You may have noticed certain avatars around the Internet looking a bit more hirsute than usual. While it’s true that winter’s coming and folks tend to get a little scruffier to stay warm, there’s actually a method to this mustache madness, or at least a good reason for the facial hair season.

We’re in the midst of “Movember”, an international effort to draw attention to men’s health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer by encouraging folks to grow mustaches. Movember participants are encouraged to register, then grow and photograph their mustaches as they unfurl. The ability to form teams adds a competitive edge, and women are encourage to join in the fun as “Mo Sistas” (that’s my company BatchBlue’s team BatchStash up there and yes, we are looking good!)

Started in Australian in 2003, Movember had nearly 180,000 participants last year. They’ve partnered with the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Live Strong (Lance Armstrong’s foundation), who split the funds evenly at the conclusion of the event.

So how does sporting big, beautiful mustaches help with fundraising? Well, just the sight of a mustache on a ordinarily nude lip can spark a conversation with friends and co-workers. From the Movember website:

“As an organization, we have a goal to change the attitude men hold toward their health. The moustache is the symbol by which we generate the necessary awareness and funds in order to be able to achieve this goal. It is a simple and effective way to achieve our number one objective – awareness.  The appearance of a new moustache opens up conversations, making the Movember participants a walking billboard, promoting men’s health for the whole month.” 

The rise in popularity of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have helped give the project even more exposure. You can follow the hashtag or official Movember account on Twitter, join their Facebook group, or check out their Flickr stream showcasing mustaches from past years’ events.

But it’s not all fun and facial fur. So far this month, Movember’s raised over 20 million dollars internationally — that’s a lot of mustache wax!   

If you or someone you know has been affected by prostate or testicular cancer, please consider donating to this cause. If you just want to come out in support of mustaches, there will be Movember Gala Parties taking place across the globe in early December.

Remember: sometimes a mustache isn’t just a mustache. It’s an attractive facial hair embellishment that can save lives.

Scientist James Fowler is a professor at University of California San Diego, where he studies the intersection of social and natural sciences. His most recent book is Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. For years, he has studied the role our real-life networks play in our health outcome.

CC image by Kris Krug.

You hear social networks these days and what do you think of? Twitter, Facebook etc. But Fowler is interested in “what became before”.  Part of what makes us human, says Fowler, is that we live in “webs of humanity”. Who are we going to be friends with? Who do we let in and how do they influence us?

The simplest kind of natural network is a pair. Pairs connect to form beautiful webs. How do these networks form? What is their purpose? How do they connect us?

We shape our networks. We chose who we bring into our network. We even choose who within our network we connect with. Some of us want everyone to be friends with each other, others take a George Costanza approach, “We don’t want worlds to collide.”

In establishing a pairing: how many dates does it take to find Mr./Ms. right? Statistically, it would take 6,000 dates. With a network, you are in touch with personal information on a wide range of people. In fact, two out of three people who are married got married to within three degrees of separation.

Fowler is also interested in how these networks affect our lives. Researchers followed people for thirty-two years and asked questions like: where do you live? Who are you friends? They were able to see a vast, interconnected network. For the first time, they got a bird’s eyeview of a real social network. On one case, they studied obesity in Framingham – was it spreading like the flu? They were able to cluster info, size the data points to indicate obesity.

The results were not definitive, and had to account for false positives. These were easy to deal with: compare to results using a simulator. Or maybe people of the same type were choosing to be friends, reflecting a characteristic called homophily (we choose to be friends with people who are like us.) There was an advantage to having thirty-two years worth of data to draw from.

They made a movie visualizing this data, which Church played for the audience. In the clip, there are shifting lines, expanding and disappearing dots representing and tracking marriages, divorces, death. “We are connected in ways that other social species are: school of fish, flocks of birds”.

So to the issue of obesity: can your friends make you fat? It turns out that you are 57% more likely to have fat friends if you yourself enjoy a danish or three once in a while. Spouses and siblings have enormous influence.  But it’s only the truly deep connections that have that influence – you can’t catch obesity from a fat guy on the bus like cooties.

Some people whose friends gain weight stop being friends with them. But data shows that every friend makes you happier regardless of their weight i.e. it is better to have a fat friend than no friend at all. People who ended friendships when their friend gained weight ultimately ended up gaining themselves. A healthier lifestyles means getting friends and family involved. This is critically important if you want to make real change in your life.

