PopTech Videos: PopCasts

Jer Thorp, who has launched The Office For Creative Research, explores the boundaries between science, data, art, and culture. His work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. “I come here today because I am excited about data, but also because I am terrified. I am terrified that we are having progress without culture in the world of data.”

Andri Magnason is an Icelandic writer who co-directed the documentary film Dreamland, about a massive industrial project in Iceland that exposed some ugly truths about politics, industry and so-called green energy. He studies what seem like cycles of endless growth simply for growth’s sake. “I was wondering about how rational we are as humans. Where does this come from? Where does this need, this addiction come from?”

Bill Shore is the founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit that is working to end childhood hunger in America. “Those of us who are passionate about social change and social innovation, we have got to find ways to break the rules. I believe it is a strategic necessity and a moral imperative.”

Revered as “The Sound of New York,” Young Guru has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s albums and officially became Jay-Z’s tour D.J. in 2010. “When we study hip-hop we are actually studying the history of piracy. If we go back and study all piracy, we see that most things that were created in the world are a remix of something else.”

Dean Karlan is President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems, and works to scale-up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. He is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. “There are some problems that we can solve. But we have to be pragmatic about it and figure out what is actually working and what is not.”

Peter Kareiva is the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Kareiva is often noted for his emphasis on nature’s resiliency, rather than its impending doom. “Totally unnecessarily we get into a conversation where it is farmers versus conservation, where it is loggers versus conservation, where it is fishermen versus conservation.”

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.”

Kelly Benoit-Bird, an oceanographer at Oregon State University, applies acoustics to the study of ecosystems in the open ocean. “When we look more deeply at the ocean, we are given new insights on how we interact with that ocean, and what we can do to effectively protect it.”

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, MD and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch, Ph.D., founded Threshold GlobalWorks to explore a neurobiological approach to social resilience. “We are all wired with it, in case you did not know that,” says Leitch. “We are born neurologically wired for resilience because our system is survival-based.”

Eiríkur Hrafnsson calls his new company, Green Qloud, the world’s first green cloud computing company, bucking a frightening trend. “ It is not far-fetched to imagine that in 30 or 40 years, 50 percent of our energy will be spent on IT.”

Yossi Sheffi explores the various flavors of redundancy, simplicity, flexibility and communications strategies businesses employ to make themselves resilient. “These are the most dangerous things; the things that have severe consequence and low probability…These are the events one worries about when one has to run a large organization.”

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, 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.”

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.”

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.