Last week was the last Future Salon for this year. Even though I wasn't able to participate, I hear John Smart did a great job hosting and it was a big success.Thank you. It is great to have people like John to carry the torch.
Actually it would be even better, if more people that like what the Future Salon is doing would join. With your extra push, we are convinced, it will be even better next year.
"Yes, but how much effort will it be?" I hear you think ;-) No one has time these days. We want to make it as easy and efficient as possible.
Early December we will have an evening meeting where we talk about the general direction and split up the months between us. Depending on how many people we are, you focus on your theme and month, host that month and that is it.
The overarching theme of the Future Salon is:
Boldly creating a world that works for us all.
Therefore we are not covering the latest gadgets at our salons. We are interested in taking a look at larger trends, limits of our own human capabilities and how to overcome them. What can be done to create a more just society that gives opportunities to everyone involved to grow to their full potential?
If that aligns with your own vision and interests, please fill out the following couple of questions and we will contact you regarding the December meeting.
Of course filling out this form doesn't commit you to anything. We know that even with the best intentions life has the tendency to catch up with and sweep you into a different direction than planned.
Let's end the Future Salon year with a bang: 9 steps to a healthier
happier you presented by Mark Allen 6 times Ironman winner and Brant
Secunda a shaman, healer and ceremonial leader in the Huichol Indian
tradition of Mexico. Tuesday 10th of November 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo
Alto. Please RSVP http://tinyurl.com/ybclfbp.
Fit Soul Fit Body, 9 Keys to a Healthier Happier You
World-renowned shaman Brant Secunda and legendary Ironman
Mark Allen will talk about their bestselling book, Fit Soul Fit Body. They will
speak about how to become truly fit from the inside out and take your life to
the next level. Whether you’re training for an athletic event or just want to improve
the quality of your life and how you feel about yourself, Fit Soul Fit Body - 9
Keys to a Healthier Happier You is about everything that makes you well. [more]
As promised the second part of Professor Merzenich's Future Salon talk. Enjoy.
You may want to jump to minute 44 where he lists 13 elements from as he says 1000s that have an influence on our brain plasticity development in ways that we don't yet comprehend and why he thinks that we are not evolved enough to handle the pace of development that we are jumping in literally head first:
We are driving culture too fast and are too dump to understand the consequences.
Cutting umbilical cord too early: Leads to 2 minutes of no oxygen to the brain, which is a suspect for the rise in autism.
Only very few drugs have been studied regarding their influence on the brain.
Chemical safety regulations: 100s of 1000s of chemicals are created every year and they are only banned if there is a clear demonstration of harm.
Car seats (He put that one up for fun). Is it a good idea to put our little kids into little prisons? Same with making our babies sleep on their back. Consequence is that the baby is slower in regards to crawling. His prediction: We will have a female president in the future and she will be very authoritarian because of the restrictions put on her via our current car seats. The interest of our children to go to the outdoors or to the parks will continue to decline because our children don't see what is happening outside of the car window. We come from growing up in the wilderness and we are now wilderness deprived.
We have paved our ways. We have hard shoes to take away the unevenness. Our brains are amazing at balancing out the differences and it actually burns lots of calories doing it, but we don't want hardship. It is not a surprise that it has been proven, that people living on cobble stone streets are healthier. It is one of the reasons why in old age we are frailer than we should be. We were not designed for paved roads.
Hand held devices.
We systematically make our children being afraid of all adults. What a screwy idea to make every child being afraid of every adult. It's insane.
TV addiction
Taking executive control of our children's lives. [24 hour surveillance.] Shouldn't that be one of your main goals to give our kids the executive control of their lives?
Video games.
Narcissism: One word Twitter. [Comment: That on a day when I twitter more than ever ;-)] Let's all be really self-interested. Let's practice many hours a day on how cool we are.
Pornography and media: Is that really a good idea? Praying to the lowest denominator?
By using GPS your brain shrinks. London taxi drivers are able to pass the license test after 3 years of studying, aka driving around on scooters to memorize streets. One year after introducing GPS the London taxi driver's extended brain shrunk back to the usual size. [Comment: There is always a trade-off. Since we can read, we can't remember as good as we used to. We just didn't know how big the difference is for your brain. Another proof of use it or loose it.]
