Not saying you’re wrong. I just think you could tweak the new FU policy to be higher integrity.

P.S. I’m sending over a press release next week. Can you hold it until January? Thanks.

This is appalling.

I urge everybody to watch this:

It is the true story of a men’s brogue shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England that in order to survive, stopped making men’s brogues, the market for which had been swamped by cheap Eastern European knock-offs, and found their “niche market” – kinky boots for drag queens and transvestites.

It is: a story of commtment; advice on how to be open and flexible to changes in your business environment; a treatise on finding opportunities  in the strangest of places;  a tale about how to be true to oneself; a lesson on respecting others even if they are different than you; and finally a lesson on leadership.

The other thing that I love about this movie is that it has a strong story, a lot of heart, it used fantastic venues (a one hundred year old factory), and it employed a bunch of the shoe factory employees in the movie. The writing was great, the scenes that were awkward and tense were intentionally written that way and it was not played up for laughs. There are a lot of moments in the film that you really want to end because they’re uncomfortable. But that’s the magic. Those uncomfortable moments are there in life!

Go rent this movie.  And if you are a business school leader, show this to your class. Here are some great lessons that I found. Which ones will you find?

• A company is a collection of individuals who have committed their time and energy to the enterprise. Respect them and respect their commitment. Show them your loyalty – they deserve it.
• If disaster strikes and you have to lay people off, don’t make excuses. Do it quickly and cleanly. It will suck and that’s life.
• Before you lay them off though, ask them for their ideas. They are close to the work. They will surprise you and may even save the company.
• Look at your business environment for big changes. When they come, change your business, change your product, change your service. Adapt or die.
• Look for new opportunities every where you go. Do this by finding somebody who is in pain from an unfulfilled need. Don’t try to create a market – find one that is underserved or not at all served.
• If you and your life partner don’t want the same things, you’ll never really reconcile it. You’re better to move on and live out your lives apart.
• Also, if your life partner can’t support your 100% commitment to your business, your partnership will fail. It’s hard enough to run a business. It’s impossible to do it when your partner isn’t there to support you, or worse, is acting against your effort.
• Work with your customer to build rapid prototypes and get rapid feedback. If they tell you it’s wrong, then go back and do it again.
• Forget your old business so that you can learn your new business. The old assumptions and beliefs and goals are probably not true. (In this case, the factory went from selling “life-long comfort” to selling “Two and a half feet of tubular delicious SEX!”)
• You can push your people hard but only if they know that it’s for them and not for you.
• Sometimes the tide of attitude can shift away from you or towards you on the suggestion of just one person in your team who holds a lot of sway. Earn that person’s respect and you have earned the respect of the group.
• Aim high. Choose big hairy scary goals that are way beyond your comfort zone. (I disagree with the “S.M.A.R.T.” goals approach in life.)
• You can run from your childhood but you can’t hide. You don’t need to “deal with it” all first, unless it’s getting in the way of your life. In which case, go figure it out and then get on with things.
• Life, relationships, business, sex, gender, psychology – they’re all messy and uncomfortable. And that’s the way they’re supposed to be.
• Find something you want to do. Pursue it with all your heart. And share that adventure with people you care about.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

One key component of the 30 Days of Sustainability is a dynamic, interactive website, which also launched on March 2nd, 2006. To learn more about the 30 Days, check out http://www.30daysofsustainability.com.

There are side effects of this fact. Namely, that some peoples actions do not align with their words. Hence the old “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon. But it is possible to construct a fairly trust-worthy identity by connecting yourself to your activities, friends, colleagues, and related organizations and then having some of those people endorse you. Think about your online identity as you would for a company. Both a company and you need to be found, identified as unique, associated with certain character traits or skillsets, verified as a trust-worthy entity to do business with, and so on.

Could somebody forge a fake identity on the web that is complete, convincing, and well-connected? Yes, of course. Just the way those same people do in the real world. Because your ability to forge an identity is separate from the type of identity being forged. The converse of that is: are there really amazing people with fantastic connections, amazing skills, incredible work-ethic, engaging personalities and impeccable integrity who are difficult to find either in real-life or on the web? Again, yes.