Fowler also discussed “emotional stampedes”. Emotional states like happy, unhappy and neutral spread through networks. And, far-away friends affect you as much as people close to you. For instance, even seeing a far-away friend once a year getting fit can inspire you. 

There’s also financial contagion e.g. Northern Rock bank, where there was a run on the bank because everyone thought that everyone else thought the bank was going to fail. Contagion works with voting, too. Person to person effects; voting inspires others in their network to vote.

“Real influence spreads three degrees and no further,” says Fowler. They most affect obesity, smoking, drinking, happiness, altruism, loneliness and depression.  There’s a ripple effect in networks; influence and ties gets weaker the further you go out. They also conducted twin studies: can genes affect people’s social network structure? His research showed that it did.

There are important lessons to take online: social networks affect you in many ways. Is that the end of free will? No. Fowler personally reacted to this new evidence by losing five pounds. This, he feels, will potentially improve his son’s life, his son’s friends lives. By changing his behavior, he wants to take care of friends and family. “If you tell people that they can influence one thousand people, they will change their lives.”

Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman and Rachel Barenblat for their amazing live coverage these past two days! Picking up since they had to head south a little early. Safe travels to our PopTech friends!— MRR

“You may have noticed a small, roving, very adorable robot over the past few days,” jokes Andrew Zolli to begin the final session of PopTech. This robot is the work of roboticist Kacie Kinzer, who explains that she’s actually not that interested in robots, she’s more interested in people. Kinzer’s tiny, friendly robots, which she calls tweenbots, traverse cities unaided except for the help of strangers.   

CC image from Kris Krug

Kinzer, who lives in NYC, finds it often to be an overwhelming place: filled with “trash and noise and guys with clipboards”. This, she explains, makes it hard to have real moments of interaction and serendipity in the city; the very things that separate humans from robots. Her goal in creating tweenbots is to change the way people experience city on a very small scale, and to encourage them to engage with the city in a different way. In her words, to create “robots that make humans act more like humans.”

Tweenbots got their name both because they travel between spaces, and also because they are between humans and robots and between reality and imagination. “Sam”, the original tweenbot, rolls along in at straight path at a constant speed, proudly bearing a flag that reads “Help me! Trying to get to (a specific place in the city), aim me in the right direction.” His simple, smiling face is apparently quite effective in getting strangers to engage.

Kinzer’s efforts put Sam out in the city in the NE corner and tried to get him to the SE corner while recording what happened. “I quickly learned,” joked Kinzer, “that New Yorkers very rarely suspect they are being watched” so there was no need for hidden cameras, she could just record Sam’s interactions unobtrusively.

A video clip shows a man following Sam along for thirty seconds or so, then decides to help. Passing dogs look slightly confused but enthusiastic. The day that Kinzer shot the video was very hot, causing the rubber tread on the tire came off and Sam to go in circles. A group of seemingly delighted and unrelated men worked together to figure out what had happened and, like an ad hoc pit crew, found the missing tread, replaced it, and set him on his way again.

“You never really know how deep the level of engagement will go,” says Kinzer. A young woman talks to herself as she tries to orient him, triangulating to determine the best way. A street performer inspects him curiously. Throughout the clip, characteristically stern New Yorkers are laughing, helping, participating in this little robot’s journey.

“When I first started the tweenbots,” remarks Kinzer, “I had no idea that a cardboard robot in NYC would provoke such a poignant response.”

Her personal favorite moment from her experiment was when a man carefully turned the robot around, cautioning “You can’t go that way, it’s towards the road.”

“New Yorkers really brought the story to life and taught me about empathy and kindness,” says Kinzer. “Thank you, New York!” 

George Church, founder of the Personal Genome Project and Professor of Genetics and Harvard Medical School begins by thanking the crowd and mentioning how insprinig he’s found the past three days. So how can we harnass this energy and change it into action?

CC image by Kris Krug.

For furthering genetic research, he believes, the answer may be in crowdsourcing. “Data doesn’t do much good if you don’t share it.”