One of our problems is, that these things are just too complicated to do anything about them.
We have about 1000 things that are really important, most of them we don't even know about. Individually we may know about one of them deeply, may be a handful, but that is it.
We have to figure out how we as a society get true expertise around these problems to resolve them and we have to figure out how by accepting our individual limitations we can accept societal solutions.
We have a long long way to go to do that and we may be incapable to do it, because remember we are inherently selfish, a fundamental problem that we have to deal with.
We are at the beginning of enlightenment or disaster. Somehow we have to bring science and knowledge back into this for a true understanding of what we are.
In a sense the only hope we have really is to identify what we are and accept what we are with our limitations.
It took us a while to post it, as we were hoping to get the slides. People came up to me after the talk and said that it was one of the best Future Salons ever.
It is only part one, as I maxed out the weekly allowence for uploading video. Next week part II.
Let's end the Future Salon year with a bang: 9 steps to a healthier happier you presented by Mark Allen 6 times Ironman winner and Brant Secunda a shaman, healer and ceremonial leader in the Huichol Indian tradition of Mexico. Tuesday 10th of November 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. Please RSVP http://tinyurl.com/ybclfbp.
Fit Soul Fit Body, 9 Keys to a Healthier Happier You
World-renowned shaman Brant Secunda and legendary Ironman
Mark Allen will talk about their bestselling book, Fit Soul Fit Body. They will
speak about how to become truly fit from the inside out and take your life to
the next level. Whether you’re training for an athletic event or just want to improve
the quality of your life and how you feel about yourself, Fit Soul Fit Body - 9
Keys to a Healthier Happier You is about everything that makes you well.
Think you know what it means to be fit? Think again.
Let’s face it: fitness goes far beyond how long it takes
to walk or run a mile. When you’re stressed out, emotionally drained,
overworked, overweight, and not satisfied with your physical body, you can’t
get much of anything accomplished—at work, at home, on the race track, wherever
and in whichever capacity.Put simply,
when you’re spiritually unfit, life is a greater challenge. That mythical
“balance” you’ve always dreamed of achieving was just a myth. Not anymore!
Mark Allen was one of the top triathletes in the world but
struggled to overcome the barriers that were preventing him from winning the
grueling Ironman World Championship Triathlon in Kona, Hawaii.
Then he began studying with Brant Secunda, healer and
teacher in the Huichol Indian tradition of Mexico. Brant is the only Westerner
to have completed a 12-year apprenticeship with Don José Matsuwa, the revered
Huichol Indian shaman who lived a vibrant, happy life to 110 years old. Brant
taught Mark the spiritual and healing exercises that allowed him to integrate
his physical and psychological fitness. He gives Brant much of the credit for
his remarkable success.
Mark went on to win a never-before-achieved six Ironman
World Championships in a row, and was eventually dubbed “The World’s Fittest
Man” by Outside magazine.
Bio
Brant Secunda is
an internationally acclaimed shaman, healer and ceremonial leader in the
Huichol Indian tradition of Mexico. He completed a twelve-year apprenticeship
with Don José Matsuwa, the renowned Huichol Shaman who lived to be 110 years
old and who adopted Brant as his grandson. Alongside other dignitaries
including President Jimmy Carter, Brant cofounded the Peace University in
Berlin, and is a founding member of the American Herbalists Guild and has
taught at the American Holistic Medical Association Annual Conference.
Brant lectures at conferences and universities worldwide,
and since 1979 has been the director of the Dance of the Deer Foundation Center
for Shamanic Studies in Soquel, California. He has worked with many
organizations including The World Health Organization and the American Holistic
Medical Association, was the cofounder of the Humanistic Medicine Congress in
Germany, and was a nominee to be a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Award
for his service worldwide. He leads seminars and retreats at spectacular places
of power like Japan, Crete, the Italian Alps, Alaska, Mt. Shasta in California,
and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. His work has been documented on television,
radio, and in articles and books throughout the USA, Europe and Japan.