What is the final message here? Work on both parts. Be the person you want to be in the world. But then make sure that your online presence is aligned with that reality as well. Make sure that there is substance first, and visibility and style second.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not a comment on the Vancouver Enterprise Forum, which does a great job of bringing these people together time and time again. It is a comment on the state of networking generally in this city, if not the western world.

But that evening was different. Darcy Rezac, Managing Director of the Vancouver Board of Trade, got on stage with a microphone, introduced himself, gave the group some ground rules and “permission to network”.

Some of his rules included:

The energy that this talk unleashed was enormous. People laughed and chatted and exchanged cards. In fact, it was hard to shepherd them out of the room to the upstairs theater for the actual talk! This evening was a turning point in my own understanding of networking and I will always remember it. I bought Darcy’s first book “The Frog and the Prince” that night from Gayle and read it that night.

Well, I’m pleased to report that Darcy Rezac, Judy Thomson, and Gayle Hallgren-Rezac are at it again and are releasing “Work the Pond – Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Business and in Life” on October 4, 2005.

No matter what you do – business, government, or non-profit work – if you need to work with people and build out your eco-system of “weak links”, you need to read this book. I highly recommend it.

Congratulations Darcy, Judy, and Gayle!

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The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.

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The original Cornell press release link is here.

Currently listening to (ironically) Robin S – Show Me Love (Stonebridge mix) from the album “Club Sounds Vol. 27 CD2″

(Thanks to William Gibson’s blog for the link)

Her ex-husband was filing to take custody of their children, and Lisa was desperate to have another child with her second husband. Meanwhile, she had been attending various dog shows, where at one point, she had her photo taken with a young expectant mother-to-be named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, Lisa came up with a fake name (Darlene Fischer), contacted young Ms. Stinnett on the internet and claimed that she wanted to come over to look at Ms. Stinnett’s rat terriers in order to purchase one of the pups. That morning, Lisa Montgomery went to the Wal-mart to pick out baby clothing. One lady thinks that it may have been Lisa who approached her in the Wal-mart that morning, offering to hold her baby while she shopped. Her motherly instincts told her this was not a good idea so she didn’t allow the stranger to hold her baby. In any case, Wal-mart officials did see Lisa on the security tapes that morning buying clothing. Then she went to the young mother-to-be’s house. Bobbie Jo Stinnett had been on the phone with her mother and told her mother that she had to go meet a new customer who was interested in pups. When she opened the door, Lisa Montgomery strangled her, cut the fetus out of her womb while she was still alive, cut the umbilical cord on the child, cleaned and dressed the baby, and then called her husband to tell him that she had delivered the baby while she was out shopping. Lisa Montgomery’s husband and kids met her near Topeka, Kansas the next day and the “new family” went home. Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s mother found Bobbie Joe laying in a pool of blood, called the ambulance, and unfortunately Bobbie Jo died on the way to the hospital in the care of the paramedics. She was 23.

When I read stories like this, I do my best to try to understand what would cause somebody to commit such an act. Given that cases such as this occur with some regularity, the first lesson I take away is that once again, this is a reminder that we are biochemical animals with intense biological imperative drives. We are shocked because the acts seem to be the act of unreasonable people. And that’s the point. Reason would not enter into it, given that it is a higher level brain function, separated from the lower instinctive drives to mate, run, kill, eat, and nurture. I will never know what Lisa Montgomery’s issues were. But if I had to guess, there might be shame at having lost a child, fear of an angry husband if she told him she lost it, and the innate desire to mother that had been cut short and that needed an outlet.

It sounds like she had been a pathological liar about being pregnant and had finally worked up the courage to steal somebody else’s baby and claim it as her own. So the lower instinctive drive activated the higher-level social skills, got her near a potential target, and then she killed another woman and took that child as her own. This is something that sometimes happens in the non-human animal kingdom as well. We are not as far away from it as we would like to think. Sure, we are separated by ethics and morals. But some people don’t have those. My friend and mentor Peter Koestenbaum recently wrote an appropriate article in his weekly leadership newsletter:

CHOOSING ETHICS

Being ethical is always a decision. Animals may have feelings, capable of bonding and attachment, but we don’t say they are ethical. Being ethical is typically human. And humans who tamper with their ethics endanger the integrity of their very humanity. The difference lies in the zone of freedom. For we choose our behavior in accordance with the criteria of what is ethical and what is not. A person may commit a heinous crime, but if that person lacks judgment, cannot reflect, cannot think, that person is given treatment instead of punishment.

