Speakers in the News »

6/16/06
DANIEL GILBERT

As Father's Day approaches, we turn to the wisdom of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of the recently-released book "Stumbling on Happiness. His article on Time.com "Does Fatherhood Make You Happy" offers sage advice on the ups and downs of parenting. According to Gilbert, the best approach to child-raising is one that appreciates both the intense highs and the depressing lows of this all-encompassing experience: " Our children give us many things, but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality. The fact that children don't always make us happy--and that we're happy to have them nonetheless--is the fact for which Sonora Smart Dodd was so grateful. She thought we would all do well to remember it, every third Sunday in June." At the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, Gilbert presented a lecture titled "How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times".

10:43am CST | +

6/15/06
MARKOS MOULITSAS

Congrats to Markos Moulitsas for organizing last week's successful YearlyKos event in Las Vegas. In addition to his conference-planning activities, the founder of Daily Kos also earned an appearance on the June 11 edition of Meet the Press. Asked by Tim Russert to identify the most important thing that liberal progressive bloggers can do to influence the 2006 midterm elections, Moulitsas responds, "Well, a lot of it is what we’re already doing, which is talking about these races, talking—making sure people in Washington, D.C., and outside of Washington, D.C., know what’s happening out in the states. We’re identifying Republican misinformation and dirty tactics and talking about those, acting as a rapid reaction force, motivating people to get active and to get involved in campaigns and to help fund campaigns and do the hard work that it takes to do these elections. I mean, this is the stuff that the right-wing noise machine has been doing for decades. Now we finally have a vehicle. And we’re very small, comparatively. We’re a very nascent movement, very nascent medium. So we don’t have the kind of influence that, say, a Rush Limbaugh does on, on talk radio, but we’re growing and we’re becoming more and more sophisticated as we mature as a medium and as a movement." Moulitsas was part of the "Revenge of the Blogs: Election 2008" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

11:04am CST | +

6/14/06
MARISSA MAYER

Marissa Mayer graces the cover of the current issue of BusinessWeek. The publication's profile is all praise: "As Google's vice-president for search products and user experience, she is the last stop before founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the way to final approval of any new feature that appears on the Web's most valuable real estate. She thrives by practicing obsessive fastidiousness in hiring, fanatical social networking in managing, and apolitical critiquing of new ideas. . . Mayer has been a Champion of Innovation longer than most, long enough to create her Nine Notions of Innovation. Her Third Notion -- hire not just the best but the most brilliant -- is perhaps the most important. An enormous global talent hunt is under way, with companies shifting from process and quality control to creativity and empathy as the key competitive edge. Mayer gets this. She still personally approves every hire for the products group at the 6,000-plus person company. She scans the résumés of interns, many of them Rhodes Scholars. And she picks the Google Associates, who are hired right out of college and trained internally. Mayer also shepherds each class on a summer trip overseas to stimulate creativity. She's a big reason why Google functions as a single, open social network, where every piece of work is laid bare on the company's intranet." At the 2004 SXSW Interactive Festival, Mayer gave the presentation "Google, Innovation and the Web."

12:05pm CST | +

6/13/06
AMANDA CONGDON

Watch Amanda Congdon interview financial kingpin, philanthropist and philosopher George Soros on a June 8 special edition of the Rocketboom video blog. "In the last few months," notes Congdon, "President Bush's approval ratings have dropped dramatically -- as low as 29% in some polls -- and congressional approval is even lower. What happened to help American's really get the picture about this administration?" Soros responds, "Reality. This administration believes that it can manipulate the truth, and to a large extent that is possible. But then reality eventually manifests itself. That is what happened Katrina was reality. Iraq is reality. People, in the end, can't be deceived indefinitely. The time comes when they see the reality. And that is what happened." Other topics covered in the short discussion between these two range from Bono to web surfing to market-driven global politics. Congdon was part of the "Democratization of the Moving Image" session at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:16pm CST | +

6/12/06
CRAIG NEWMARK

Kudos to Craig Newmark of craigslist, who continues to fight for net neutrality. In the wake of last week's US House of Representatives approval of the cynically-named Communications, Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (Cope) Act, Newmark penned this editorial in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle outlining the importance of retaining net neutrality: "It really looks like we're at an historical turning point, much like the time of the invention of the printing press. Things are changing at an accelerated rate, facilitated by the democratization of power provided by the Internet. But this trajectory could get derailed by the federal government as a few people representing big telecoms fight the free and open access of the Internet. Right now, the Net is open to everyone, as democratic a platform as any. But on Thursday, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to grant big telecoms the ability to provide privileged access to the already powerful. . . .In other words, opponents to the Internet's open and free access are trying to change the rules -- and they're trying to mislead you, claiming that they're against regulation and that they only want you to pay for the rising cost of their "pipes." That's information warfare. Democracy relies on the honest exchange of information. We now have a rare opportunity to better control our own lives, and to demand an increasingly clean government. Only a few of us will speak truth to power, but a lot more of us need to get behind those who do." Newmark has spoken at the SXSW Interactive Festival each of the last three years; he was part of a special keynote interview at the 2006 event.