PopTech Blog

Whether you're ready or not, the holidays are upon us and that means that between spending time with family and friends, you might find yourself with some extra time to crack open a book. If you need a little literary guidance before plopping down on the couch, what follows is a list of books that a few of us at PopTech are looking forward to kicking back and curling up with between sips of egg nog or mulled cider.

• Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything by F.S Michaels (Emily Qualey, Online Producer)

• The Penguin and the Leviathan by Yochai Benkler (Andrew Zolli, Executive Director, Curator)

• Show & Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material edited by Julie Ault (Andy Dayton, Web Designer)

• Just Kids by Patti Smith (Jim Ruddy, Technical Director)

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Chris Kelly, Assistant)

• Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Dan Barasch, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships)

• It Chooses You by Miranda July (Emily Spivack, Editor-in-Chief)

• The View from Lazy Point by Carl Safina (Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Contributor)

What will you be reading over the holidays? Let us know in the comments.

Image: Source unknown

Lightning bolts strike around the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic chain near southern Osorno city [in Chile], on June 5, 2011. (Reuters/Ivan Alvarado)

via The Atlantic's Year in Volcanic Activity slideshow

Amy Sun, founding architect of MIT’s Fab Lab program and 2011 Social Innovation Fellow, explains how the program she created "gives people access to the tools and processes for the modern means of invention." What that translates to are successful programs that have enabled citizens in Afghanistan and Kenya to 'make the Internet' based on the resources they have at their disposal. When you provide people and their ideas with tools and a guiding set of principals, Sun believes, it can unlock capacity and energize a community.

There's always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week's highlights follows.

• When PopTech volunteer Brent Danley prompted his 12-year-old daughter Skye to choose one PopTech speaker who she'd like to meet, she picked 2010 presenter and 2009 Science Fellow Sarah Fortune. Danley, who met Fortune at those two previous PopTech conferences, scheduled a family field trip to Fortunes' lab at Harvard. Read more about their trip here. 

• Erik Hersman (PopTech 2011) wrote a guest blog post on PBS' Idea Lab blog, explaining SwiftRiver, a free and open source intelligence platform that helps people curate and make sense of large amounts of information in a short period of time. 

• Designer Nicholas Felton (PopTech 2009) was recently interviewed by Substratum and divulged how he became a designer/artist, how working in a community influences approach and how his design goals have changed over time. Previous interviews feature PopTech speakers Heather Knight (PopTech 2010) and Zach Lieberman (PopTech 2009). 

• This week The Economist explored what video game technology can accomplish in the real world. Noted in the article is PopTech 2011 Science Fellow Adrien Treuille and his colleagues who are outsourcing research through gaming.

• Using genomes as an archeological record, PopTech 2011 Science Fellow Pardis Sabeti studies the patterns of natural selection. Sabeti is currently leading development of a new massive scientific data-mining tool. 
  

If you'd like to receive a stream of these updates (and more) throughout the week in real time, follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the PopTech blog.

Image: SwiftRiver/Ushahidi

This article was written for PopTech by Captain Wayne Porter. It serves as an update on A National Strategic Narrative (pdf), authored by Captain Wayne Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby, which proposes that the United States must refocus its foreign policy priorities and invest less in overt militarization and more in education, development aid, and sustainability infrastructure. For more on A National Strategic Narrative, watch Porter and Mykleby's PopTech 2011 talk.  - Ed.

At the PopTech 2011 conference, Puck Mykleby and I were offered the extraordinary opportunity to share our perspective on America’s positive trajectory in the 21st century as reflected in our “National Strategic Narrative” [published online by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in April 2011].   The response we received was not only personally gratifying, it validated for us the willingness of American citizens to recognize that the world’s greatest challenges offer the greatest opportunities, that our values and hope trump fear and victimization, and that the antidotes for anxiety and decline are education, innovation, and hard work.

Puck and I have been asked many times since our presentation, by a wide variety of people, what they might do to play a more positive role in pursuing the sustainability of our national prosperity and security - at home and abroad - in a complex global environment.   We can’t pretend to have a formulaic response to that because the actions each person chooses to take are based upon what they feel most passionate about.

In the National Strategic Narrative we offer three priorities we believe are imperative for sustainable prosperity and security in this interconnected Age of Uncertainty: a commitment to improving the education of our youth; a broader understanding of “security” and the tools required to achieve that; and, the development of, and access to, renewable resources for a growing global population with dreams of a better future.  America has a leadership role to play in this new strategic environment, and that begins at home.  We’ve heard too much about blame and not enough about responsibility.  It’s time to focus less on entitlement, and more on enlightenment.  Read more...