A challenge is that we’re at a point where we don’t know what the social standards for data sharing are going to be. For example. says Church, “Our faces are something that actually might be worth hiding” because they could unwittingly betray racial characteristics, emotions, or other things we might not want to share. “Openess has changed since we were young.” We used to not talk at all about topics like salary, illness, sexuality. But that’s changing. As an example, he mentioned the site Patients Like Me, which brings together people who have been diagnosed with life-altering illnesses to share symptoms, treatment, etc. In this case, what’s shared is balanced with how beneficial it is for the greater good of the community.

What about the risk of using this type of data for discrimination? The GINA act was passed in 2008: the Genetic information Nondiscrimination Act. This will prevent employers etc. from discriminating against someone because of their genetics. “Because,” Church says, “everyone is watching.”

You can now get your 10 year-old kid a DNA kit so they can do things like “determine who their fathers are,” joked Church. But that is actually happening: Church told a story about a boy who was the child of anonymous sperm donor. He got a kit, tested his saliva, located his father and showed up unannounced on his doorstep.

Not all DNA data are used for CSI-like idenitification. The data can be used to identify more than just genes and traits. It’s not, as Church states, “This is your genetics, get used to it” but a potential tool to inform lifestyle changes. 

Who can contribute to new cures and prevention? Anyone can by motivating others to do it, donating time and money and raising consciousness even though folks aren’t geneticists. 

So why open source data? “We do this because we’re not sure who is going to make the break-though,” says Church, “It’s the outsiders who often make the breakthroughs.” Volunteers participating in shaping the Human Genome Project and extensive education is done with the volunteers before they get involved. They have approval to scale to 100,000 diverse volunteers. Right now the biggest complaint is “Where’s my genome?” — people want this information!

Church revealed to the crowd that he himself is actually “a mutant”. His genetic code reveals that he has three heart problems, atypical infarction, arrythmia, narcolepsym dyslexia, skin cancer, and long femur syndrome (he’s tall). What do you do with this information? It used to be that would get generic health advice: excercise, drink milk, eat green beans, grains and iron unless…you have specific conditions that some of these solutions would exacerbate. Having specific data would better inform choices for potential treatment.

Data could also be used to create a “bioweather map”. Instead of having a cold front coming in, what if it was actually a mapped the spread of a virus? Working on this through the human genome project. 

What inspires us to participate? Being a part of a community: motivate, contribute time, raise awareness. “It’s like a walk-a-thon,” says Church, “Some will be walking, some will be cheerleading in various ways.”

Aviva Presser Aiden & Hugo Van Vuuren

2009 Poptech Fellows Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo Van Vuuren are the creators of Lebone, a dirt-powered battery. The battery, which was created for the base of the pyramid population, uses microbial fuel cells to generate energy. The batteries can currently power an LED light, and the goal is to soon be able to also power radios and cell phones.

The pilot program launched in Tanzania and they are looking at doing another round of testing in Africa. Rather than curse the darkness and light a candle, the founders of Lebone want to instead power an LED. 

Eben Beyer

Eben Beyer, a 2009 Poptech Fellow, is the CEO of Ecovative Design, which seeks to address the issue of how to reduce the usage of styrofoam (or as Beyer calls it, “toxic white stuff”). Styrofoam takes up more landfill space than other other waste product and its by-product, styrene, is seeping into our environment through landfills and polluted waterways.

New materials need to be created that have less environmental impact and take less energy to produce. Beyer’s vision is to use the naturally-occuring mycelium (from the roots of mushrooms) and replace styrofoam with 100% compostable material. With this material, 10 times less CO2 is emitted in the atmosphere. 

Beyer invites everyone to send pictures of unnecessary use of styrofoam to stop@toxicwhitestuff.com in an effort to raise awareness about this issue.

Jason Aramburu

The third Fellow to present in this series, Jason Aramburu, is the founder of re:char, which is developing solutions to fight climate change. Current efforts all have their limitations, says Aramburu. Aramburu was working on “clean coal”, when he realized that that term was really an oxymoron. This lead him to create a substance called Biochar, a substance that is a by-product of agriculture (husks, stems, etc.): basically charcoal made from natural waste products.

Biochar also acts as a great soil amendment and helps reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. He invites interested parties to contact him to help scale this potentially global solution.  

