PopTech 2013 Science & Social Innovation Fellows

LINKS: See digital scribing from PopTech 2013 More on the PopTech Fellows Program

Meet the Social Innovation Fellows PopTech Fellows participate in an all-expenses-paid intensive program, which will run from October 18-23, 2013, and focus on insights and tools for accelerating and scaling “big bet” innovations. Meet the Science Fellows Fellows explore branding, media relations, social media, finance, leadership, digital storytelling, design for impact and organizational development. Interactive training sessions are led by eminent innovators, scientists, journalists and acknowledged leaders in these fields.

David DeSteno: Compassion science

David DeSteno directs the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University where his research is pulling back the curtain to reveal some of the mechanics that drive human compassion. “It is not the severity or the objective facts of a disaster that motivate us to feel compassion and to help. It is whether or not we see ourselves in the victims.”

Vicki Arroyo on Climate Disasters

	Vicki Arroyo is the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center. She studies preparedness and resiliency with respect to climate-related catastrophes. “Traditional models of who is in charge in a disaster do not necessarily operate when you have a real disaster.” georgetownclimate.org

Amanda Ripley: Where the Smart Kids Are

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy. For Time Magazine and The Atlantic, she has chronicled the stories of American kids and teachers alongside groundbreaking new research into education reform. “Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation.” OFFICIAL BLOG: amandaripley.com

Claressa Shields: Female Fighter From Flint

Boxer Claressa Shields, age 17, clawed her way out of hardscrabble Flint Michigan to win the first ever Olympic gold medal for women’s middleweight boxing. She has won 31 fights -- and lost only one. “That fight made me work so much harder when I got back to the gym, even though I cried and I was sad. It made me hungrier.”

Steve Lansing: Bali’s water temples

Steve Lansing, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, discusses the Byzantine system for the distribution of water from a volcanic lake in Bali to over two hundred farming villages. It’s worked since the 12th century, it’s egalitarian and it’s still-sustainable. “It’s one of the few functioning, ancient democratic institutions that we know about. It’s kind of beautiful.”

Tim Harford: Learning Your (Economic) Lesson

Economic commentator and author Tim Harford presented a creative, challenging perspective on financial systems, drawing upon examples from oil rig explosions to nuclear disasters to make his point. He believes that by studying the triggers of major engineering accidents, we can draw lessons on how to help prevent crises in the financial world.

Joy Reidenberg: Weird Whale

Joy Reidenberg, a fast-talking, energetic anatomist captivated the PopTech audience with her talk, “Why Whales are Weird.”  With one amazing fact after the next (Whales evolved from deer-like creatures! Their spinal movement is more like galloping in the water! They don’t actually spout water! They have mustaches!), she took us through the story of evolution using whales as a model. She explained that evolution is the process to mediate resilience and thus, survival.

Click to read more ...

Silja Ómarsdóttir: Iceland’s Constitution Co-author

Silja Ómarsdóttir was one of 25 people tapped to rewrite Iceland’s constitution after the country’s financial meltdown in 2008. Ómarsdóttir explains the constitution creation process and what it meant to overhaul the constitution, with considerable public input, in four months.

Click to read more ...

Anne-Marie Slaughter - Lego World

Anne-Marie Slaughter shares her insights on the transformation of state and non-state actors. Whereas we used to exist within a world of nation-states, billiard balls knocking against one another, we now live in a network of modular, ad hoc organizations—both governmental and non-governmental.

Click to read more ...

Daniel Kish: Blind Vision

Kish’s organization, World Access for the Blind, trains the visually impaired to achieve greater freedom and mobility through echolocation, a technique that simulates a bat’s night vision of perceiving the environment through sound.

Click to read more ...

Pieter Hoff grows trees with very little water

Dutch bulb grower, Pieter Hoff has an idea about how to make deserts bloom: capture the humidity in the air, store it in a box, and use that condensation to water plants. He calls this box the Groasis waterboxx and he thinks it can change how we feed the world and reduce greenhouse gases.

Click to read more ...

Kevin Dunbar: Unexpected Science

“What happens when science goes wrong?” asks psychology professor Kevin Dunbar. He studies how scientists approach the unexpected and learn from mistakes. Over the course of a year, Dunbar’s team examined the habits of four molecular biology labs. Watch his talk to discover their findings, including the surprising characteristics of successful labs.

Click to read more ...

Gulf Oil Spill: Michael Blum and The Trouble with Deepwater

What caused the BP oil spill almost a year ago? At PopTech 2010, Tulane ecology professor Michael Blum addressed the operational, organizational and technological failures that led to the accident.

Click to read more ...

David de Rothschild: The Plastiki Makes a Statement

In honor of Earth Day, check out David de Rothschild's incredible story about how he and his team built the Plastiki, a boat constructed from 12,000 plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew sailed halfway around the world to bring greater public awareness to the devastating impact of oceanic plastic pollutants and the need to reuse discarded plastics.

Click to read more ...

PopTech Ecomaterials Lab

Materials matter. Everything we touch, taste, wear, drive, drink, eat — all of it is connected to the use, re-use, and ultimate disposal of materials. The health of the planet and the prosperity of its inhabitants rest largely on how we extract and use materials.

In July 2010 at Harvard Medical School, the first meeting of the Ecomaterials Lab network brought together 40 of these thought leaders and stakeholders for a facilitated dialogue regarding the drivers, constraints, opportunities, and challenges surrounding next-generation sustainable materials (with a particular emphasis on textiles). The gathering unearthed new insights and areas of disagreement, and helped form a network around sustainable ecomaterials.

Alphachimp Studio Inc. was honored to be onsite for graphic facilitation support and graphic capture of the personal insight, passion and urgency expressed by this stellar group of material scientists.

Fast Company has included the results of this event in there list of 8 of the Most Exciting Developments in Material Sustainability!

Download the full report here:

Ecomaterials Lab Report (PDF

How not to save the world according to Kevin Starr

Kevin Starr, Mulago Foundation director, looks for the best solutions to the biggest problems in the poorest countries. He thinks all projects need to answer four questions: Is it needed? Does it work? Will it get to those who need it? Will they use it correctly when they get it? Too many bad ideas are using up our limited resources and that needs to change.

Click to read more ...

Picking Cotton: rape, identity, conviction, liberation & forgiveness

The story of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton is one of liberation and forgiveness. In 1984, Thompson testified that Cotton raped her, for which he was sentenced to life in prison.  Eleven years later, DNA evidence cleared him of the crime.  Thompson and Cotton went on to write a memoir together about their experience.

Click to read more ...

Kathryn Schulz: Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz is an expert on being wrong. The journalist and author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error,” says we make mistakes all the time. The trouble is that often times being wrong feels like being right. What’s more, we’re usually wrong about what it even means to make mistakes—and how it can lead to better ideas.

Click to read more ...

Elizabeth Dunn: Happiness and Money

Elizabeth Dunn conducts experimental research on self-knowledge and happiness with a focus on how people can use their money more effectively to increase well-being. Dunn determined that by rethinking how we spend our money, we can “change the world, increase our happiness, or win a game of dodgeball.”

Click to read more ...