Mark Allen
is a six-time Ironman World Champion. He has been called “The World’s Fittest
Man” by Outside magazine and “The Greatest Triathlete of All Time” by
Triathlete magazine. He attributes his success to his ongoing studies with
Brant Secunda, who showed him how to find fitness not only in physical strength
but in the power of personal spirit and balanced living. Mark and his races
have been featured numerous times on major network television and in national
publications; he has appeared on more than 100 popular covers worldwide.
Since leaving the sport after a successful 15-year career
while still at the top of his game, Mark has worked as a sports commentator and
advisor for NBC.He’s also consulted
with and spoken to many Fortune 500 companies, including American Express,
Honeywell, Northwestern Mutual, and Oracle.He developed “Forever Fit,” a special program designed to help people
live a healthy life.
Brant and Mark continue to work together at events and
retreats around the world and to develop Fit Soul, Fit Body programs. Their
book was inspired by a successful workshop they created 12 years ago for people
in the US and Europe seeking practical tools for transforming themselves from
the inside out. The tenets of Fit Soul, Fit Body offer the ultimate, unique
roadmap for fostering optimal health, happiness, and wellbeing.
Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with
light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation
followed by questions and discussion.
SAP Labs North America, Building D, COIL (Co-Innovation Lab). SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue,
Palo Alto, CA 94304[map]. Free and open to the public. Please spread the word and invite others, but be sure to RSVP http://tinyurl.com/ybclfbp so we know how many people to expect.
We
will do our best to webcast the event again via Ustream.tv on the
Future Salon Channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Future-Salon
Cool event organized by Flowplace happening this Thursday 9am PST.
Have you always wanted to be part of the challenge of building the next world? ... If so we might have something for you:
We are building an open platform of protocols and languages for creating currencies that will give birth to the next economy. This suite of tools will allow every human being and every community to build and share wealth the way they need by means of free currencies:
The MetaCurrency project is building the standards, language, platforms
The flowplace project is building the spaces where these free currencies will flow
We have begun implementing these projects. Various tools and protocols already running and progressing, being tested and improved every day, but this is not enough. We believe this next economy will completely change our way of building and exchanging wealth. To make it accessible to more people, more people need to get involved; so we invite you to join and help us building and constructing this next world together.
…
The Event : Meet the geeks
We will use a Livestream channel to explore the topics of "open data", "open transport" and "open rules" which are the basic components of the metacurrency project. We will watch some videos and chat live with the metacurrency team to answer your questions and update you in our current edge and projects status. We will also speak with TheTransitioner team to explore the concept of the flowplace and provide with the next steps you can take if you decide to join us.
Bummer I probably can't join, but would love to have a Future Salon around democratic currencies.
Collaborator's Dilemma Future Salon on Thursday 17th of September 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. Please RSVP http://budurl.com/6qx6
Many of you don't know that I am one of the people that built the very vibrant SAP Community Network: 1.8 million members and ~7000 posts per day in the forums.
When we started 6 years ago, very few people saw the power of community, collaboration or co-creation. The big advantage for us was, that we had a lot of freedom to experiment and try things out: Blogs, Wiki, point system, face to face meetings, while expanding our reach outside as well as within SAP.
By now the world has awoken to the opportunity that an active community brings with it, even though I believe we are just scratching the surface of the possibilities.
What we have done was mostly grassroots. Yes, we had a mandate from the board to create a developer community, but not one to apply the community advantages to all aspects of the business.
This is why I am so happy about this months' Future Salon speaker Nilofer Merchant. She has almost finished her book: The New How Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy.
How do you best run your company with the new realities of collaboration and co-creation? That question and many more will be answered this Thursday the 17th at the Collaborator's Dilemma Future Salon.
In 2004 and 2005 I helped John Smart organize the Accelerating Change Conferences. At both of them Ray Kurzweil gave the keynote. (In 2004 Ray tried to be present via hologram from New York, but the technology wasn't there yet and we ended up with a conference call.)
His prediction is, that within the next 20 years, technology will accelerate to a point, where the computational power of computers will surpass human intelligence: The Singularity. Check his presentation at Google from 2 months ago, if you want to get his latest insights.
Vishal is one of the smartest people at SAP and instead of accelerating change and hockey sticks he looked at our lessons learned from 30 years of enterprise software development and derived the concept of timeless software from it.