Laura Kurgan

Laura Kurgan heads up the Spatial Information Design Lab, which is they call a Think and Action Tank. Kurgan states that there are no neutral maps and no neutral data. She introduced the PopTech audience to their project “Architecture and Justice” and explained how they are looking at a city’s infrastructure. This, she says, includes prisons, which are generally not discussed when talking about cities. 

The Architecture and Justice project views data in a geographical context; in this case mapping where inmates say they last lived before they were incarcerated against maps of where crime is committed within a city. The maps reveal that crime is more widespread than the “prison geographies”. The maps also display the cost of incarcaration, which is significant.

They’ve also used data points and mapping to track population migration. To illustrate, Kurgan played a video of a giant globe that scrolls across a curved screen, leaving a swath of data in its path and sending representative pixels flying across the screen to re-convene like a flock of tiny, well-informed birds. 

Other areas of interest for the Design Lab are tracking remittances (money from people who have moved to other countries that’s sent back home) and forced migration. 

Whether we like it or not, we’ve all been translated into data. How we chose to interpret data and what we do with it are the important question.

Assaf Biderman

Assaf Biderman, who runs the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, opened with reminding us that people used to think virtual connectivity was going to reduce urban density. This proved not to be true: the Internet did not introduce the death of the city. Cities are instead a concentrated focal point of looking at new ways to be sustainable.

The SENSEable City Laboratory partners with cities around the world to develop test case implementations. Biderman showed a few examples of their work in action. In Rome, they tracked cell phone activity during a soccer game. This creates an emotional map of what’s happening in a city. They also mapped bus routes and overlaid it, providing two real-time data sets. By examining patterns in this data, different types of land use can be planned.

The New York Talk Exchange project studied communications traffic with the city of New York and the rest of the world. The data already exists to track the use of land lines in and out. Data in cities is ubiquitous. 

Finally, the Trash|Track project, done in partnership with Waste Management, looks at the “removal-chain”. Supply chain has become increasingly efficient (and well-documented), but waste managment is not. Wanting to track the reverse of a supply chain, the invited members of the Seattle community to tag their garbage and the researchers than tracked its movement. Different materials are being used to tags different types of trash (foam vs. rubber). They created a “wedding wish list” of trash to create a truly representative picture of average household waste. Everything from teddy bears to tires was tagged. Currently have ~2,000 objects tagged and expect to tag another 1,000. The early results are now on display as a show at the Seattle Public Library. 

An awareness of where your garbage actually ends up could have great impact on changing behavior. With this type of data, there’s also the possibility of improving infrastructure (and other services like cell phone usage and bus routes).

Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is a photographer whose work documents consumerism and its aftermath. When he heard about the “giant garbage patch”, a section of the ocean twice the size of Texas that is filled with tiny bits of plastic, he was compelled to try and document it. In this area, there are six times the amount of plastic than there are plankton. Jordan wanted to do a piece on this ecological wasteland so that people would have an emotional connection to it, make it real.

First, Jordan used actual trash from the giant garbage patch to create a massive-scale recreation of a portrait of the ocean. The making of this piece used 2.4 million pieces of oceanic plastic retrieved from the ocean. The plastic in the ocean is destroying habitat and killing wildlifein one of the most remote regions of the world.

Jordan’s work on this project introduced him to the Midway Atoll, an extremely remote island. Yet somehow, birds on the island are ingesting plastic and it’s killing them in droves. This, says Jordan, is major. This is basically like telling us that the world has cancer. For two weeks, Jordan went to the Midway Atoll to document this oceanic plastic pollution and, for the first time ever, he shared these photos. An emotional Jordan asked the audience not to applaud, as he said what he was showing was not worth applauding. Instead, he asked us to take with us whatever would compel us to clap and use it to do something about the unimaginable, overwhelming, but very real problem of plastics in the ocean.

Lorrie Vogel

Lorrie Vogel works for Nike’s Considered team. As General Manager, she’s leading Nike’s research in sustainable product design.  We are moving to a new economy, a “green economy”, which has no roadmap. So how does a big company like Nike do it?

