How to TED

Richard Wurman's ( founder of TED Conference ) advice to Saul Kaplan ( founder of BIF Innovation Collaborative Summits ) on how to create great events: 

Bring interesting people that you want to have at your dinner table that you are interested in their story and you can learn from and then invite other people to listen.

Source:

Saul Kaplan at BIF-4

Message taken from 10:47 to 11:58 mins of the talk

Tools

While I was reading the book cover of the Sun, the genome and the Internet, the thought of tools caught my attention.

In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies - solar energy, genetic engineering and world-wide communication - together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth.

Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences - the invention of the telescope turning the Medieval world view upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market.

Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, the Sun, the genome, and the Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor.

Source:

The Sun, the genome and the Internet

Freeman Dyson

Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780195139228

This leads me to connect to what Joo Hock blogs about tools.

Bucky used to say that if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

A more effective way to "change" thinking and behaviour is to develop a new tool for use which no one would quarrel with, which they can use. A new tool to work with re-forms the environment.

Source:

How to think like Buckminster Fuller

Joo Hock Quek

By connecting these two thoughts, I can explain to people what are examples of tools that can change behaviour and thinking.

Buckminster Fuller guide

Good Magazine have published a 6 page guide on Buckminster Fuller. I recommend it as a good introduction to his achievements.

Things we learned project

Last Saturday, I watch Stefan Sagmeister's things I have learned in my life so far at TED with the Bucky Group. I was interested in his list of things learned. I search online and found the list. I have a list of things learned too. I shared Stefan's list and my list with the group. I ask them to share their things learned. I got reply from Joo Hock and Michael. I start to see value in creating a project to collect things we have learned.

I decide to start the things we learned project.

What have Stefan Sagmeister learned in his life so far?

What have Stefan Sagmeister learned in his life so far?

1. Helping other people helps me.
   
2. Having guts always works out for me.
   
3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
   
4. Organising a charity group is surprisingly easy.
   
5. Being not truthful always works against me.
   
6. Everything I do always comes back to me.
   
7. Assuming is stifling.
   
8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
   
9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.
   
10. Money does not make me happy.
    
11. My dreams have no meaning.
    
12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.
    
13. Trying to look good limits my life.
    
14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
    
15. Worrying solves nothing.
    
16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
    
17. Everybody thinks they are right.
    
18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.
    
19. Low expectations are a good strategy.
    
20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.
    

Source:

Things I have learned in my life so far

CR Blog

What have I learned in my life so far?

1. Nothing is permanent ( including this list ).
   
2. Things fail when it is not design to deal with changes.
   
3. One can reduces one's ignorance by learning more about oneself and the World around us.
   
4. Sharing what I discover about myself and the World around me is intellectual philanthropy.
   
5. There is power when one knows one can be wrong.
   
6. There is always more than one way of seeing and doing things.
   
7. Listen to people who have unpopular views.
   
8. Do one's own thinking.
   
9. If one does not make choices, choices make one.
   
10. Connecting the disconnects
    

What have you learned in your life so far?

Credit Crisis

A simple and elegant video that explains what is:

1. Leverage
   
2. Sub-prime mortgages
   
3. Collateralized debt obligations
   
4. Credit default swaps
   
5. The Credit Crisis
   
   

Source:

The crisis of credit visualized

Jonathan Jarvis

Individual sanity is mass men's madness

There is a legend among the Persian Sufis. Once upon a time, a wise man said that the day will come when all the water in the World except what have been specially collected would disappeared. Then different water will replace it. Anyone who drank the new water would lost his mind.

Only one man took the prophecy seriously and begin to store up water. But the day that have been predicted did not come. Every body of water empty out. The man who had listened to the wise man drank water from his supply. The bodies of water and wells filled up with water again. People thirstily drank this water and everyone of them went crazy. The man who have listened to the wise man continue to drink water only from his own supply and kept his sanity.

He was the only sane person left among the mad men and therefore he was call crazy. He pours out his reserves of real water ( the old water ) on to the ground. He drank the new water and lost his mind. The mad men decided that he has become sane.

Sense from:

Water ( the documentary )

41:05 - 42:27 mins