Future Salon

Funniest Future Salon presenter Joe Quirk has a video

Remember Joe Quirk who presented the Sociobiology Future Salon in January last year? His flip-chart presentation was super funny. His book It's not you, it's biology is out in paperback now, which even made the bestseller list in the Bay Area. The science of relationship in a humorous package. Check it out.

P.S. Sorry no Future Salon in September, but for October we are finalizing someone really interesting, which we will be announcing any day now. Stay tuned.

Douple Your Chances to Die: Drive an SUV

It's not that you will get hit by an Earth First activist for driving an SUV (Although it would be good if reason would hit SUV drivers soon :-)

No, 'upgrade' from a Jetta/Golf to a Toyota 4Runner and your chances of dying in an an accident just doubled from 37 per million Jettas to 94 per million 4Runners. Oh, and if you love your child, please get a minivan for a third of the 4Runner fatalities only 31 per million Chrysler Town & Country.

Don't believe me, then read Big and Bad last year's excellent New Yorker Article by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a real eye opener regarding building and buying for perceived safety versus real safety and why we fall for it.

Malcolm just brought out a new book Blink. The power of thinking without thinking. Currently on top of Technorati's book list. Salon has a review. There is also the showdown between him and the Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki in Slate [via Evelyn].

Malcolm is on tour in the Bay Area right now. Check it out. I think I will try the lunch Stanford Bookstore session on Wednesday, which is quite close to SAP. See you there.

The Tao of Extreme Democracy Future Salon

sponsored by SAP Labs.

Update: I reread this post, and realized, that I didn't link to Extreme Democracy. Just to set the record straight: Tom Atlee will talk about his work and book The Tao of Democracy. Ross Mayfield will introduce us to the concepts behind Extreme Democracy and Zack Rosen will show us the latest version of CivicSpace.

If you check Amazon for The Tao of Democracy You will find rave reviews of the book. The one from the top 100 reviewer Robert D. Steele is especially interesting: This book focuses on what comes next, after everyone gets tired of just "meeting up" or "just blogging." This book is about collective intelligence for the common good, and it is a very fine book. He is missing the following: Still lacking--and I plan to encourage special organizations such as the Center for American Progress to implement something like this--is a central hub where a citizen can go, type in their zip code, and immediately be in touch with the following (as illustrated on page 133 of New Craft):

Extreme Democracy Plus Future Salon

It's election time, but of course the Future Salon looks beyond Swift Boats :-) One of the inspirations is the upcoming Extreme Democracy book: "Extreme democracy" is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues."

Another inspiration is The Tao of Democracy by Tom Atlee who has thought about, written and spoken for twenty years on innovations in democracy. Paul H. Ray, Ph.D co-author of The Cultural Creatives sais about his book: What Tom Atlee is writing about is just about the most important thing that's happening at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Over a year ago John Abbe pointed the Future Salon in his direction by posting links to chapers of his book. There for the first time I got introduced to the excellent concept of citizen deliberative councils.

Third inspiration are the tool makers, like the volunteers that created the DeanSpace and now are knitting CivicSpace, an open-source grassroots organizing web-application toolkit .

The beauty is, that on Thursday the 16th of September we bring these three rays of hope together and let them shine at the Future Salon.

Technorati: Mavens and Connectors

In his book The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell analyzes how ideas spread in the society. He writes that mavens (experts who love to teach) and connectors (people who know a lot of other people) are especially important for how fast an idea gets propagated through society. Examples in the blog world would be Matt Haughey with his PVRblog is a Tivo maven and Glen Reynolds is clearly a connector as noted in the Tipping Blog. There John Heiler also concludes and I agree, that online the lines between connectors and mavens are blurring.

Hacking Matter using Quantum Dots

After Wil McCarthy's talk: Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter I overheard the following conversation: "Sounds like Snake Oil to me." "Well, if it is true, then one can make excellent snake oil out of it."

The "it" that Wil McCarthy was talking about in his presentation are microscopic small devices called "Quantum Dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and these properties can be changed at will. Properties like color, transparency, thermochromicity, fluorescence, many others still undiscovered.