Nike’s first area of focus was reducing their footprint and the amount of waste. They’ve reduced their waste 50% in the past ten years. They’ve also focused on energy use and removing toxics from their products. Reducing your footprint, says Vogel, will never get you to a “green economy”. That needs to be done at the product level: they were at first inspired to try and create a shoe that you could plant in the ground and it would biodegrade. Their second thought was to try and make a product that would last forever. But from a human nature standpoint, that wouldn’t work and the products would ultimately end up in a landfill.

The answer seems to be creating a closed loop product, one that would keep the materials in play. Vogel describes this as “designing for disassembly”. The two main materials they currently use are polyester and cotton, neither of which is sustainable due to their environmental impact. Vogel’s team is working on creating better materials, even with the challenges presented by cost, accessibility and a broken recycling pipeline. Vogel believes we need a sort of materials DNA so that tagged materials can be easily identified. Recycling must happen in a world of diminishing sources and ever-increasing population.

As the video she showed us demonstrating the closed loop paradigm stated, “a shoe can’t change the world, but an ethos can.”

Paula Kahumbu

Kenyan-born 2009 PopTech Fellow Paula Kahumbu is the founder of Wildlife Direct. (I attended her Wednesday session with PopTech Fellow Paula Kahumbu and biodiversity researcher Healy Hamilton) She’s working to mobilize people to care about more about animal conservation, largely by using technology to better connect people to affected animals. A special area of interest for Wildlife Direct is protecting lions, which are often poisoned using cheap pesticides.  

She recounted the story of Anthony Kasanga, a young Maasai who decided that he wanted to save lions rather than kill them. Kasanga began blogging for Wildlife Direct and soon received international attention. His group, the Lion Guardians, saved 50 lions last year, which, considering their numbers, is a very high number. Wildlife Direct continues to work to get the word out about the importance of saving African wildlife by using modern tools of engagement.   

Katy Payne

Katy Payne, author of “Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants” and founder of the Listening Project is a “bioacoustician”. Earlier in her career, her work brought her to a zoo, where she sat for a week observing how an unrelated group of elephants formed social bonds. She became aware of a low throbbing sound that she didn’t hear in any other part of the zoo, and deduced that it was a low frequency that the elephants were using to communicating with each other. She returned to the zoo with equipment to test her theory. Payne played the PopTech audience a recording from the zoo, where we heard ears flapping and the exaltation of air whistling through elephant trunks. Sped up, the tape reveals a cacophony of sound otherwise inaudible to to human ears. Clicks and whistles similar to whales, but also different: deeper, more like a series of grunts than song. 

Payne spent the next fifteen years in South and East Africa researching elephant communication. That area has between 16,000-82,000 elephants. As Payne says, “Nothing was really known about these elephants.” She found a station that overlooked a popular clearing where hundreds of elephants congregated. Working with a team, she set up digital recorders to listen in to these elephantine conversations. They spent months in the platform observing the elephants and compiling the data, bringing back video and audio that they were able to link together. With this data, they created sheets (like tablature) that documents these sounds in writing, creating a sort of elephant dictionary. Understanding how elephants use sound to communicate, Payne says, provides a previously unseen glimpse into the vibrant, complex and ultimately very social world of elephants.   

Willie Smits

Willie Smits, founder and Chief Science Officer of Tapergy is interested in looking at the big picture to bring together learnings from different disciplines. He’s studied orangutans, climate change and indigenous people and especially, where these all intersect. Smits’ homeland of Indonesia, he states, is the third-worst offender in the creation of greenhouse gases. This lead him to seek the answer to the question: How can we power the earth in a truly sustainable way? 

Smits believes one crucial way is to save the forests. We need to imitate nature in our agricultural practices. We should look at raising sugar palm trees, which can generate a form of usable oil with harming the plant or limiting it to one growing season (unlike other crops like corn). Sugar palms also have very deep roots, which help to bring nutrients far into the soil and reduce erosion.

Tapergy promotes the planting of sugar palms, which are still used in Indonesia as a form of currency, to create a efficient crop that provides a year-round resource and source of income for local people. Other solutions include using technology to encourage children to log plant and animal life around them, providing useful snapshots of real climate data and using available and emerging technologies to better inform our decisions about agriculture and how we are living our lives in general.     

Gideon Obarzanek

Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek of Chunky Move showed a brief sequence of his choreography, which included dances that looked like giant spiders scuttling across the stage, the illusion of rose petals blowing across prone dancers and intertwined bodies bathed in pulsating, monochromatic shards and shafts of light.  