Human freedom is rooted in the human fact of free will. And free will is scary. Why? Because we can choose anything we want. In the purity of our philosophical truth, the truth about freedom is that, like it or not, we are at least potentially and theoretically free to choose whether we are to attach ourselves to something, like our child, or whether we want to distance ourselves from, and do not care what happens to, people at the other end of the world. We can also choose the reverse….

December 20, 2004

[From The Philosophic Consultant, 2002, Koestenbaum]

What I want to know is, exactly how clueless is her husband? Her previous husband knew that she had her tubes tied. You would think that her current husband would know that. You would also think that he would notice if she had added 20-30 pounds of fat and was cycling through the standard pregnancy biochemical cycles for eight months. She managed to cover it up long enough to find the young mother and take her child. That alone seems bizarre and hard to believe, but perhaps she wrapped herself up with blankets around her waist to cover up the obvious or perhaps she was bearing a lot of extra weight so it wasn’t noticeable. But if the rat-terrier people didn’t believe her, then why did her husband? Did they never have sex? More likely, he knew she wasn’t pregnant but didn’t want to know where the baby came from. That is only my speculation though.

The child was taken from its womb at eight months. Who knows when it was actually scheduled to arrive, but it was brought into the world sooner and much more abruptly than anticipated, and by all accounts she is doing fine. That is the resiliency of life and I think it is quite awesome. It makes me think of my favourite line from Jurassic Park: “Life always finds a way.”

I feel horrible for Zeb Stinnett, husband of the dead young mother-to-be, who will now have to live with that death and will have to raise his child by himself all because some crazed biologicially driven woman from another state murdered his wife and stole his child. And for Mr. Montgomery and his kids who will have to sit through a lengthy trial while their wife and mother is charged with kidnapping and murder.The kids are in school so I can’t imagine how that is going to affect them. Fortunately, they have been handed over to Montgomery’s ex-husband, the kids’ biological father. Not that that will make it any easier for them.

Bobbie Jo, rest in peace. And Baby Stinnett, welcome to the world. Hopefully that will be the worst thing you will ever experience while you’re here.

While they were at it, Terri Leo, one of the members of the 15-person Texas Education Board made sure that all homosexual code words like “couple” (gasp) and “adults” (shriek) were properly changed to husband, wife, mother, father, where appropriate. Thank God and the Republican member for getting that straight (pun intended.)

My favourite part of the article was this one:

The board rejected a proposal from Leo asking for language saying: “homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behavior like depression, illegal drug use and suicide.”

How long will it be until they remove all of the science texts that reference evolution…or have they done that already. Then I guess we’d pretty much have to ensure that the kids don’t hear about our newly discovered hobbit-like brethren from Flores Island or the genetic discovery that humans and mice came from the same genetic ancestor about 75 million years ago. We wouldn’t want the kids to know that either. They might question the Bible, turn gay, have sex out of marriage (or in marriage), think for themselves, and grow up to be intellectually engaged adults.

Now, I have heard of using neural networks connected to wings or to legs and then letting them learn how to walk or fly. But I have never heard of using live brain material to achieve the same thing.

It brings to mind (no pun intended) articles I have read on teaching the body to “feel” fake limbs as well as on retraining sexual stimulation (teaching quadriplegics to attain orgasm through touch stimulation of their head for example rather than their genitalia), many of which point to the somewhat universal nature of neurons and their ability to remap to different inputs and outputs by simply retraining them purposefully.

The fascinating thing for me about this work is:

• the brain works without a heart (or so it appears unless I read the article incorrectly) which makes me ask, what is feeding it? Also, it’s interesting to me that all you need is the core material and then it just works – it does what it is supposed to do, which is receive inputs, establish communication channels, and drive outputs.

• it is a true bionic hybrid, similar to the guy who sent email via his thoughts recently.

Matt asked me what I thought of the ethics of this work. I don’t think there are any ethical problems with designing and building hybrid bionic creatures to understand the cognitive systems and signalling networks.

Although I do admit that the idea of fleshy brain material being inside this device did give me pause for a moment for some reason that I still can’t articulate.

