Responding to Risk with Resourcefulness

President of CBR Global Advisors Celina Realuyo who is also an assistant professor on counter terrorism, talks to the TEDXSF audience at the California Academy of Sciences yesterday afternoon. She encourages people to set up plan of attacks for potential risk scenarios in our lives, whether it's in management or in our personal lives.

Her orientation comes from serving as a former U.S. diplomat, a foreign policy maker under the Bush and Clinton Administration, and a professor of counterterrorism and national security.

Suffering, Heartbreak & Empathy OR Passion, Purpose & Contribution?

Two very different personalities on the TEDX Berkeley stage this past weekend: Asma Abbas, who raised the notion of compassion, emphathy, suffering and heartbreak -- how are they related to politics? She suggested a correlation between how deep we can go with empathy and the degree of homogeneity in the society.

Enter personality number 2: inventor Ross Evans, who reached his audience through storytelling, and the idea that the combination of passion, purpose and contribution result in unlimited possibilities. Compassion and emphathy are blown open and now only are they contageous like Dacher Keltner suggests, but a must if we are to find sustainable happiness in our lives.

Political theorist Asma Abbas attempts to draw out of the crowd, posing a number of questions: what do you think of heartbreak and what it means? How do you think heartbreak relates to politics? She also talks about how heartbreak relates to suffering and what suffering means and how it plays out in less homogeneous societies. She asks, "what is it that you and I would die for?

Clearly emotional about the subject, she had a hard time bringing many of us to her central point. Moving in a direction many of us who have either lived abroad or traveled extensively can resonate with, I resonate when she says, "the amount of emtoion and the range I have for it when I return to the states, shrinks. She suggests as a response to what heartbreak has to do with politics - "doesn't it have to do with who our heart breaks for? Who is it that our heart goes out to and why?

She says, "this demand that someone can make on your emotion in a world where gratitude and emphathy are low, just doesn't work. We are making a mistake if we assume that everyone is working towards the same end." She continues, "there are many ways we confront suffering. As things become more homogeneous, it becomes harder to be empathetic and compassionate." What would death mean if there wasn't life? She asserts that some people can't give up 'living suffering' because it's a way to connect with the future.

Ross Evans, inventor of Xtracycle and founder of Worldbike, takes us on a journey to Africa, where we see the workshops they set up to show locals how to use these bikes as a way to alleviate poverty and get people to medical care in times of need.

Ross also created HoliShift, to promote and evangelize the belief that passion + purpose + contribution, will give you everything that you need in your life to not only be happy, but to create miracles.

Examples of HoliShift questions could be: what is sacred to you? what powers your spirit?

We all know passion: it's what we love. When we're doing our 'purpose,' we feel as if times goes away. We're completely in flow when we are living our 'purpose.' It's how we provide value to our own lives as well as others around us. When we provide enough value, the world simply takes care of us.

It's clear that most people want to make an impact in the world before the end of their lives. When we find that intersection between the three - passion, purpose and contribution, then we will create the most impact. We understand this intersection 'naturally' as children, but over time, it gets beaten out of us.

Asma Abbas: What Does Heartbreak Have to do with Politics?

Author and professor Asma Abbas who has received her doctorate in Political Theory and Social Thought asks the TEDX Berkeley audience: What do you think heartbreak is and what does it have to do with politics?"

Asma also talks about how it relates to suffering and what suffering means in the west versus more diverse, less homogeneous societies. She asks, "what is it that you and I would die for?"

Sarah Palin: the Dangerous Airhead

This past week in the Huffington Post, Mona Gable writes an amusing but scary account of Palin's most recent examples of her ongoing hunger to become a celebrity and folksy hero, regardless what it takes.

Her first example is Palin's documentary deal on Alaska she struck with The Discovery Channel.

Gable writes: "beyond semantics, what were the folks at Discovery Channel thinking? Did anyone there consider the irony of hiring a woman to host a "nature" show who disdains nature? I mean, before she fleeced you for more than $1 million an episode, (for that matter, John McPhee would have been excellent, and I'm sure he'd have done it for much less), that maybe it wasn't the smartest choice given her strange relationship to the truth and her polarizing politics? Did you forget that in her brief and erratic tenure as governor, Palin had a dreadful environmental record, championing such animal-friendly policies as the aerial shooting of wolves? Or refusing to give protected status to such endangered species as the beluga whale? Even now, Palin proudly and avidly flaunts her ignorance about climate change."

