FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog

Browse by Category › re:con pop!tech 2005

October 21, 2005

Better Science Through Video Games

Want to make your kid smarter? Tell him to put down that book and pick up a joystick. Playing video games is actually more of an intellectual challenge than reading, says Steve Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good for You” at Friday afternoon’s session of PopTech!

“Decision making doesn’t happen the same way in books as in games,” he says. “Video games teach the scientific method: Build a working hypothesis, test it, and if it doesn’t work, try again.

“The ability to make the right decisions at the right time based on the information in front of you is the very definition of being smart,” he says.

Posted by Linda Tischler at 6:50 PM | 10 Comments

China and Us: Are We Toast?

Discussions about China’s encroachment on U.S. competitiveness often end
with the comforting idea that we’ll be OK because China is several
economic transformations behind us. They’re moving from agriculture to
industry, the argument goes, while we’re moving up the economic ladder
from industry to services.

Don’t get too cozy with that notion says Oded Shenkar, Ford Motor
Company Chair of Global Business Management at Ohio State University at a PopTech! Session called “The Chinese Century: Are We Toast?” “We’re in uncharted territory,” he says. “There is no precedent for any major economy based solely on services.”

Continue reading "China and Us: Are We Toast?"

Posted by Linda Tischler at 12:43 PM | Add Comment

Frog Soup at PopTech!

Day Two on PopTech! Earned the distinction as the Conference Most Likely to Induce Whiplash. The morning sessions were devoted to dire predictions of the incipient meltdown of the planet, the afternoon to the potential of video games to save them –- or at least the hope that kids smart enough to play “World of War” will also be smart enough to figure out a strategy to save our sorry butts.

Mark Lynas, author of “High Tide,” showed truly alarming pictures of glaciers taken 10 years apart. If anybody doubted that global warming was for real, these images would put that speculation to rest in a terrifyingly vivid way.

Lynas, who’s British, made no bones about his contempt for the current American administration, but politics aside, his data should strike fear in the hearts of the most recalcitrant nay-sayer.

Temperatures are higher than they have been for 5,000 years according to glaciologists from the Andes to the Alps, he says. Stuff that’s been buried for this long is suddenly bubbling to the surface. The World Glacier Monitoring Service (run out of Switzerland) –- says 90% of world’s glaciers are retreating.

Lynas ran through a range of scenarios that are likely to occur with one degree of warming, up to six. Even small increases, he says, are likely to trigger dramatic triggers. With two degrees of warming, for example, one third of all species will be extinct. That means the end of polar bears, walruses, and empire penguins. At five degrees, you can say good bye to coastal cities from New York to Bombay.

Why aren’t more folks more alarmed? “We’re like the frogs being boiled in a pot,” he says. With Wilma bearing down, we seem to have passed beyond simmer.

Posted by Linda Tischler at 8:08 AM | Add Comment

October 20, 2005

PopTech! Kicks Off

Given the events of 2005 – killer hurricanes, radical insurgencies, melting ice caps, threats of pandemics – the theme of this year’s PopTech!, “Grand Challenges,” has a “ripped from the headlines” urgency.

Stepping to the stage before a sold-out crowd at Camden, Maine’s opera house this morning, curator Andrew Zolli promised the next three days would explore not only a range of catastrophes currently besetting the earth and its people, but also the enormous opportunities for exploration, creativity, and sustainability on the horizon, driven by human ingenuity and invention.

Promising beginning! Unfortunately, the first speaker, Graham Flint, a physicist who is working on a portrait of the world as seen thru gigapixel digital cameras quickly got bogged down in the minutae of the technology instead of demonstrating its cool applications.

In conjunction with Google Earth, Flint and his team are currently building a portrait of America, but will soon move to preserve images of the world’s endangered sites in high rez. “Had we photographed the Buddhas before the Taliban blew them up we’d have that forever, but now it’s forever lost,” he says. The images, on display in the opera house, had an HDTV-like clarity. I worried about those rusty bolts on the side of the space shuttle Discovery in one picture.

Meanwhile Rome is “dissolving like an Alka Seltzer because of acid rain. If future generations want to see what the Coliseum looked like, they’re going to have to see it via virtual reality since reality reality will be gone,” Flint says.

Flint ended with an image showing what the camera can do in a useful way – projecting an image of a nude beach in California, with pre-blurred faces to protect the perps. Stay tuned for the debate over the privacy implications of this technology. Check out the project at www.gigapxl.org.

Folks who can’t make it to Camden can watch the conference on ITConversations.com and ask questions via live@poptech.org.

Posted by Linda Tischler at 10:48 AM | Add Comment