Links to the other sessions: Session 1, Session 2, Session 4
In this session:
- Bryan Ritchie – Dismantling the Shark Cage
- Karl Gude – Visualizing Information
- Mark Wilson – Fair Sins and Virtues
- Dirk Schweitzer – Genetic Genealogy
- Chip Brock – Mass Confusion: The LHC Challenge
Dismantling the Shark Cage
Presenter: Bryan Ritchie
https://www.msu.edu/~ritchieb/
Bryan K. Ritchie is a professor of international relations and political economy at Michigan State University’s (MSU) James Madison College. His research and teaching focus on the political economy of innovation, entrepreneurship, technological development, skills education and training and social capital. He has received numerous teaching and research awards and has been published in several academic journals, newspapers, blogs and websites. He is the author of “Systemic Vulnerability and Sustainable Economic Growth: Skills and Upgrading in Southeast Asia,” and “Relationship Economics: The Social Capital Paradigm and its Applications” .
Ritchie is an entrepreneur. Prior to his academic career he started and managed multiple companies in the computer industry. He has also held management and consulting positions at numerous firms. Ritchie is an associate director for MSU’s BioEconomy Network and co-directs the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity. Ritchie received his Ph.D. from Emory University and his MBA from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management.
There are still sharks in the water, but things are changing. Institutions need to change. Michigan has created more wealth for more people in our history as an empire.
People are benefiting from the status quo. Not the most important reason these institutions persist. They persist because we think the way they tell us to think. Need to change our thinking in order to change our institutions.
Six ideas
Old Thinking: More jobs equals stronger economy
Jobs are not the positive. It’s the types of jobs that matter. Jobs that could go away are useless compared to jobs that are going to last.
Current Reality: Jobs are an outcome, not a cause
New Thinking: Create entrepreneurial and innovative enterprises
Economic hunting – trying to attract companies to your area. Usually through lowest cost of labor.
Economic gardening – ways to create incentives to establish and grow.
Taxes don’t matter. Simply a cost towards the bottom line. What we tax and regulate needs to coincide with what we provide in the community as value.
Old Thinking – Maximizing security and monimizing risk with long-time employment with big firms
Current Reality – The global econonmy and the rapid change in tech has made stability and security an illusion
New Thinking – Create institutions that absorb the negatives (risks) from change and do not punish failure (In Florida, if declared bankruptcy on a business, your primary residence is not at risk.)
Cool cities are also outcomes, not causes. Make it easy for people to try (in a calculated way) things.
Old Thinking – Education beyond high school is a luxury good that most do not need to make a living
Current Reality – The new break-even economic point for education is now a bachelor’s degree
New Thinking – Education = risk taking. Be creative in the environment
Old Thinking – Organized albor is needed to balance workers needs and rights with demands of management
Current Reality – technology is driving needs for higher skills
New Thinking – Labor must champion productivity and skills upgrading
Work needs to be an institutions of learning as much as if not more than an institution of earning
Need to foster ent. in a broad sense. New things anywhere and everyway. This is a culture change. Get involved in the policy process… how we create a new economy, not where the next 1000 jobs come from. Own the debate, lots of sloppy ideas. Make politicians know they have to do what’s right.
Search for pearls of economic development and growth.
Visualizing Information
Presenter: Karl Gude
http://visualeditors.com/gude/
Twitter: @karlgude
Karl Gude has been visualizing information for news organizations since the late 70s and is one of the few visual journalists who has worked for newspapers, news magazines and wire services. Until recently he was the director of information graphics for Newsweek, a position he held for more than 10 years. He has also worked for the Associated Press, United Press International, the New York Daily News and the short-lived National Sports Daily.
Gude has visually covered seven presidential elections, a slew of wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, sports, business and countless medical and scientific discoveries. He led a Newsweek team of graphics reporters during the attack on the World Trade Center and later mapped the progress of U.S. soldiers as they headed toward Baghdad. He has charted the ups and downs of the U.S. economy and used statistics to illustrate how Enron executives lied to stockholders.
Gude teaches information visualization for Michigan State University’s (MSU) School of Journalism and provides consulting for news and government organizations. A collection of Karl’s infographics, personal drawings, paintings and even children’s books can be found on Flickr.
Tea cup and a fire hose, that’s all I have to say. Awesome start!
“Information gushing at your brain like a fire house pointed at a tea cup.” – Scott Adams
Video of it happening courtesy of the East Lansing Fire Department.
Lot of bad news on the Internet. Way more information about the world than you ever knew before. Get grief fatigue. Can’t care anymore. Brains not wired to absorb constant pain. Need to move on. It’s only going to get worse.
Originally was just Enc. Brit. as the entire collection Western world. Internet has exploded what that is. But our brains aren’t going to grow. News editor told you what you were going to get. Lots left on the cutting room floor. Now, we’re the editors and control.
Unfortunately, it’s all crap out there. We’re not just consumers, we’re also the producers. We write words, words, words, words.
SHOW IT!
