Scotto Moore takes us into a digital fairy tale about a young woman who realizes that first person video footage from her own life is being posted to YouTube – before the events actually occur in real life.
Surreal fantasy or could it really happen? You’ll not want to miss this gem from one of Ignite Seattle’s recurring cast of characters.
You can find Scotto Moore on his Web site at scotto.org.
We geeks love our personal tech. iPhones, Kindles, and netbooks – these are the things we are quick to buy, and quick to trade up to stay on the bleeding edge. But in our wake we leave mountains of discarded, useless, and toxic ex-electronics. We have accepted this cycle of perpetual desire, momentary fulfillment, and discarding to chase new desires as the inevitable cost of technological life. But must this necessarily be the case?
Humblefacture is a movement to better understand how the way we make things affects our society and the environment. Using this understanding, practitioners of Humblefacture aim to make things more safe, useful, and accessible to more people.
Dominic Muren shows us how modular design, biologically-inspired construction, and user fabricated components can be used to create consumer electronics which go beyond “green materials” to create truly sustainable manufacturing.
Dominic Muren is a full time lecturer in Design Studies in the Department of Design in the School of Art at the University of Washington. He has written extensively on design and how it relates to society, both online as a writer for Treehugger.com, and on the weblog IDFuel.com.
You can find Dominic at @dmuren on Twitter, his Web site, dmuren.com, or on the bookshelves with “Green’s Not Black & White: The Balanced Guide to Making Eco Decisions,” published in May 2009.
Because you demanded it, here’s the list of speakers for Ignite Seattle 7 being held a week from Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at the King Cat Theater.
We have an all-star line up of some of the most ingenious, fascinating and inspiring geeks from across the world (or at least in or around Puget Sound).
Daniel Westreich (danielwestreich) – Causal inference is hard; or how I learned to stop worrying and love counterfactuals
Lee LeFever (leelefever) – Where Goldfish Come From
Everyone knows goldfish and koi, but very few have ever thought about where they come from – how they are bred, raised, transported, etc. I know these things like the back of my hand.
Since 1965, my family in North Carolina has owned and operated one of the largest fish hatcheries in the US. Blue Ridge Fish Hatchery raises and sells goldfish and Koi – 10’s of millions of fish a year.
Dan Shapiro (danshapiro) – Making Benjamin Fly: Geeking out aero-style for about a hundred bucks
When I was a kid, RC flight meant spending thousands of dollars to put what was essentially a slightly-aerodynamicized lawnmower in the air. You spent thousands on engines and electronics and balsa, months building your plane, crashed it your first flight out, and then repeated. Over, and over, and over again.
Enter lithium polymer batteries, rare earth magnets, miniaturized solid state inverters, 2.4 GHz spread spectrum frequency hopping transmitters and receivers. What do you get? I’ll show you. And I’ll show you how to get it up, for about one benjamin.
Mandy Sorensen (mandercrosby) – What To Do With 60 Minutes in Whale (and How I Learned to Use a Machete!)
Ever wondered what to do with a half-alive beached whale on a remote island in the Pacific?
Mehal Shah (mehals) – Fighting Dirty in Scrabble
Are you tired of your family thrashing you at Scrabble? Do you wince when someone brings out that red box at board game night? Are you ready to wipe the smug grin off the face of your significant other who pulls 7-letter words out of nowhere?
Elan Lee (elanlee) – I Wish I Was Taller
I filed a bug on my life with a major software company in Redmond.
Lauren Bricker (brickware) – Geek Generation
Don’t call me a teacher, I’m more of a “Geek Generator.” I have kids (9 and 18), both who love computers and yes, they’ve already learned how to program. But apparently that wasn’t enough for me. For the last two years I’ve been teaching computer science at a local private high school. It’s incredibly interesting, rewarding, and yes, a lot of work. My goal with this talk is to generate more Geek Generators.
Willow Brugh (willowbl00) – Creating Communal Creative Space
The experience of building a maker space from scratch is certainly a project – I’ll talk about my experience in doing so, what advice others have shared with me, and what spaces like this are already available in Seattle (and perhaps elsewhere on the West Coast).
Mónica Guzmán (moniguzman) – Addiction! Staying afloat in the age of the stream
Glued to email, your RSS reader or Twitter? Has your hand grown by 133 grams — the approximate weight of an iPhone? The Web is a stream, and it’s easy to drown. Tips, tricks and cautionary tales from a reporter who swims the stream to stay on top of local news, but has learned the hard way how easy it is to get carried away.
Gregory Heller (gregoryheller) – What Makes The Greenest Cab?
Green transportation is all the rage these days, especially hybrid vehicles. Popular wisdom may lead some, including civic leaders and politicians to believe that the greenest vehicle is a hybrid. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been fighting to “Green” the Yellow Cab fleet in that city by forcing all new cabs to be hybrids. The iconic NYC TaxiCab often sets the pace for the rest of the country’s cabs. However would hybrids in NYC really make green cabs? And would the rest of the country’s cab industries follow suit? The answer may surprise you.
Todd Sawicki (sawickipedia) – How I learned to Appreciate Dance Being Married to a Ballerina
Often times we see talks about how spouses deal with being married to geeks and startup jocks, now its time to turn the tables. This is a talk on what I’ve learned about ballet and how to appreciate it being married to a former professional ballerina. Hopefully you too will be able to tell the difference between a first and fifth position and a Plié vs. a Passé. Even a geek can learn to love classical dance.
