Environmental Entrepreneurship
In the past few years, we have greatly improved our environmental quality. However, new challenges of disappearing habitat, ineffective regulations etc continue to pose more challenging problems. This has given rise to a new breed of environmental activists – environmental entrepreneurs.
Environmental entrepreneurs specialize in identifying conservation opportunities, mobilizing resources, and building a constituency for conservation. They are leading this change by developing an experimental and non-doctrinaire field, conservation based development (CBD).
Successful environmental entrepreneurs understand they must become part of local communities. They don’t make the elitist conclusion that people merely want the wrong things. They don’t insist that people exchange their old values.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6834301398347507694
About Dan Barber:
Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City, a 2001 James Beard Award nominee for best new restaurant and a noted neighborhood eatery that continues to celebrate the farms of the Hudson Valley with its menus. In the summer of 2002, Food & Wine Magazine featured Dan as one of the country’s “Best New Chefs.” He has since been featured in The New Yorker and Gourmet Magazine, and included in “The Next Generation” of great chefs in Bon Appétit’s 10th annual restaurant issue.
About Marianne Cusato:
Born and raised in Anchorage, Ala., Cusato is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the founder of Cusato Cottages, LLC. Ranked the No. 4 most influential person in the home building industry in Builder Magazine’s annual “Power on 50” list, Cusato and her design principles are changing the landscape of the housing industry. In 2006, the Smithsonian Institute’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum honored Cusato with the first annual “People’s Design Award”. In June 2006, Congress appropriated $400 million for an alternative emergency housing program, based on the idea of the Katrina Cottage
About Adam Lowry:
Founder and Chief Greenskeeper of Method Products, Adam Lowry believes that business, as the Earth’s largest and most powerful institution, has both the opportunity and the obligation to be the greatest agent of positive social and environmental change on the planet. First and foremost an entrepreneur and change agent, Adam has a proven track record of innovation across multiple categories and consumer segments.
Method is the 7th fastest growing company in America and grown to the nation’s leading green home care company, in a very mature industry: household cleaning products. The company was founded in 2000 with the belief that they could revitalize the drudgery of cleaning with soaps and sprays designed to be easy on the eyes, nose, and the environment. Sure enough, it has taken off. Revenues are in the tens of millions of dollars and their products are on the shelves of Target, Safeway, and many other stores.
Tags: Adam Lowry, Business, Conservation Opportunities, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Cusato Cottages, Dan Barber, Design, Environmental Activists, Environmental Entrepreneurs, Environmental Entrepreneurship, housing, Housing Industry, Hudson Valley, James Beard, James Beard Award, Katrina Cottage, Marianne Cusato, Neighborhood Eatery, University Of Notre Dame, Wine MagazineSpore
Spore is a multiplatform “God game” under development by Maxis and designed by Will Wright that allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its existence as a multicellular organism to a spacefaring sapient creature. The game has drawn wide attention for its promise to simulate this development of a species through open-ended gameplay using procedural generation.
The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls “possibility space.”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8867943393224455359
About Will Wright:
A technical virtuoso with boundless imagination, Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With his follow-up hit, The Sims, he encouraged the same creativity toward building a household, all the while preserving the addictive fun of ordinary video games.
Wright’s genius is for presenting vital abstract principles — like evolution, differences of scale, and environmental dynamics — through a highly personalized, humorous kind of play. Users invest themselves passionately in characters they create (with Wright’s mind-boggling CG tools), and then watch them encounter fundamentals of life and nature.
If it all sounds suspiciously educational, well, it just might be … Wright has created not just an irresistible form of entertainment, but an ingenious, original pedagogy.
About John Seabrook:
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace and Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing the Marketing of Culture. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and The Village Voice. He has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
Intellectual Property in 2012
Tim Wu talks with Jeffrey Toobin about the tension between control and exposure in intellectual-property law today. Wu believes the copyright tension in the next few years will be between control (making money off content) and exposure. He explains why in February, 2009, your television screen might go blank if you do not have cable or satellite service.
Wu led with his thoughts on the the difference between the laws and culture of the telephone versus the computer. The former is closed and controlled whereas the latter is more open. In the near future, what will happen with these two different worlds? Which will prevail?