Notice it, get it, scan it… fast! You’ve got five seconds. Need to stop them in their tracks. Words are dense. Ouch!
Words are important, but even a document can be scannable. Breaks, headlines, bullet points. Pour it into wordle.
But I’m not an artist! Or a computer scientist! No problem, there are rules and tools. And there’s technology! It’s hard. But it’s really easy, kinda cheap.
Free, easy – documents, charts, drawings
We’re all right-brained in some ways. What can you visualize? Look for opportunities in your message, think about design, then use visual tools. Use things to compare and associate and flow or relate and explain the real world and locate.
So instead of contributing to this… crap, look for opportunities to target visually.
Fair Sins and Virtues
Presenter: Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson revels in all dimensions of the world’s fairs and is especially intrigued by the combination of optimism and promise they offer and the unflattering mirror of society they reflect. Wilson’s presentation explores 150 years of the sins and virtues of the world’s great expositions.
When not immersed in the world’s fairs, Wilson is the associate director of the School of Planning, Design and Construction at Michigan State University (MSU) and has an academic background in economics and geography. His three primary interests include the planning and politics of mega events such as the world’s fairs and the Olympics; information technology, cyber geography and the relationship between technology, people and places; and the role of non profit organizations in community development.
Wilson is committed to international education and has developed or participated in study abroad programs in numerous countries. He has also participated in US Pavilion programs at the world’s fairs in 1993, 1998 and 2005. Wilson serves as chair of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on Global Information Society. Please visit his homepage at www.mark-wilson.org.
We forget that world fairs still existing. We think they are meant to show us the past. Really, they show us what already exists. Sometimes they show us things we don’t want to see.
Little bit of a history lesson on the first world fair. Look it up on the Internets.
World Fairs show us optimism. The Eiffel Tour was an example of this. The Washington Monument was example of this. General Motors was an example of this with Futurama in 1939.
World Fairs show us hubris. Show how other populations are worse off.
Aesthetics is another virtue. Whistler’s Mother an example of impressionists. Barcelona chairs. The Space Needle in 1962.
Wrath is another aspect of World Fairs. 1901 President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist at the fair.
Lust also is a sin of the fairs. Midway in Chicago was created to attract more people to the fair.
World Fairs are more about the past than the future, and more about sin than virtue.
Genetic Genealogy
Presenter: Dirk Schweitzer
Dirk Schweitzer is a German native and a chemist by training. He is working on establishing a green economy by replacing oil-based products with sugar-based products.
Could get crazy with this genetic geneology stuff. Yup, he’s explaining chromosomes. I could be lost shortly.
Yea, that was a lot. Tons of stuff about genetics. I listened, but sure didn’t recording much. Whew!
Mass Confusion: The LHC Challenge
Presenter: Chip Brock
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~brock/
Twitter: @chipbrock
Raymond “Chip” Brock is an elementary particle physicist. He trained as an electrical engineer and briefly worked in the engineering industry. Brock obtained graduate degrees in experimental and theoretical physics from Carnegie-Mellon University. Since, he has spent the last 30 years exploring the “inside of the universe” as a professor of physics at Michigan State University. His research takes place at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois and the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He frequently gives guest lectures about scientific results and the future of particle physics.
Brock chaired the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 1994 to 2001. He is an American Physical Society fellow and author of more than 200 scientific publications. He is the recipient of numerous MSU research and teaching awards and has served in numerous national advisory roles. He currently serves as the elected chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields.
Brock researches electroweak particle physics, which entails performing experiments studying light and heavy particles. After years of preparation Brock and his MSU colleagues have launched the most ambitious physics project of all: The gargantuan ATLAS experiment at CERN.
LHC is 27km/17mi in circumference. 10,000 magnets. Interest is in the beiginning of the universe. Recreates that moment 40,000,000 per second.
From this we’ve realized we’re confused about mass. 2 big ideas:
- Mass is energy.
- E = mc^2 is one equation. But today we get 2:1 offer.
- m = E/c^2 is the other equation.
- Nature is clumpy – stars, earth, buildings, people. Energy has ways it likes to clump. Way to study those clumps is to “bang” stuff together.
Elementary in nature – things with no smaller parts: electrons and quarks… we think
Mass of a proton is greater than sum of its parts. It’s the things that hold those parts together: gluon is that field of energy that holds them. Energy that provides mass.
Quarks share same properties except one: mass. The action is in the vacuum in understanding mass. Start of universe was a tiny ball of energy 13 billion years ago. No mass in those particles moving at the speed of light. Then the magic temperature occurred and the vacuum got full… with the Higgs Field. The Field has Higgs particles (boson) in it. The Higgs Boson’s job is to grab onto other particles. It gave those particles inertia, which is mass.
Andromeda galaxy has dark matter that holds stars at the outer edges together. There must be a dark matter particle.
ATLAS is a very large detector. Much of it built at MSU. Tracks everything that happens inside the LHC.
In 20 years, we’ll study more about the origins of the universe than we do down.
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