UPDATE: This Wired article discusses research at Andrew Schwartz’s neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh that allowed them to train a monkey to learn how to use a robotic arm simply by sending it brain signals, in essence, re-mapping some small subset of neurons to the inputs and outputs of this robotic arm. The monkey could then use the arm to feed itself. Once again, this seems to point to the brain as being quickly able to adapt to new limbs, new motor skills, and new sensations or at least the sensation of sensation.

In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants decontaminate the soil), make money (enough to pay for the process AND make a profit), and also keep small artisan miners in business, although now they are watching over crops instead of pouring chemicals into the old mines.

UPDATE: Closer to home, Matt brought my attention to a successful joint effort between Teck-Cominco, Western Bioresources Consulting, and Celgar Pulp Mill. Thanks Matt!

These are great examples of triple-bottom-line thinking.

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The Massive Change project encompasses a variety of media including a book, an international exhibition, public events, a radio program. The online forum and film are in the process of being created.

I had the good fortune to be given, as a present for completing my 35th year outside of the womb, a ticket to attend a day long series of panel discussions with some very brilliant minds of the day including such visionaries as Esther Dyson (Chairman of EDVenture Holdings – a venture capital firm, and author of Release 1.0), and Dean Kamen (creator of the Segway.)

The day was broken up into five separate conversations on a theme with a moderator and two panelists. The subject matter included the continued exponential expansion of the “global mind”; wealth & politics; evolution’s designs (biology as template); urban design, space, and transportation; and finally military applications of design and the transfer of technology from the military to the public sector and also in reverse.

I did not take a lot of notes as I did not have a laptop with me so this posting contains some overall impressions, a few specific notes, and a few of my own thoughts on some of the discussion points.

Session 1: Information and Image: Building the Global Mind
With: Bill Buxton: human/computer interface researcher and designer and Esther Dyson: venture capitalist, and general techno-diva.

Interestingly Esther has no phone at home, nor does she drive a car. I figured that if she doesn’t drive a car, she must live in New York. I checked the address of EDventure holdings and sure enough, that’s where it is. I’m not sure that’s where she lives, but where else could somebody with her schedule get by without a car?

I was really expecting a lot from this session but Esther couldn’t seem to connect to Bill’s conversation at all. Bill on the other hand was engaging, energetic, and driven. I could have listened to or talked with him for hours.

Esther gave the audience a long explanation of her work with ICANN over the past couple of years and if I may be so bold as to summarize it, it was this:

It sounded like she had been through a war.

Bill Buxton, having for the most part, his own conversation on his side of the stage waxed poetic about why Alvin Toffler’s ideas were wrong the night before, how humans can’t think on large timescales (or was that Dyson?), and how it is impossible to be a renaissance person but that the way to handle that is to build renaissance teams.

One of the interesting points of his conversation was where he talked about James Murray, one of the key editors of the Oxford dictionary, perhaps the single largest open-source off-line project in the world, where every word in every book in the history of the English language had to be found, traced, and documented. A fascinating history can be found over here at Wikipedia.  According to Buxton, this type of document exists in no other language in the world.

Unfortunately for this session and two others, Bruce Mau moderated it and while I think he did a superlative job with organizing the whole Massive Change project, he is not a moderator and that role should have been handled all day by somebody like Charlie Rose who moderated sessions 2 and 4. Without a strong moderator, the conversations did not connect, the panelists were often left trying to fill the space on their own, and a lot less real content was delivered in the end.

Session 2: Wealth and Politics: Is the World Getting Better?
With: Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, specializing in analyzing cultural and economic shifts, design innovations and strategies for ethical leadership and Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist and sustainable development consultant.

My take-away from Andrew was that there are serious demographic changes that will drive severe global economic changes and that those forces are different in different countries. He gave a brief tutorial on the work that he does with the Demographics Society, showing the various demographic bell-curves of various countries. He showed a normal curve (looks like a bell); the U.S. curve (lots of kids at the bottom makes it like bell-bottomed pants); and terrorist  states (lots of young men, no economic middle class, very few old people to lead the society).

