What will change everything?

This years Edge question posed to some 150 scientists, authors, musicians, philosophers and other respected experts were posed the question “What will change everything?” (I was omitted for some reason!).

 

This has to be one of the toughest questions to answer and the responses certainly seem to be diverse, although they were just posted yesterday so I can’t comment significantly. The Edge editor cleverly added a sub-question,  “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”.

 

Just think about this for a minute – here’s one game changing development few could have predicted even 3 years ago:

 

A virtually unknown politician, a black man who’s father is from Africa, will be elected president of the US.

 

And another:

 

Most newspapers will either be on the verge of bankruptcy or considering it.

 

Back to the big question and responses…The responses spanned new methods of energy production, the dawn of telepathy, freely available artificial intelligence and the colonisation of the Milky Way.

 

I was a bit shaken by LAWRENCE KRAUSS, Physicist, Director, Origins Initiative, Arizona State University; who said, in his lifetime, there is a real danger of THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST A CIVILIAN POPULATION

 

I sincerely hope he is wrong but somehow it has set alarm bells ringing in my head.

 

Personally I hope that 2009 is a major wake up call to the environment, despite the recent climate meeting in Poznan, efforts in Poland seem to be lame – we must all wake up to this and do our bit not just talk about it but really do something. Two responders of note to the Edge’s question British novelist Ian McEwan’s prediction that solar technology will really take off and Stanford climatologist Stephen H. Schneider’s guess that rapid melting of Greenland’s ice sheets will wake up the world to the need to take concerted action on curbing C02 emissions.

 

I’ll blog more about the responses as I wade through them.

 

I guess being ready for anything is the only rational strategy. So, what exactly do you expect to happen in 2009 that will cause significant global change?

 

 

Picking up the pieces

2008 was a pivotal year for me – I can only say it made me the strongest I have ever felt and so into 2009 I bound with the usual degree of optimism mixed with a healthy dose of realism.

If you want to know how business can remain attached to its focus whilst considering the environment stay tuned – alternatively stop me on my bicycle in my suit cycling through warsaw, the snowy capital of poland.

Looking forward to connecting with you in 2009 and beyond.

Polish Notaire

To solve a property transfer dispute in Hollandi I needed to get some documents legally notarized so I can send them to my legal representatives in Holland. This was my first experience of dealing with Polish Law and I hope the last. Tara, who regular readers now know is my Polish fiancé, and I visit a Notaire recommended by her mum in Opole the nearest town to the village where Tara’s mum lives and where we have taken up temporary residency.

Polish Premier slips up

Donald Tusk was quoted in Time magazine as shining a particularly negative light on all things Poland – his quote follows.

“We have no oil and gas,” he says. “We don’t have high tech. Our centers of development, are far, far behind others. We will never be an extraordinary tourist attraction. Poland is quite a mediocre country in some regards. The only natural resource that we have, and with which we can compete, is freedom.”

Read more at Polandian

Poland’s Creative Tension

Whilst researching Poland’s recent history for inclusion in my book I discovered that in 2004/5 the Polish Government embarked on a multi million zloty investment into a brand campaign. The idea was to identify a brand which would differentiate Poland from other nations and project its national characteristics attractively and effectively. Pop over to our co-operative blog to read more about Poland’s Branding

The ugly face of sports

Racism in football within Poland recently hit the headlines after a BBC journalist raised the subject. In fairness this is a subject that my wife is quite passionate about having suffered racial aggression and abuse for many years by loutish ‘football’ game attendees (I can’t call them fans because they are more akin to thugs). But what is it about this pack mentality that brings the good name of sport into disrepute?

Sport is a team game, whether you are a solo swimmer, a 100 metre or marathon runner or a tennis player, sport depends upon coaching, encouragement by others. A collective effort! In short sport is about sportsmanship.

Sportsmanship is defined as “Conduct and attitude considered as befitting participants in sports, especially fair play, courtesy, striving spirit, and grace in losing.”

Note the key words in the definition ‘ fair play, courtesy, striving spirit and grace in losing’. To me sport is taking part, enjoyment, having fun – regardless of the level, sure for many winning is important but without enjoyment there is no winning…..

Images like the one below must be stamped out to bring enjoyment back to sport for everyone.

Kicking this out of sport has to start through education – the parents and this child should be barred from attending sporting events for life…..aggressive behaviour is the ill face of what should be an enjoyable occasion.

I am optimistic that Poland will solve the race issue in sport soon but the clubs, police and government have to act with a concerted effort to eradicate this disease and it has to start in the classroom and at home.

Emotions and our Decision Making

Last week I heard the former head of the Warsaw stock exchange say that 50% of investing decisions are made on pure statistics and 50% are made on emotions. I would expand this theory and say that 90% are made by emotions. This reminds me of a famous investment company founded by 3 Nobel Prize winners (2 in economics) that failed miserably because all their investment decisions were based on pure economics, emotions were removed.