In a couple of hours (Wednesday 9th 2pm PST) Vishal and Ray will do a live video conversation that you shouldn't miss.
According to some calculations, about 50% of the worlds GDP touches at least one SAP system, that gives us a unique perspective on what is going on at enterprises worldwide.
Yes, technology is accelerating, but the complexity of our systems that are running our companies is accelerating as well. Not sure which one has the upper hand.
I also can't shake the feeling that Mitch Kapor may be right, who called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ
140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which
everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's
fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of
the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me.
Rumor has it, that the live twitter stream will be integrated into the video conversation. Tweet with you there soon.
Collaborator's Dilemma Future Salon on Thursday 17th of September 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. Please RSVP http://budurl.com/6qx6
Abstract: Just as Clayton Christensen highlights The
Innovator's Dilemma, we must identify and name The Collaborator's Dilemma to
describe the way we create—or fail to create—strategies that work.
Organizations, and the people within in them want to tap the talents of their
people, generate lots of great ideas and have everyone co-own the solution.
But we don’t do that. We instead have an “air sandwich” between the
executives and others.
Collaboration can fill that gap I call an Air
Sandwich: the empty void in an organization between the high-level strategy up
in the stratosphere and the realization of that vision down on the floor. Where
there should be connective pieces between the vision and the reality, in an Air
Sandwich the filling consists mainly of misunderstandings, confusions, and
disinformation. It is that Air Sandwich which prevents us from
winning.
This session explains how this problem is fixable if one is
willing to reinvent their firm to win. Discussion will center on the future of
work and organizations and how collaboration will play out in 5, 10, 15 years.
John Smart is someone who has thought deeply about the future and shared his insight at the Future Salon. Video in two parts. He also is sharing his slides here:
http://accelerating.org/presentations/EvoDevoUniverseBAFS2009.ppt
Interesting observation / aspect of this months Future Salon topcic:
Freerisk.org sucks in financial data from the SECXBRL format, allows the community to add additional annotations, and then makes that data available to standard risk analysisbioinformatics. Keep the data available, add annotations, and have this sandbox in which algorithms can be applied and developed. using the algorithms and, this is the best part, available for others to apply their own algorithms. My first reaction was, this is what we want to be able to do in bioinformatics. Keep the data available, add annotations, and have this sandbox in which algorithms can be applied and developed.mndoci.com, Freerisk – An open platform for risk modeling, Jun 2009 If you want to find out more about FreeRisk, the two founders are going to present at the Future Salon on Thursday 20th of August.
Even though we had the biggest financial breakdown since the great depression, so far no fundamental changes that I know of to our economic system have been implemented. It sets us up for a similar crisis in the future. This is the first Future Salon in a series where we are looking at alternative economic solutions.
One of the problems was, that even Moody's and Standard & Poor's AAA rated companies were falling. Their risk assessment was useless. This month's Future Salon speakers are working on solving that problem by bringing transparency and competition to risk assessment.
Please join us at the FreeRisk Future Salon on Thursday the 20th of August 6pm please RSVP http://budurl.com/j6n2.
Why Humans May Be Too Neurologically Limited To
Successfully Rule The World
Super excited about our next Future Salon with Professor Michael M. Merzenich, Ph.D. on July 17 6pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto please RSVP: http://budurl.com/3abd
Abstract: Brain Plasticity Revolution We’ll discuss the principles of brain plasticity, on the way to
explaining the bases of origin of individual human abilities and the ‘Persons’
who employ them. We’ll describe how this science has been employed
to improve or transform the lives of children and adults in need of neurological
help. We’ll consider some of the greater societal implications of our
new understanding of the brain-plasticity bases of normal and abnormal human
behaviors. We’ll try to explain how the empirical, pragmatic and
substantially fictitious notions about our self-development and about our
humanity that have provided the primary bases for the education, organization
and control of human societies are now being challenged by a scientific
understanding of the true nature of the processes that account for them.
In its implications for how we view ourselves and our rapidly evolving
cultures, this new perspective about our true, limited natures may provide the
basis for rapid, further societal degradation -- OR guide us toward large-scale
societal corrections, and cultural rejuvenation. We’ll end our
conversation by discussing a few strategies that might guide us toward that
better path.
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