Yoram Bauman – Principles of economics, translated
Translates for a lay audience the “10 principles of economics” from Harvard professor Greg Mankiw’s best-selling textbook.
Deepak Singh (mndoci) – Big Data and the networked future of science
New instruments, sensors, distributed scientific collaboration, informal publication channels = lots of data. How do we crunch it? How do we share it? How do we distribute it? This talk will dive into (a very very fast dive) into the challenges and solutions of the big science of today and tomorrow. Exascale anyone?
UPDATE: July 31, 2009
Jessica Hagy (thisisindexed.com) tells us which lies to ignore.
Rob Gruhl, the person who taught you how to buy a car is going to teach how to take beautiful photos.
Vanessa Fox – (@vanessafox) brings the SEO expert’s guide to food.
Scotto Moore, our artist-in-residence, is back with another digital fairy tale, “CPU.”
Matthew Amster-Burton – (@mamster) a local food writer talks about raising a foodie.
Thanks to everyone who submitted. As usual, we had an embarrassment of riches to choose from and making this list was extremely difficult. If we didn’t pick you, please don’t be discouraged, we live and die by your submissions.
It seems Nature has beaten man to almost every “invention” : Helicopters, Submarines, Electricity, Video Cameras, Supercomputers, etc. For the longest time Mike Tyka thought the one notable exception was the wheel. Recent discoveries in biochemistry proved this to be false as well.
Nature has invented a full blown, reversible, proton driven turbine engine, many tens of thousands of which churn away in every one of the billions of cells in a human body. Join Mike Tyka as he takes you on a journey of discovery inside your body and the wheels that make you tick.
Dr. Michael Tyka is a senior fellow at The Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington’s Biochemistry department.
Yesterday’s breakthrough solutions are today’s historical curiosities. Such is the case of stick charts, which were once used to navigate the Marshall Islands.
By observing the waves, wind and stars, select Marshall Islanders were able to find their way across the water. In 1898, Captain Winkler of the German Navy began decoding the stick charts, allowing us to understand how and why the charts worked.
Using his experiences as a lens, Ken Beegle asks us to look at what we’re building today and ask what type of historical curiosities they will become.
You can find Ken on Twitter at @kbeegle, at his Web site, and the slides from this presentation at Slideshare.
Eye shadow and code don’t mix? Despite a sea change of attitudes and an influx of women in the male dominated field of technology, issues of inequality and discrimination remain.
Through humor and anecdote, Maya Bisineer’s Ignite talk shows you how to create role models that will foster the next generation of geek girls. She encourages people to think hard and respond differently to gender issues – be it with respect to introducing math to little girls or being more accepting of the tech women in their lives.
Maya’s talk mixes her own life story with tips about how to meet or be a geek girl and shows that yes, eye shadow and code can and do mix.
Maya Bisineer is the founder of Memetales, a site created to “democratize creation, sharing and marketing of children’s picture books.” She also serves as the Director of Education for the Social Media Club Seattle.
You can find Maya at ThinkMaya on Twitter, on her blog and she is a regular contributor to the SimpleMom blog.
Money tight? Want to save more for a rainy day? If you aren’t fully utilizing your public library, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year! Learn how to get share books, DVDs, CDs, magazines, articles, audiobooks, and much more…without overloading your budget or your storage space.
Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all that your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.
Dawn is the Teen Services Coordinator for Sno-Isle Libraries. You can also find Dawn on her blog.
Remember the joy of writing your first Hello World application? Do you still have a copy somewhere so you can gaze upon your coded baby steps into the world of binary goodness? In knitting, creating something beautiful is just like binary, with a series of knits and pearls you can dream up the most sophisticated of patterns.
In the spirit of hi-tech meets hand-tech, Beth Goza will show you how to convert your binary Hello World app into a pattern of stitches (think knit =1 purl = 0), so that you can create, mount, frame and hang your Hello World genius for all to see.
You can find Beth at bethgo on Twitter, on her blog. During the day, Beth works at T-Mobile on the devPartner Community team.
Beth also gave the “Is 2008 the year the “Third Screen” Takes Center Stage?” Ignite talk in August of 2007 and she will be speaking at the 2009 Gnomedex.
Scott Berkun is a great public speaker. He travels the country speaking on project management, innovation, design and lately on how to speak. As an offshoot in his research on his upcoming book he put together this Ignite talk on Why and How to Speak.
He’s summarized the talk in this excellent blog post on Speaker Confessions (where he’s chronicling his new book):
He’s got several more points at his site.
Expressing one’s self on Twitter involves summarizing, editing, and jettisoning the unimportant. We need to strip our thoughts down to the bare minimum, while most importantly, retaining the meaning.
For the more verbose of us, Twitter’s 140 character limit poses a challenge for conveying something as simple as where you are and what you are doing. But what about communicating something much more complex, like breaking up with someone?
Jason Preston navigates you through the world of minimizing the complex feelings, thoughts and action items associated with breaking up with someone in less than 140 characters.
In this instructive how-to video, you’ll build your Twitter toolbox with the following editing tactics:
and if necessary, you can gain the ability to break up with someone on Twitter.
Jason Preston is currently the Director of New Media at Parnassus Group, the company responsible for the 140 | The Twitter Conference.
You can find Jason at Jasonp107 on Twitter, on his blog or his thoughts about the future of publishing at Eat, Sleep, Publish. Jason was recently interviewed by Scott Berkun about this talk here.
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