The fundamental message from Hazel and from the work that she has been so passionately involved in for many years was that the currently used metrics of capitalist economies around the world, are wrong. GDP and GNP are measuring the wrong thing. What gets measured (pure economic output), improves. Therefore we increase efficiency to bump up the numbers but we end up with high outputs and a lousy society. So her goal is to build a new set of measurements and then disseminate those far and wide in the hope that if countries were measuring quality of life rather than just pure economic outputs, they would at least have a useful measuring stick.

This was a topic of frequent conversation when I attended the Environmental Studies department at UVic a decade ago. For example, if you introduce a set of policies and environmental carcinogens that end up causing a higher incidence of cancer, which in turn requires more expensive doctor visits….voilá…higher GDP. Often, extremely negative real-world results translate into higher GDP rankings.

One of the new measurement systems that Hazel discussed is the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators:

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Helen managed to bring up a few more issues noted here:

• Her friend Jeremy Rifkin has just launched his new book titled The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.

[I have another of Jeremy Rifkin's books titled The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World and it is an incredible read. I am also interested in his book The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth but have not yet had a chance to read it.]

• Another interesting website/project that is currently underway is Freecycle.org, an international free + recycling project where people can give and receive things that they have to other people in their local community. So rather than keeping that old box of cables, many of which you probably paid $10-30 for, you can list them on Freecycle. Then somebody else who happens to need that thing can come by and get it from you – for free. There is no bartering, all of the items listed must be given free of charge.

[I subscribed to their site which actually runs the listings using Yahoo Groups with notifications that come into your mailbox of your mail client which you can set up a rule for to siphon off into a Freecycle folder. I would prefer to see it done via something like Craigslist and using RSS feeds, but hopefully they'll get there.]

Session 3: Designing Evolution
With: Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry and advocate of nature based design innovation and John Todd, biologist and designer of Eco Machines for the treatment of waste, food production, generation of fuel and water treatment.

Janine began the session with an overview of biomimetic design principles by examining the stage furniture (chair, table, water jug) and explained the differences between how nature would make a material and how we make that same material using toxic, ecologically wasteful processes.

Then John Todd discussed his eco-machines, large greenhouses that contain a few thousand species of creatures and plants from all five bio-kingdoms – monera, protista, plantae, fungi, animalia – a classification that has recently been usurped by a three domain model.

Some notes from his waste-water Eco-machine:

• to build an eco-machine, you combine ecologies and direct them towards a goal; to do this, he combines ecologies in order to solve particular problems;

• he can build systems that require only 1/10 of the inputs of a traditional man-made system;

• his sewage treatment Eco-Machine treats 100,000 gallons / day of sewage and outputs perfectly clean water. The input speed has no effect on the output quality.

• in order to build something of this complexity, he can’t plan it. He can only build them by combining several thousand species from all five kingdoms and then let them self-select out until they find their balance equilibrium at which point there are usually still around 300 unique species left in the Eco-Machine.

Back to Janine Benyus, she discussed her new project called “Google for Biodiversity.”

She started by getting a bunch of biologists together with a bunch of industrial designers. She then had the designers say things like, “I would like to build a pump.” Then the biologists would go away, compile all the information on the 24 pumps found across 68 creatures (I made those numbers up) and then present that to the designer. The designer would find the one that was the best fit, replicate it using other materials, and then voila – biomimetically inspired pump design! However, this was very labour intensive. The biologists and designers didn’t speak the same language. And the biological data was not organized by function, but by animal.  So, “Google for Biodiversity” was formed.

The goal of this project is to catalog all biological data by function rather than by animal and then to build a translator between the biology world and the design world, such that a designer working on a project can say, “I need a solar desalinization device” and then the website will identify all of the potential possibilities that exist in the world’s creatures and allow the designer to pick and choose from that of the mango for example, and try to replicate the function in his design.

The problem is a difficult one. The two ontologies do not connect and have to be mapped to each other. The biological data is currently referenced by creature, not by function. And having biologists and designers sit side by side is expensive and not very scaleable.

Janine and her students are currently building a proof of concept of this system where they have tagged 12 species of creature appropriately and can now search the animals using designer language.

I asked Janine whether or not she was using Semantic Web tools to build her system, and surprisingly she wasn’t and in fact, had never heard of the semantic web at all. I suggested to her that she should look into it as it would help her with the ontological mapping and tagging. It would also be interesting to see if you could deploy something like Axonwave‘s NLP-based tools to assist the humans by applying the semantic tags or else aiding in the re-categorization of biological data by function.

