The weather conditions weren’t ideal, Colin Rich recalled in a recent phone interview.

The artist planned to release one of his DIY camera-balloons at PopTech 2010. In preparation for the balloon’s release, he had installed two secondhand digital cameras inside a Styrofoam mannequin head he’d dubbed PopStar, attaching the head to a homemade high-altitude weather balloon with a bit of duct tape and some string. The plan was that once in flight, the cameras would regularly collect videos and still images until, around 125,000 feet, the balloon would burst and deploy a parachute. Rich hoped PopStar would safely land within 100 miles of the central Maine launch site but gusting winds threatened to whisk it hundreds of miles away.

Rich launched the device and hoped for the best.

“Something went wrong near the apex [of the flight]. Maybe there was a gust of wind or the parachute deployed too early,” Rich recalled. When he recovered the PopStar rig in a blueberry field using the GPS that had been attached to the contraption, he only found the mannequin head and one of the cameras. The parachute as well as the base — and the second camera within it — were missing. Somehow, the rig had fallen apart in midair.

Colin presented images from the one recovered camera on the PopTech stage “We were at a conference on necessary failures so it seemed to fit the theme. I figured the [second] camera was lost forever.”

Then, in early December, Rich received a Facebook message from St. Andrew’s Oceanographic Institute researcher Josh Nunn: I have the missing camera!

Rich learned that the camera had landed off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, floating in the Bay of Fundy for several weeks until researchers fished it out of the water. The external case was battered. Salt and battery acid had corroded everything. The camera was ruined but the camera’s memory card was still intact!

It would have have been thrown away except that Nunn noticed that the card contained footage – and Rich’s name embedded in the files. After finding a Huffington Post article on Rich, Nunn realized that these images might be important so he found him on Facebook.

Within a week, Rich received a box containing the missing media. Some of the footage had been corrupted, but Rich has been able to salvage much of the material, including this video.

To find its way back to Rich, the camera had traveled 24 miles into the air, over 150 miles across North America, and then across cyberspace. “Out of the sheer vastness of space, someone had tracked down the missing camera and found me through the Internet,” Rich laughed. “I think that’s the really cool thing to come out of this.”

If you’ve checked out Spark, PopTech’s pilot youth initiative, you might have noticed that high school students are a critical part of the campaign.

Four rising seniors were selected as this year’s Spark Connectors: Keziah Green and Anthony Morris, both from BCAM High School in Brooklyn, New York; Molly White, from Camden Hills Regional High School in Rockport, Maine; and Sarina Chawla, from Tesla Engineering Charter School in Neenah, Wisconsin.

In advance of PopTech 2010, all four Connectors attended a one-day workshop, learning how to visualize ideas with Peter Durand, tell stories with Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad, and produce video with Chris Walker-Spencer. During the conference, the Connectors used these tools on the Spark blog to record their thoughts and interviews about the speakers they’d seen present.

Molly met and interviewed a couple of her favorite speakers, eco-adventurer David de Rothschild and Graham Hill. Sarina practiced the visual approach to telling stories, capturing two views on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Keziah learned what being wrong reveals about memory and human nature. She and Anthony also found time to celebrate the hard-working staff that produces the PopTech conference every year.

When asked what they had learned at PopTech, Anthony summed it up nicely. “It only takes one person to change the world. I want to be part of that.”

PopTech contributor Jonathan Laurence captured these students’ participation with the Spark program at PopTech 2010. Check it out!

Photos:Thatcher Hullerman Cook

As part of PopTech’s Spark youth initiative, biotech entrepreneur Dr. Hayat Sindi visited Coastal Studies for Girls in Freeport, Maine this past Thursday. Sindi shared her story about how she became a world-class scientist and innovator and discussed challenges the participating 10th grade students face in achieving their goals.

Sindi recounted how, as a girl growing up in Saudi Arabia, she dreamed of becoming a scientist. Despite significant social pressure to remain at home, Sindi moved to the U.K. to pursue her studies. Once there, Sindi said, many doubted her ability and resolve. Undeterred, she earned her PhD in biotechnology and achieved international recognition for her work. Not content to just succeed in the lab, Sindi has become a social innovation leader, helping to develop a portable, low-cost diagnostic tool that makes it possible to monitor patients in even the most remote settings.

