Category: Speakers

Almost all of the medical advances we enjoy today were first tested in mice. Most what we know about human physiology was first studied in mice. However, the general public’s understanding of lab mice is usually limited to a few characteristics – they’re white, and they’re probably trying to take over the world.

In truth, all mice are not created equal (many of them aren’t even white!). Over the past century an entire industry has developed that is devoted entirely to the creation and production of lab mice. My talk will cover the factors that make some mice more useful than others, and the mouse-industrial complex that exists to meet the needs of modern science.

About Molly Nixon

You can find Molly on Twitter @thebeastieswee.

Crowd sourcing has always been around but with the current technologies, its capabilities have grown tremendously. This presentation will focus on the use of these tools in an environment vastly growing by the number catastrophic events around the world. The month of September is National Preparedness Month and with that CrisisCommons, a volunteer technical community that connects people and organizations who use open data and technology to innovate crisis management and global development, will be going on a road trip. (ROAD TRIP!!!)

About Pascal Schuback

You can find out about Crisis Commons here and find Pascal on Twitter @schuback).

About George Dyson

From his TED bio page:
A member of the fabulous Dyson clan, George Dyson is sometimes defined as a son-of and a brother-of, but he has found his own voice as a chronicler and a philosopher of science and the future. The son of physicist Freeman Dyson, George grew up inside one of the most fervid hotbeds of scientific research in the Atomic Age. He spent his early adulthood living in a treehouse, and designing and building Aleutian kayaks (chronicled in his book Baidarka: The Kayak). While he maintains his kayak business now, his parallel interest in science and the future has brought him to the fore.

My full-time job is working on software to help people in get around Internet censorship in countries like China and Iran, where the government filters what people can access on the Web. I can talk about the history of methods used by repressive government to censor the Web, and the parallel history of the tools for users to defeat that censorship. I will address some of the misconceptions that people have about the nature of circumvention software and the battle between the censors and the circumventors. And finally I will pose some of the (as-yet-unsolved) problems faced by the developers of circumvention software — problems that perhaps the geeks in the audience would enjoy taking home and thinking over.

About Bennett Haselton

Bennett Haselton has been developing workarounds for Internet censorship since 1996. He is the webmaster for Circumventor.com, a distribution network for tools to evade Internet blocking. He has also worked as a professional security tester and published research on Internet security and privacy. He gets a kick out of describing himself in the third person.

You can find his work at Peacefire.org

Now that many of my geek friends are having children (I had mine in my early twenties, somewhat “early”) I want to share some shortcuts and musings that my partner and I have discovered on the way.

About Amber Straub

Amber works at Swedish, and dreams of someday helping make healthcare simple stupid. She enjoys not being crazy, cooking, snowboarding, multitasking, and tracking down her 10 year old daughter. She can be found on twitter @shadalicious

As a professional one-armed juggler and inspirational speaker, I strive to make every show about an important aspect of being human in relationship with other humans. I am a juggling geek, a relationship geek, and a circus freak who loves to juxtapose the tragic with the comic in order to bring the audience to a new balance within the dialectics that define our lives: comfort and pain, self and community, task and maintenance, love and fear…I will make of these five minutes something you will never forget.

About Jason Quick

Jason is a performing artist, inspirational speaker and circus arts teacher. There is very little that he likes more than overcoming interesting obstacles that challenge the ways that people limit themselves; in this endeavor his handicap becomes a fortunate gift. You can find out more about his work at jasonquick.net.

Amanda (aka Sirin) will talk of the hooping sub-culture and how this modern take on an old fitness craze has taken a very new and different look. It’s become such an addiction to some that they’ve built careers out of hooping, branched off the sub-culture into sub-sub-cultures such as fire hooping, hoop yoga, hoop aerobics and hoop dancing.

About Amanda Straub

Amanda is a software developer who fell in love with this big circular toy over two years ago while she was looking for a fun new fitness regiment. Hoop dance has become a permanent past time for her, and you can usually find her in the parks around Seattle when the weather is nice with a big stack of hula hoops to share. As a Seattle “hoop ambassador,” Amanda teaches hoop dance classes, makes hoops in her spare time, and generally loves spreading hoop love in her wake.

You can find her on Twitter @amandahoops.

When I was originally invited to speak at Ignite, I was asked if I could somehow do my presentation while performing an aerial act. My response: “You’re crazy! I don’t know how I would do that.” I suggested that instead I just stay on the ground and talk about how I left the software industry to run away and join the circus. But then a funny thing happened when I was writing that talk: I realized that an aerial act and a timed talk are not that different! Thus, two weeks before the event, I totally rewrote my talk – and choreographed an act to go with it.

About Bev Sobelman

In 2003, Beverly Sobelman walked away from her 18-year career in software development to find something new. That new thing turned out to be a career as a professional circus aerialist. In 2007, she founded Versatile Arts, Seattle’s first full-time aerial studio. You can find her on Twitter @bev_sobelman

Working in Cranium’s editorial department for 8+ years, I got hooked on Dr. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, and I still find it to be a uniquely powerful tool for inspiration and general perspective-broadening. And in the current educational climate, when just about everything revolves around reading and math scores, I also think it’s incredibly important for the kids (and grown-ups!) in the crowd to hear these messages:

1. There are lots of ways (beyond just “reading” and “math”) to be smart!
2. We’re naturally inclined toward some of the intelligences, but we can improve and develop in any of them.
3. If something seems tedious or difficult to you, you can use the multiple intelligences to change your perspective.

About Catherine Carr

After leading Cranium’s editorial team for 8+ years, Catherine Carr runs her own consulting business, focusing on the intersection of brand and content and authentic consumer engagement. Through speaking gigs and client work (including projects for Giant Thinkwell, Wonder Forge, and PhotoRocket, among others), Catherine loves communicating ideas in creative ways. She also makes a mean homemade Bolognese.