My favourite quote of Janine’s was: “Limits [of resources] should be considered by designers as a design contest – an opportunity to exercise their skill in designing efficient mechanisms.”

However, I personally believe that the best way to ensure that this happens in any particular area is for constraints to be quantified, clarified, and made explicit. And in those cases where they don’t exist, make them up if you have to. Humans rarely if ever design efficiently for the sheer challenge of it. Design is hard enough as it is. They wait until they are pushed into it. That is why the best thing that could happen to alternative energy development would be for something horrendous to occur that jacks oil up to $500/barrel – a 10x multiple over its current Fall 2004 price. THAT would boost spending and ingenuity in the energy/transportation sector like nothing else. Designers the world over would engage their efficiency creativity and you can be darned sure that automobiles would be getting 100mph in about 12 months.

Session 4: Urban Space, Movement, and Energy
With: Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, entrepreneur, founder of DEKA Research that builds the stair-climbing wheelchair; and Jaime Lerner, architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, where he revolutionized transit and recycling programs.

Lerner spoke on the history of Curitiba, Brazil and his mayoralty there. When he first became mayor and the city was at 600,000 people and approaching a million, he was advised by mayors of all of the other major cities of the world that he absolutely HAD to build a light rail transit system. Fortunately for Curitiba, they did not have the money to do so. So he built a bus system that ended up surpassing most if not all LRT systems in the world, that is self-funding (it pays for itself and requires no subsidies) and that moves more people than LRT systems at 1/8 of the cost. It has been hailed the world over as a transportation model to be applied to many of the world’s cities as they face increased density, and mounting LRT construction and legal costs and timelines.

He talked about how New York has been talking for FIFTY years about putting an LRT line on 2nd Avenue. They have finally approved it. But it will take twenty years to build. Seventy years of not moving people because the solution is so drastically expensive and difficult to execute!!

Here were some of Lerner’s notes:

• live work and play in one part of the city. Separating functions is an economic and ecological disaster in the making.

• when you build transit, stay on the surface – don’t tunnel and don’t go above ground – both are expensive in terms of land-buy-backs and both are slow in terms of actual people moved across distances because of having to go underground and then above. Most of all, stay on the surface to minimize the costs of building underground or above ground on raised platforms.

• Ignore the peer pressure that says you need an LRT. You don’t. No city does.

• Curitiba moves 2 million people per day by bus. It pays for itself from ticket revenue.

• if a regular bus can move X people per day through the city, there are a couple of things you can do to get higher multiples. If you have a dedicated lane, that bus can move 2x the people. If that bus is articulated, then you can move another 1.7x the people. If that bus is a double-bus, it can move 2.5x the people. Add that all up and they are getting an 8.5x multiple over using a regular stand-alone bus! Because they are using double-decker articulated buses that get their own dedicated bus lanes all through the city. BRILLIANT.

• another awesome part of their buses is that to get on a bus you enter a bus-tube that is a tube-shaped building at the bus-stop. You pay to go into the tube, and then when the bus arrives five sets of doors on the bus open into the tube platform. It’s like an LRT but only two bus-lengths long. So the people can move in/out of the bus in 5 or 10 seconds and then all of the doors shut and the bus moves off again. When you leave the bus, you then exit the tube from the opposite end you entered from. This tube-platform minimizes idle time and keeps the passengers sheltered from the weather.

• Their buses arrive at the tube every 30 seconds. As he noted, many people do not like taking the bus because they have to learn the routes and the timing or they waste a lot of time. Well, if a bus is coming by every 30 seconds, that’s not an issue!

• Recycling is handled by exchanging items of value for the goods that need to be recycled. Even the poorest squatters are paid for their garbage with tickets for the buses, or food from outlying farms. Curitiba recycles 2/3 of its garbage, one of the highest urban recycling rates in the world.

• Even the fishermen are paid to clean up the ocean. They are paid if they catch fish, and they are paid by the city if they catch garbage like tires or car parts.

My favourite quote of Lerner’s was: “The city is not a problem; it is a solution.”