Wu believes the copyright tension in the next few years will be between control (making money off content) and exposure. Several questions will be answered in the near future. How do you preserve openness yet cash in at some magic moment? How will people creating content make money? He thinks people will figure out a way.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2717018717197075420
About Tim Wu:
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford U. Press 2006), and a writer for Slate Magazine. In 2006 Wu was recognized as one 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine for his work on Network Neutrality theory.
Tim Wu previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc), and Harvard Law School, and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law School.
Wu has written for various legal publications, and also the Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Slate Magazine, Playboy, and others. He is on the advisory board of Free Press, Public Knowledge, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
About Jeffrey Toobin:
Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, former legal analyst for ABC News. Toobin has provided broadcast legal analysis on many high profile cases, including Michael Jackson, the O.J. Simpson civil trial and the Starr investigation of President Clinton. He received a 2000 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián González custody saga.
Earlier in his career, he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, as well as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh during the Iran-Contra affair and Oliver North’s criminal trial.
Toobin earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Toobin has written several critically acclaimed, best-selling books including A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President; The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson; and Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election.
Tags: Business, content, Intellectual Property Law, Jeffrey Toobin, Mcgill University, O.J. Simpson, Oliver North, Riverstone, Riverstone Networks, Satellite Service, Scientific American Magazine, Silicon Valley, Stanford Law School, Technology, Two Different Worlds15 Ways to Avert a Climate Crisis
With the same humor and humanity he exuded in his famous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore spells out 15 ways we can address climate change, from buying a hybrid car to inventing a hotter brand name for global warming. First, though, comes a hilarious set of stories from “The New Gore”, who turns out to be a stand-up comedian.
The former Vice President has plenty of joke material, and he’s funnier than you’ve ever seen him. Then he gets down to grittier matters with a list of actions ordinary people can take to stem the tide of global warming. His message: Doing something is easier than you think.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2333533305133943085
About Al Gore:
Unlike some in public office, Al Gore always intended to get something done, and since leaving Washington, DC – following the tumultuous 2000 election – he’s still at it. In fact, his campaign for alerting the world to the dangers of climate change has only gained momentum. His Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth is the third most successful documentary ever released at the box office. Gore’s famed PowerPoint presentation has drawn in a reluctant public, with its meticulously researched content and lucid style.
Meanwhile, Gore himself has found his footing as a communicator. The once “wooden” style has given way to a warmth and humor that reveal the depth of his experience as a soldier, congressman, senator, veep, TV executive, teacher and author. Arguably, Gore is better positioned today than he has ever been to affect the future of our environment and world.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.
Tags: Al Gore, Business, Climate Crisis, Congressman, environment, Footing, Global Warming, Hybrid Car, Inconvenient Truth Al Gore, Inspiring, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change Ipcc, Ordinary People, Powerpoint Presentation, Stand Up Comedian, Tv Executive, Veep, WarmthGeniuses, Collaboration & Stubbornness
Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving, and how long it takes to master any challenge. He observes, ‘Modern problems require persistence more than genius, and we ought to value quantity over quality when it comes to intelligence… When you’re dealing with something as complex and as difficult as Fermat’s last theorem, you’re better off with a large number of smart guys than a small number of geniuses.’.
He advocates taking problems slowly – noting that expertise comes with approx. 10,000 hours of training. He thereby identifies the ‘mismatch problem’, which is simply the idea that standards used to judge/predict success in a given field don’t match what it takes to be successful in that field.
For example, when diagnosing colonoscopies, it’s how much time the doctor spends on each colonoscopy, not how smart they are, how much training they have, where s/he went to school etc. that determines success. If you spend more than 10 minutes on each colonoscopy rather than one, you’ll find the cancers. However, we select and train doctors for their cognitive facility, for, amongst other things, the speed at which they acquire information and the efficiency with which they go about their tasks.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1774374975115960145
About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.
Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.
Tags: Bestseller, Business, Collaboration, Collaboration, Intelligence, Malcolm Gladwell, Ordinary People, Persistence, Stubbornness, Talent, Talent, Tipping Point, Wayne Gretsky
