48 hours to get lowest priced All-Access Pass

There are only 48 hours left to buy the lowest priced all-access passes of the year! Daniel Simons, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Aubrey de Grey, Leonard Mlodinow and many other leading business leaders, creatives and scientists will be at IdeaFestival 2011.

So if it's something you've been considering, let us sweeten the pot. All-access pass holders this year will get, courtesy of the IdeaFestival, a one-year subscription to four of the very best and thought-provoking periodicals around - Fast Company, Ode, Make and Oxford American!

The festival has been known to create a buzz. This year, keep it.

Wayne

Image of Philippe Petit, IdeaFestival 2010: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Musical notes and rumble strips, Monday links

Credit: NASA / JPL / Cornell / color composite by James Sorenson

Good morning! Get your mind going with these Monday morning links:

• Dyslexics may have a problem recognizing voices, not just reading words. The information might lead to early intervention strategies.
• Eric Schwitzgebel writes about the link between disgust and moral condemnation.
• Do bees have feelings?
• How the digital age might help us tell stories in new and more compelling ways.
• Smiley faces for road signs? Musical notes for rumble strips? How behavioral economics has come to driving.
• "All behaviors were consistent with what the researchers term 'counterfactual thinking'—looking back at what could have been—and suggest that investors are motivated by a desire to avoid regret and instead feel pride" - well of course. Investing is driven by emotion, not facts.
• How dangerous is "common sense" to managers?
• Dice may contribute to the conservation of leopards.
• Through an ambitious new study called the Good Judgment Project, a group of researchers hope to improve the future of forecasting.
• In the new field of exoplanetology, astronomers are discovering that Super-Earths, rocky worlds the size of Uranus, are far more common than anyone suspected. The exoplanet count has reached 573. Kepler will add hundreds, if not thousands, more.
• Ever wonder why some events seem to pass by more slowly than others? A new study is shedding light on how the brain processes the passage of time.
• In the image above, the mars exploration rover Opportunity, seven years past its expiration date, approaches a massive crater dubbed Endeavour that is beyond the hills in the foreground. The little rover will spend some time exploring the strata on the inside of the crater walls, which should improve the understanding of the planet's geology.

Wayne

Don't play God

Global economic, network and climate systems are complex, and their true nature can't be understood by referencing a single event or characteristic apparent to us. By itself, a cold and snowy March Kentucky day says nothing about global climate change.

Beginning with a story about a courageous British doctor and prisoner in the second world war, economist Tim Harford delivers a lovely mediation on the all-too-human tendency to meet complex unknowns with judgements that harden into certainty, and asks us to apply the same wisdom applied by that doctor, ever the scientist: don't play God.

Rather, fail better. In open systems better outcomes can be had by taking measured risks to improve a product or service - a practice for which Google, seemingly always in beta, is well known. In open systems, complex questions of science respond to patient probing. In open systems, it can be better, and not because one person or group of persons are certain that it can, but because reality will always be bigger than our uncertainty anyway. Isn't that good news?

Based on his best selling book, Drunkard's Walk, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow will talk about the related idea of randomness at IdeaFestival 2011. And one of Harford's colleagues at TED Global in Scotland, Sheril Kirshenbaum, will be at IdeaFestival 2011 to present "the science of kissing." Bring your boyfriend or girlfriend. Come prepared to learn.

I hope to see you there!

Wayne

New "multiverse" hints from ancient radiation

Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

Astronomers analyzing years of data returned by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe believe they have located places in the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, that may mark the locations where other universes have touched our own.

"Multiverse theory" proposes that the Big Bang that produced our universe is, in fact, a regular event. BBC:

The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.

But Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues have now worked out that when these universes are created adjacent to our own, they may leave a characteristic pattern in the CMB.

The Planck telescope will study the CMB in greater detail, and will help to either confirm or refute the current findings. Public data from that space-based observatory is expected by 2013.

At IdeaFestival 2011, Suketu Bhavsar, a professor of astrophysics at Cal Poly Pomona, will talk about the possibility of a “multiverse” and will no doubt touch on this developing story.

Purchase your All-Access Pass today to lock in the lowest rate of the year!

Wayne

Your human resource department, the IdeaFestival

At the IdeaFestival, "new connections" happen all the time. Some extraordinary people, like Jan Winter, have been inspired at the festival to start businesses. Jan, in fact, is changing the fitness habits, and futures, of tens of thousands of children.

When organizations send employees to the festival, business is the real winner. Free to recharge their imaginations, to think laterally, employees return energized by what they've seen and heard and ready to make a contribution. For organizations today, which depend more than ever on human capital, that's a bottom line result.

Whether you send your employee to attend just one event or several - and trust me the effect is cumulative - you might think of the IdeaFestival as the coolest human resource department you've ever had.

Wayne