Obarzanek has become increasingly interested in using projectors as part of his pieces. He realized that he didn’t like the confines of using pre-rendered images (which forced dancers to be in specific places at specifics times), so he worked with a software engineer to create a program that takes information from a moving body and use algorithms to create new images based on their movements. Obarzanek would then project that back onto the dancers, allowing for a more organic form of expression, illustrating what Obarzanek describes as their “creature part”.

In this way, light because its own entity in the show. It’s as if, Obarzanek said, he is choreographing with light. This, combined with noise and feedback, allows his team to create something truly unique.

Photo credit: Kris Krug

John Fetterman

John Fetterman is the hulking, tattooed and impassioned mayor of Braddock, PA, a tiny town ten miles from downtown Pittsburgh.

Braddock was built around the steel industry: vintage pictures show a thriving downtown area boasting 30 tailors, 5 banks, 51 barbers in their community. Over the last few decades, the town has imploded and now none a single one of those businesses remain. The town is incredibly depressed: the median price of a home is $5200 and the average annual salary is $17,500. 

What can be done to stabilize a community that’s lost 90% of its population and rebuild successful community? Fetterman chose to focus on the community that remains. Under his leadership, the town has focused its efforts on youth employment, opening playgrounds, and bringing green spaces and arts back into the area. Urban agriculture is helping to green up public spaces and his team has worked to introduce neighborhood artwork and re-purpose abandoned homes into foster care facilities. 

Regular Braddock Block Parties have a strong community flavor; often bringing families together for holidays since so many can’t afford to celebrate at home. One popular event is arm-wrestling: if you can beat the Mayor, you win his paycheck! And new businesses have opened in town, such as the Transformazium, a collective art show and Fossil Free Fuel, which converts cars to biodiesel and offers a training program in how to do so.

Fetterman states that when he took over in 2006, 5-6 homicides a year were being committed in a community of less than 3,000 people. There’s been no murders in the past 18 months and crime overall is going down. 

Fetterman was shocked to learn just days ago that he was on the cover of the Atlantic; that same week he learned that Braddock’s biggest employer was shutting down, which is going to devastate the town on many levels. An emotional Feteterman said he was not sure what the future of Braddock holds. Something tells me he will continue to fight to make it brighter for the people who live there and in doing so, set an example for many similarly decimated towns across the country. 

Erica Williams

Erica Williams is a Washington DC-based activist who works to get under-represented communities to take part in the political process. She asked the PopTech crowd to put aside any pre-conceived notions about her generation (the Millennials, born in 1978-2000). Williams was raised by two pastors and defines her childhood by two things:faith and church. When she was sixteen, her father was delivering a sermon entitled “New Life”, suffered a heart attack and died in an instant. This guided her decision find her personal calling and become involved with politics (even though she confesses she doesn’t really like what America calls “politics”).

The Millennials, says Williams, in fact don’t relate to traditional politics. However, despite a lack of trust in political leaders, they are one of the most civically-active generations. Williams is interested in redefining politics to include more than a bumper sticker, a yard sign, or even voting. She’s helping to figure out what politics should look like in an ideal, collaborative, “post-racist” society. This generation is using the tools available to them (e.g. Internet, blogs, web forms) to research and organize. This is more powerful, explains Williams, and better addresses her generations unique needs and demographic. 

22 million voters unders under the age of 30 voted in the Presidential campaign — this is how he got elected. The Milliennials supported Barack Obama because he supported them and their vision for what they want to achieve. Williams’ vision for America is about honesty, connectivity and collaboration. These shared ideals should be timeless and ageless.

Reuben Margolin

Sculptor Reuben Margolin works in the medium of motion. As a child, he started playing with stilts and was enamored with math. After going in a few different directions in school, he set out with a typewriter strapped to the back of a motorcycle to write poetry as he traveled across the country. This resulted in the creation of a mobile, which he drove for five months in order to have deep, meaningful conversations with people he met along the way.

Soon after, on a hike, he saw a transparent caterpillar that inspired him to try and replicate it as a machine. Although the finished product didn’t move as elegantly as a caterpillar in nature, it fueled his interest in examining movement in the natural world. Still seeking a way to perfectly capture the wave of a caterpillar’s motion, he demonstrated on the PopTech stage a much sleeker machine made of wood, thin rope and metal that did indeed undulate like caterpillar creeping. He’s now exploring applying this principal to giant circles, wooden frames and other forms.

