorably to all the acreage that cotton had claimed. The weevil’s entrance enables Yafa to embark on numerous branches of this story, from the use of pesticides to the influence of the weevil, and cotton farming in general, on the music of the blues. Cotton is a huge topic, and Yafa’s often discursive style suits it well, as he discusses entertainingly the rise of denim and of blue jeans (blue because cotton has a particular molecular affinity for dye from the indigo plant); the rise of the current biggest cotton producer, China; Gandhi’s use of cotton spinning as a tool against oppression; the modern use of pesticides on the crop (second in tonnage only to those used on corn), which is now forty billion pounds a year worldwide; and the subsidies for American cotton farmers which are disastrous for millions of poor farmers around the world (and may increase their poverty and acceptance of terrorism, Yafa argues). Yafa explains how a world that is sometimes resistant to genetic modification has embraced GM cotton mostly because you wear cotton and don’t eat it. Such logic is false; you do eat cotton, in cottonseed oil, and in the short fibers go in cheap ice cream to thicken it. In fact, as Yafa shows, you and almost everyone else in the planet will be using cotton somehow today. It’s a good reason to learn about the plant, and this brightly-written and detailed history does the job nicely.

This is my first mini review of a talk from IT conversations, it is an interview by Moira Gunn with Dr. Henry Jenkins and explains how he thinks video games will revolutionise education. Dr. Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Media in Transition).   The talk is truly fascinating, and pretty scary when you think about the dramatic affects it will have on the capability and outlook that the kids of the future.  Surprisingly this talk and others point out that the gamer generation will have different attitudes to work and will need to be managed differently, this talk by John Beck, a Senior Research Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center of the Digital Future, is on that topic.

I particularly liked the description of the teacher, as more of a coach and leader, and the emphasis on experience as a tool for learning.  In the games that bring history to life it is interesting how it will be possible to provide a real insight into what life was actually like for those experiencing key events from different perspectives, it will no longer to a sequential textbook description.  He also talks about a science game where students try and master magnetic fields by learning to navigate through them, the teacher then explains the theory and the kids can try again this time with an evolved understanding of the underlying theory.  He mentions that in the classroom of the future kids will use textbooks as “cheat sheets” that help them play the game better.  This is much more true to life in the real world which is of course all about doing things and researching to do things better.

The best part of the talk was where Henry talked about about the process of producing a game.  The producer asks the teacher “why are we teaching this – what is its purpose” ie what is the relevance of the knowledge learned to some real activity.  You would hope that the teachers had a good answer but invariably I suspect the answer is “it’s important”.  As someone who likes to learn by experience and apply what I have learned the whole talk was music to my ears.

That said I am not a gamer! why? because I am worried that I will get drawn into it and never get any work done or spend time with my family etc,  I have an addictive personality and games certainly sound addictive!

If you want more, then try reading this interview on Education and Violence, these books,  and this wide ranging interview.

My best discovery by far in the last few months has been the IT Conversations web site.  I listen to quite a lot but have found that I quickly forget the talks, when I really want to research them more, and certainly want to share the gems with others.  So I have decided to write mini reviews of the talks and provide some directions for further study.  I have also found that the Treo makes a great device for listening to these recorded talks btw.