This investment firm used to think about decisions as old, calculated, detached, computations that examine the costs and benefits — only recently have we gained a higher appreciation for the role of emotions in our decisions and for the fundamental ways in which they change us.

One example of this is a fantastic paper by Paul Slovic (http://journal.sjdm.org/jdm7303a.pdf) in which he asks the question of why we care about baby Jessica (the American 8 year old that got stuck in a well 20 years ago and the world watched ) but don’t seem to care as much about genocides such as the one in Darfur (where 800,000 people were murdered in about 100 days, while the world watched and did nothing).

Of course there could be many reasons for the difference but it is rather amazing to realize that baby Jessica got more C.N.N. coverage than Darfur. Why? One of the emerging reasons for this seems to be that we are called into action by emotions — we see a cute toddler in trouble, and our hearts go out to her, but numbers and statistics numb our emotions and reduce our motivation to act.

Joseph Stalin expressed this sentiment when he claimed that “One man’s death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.”

Nobel Prize winning physiologist, Albert Szent-Gyorgi had a related observation: “I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would risk my life for him. Then I talk impersonally about the possible pulverization of our big cities, with a hundred million dead. I am unable to multiply one man’s suffering by a hundred million.”

It turns out that we are numbed by numbers much quicker than Stalin and Gyorgi suggested.

For example, it turns out that describing one starving child in Africa creates higher emotional responses than describing two starving children using an equivalent amount of information. The single child creates a higher emotional response and, as a consequence, people donate more money to the one child compared with the two. It also turns out that describing one starving child creates more emotional reactions (and donations) relative to a situation where the same child is described but this time with additional information concerning the magnitude of the hunger problem (3 million kids in Malawi are facing hunger).

Emotions are an integral part of who we are, a part that represents our evolutionary history, a part that is a basic and necessary component of our behavior.

Maybe TV companies need to employ people strong in Emotional Intelligence to deliver the news and stir us into action to make the world a more equitable place to live..

Polish Energy Gridlock

Forgive me if I sound somewhat negative about the state of the Polish Electricity sector (Grid and Power Stations). Over at Polandian I have written about yesterday’s blackout in Szczecin (population 420,000) and a) the need for investment in the energy sector (both grid and stations), b) a sensible clean energy bill and c) privatisation of assets. Read More here

Poland is not a 3rd world country

Courtesy of Google’s news updates I came across a blog post by some ‘volunteer english teacher’ coming to Poland. The post shows the idiotic view that some people have of Poland. Here’s the post:

Saturday, April 5, 2008

After going to the training session today, I had a few questions:

1. I know that some areas in Europe have changed their ATM cards to have a micro chip in them, and can no longer read our credit cards. Is this the case in Poland? Will we have access to an ATM machine? Should we just bring cash?

2. As far as bringing a computer… Is it necessary? Should we bring one? Will we have access to an internet cafe?

3. Lastly, when it comes to our teaching materials, and wanting to make copies… I doubt that wherever we will be teaching will have a xerox machine. Will we have access to towns where a xerox machine is available if we want to copy a story for the students to read or something?

Thanks! I hope everybody is getting excited! I know I am!

Posted by C Campbell

and the link is Learning Enterprises

It is absolutely incredible that someone could ask such questions such as… “will we have access to ATM machines?, will we have access to Internet Cafe’s and Will we have access to towns where a xerox machine is available?” The towns they are staying in after orientation in Krakow are Tarnow and Rzeszow!!! Even the small village where my mother-in-law lives in the South of Poland has an ATM, far more than some Texas towns I have visited. In fact some areas in large US towns, like Detroit, don’t have ATM’s because of criminality! Whilst there are probably some remote villages in Poland without these facilities, (I think the internet cafe will be the least available – but connection will likely be available in accommodation) – small Italian or Spanish villages are less likely to have these facilities than a village in Poland….

Maybe the fault lies with the Polish Government and its inability to establish a worthwhile foreign service communication mechanism as mentioned by Scatts (but I can’t find the exact post).

April Fools Day

Google has established a reputation for silly hoaxes with pages hyping its Google MentalPlex. It once posted openings for its Googlelunaplex office on the moon and introduced a smart-drink called GoogleGulp!

Likewise the British Press, which normally make stories up all the time, but on April Fool’s Day they all fabricate in the name of humour. The Times used the 1st April to run a spoof ad announcing an auction of “surplus intellectual property”—various patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The Daily Mail announced the postponement of Andrew and Fergie’s wedding because of a clash with Prince Charles’ calendar. He was going to be butterfly-hunting in the Himalayas. They also told readers that nuclear submarines were now patrolling the Thames.

If you want to see more April fool jokes take a look at the Museum of Hoaxes Web site which lists the Top 100 greatest April Fool’s hoaxes of all time.

What Polish April fools day jokes got your interest?