Margolin ended his presentation by revealing a gorgeous, sparkling sculpture suspended from the Opera House Ceiling, which swung gently above the crowd as though wind was blowing through a giant, gilded glass net.

Margolin noted that there are two ways of looking at things: one is at the sparkle and the dawns and the beauty of the world, and one is at the structure and the meat and the math. His art brings both of these elements together in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually interesting. 

PopTech Fellows: Taylor Stuckert and Mark Rembert

2009 PopTech Fellow Taylor Stuckert, co-founder and Mark Rembert of Energize Clinton County founded their program when their hometown was impacted by massive layoffs. After living away for several years, they both returned to their town with “fresh eyes”; wanting to help the town rediscover its place in the world. They wrote a letter to the editor (which is what, they joke, people do in small towns) about going green that instilled the town with a sense of purpose. Now over 90 businesses are participating in ways to buy local, helping to weatherize homes and solving for themselves problems that are putting them at the forefront of green efforts.

Energize Clinton County is looking to form partnerships that will allow them to bring their vision of self-sufficient, greener communities nationwide.

Watch PopTech streamed live or follow us on Twitter @poptech

Photo credit: Kris Krug

The morning began cold and wet, but the Camden Opera House quickly brightened as attendees for PopTech 2009 arrived to fill it to buzzing capacity. First to take on the big task of getting on the big stage were writer Kurt Andersen, Duke economics professor Dan Ariely, and jazz musician Logan Richardson. Joining them were PopTech Fellow Emily Pilloton of Project H Design.

To open, Logan Richardson played an upbeat and soulful rendition of America the Beautiful on the saxophone. The song set the tone for this year’s theme: America Reimagined. PopTech curator Andrew Zolli then welcomed the crowd with his trademark wit and enthusiasm, and laid out what promises to be an exciting, engaging and inspiring three days in Maine. Zolli also displayed a picture of his new, lovely baby daughter and revealed how becoming a parent has changed him both on a personal level and by helping him to be more expansive in his thinking about the world we’re leaving our children.

The speakers and performers at PopTech this year are examining the questions: Is reinvention possible? What would it look like? Here’s the beginning of this conversation.

Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen was the first to frame a response to this question. He referenced America in the 80’s and its “living large” mentality: bigger cars and bigger houses and more and more consumption. With our emphasis on youth culture and instant gratification, “We took Peter Pan” said Andersen, “a little too seriously.” As a result, our politics have become more impatient, even “brattier”, resulting in shouting matches and poorly-spelled placards waved self-righteously in town hall meetings. Andersen drew a parallel between the Roaring 20’s and the 1980’s and how they share similar political backstories leading up to market crashes.

In the last twenty-five years, we’ve already gone through enormous change: closer to equality for women; more tolerance for gay people; murder rates down. The change that is happening now with old industries dying will give opportunity for newer and smaller enterprises. If Andersen’s cycles predict accurately, people will now pursue work that makes them happy rather than wealthy. People are taking the chance to reinvent themselves since more traditional job paths are failing. Sustainability needs to go beyond environmental and encompass finances, health care, education.

If our story of reinvention is to be written, said Andersen, a big part of it needs to be about embracing the amateur spirit. Amateurs embrace new challenges, don’t worry as much about rules or what people think of them. A happy by-product of the past twenty-five years has been the rise of the amateur, especially on the web. This will be one of things that gets us to a new era, but we will need humility as well as passion and enthusiasm. Andersen himself took a firing fifteen years ago to reinvent himself into who he is now and expressed his hope that the PopTech community will be able do the same from changes that will arise in their lives. 

Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, referenced the foolishness of certain actions (e.g. texting while driving), what he calls “small irrationalities” that we do every day. These can lead up to big problems. With our current model of labor, for instance, we reward people with rest. This doesn’t really capture what it is that engages people, what causes them to want to work. The structure of bonuses in similar: it’s assumed that the promise of money will make people work harder. Arielly’s studies have shown that we are not necessarily inspired by more money, as money is both a motivator and a stressor. So what does this mean for Wall Street and our spending patterns in general? And how do successfully map incentive to performance?