The essence of Gable's piece however is about her "refusal to take responsibility for stirring up violence on the right with her incendiary rhetoric."

She writes about Palin's suggestion that Obama was "paling around with terrorists" when she was running for vice president. Mona also reminds us of her other vocal assertions, when she "claimed that the president had inserted "death panels" in the health care bill, precisely so they could kill her Down syndrome infant and her aging parents."

Read more, including her final plea for someone to hold Palin accountable and set things straight.

Economist Innovation Event: Declaration of Interdependence

Team breakout sessions from this week's Economist & Berkeley Haas School of Business presented on-stage: innovative ideas around the areas of finance, new business models, education, healthcare, energy and sustainability.

Below is the idea presented on the new Declaration of Interdependence. Also refer to the more extensive summary of the event.

Early Glimpse of Countdown to Zero: #countdowntozero #nuclear

At Long Beach last week, film producer Lawrence Bender gave an early preview of his latest movie Countdown to Zero about nuclear weapons threat. Following the eye-opening film, he takes questions from the audience. While the footage is extremely dark, you can hear the dialogue.

A snippet from a Hollywood Reporter review below and below it, a video shot of the preview Q&A in an extremely dark room.

David Cameron on Behavioral Economics: #TED2010

This past week at TED, David Cameron, Britain's Conservative Party leader talks about a new era in politics, where governments have less power and money and people empowered by technology have more of both.

Dr. Gino Yu Raps on American Integration 20+ Years Ago

Dr. Gino Yu from Playlab in Hong Kong does a short rap number he wrote twenty years ago in his college years. (about being Chinese and studying and working in the U.S.). It's endearing and amusing at the same time.

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on Social Media #tg09 #leweb

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah gave an amazingly inspirational talk....on social media and how powerful it can be to mobilize social issues and causes, on passion, on having a voice, on Twitter, on taking action because action is so easy for all of us now with the free and easy-to-use online tools we have at our fingertips.

Social Media, The Law & Twitter (followed by lawyer jokes) #140Conf

Attorney Glenn Manishin (@glennm) tells amusing lawyer jokes at the 140 Characters Conference this past week in Los Angeles. Scroll down and hit play.

Glenn was on the panel that discussed public policy, legal issues within the context of social media and who owns what on the web.

Says Glenn, "if you ask a lawyer a question, they’ll say, it depends." Well, in this space, it really does depend because there is no law about social media right now. There are doctrines of law that affect social media, you can be fired, not hired, but he asserts, that in many ways, "its still the wild wild west."

Because the wild wild west is abbreviated to www....now what? What about linking? Caching? Twitter? Answers are evolving as we speak. Risks are high but if you don’t take the risks, you also don't yield the rewards.

So, who owns the content on social media networks? Can employers prohibit employees from using social media?

Employers could learn a lot about their employees by not only allowing them to voice an opinion but engaging with them in the process. If you let employees use social media, you can monitor their voice and their behavior. Instruct them out to use it and give them concise guidelines but give up the control. In the long term, that control won't work to serve corporations.

Larger corporations don't just think about the legal risk but also the business risk. Brett Trout (@bretttrout) talked to us about intellectual property law. He says with a grin, "social media isn’t like baby bottles or the phone – it’s a tool you have to use. If your lawyer isn’t using social media, you need to get a new lawyer. You need a lawyer who understands what it is and its implications."

As for endorsements and being up front about what you're doing, we are given this analogy: sharks don't know much about playing badminton but they do know how to hunt & kill.

On copyright and trademark issues, 90% of tweets are repetition of facts that are already public and out there.

Tweets live forever and anyone can see them. There’s a difference between that model and Facebook, a walled community, which means you decide who sees your content.

Normally the copyright rule is that if you use the entire article or quote, it’s not considered fair use. You can use a portion of something for commentary or parady. If you retweet, by definition, you’re basically repeating everything someone said.

By posting something on Twitter, you are not copying it, you’re reposting someone's stuff and as Pete Cashmore once said about reposting stuff, it's great to extend that reach of what you said. Hear hear. Distribution distribution distribution.

@glennm below tells us some amusing lawyer jokes on-site at the Kodak Theater last week.