I loved this guy. He laughed quickly and easily and it was obvious that he was extremely passionate about the principles that they had used to build Curitiba. He was also pleased that at last count, 87 more cities had begun to build using these same principles. But it had taken 20 years for that to happen!

–

Dean Kamen spoke about his motivation to build the Segway 2 wheeled device.

• When Ford built the car, 9% of people lived in cities.

• As of 2000, >50% of the global population lived in cities (>3.2B of 6.4B).

• the average speed of the automobile in most cities is 9mph, the same speed of the Segway.

• he feels that the car is designed for the freeway and should absolutely be used to drive on the freeway, but then it should be left at the city gates in much the way that horses and carts were also left outside the ancient cities. We should be using other forms of transportation from the outer ring to the inner core of the city.

I have to say that as much as I like Dean Kamen and as cool as the Segway is, even I wouldn’t run around on one because they’re just so….geeky(?) I’m not sure what it is but something bugs me about them. Maybe it’s just the dorkiness factor. I can’t quite pin it down.

Also, bikes widely distributed by the city and covered bike routes would do more for commuters than expensive electric Segways everywhere, although Paris is trying an experiment with them.

I think the biggest difference between the panelists was the following. One had built an incredible city of 1.6 million people on ecological principles and the values of simple, cheap, and quick. Kamen was trying to solve the commute problem by adding a heavy, electricity-using scooter that was difficult to get up and down stairs and that would pretty much require putting a rack onto your vehicle in order to carry. It is the solution for cities that we don’t actually have. I mean, I give the guy points for long term fifty year vision, but I still don’t get it. And there are a lot of other things we can do that are cheap, quick, and simple like Lerner has done.

(To be continued…)

• outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar trends;
• China is committed to building 50 MIT equivalent institutions;
• their move towards generating intellectual property may result in them actually caring about same;
• computer technology will disperse and become ubiquitous – routers, desktop computers and servers will disappear – [I have a hard time with the server part.]
• IT departments will become Information Departments, focused on privacy, data protection, and security against pathogens;
• humans and machines will merge through the application of nano-machinery and nano-computing intelligence added into the body and brain;
• culture shock won’t happen because of the boiling frog theory (my paraphrase);
• biotech is just beginning [I agree, we're only 36 years into what may well be another standard 80-100 year technology cycle.]
• we currently have the means through diet and supplementation (he takes 250 supplements per day) to slow down aging such that the person can still be around to take advantage of biotech discoveries that will allow them to rebuild their bodies and brains in order to live a longer life;

I love Ray Kurzweil because his interviews and writings are always so completely outrageous to most people.

And my favourite quote of all was when the interviewer, in response to the augmented intelligence comments, asked him, “Aren’t you smart enough already?”

Ray replied:

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I love this because I relate! I am interested in so many fields that I find it difficult to specialize and deepen my skillset in any one of them.

Humans are funny creatures in that we have no sense of scale or proportion. We will spend $50,000USD to rescue one dog in an emergency, rather than take that money and sponsor the ongoing care of 500 pound dogs. We will spend millions on a trial to put Martha Stewart behind bars for a single sell-order rather so as to be SEEN to be doing something rather than apply those funds to finding and prosecuting real criminals. We go from disillusionment with our government on the one side to throwing them entirely out of power on the other side. (That last item is particularly British Columbian.) As a society, we seem to have no sense of proportion at all. Our irrationality and emotional nature seem to conspire to make us see-saw from one extreme to the other in an instant because that is easier than maintaining focus in the long-term on a particular direction.

We are like a short-sighted, stupid, and temperamental ogre – oblivious to most things and quite unable to plan long term, but once riled, quick to act and extremely out of proportion in its response.

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It might be the bias inherent in my own network of friends, particularly because of the fact that many of us went through the Leadership Vancouver program here, which is focused very heavily on community development, but it certainly feels to me like many of the entrepreneurs I know are also more interested in building companies while having a positive impact on the community around them. Some of the examples of this are particularly obvious in the bioproducts arena where many of the technologies are truly green.

Another great example is the work being done by the people over at BC Technology Social Venture Partners in association with many of the local social entrepreneurs.

Look for web-reports that the author of this will surely exceed bandwidth limits on his/her Earthlink site soon.