Mohammed Rezwan: Floating schools

Climate change is exacerbating flooding in waterlogged Bangladesh. Already, hundreds of schools get wiped out during the monsoon season. Mohammed Rezwan builds floating schools, healthcare facilities and libraries. “If 20 percent of the land goes under water, which may happen in the next 10 to 20 years, where will these people go? We don’t have enough space, enough land. People have to live on the water in some way.”

Víðir Reynisson: Iceland's disaster response

Víðir Reynisson, head of the National Commission of Icelandic Police, coordinates the country’s response to natural disasters, including the infamous Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and oversees the country’s search and rescue teams. Iceland has developed a nimble crisis management model. “With all disasters, with all crises, comes opportunity.”

Stephanie Coontz: Gender gaps

Stephanie Coontz, an historian of the family, discusses how globalization has brought more women into the paid work force. Coontz urges us to redefine our notions of gender equality, arguing that every worker has a right to a family life.

Lloyd and Zimbalist: Memory mapping the news

Alexis Lloyd and Michael Zimbalist, both from the New York Times R&D Lab, describe a new app for memory mapping the news, which they created for PopTech's iPad app. Unlike the old model of top-down publishing, it allows consumers to combine news with their own personal memories. Users can see timelines in real and perceived time and view stories from the archives within the context of their own lives.

Paul Needham: Owning electricity

Paul Needham’s organization, Simpa Networks, makes solar energy available to the poor. By using a pay-as-you-go pricing structure modeled after mobile phone cards, Simpa gives its customers ownership of the electricity. Once the initial cost of the equipment is paid off, the device belongs to the customer and their electricity is free.

Krista Donaldson's Design Revolution

Krista Donaldson runs D-Rev: Design Revolution, which creates world class products—market and user driven—designed to meet the needs of the four billion people all over the world living on less than four dollars a day.

Alyson Warhurst: Risk mapper

Alyson Warhurst is CEO and founder of the risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft, the leading source of extra-financial risk intelligence for the world’s largest multinational corporations, asset managers and governments. “We can really start telling a story in terms of predicting risk in the future…We are actually able to engage in policy change to be able to shape the future growth environment and prevent disaster.”

Didier Sornette: Predicting risk

Didier Sornette is a professor of entrepreneurial risks in Zurich. He explores data patterns to help predict crises and extreme events in complex systems, like global financial crises. “Most crises are endogenous. They are not coming out of the blue, like a black swan. They are knowable. They can be diagnosed in advance.”

George Bonanno: Measuring human resilience

e	George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology, mines massive data sets for surprising revelations about how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity. “There isn’t one thing that predicts resilience. It’s not two things. It is not necessarily in us.”

Andri Magnason: Iceland, human experiment

From the Icelandic food store chain, Bonus, to the midnight sun, everyday Iceland inspires activist poet Andri Magnason. His poetry and children's books reflect his deep connection to his homeland as does the way he's schooled himself—and the public—on preserving Iceland’s beauty and natural resources.

Eben Upton: Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, shows how he is hooking a new generation of kids on computer programming. “I remember sitting down with my wife for dinner…and we had this sudden, appalling realization that we had promised 600,000 people that we would build them a $25 dollar computer.”

Kári Stefánsson: Decoding genetics

Dr. Kári Stefánsson is recognized as a leading figure in human genetics who studies the fuzzy relationship between genetic mutations and environmental factors. “Where is the line of distinction between nature and nurture? Where is the line of distinction between genes and environment? It really doesn’t exist.”

Margrét Pála: Educating children differently

Margrét Pála is a preschool management specialist in Iceland who advocates sex-segregated classes, natural play material instead of conventional toys, and a long-forgotten belief in discipline to develop optimism, courage and resiliency in young children. “Feel the cold! I even take them into the snow -- and then the lava. Scream a little bit! But continue! And enjoy it!”

Simonetta Carbonaro: Liquid societies

Simonetta Carbonaro, a consumer psychologist, encourages us to think differently about consumption. She reminds us that a consumer-hungry outlook for cheaper and faster is outdated, and that we now know that consuming and producing less, in fact, creates more jobs, more free time, and more happiness.

John Thackara: The end of endless growth

Social critic John Thackara argues that the current human paradigm of endless growth is obviously unsustainable, so we should consider the brilliance of the Brazilian Jequitiba tree, which soaks up four tons of water a day. “I am a proper tree hugger, as well as a lichen hugger.”

JUDITH RODIN: WHY RESILIENCE

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, explores how resiliency can empower even the most destitute and vulnerable communities. “When the World Bank was planning to invest $100 million dollars in upgrading the slums in Nairobi, these slum-dweller leaders were represented at the table.”

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.

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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.

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