While her work could transform global health worldwide, Sindi revealed that she still faces significant challenges. She told the students that some critics have dismissed her accomplishments, suggesting that true science is only practiced in the lab. Sindi brushed off this criticism. “We need to extend the social benefits of nanotechnology to the poorest in this world,” Sindi explained. “They are the ones who could benefit most from this kind of work.” Sindi is also developing more opportunities for scientific research, and for women in the sciences, in the Middle East.

With the recession lingering on, technology entrepreneur Lisa Gansky thinks it’s the perfect reason to give experiences rather than more stuff this holiday season.

Gansky introduced the idea when she spoke at PopTech 2010 about her predictions for the future of business. She revealed how the interconnected relationships and information of the emerging “mesh” economy is making it far easier to share goods and services without the expense of ownership. Gansky recently published a book on the subject, called The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

A number of companies, among them Netflix and the car sharing service Zipcar, are taking advantage of the data-rich “mesh” to build richer experiences and stronger brands by providing people with what they need the moment they need it. [Other companies can be found in her book, and in the accompanying online directory.]

The “mesh” is not just good for business, says Gansky. It’s also good for consumers. Web-enabled mobile devices and social networks are “taking the friction out of sharing,” unleashing the true impact of peer-to-peer relationships by helping consumers buy less but use more.

Gansky’s gift guide is a great way to join the experience marketplace, presenting an offbeat take on holiday giving where there are “no boxes, no gift wrap, no batteries required.”

Psychologist and neuroscientist Chris Chabris studies the numerous ways our intuitions fool us. Chabris is the co-creator of the famous “gorilla experiment” and author of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. He explores six “everyday illusions” that demonstrate the mistaken beliefs that we all hold about how our minds work.

For example, Chabris says that we often suffer from an “illusion of attention,” thinking that we see the world as it really is when in fact we are making all kinds of assumptions that shape how we perceive the real world. We also tend to have too much confidence in our own skills and abilities, and the least skilled tend to be the most overconfident. Another illusion that Chabris discusses is the illusion of cause: we tend to inaccurately connect cause and effect, when what really exists is accident or correlation.

You can also try a few of the experiments discussed in Chabris’ book.

Speakers Robert Fabricant and Gustav Praekelt took to the PopTech stage to talk about the next chapter for Project Masiluleke, an innovative effort to leverage mobile technologies and a bold self-diagnosis campaign to combat South Africa’s crippling HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics.

In the two years since Project M launched, the initiative has proven itself to be a transformative intervention that allows public health initiatives to directly reach the public. It helped create a self-testing kit that allows people to learn their HIV status from the privacy of their homes, and despite the pronounced social stigma surrounding the disease. According to Praekelt, Project M has also delivered more than 800 million text messages, at no cost to users and while generating revenue for local phone operators. In addition, the project has also established a successful AIDS help line, which has received about 1.5 million calls to date.

Project M’s success demonstrates the real world impact of PopTech, says Fabricant. The idea for the project emerged in response to Zinny Thabethe’s appearance at the PopTech 2006 conference. HIV positive herself, Zinny has been fighting to reverse the course of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Moved by her story, an interdisciplinary mix of partners that included Fabricant, of frog design, Praekelt, of the Praekelt Foundation, and representatives from iTeach.

The initiative also received critical support from PopTech’s Accelerator, a social innovation incubator that works to sustain the earliest stages of transformative initiatives. It’s tempting for designers to think they’ve solved something, says Fabricant, when there’s often a huge gap between bright ideas and actually achieving something worthwhile. The initial creative plan for Project M only took a few days, yet implementing the project and ensuring that it would be sustainable proved to be a far greater challenge. “Who is going to do all the messy, dirty things," asks Fabricant. "This is what PopTech did for two years, on every level imaginable.”

In May 2010, Project M won the prestigious 2010 Impumelelo Sustainability Award. Now that the initiatives has demonstrated its effectiveness within communities, the award grant will be used to build public awareness about the project itself.

Ben Goldacre is a fast talker. He has to be. He has so many examples of bad science to share.

Goldacre is a British physician and author of the weekly”Bad Science” column in the Guardian as well as of Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks. He takes on an impressive range of “enemies of reason,” a list that includes sloppy journalists, creationists, politicians that play fast and loose with the truth, pharmaceutical companies that design faulty drug trials, and a media that promotes pseudoscience. For example, suggesting that certain foods or objects can cause or cure diseases like cancer muddles the distinction between facts and beliefs. It can also be downright dangerous.