Arielly brought his research to some bankers, who identified themselves as “special.” The bankers felt they needed the bonuses and related stress to enable them to excel at their jobs, although they declined to be tested. So Arielly took his research team to study basketball, specifically “clutch players” who are paid millions of dollars to perform in the last five minutes of the game. It turns out that clutch players do perform better, but it’s correlates more with the number of chances they get to practice; since their teammates are more inclined to pass to them (believing them to be better players). Stress without this belief doesn’t cause improvement.  

Then you have a man who smells shoes for a living whom Ariely referenced. He is more motivated by meaning and social forces – is he happy in his job? Andersen’s research shows that the motivators of rest time and money are in fact not effective. As this is the model our free markets are based on, we need to examine what truly makes someone happy at work both for our health and the health of our economy.  

Emily Pilloton

Emily Pilloton founded Project H Design in 2008. Currently, about 300 designers from all over the world are working on 22 different projects rooted-in design thinking. Pilloton describes the projects as simple, but the problems they are solving for are quite complex, such as a bag for homeless people that coverts into a hammock. At a Mexican school, they designed new tables that fostered better interaction between students and involved members of the community in their creation and design.

Project H’s ultimate goal is global scalability. They are looking for help in scaling all aspects of the business from the PopTech community.

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Photo credit:Kris Krug

At today’s special session “The New Edge of Conservation”, leading practitioners of ecological conservation Katy Payne, Healy Hamilton and PopTech Fellow Paula Kahumbu walked us through some of the latest technologies being employed in their respective fields.

Animal communication expert Katy Payne played clips of whale and elephant songs and discussed how their ways of communication could inform ours. Real-time monitoring of a group of elephants displayed complex social interactions. Payne played a video clip of a baby elephant that, left unattended by an inexperienced mother, was alternately kidnapped and rejected by other female elephants. The language of elephants, Payne noted, is emerging to be, like ours, heavily influenced by emotion.

PopTech Fellow Paula Kahumbu of Wildlife Direct spoke on how her organization is helping to mobilize conservationists in protecting wildlife in central Africa. She explained how cattle-killing lions are being intentionally poisoned by cheap pesticides as humans increasingly encroach on their territory. Poisoning kills not only the lions, she said, but hyenas, vultures and other wildlife.

Lions have also traditionally been hunted by the nomadic Maasai people. Lion warriors, called “Moran”, used to kill a lion as a part of a cultural ritual into manhood, said Kahumbu. One Masai young man, Antony Kasanga, decided he wanted to protect lions rather than kill them, so he founded a group called the Lion Guardians. Kasanga began blogging with Wildlife Direct to tell the story of lions. By using the power of social media, Kasanga and other bloggers at Wildlife Direct are able to engage people all over the world in the importance of saving African wildlife. Wildlife Direct is now exploring new tools, such as partnering with PopTech alumn Ushahidi to provide real-time visualization of what’s happening on the ground, whether it be observing a rare species in its natural habitat or bearing witness to poaching. 

Biodiversity researcher Healy Hamilton wants us to also take a broader view of conservation. Rather than looking at individual parks and species, she says, we should look at how climate change is impacting the environment as a whole. Emphasizing the importance of an animal’s ability to roam to find food, mates and shelter, she traced the steps of a wolverine wearing a satellite radio collar. Researchers found that his territory included hundreds of square miles (including scaling the highest peak of Glacier National Park in the middle of winter).

Her campaign Freedom to Roam uses “connectivity conservation” to create landscapes that allow animals and humans to co-exist. Creating wildlife corridors (such as bridges and tunnels so that animals can cross roads) will connect otherwise isolated patches of habitat and allow species to roam, thus ensuring a thriving and diverse wildlife population. Diverse groups of people like hunters and treehuggers need to work together to protect wildlife or we’ll end up with a species-poor plant and animal population.  

All of these tools are providing new insight and data about how we as a species are impacting our environment. As Healy Hamilton observed, this is the first time we’ve been able to really measure change as it is happening around us. But, Paula Kahumbu reminded us, “technology won’t change the world; changing our hearts will.” 

Photo credit: Shashi Bellamkonda/@shashib