Goldacre shares the story of Matthias Rath, a German doctor who condemned anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS and instead offered his own vitamins to a gullible South African public. Rath not only grew rich on his scheme, his efforts also helped validate claims by “HIV denialists” who suggest that the virus was not the cause of AIDS, says Goldacre. This view had critical support within the South African government, and paved the way for the country to refuse necessary drug treatment to citizens. According to Goldacre, this “dumb idea” cost more than 300,000 South Africans their lives between 2002-2005.

What Goldacre finds just as frustrating is how few people have stepped forward to denounce Rath and his activities. He notes that almost no one in the alternative therapy community has spoken out. That might have something to do with Rath’s willingness to defend himself in court. When Goldacre wrote about him in his Bad Science column, the vitamin salesmen sued Goldacre and the Guardian for libel. (Rath has since dropped his suit and ordered to pay damages.)

The HIV story has terrible consequences. It reveals how difficult it is to adequately explain the complexities of science to the general public. It also suggests how difficult it is for many people to accept scientific inquiry as the dominant way to understand the world, often choosing instead to rely on anecdotal evidence and untested claims. Bad science, says Goldacre, is something we do to ourselves.

Eli Pariser spent the last decade organizing people. Now, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, is organizing information.

Algorithms generally manage the enormous amounts of available data by giving you more of what you like with every click. The trouble, says Pariser, is that the vision of perfect machine categorization often fails to adequately represent the multiple ways that information can be grouped.

To underscore his point, Pariser tells the story about physicist Niels Bohr, who once proposed calculating the height of a building by using a barometer as a weight. Bohr’s failure to use the barometer as a measurement device meant he failed his high school physics exam but it also reveals a flexibility of thought that machine curation does not adequately capture.

For example, Netflix bases its categorization system on prediction, namely “if you like this, you’ll like that.” Once the Netflix model determines a user like romantic comedies, says Pariser, it will continue to suggest romantic comedies, effectively narrowing the types recommended. In other words, the Netflix algorithm doesn’t provide users with risky choices.

Pariser says that machine curation also risks reducing the “noise,” namely the randomness and unpredictably, of information to a point that it impedes the creative process. Here, Pariser points to Dean Simonton’s research on spontaneous creativity and the likelihood that similar creative ideas will pop up in a lot of different places the same time. “A perfectly relevant environment,” laments Pariser, “lacks the ability to recognize this kind of variation.”

Pariser suggests that this narrowing of information doesn’t need to be inevitable. “We need media systems to make us uncomfortable. We need media to help us pay attention to the things that we don’t know. We need systems that don’t block us.”

In the meantime, he’s starting to work on a site he’s going to call thingsyoullhate.com. It’s not up yet, but when it is, Pariser wants it to highlight ideas and things that people completely unlike you think are great.

(Photo credit: Kris Krüg)

9th graders Nour Al-Arda, Asil Abulil, and Asil Shaar, and their teacher, Jameela Khaled, are proof of the power of innovation driven by local needs.

They realized that the rough terrain and rundown streets around their home in the West Bank Al-Askar refugee camp made life difficult for a blind friend. So, they developed an electronic cane equipped with ground sensors which cause it to beep or vibrate when confronted by a hole or obstacle. Earlier this year, the four won a special award in applied enginering at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair — a first for any Palestinian representative.

(Photo credit: Kris Krüg)

2010 Social Innovation Fellow Matthew Berg says Africa is ready to code.

Berg says that Africa needs to build its local technical capacity if its going to be able to locally, and sustainably, address the continent’s profound health issues. So, he helped create the Rural Technology Lab to train the continent’s first generation of programmers. They are learning to build community initiatives by leveraging the exploding popularity of mobile phones with technologies like RapidSMS.

With the help of this lab and the MillenniumVillages Project, Berg has created ChildCount+, a mobile-phone-based health platform. The project works with community health care workers to ensure that mothers and their children are part of community health systems. By using basic SMS messages, communities are able to register patients as well as track their health in a community patient registry. The pilot program has already registered more than 10,000 kids and 5,000 mothers.

(Photo credit: Kris Krüg)