Topic: Culture

Imagine yourself midway through your career. Now imagine that you're successful but emotionally unsatisfied with what you are doing. What do you do? In another episode of Cooking with IEEE Spectrum, Suzan Hassler speaks with Menelio Griffith to learn how he faced just such a situation and decided to leave the field of engineering to pursue his passion: cooking.

Neil Giarratana, president of a small web software firm called Lucidus, is bucking a demographic trend. According to the United Nations, 2007 was the tipping point for world urbanization, and migration to big cities is expected to be a huge continuing trend in the 21st century. But Neil moved from Fairfax, VA to Keene, NH to combine high-tech business with small-town New England life.

Toothpicks. How are they made? And how did they come to be mass produced? Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Henry Petroski to find out.

In the digital world, where information can be spread easily, there is a counterforce attempting to lock it up. Shared culture, illustrated by the creative commons movement, continues to be fought against by traditional commercial culture. Gerd and Glen discuss these issues, assessing how things are likely to change in the future. They talk about how content owners have found ways to quickly filter internet content to assert their copyright rights and share examples about how companies are trying to find ways to be part of the sharing process.

When you look at endless variety of products in the grocery store, do you wonder how they were all developed? In many cases, the companies have just guessed, but they also may have used methods developed by Howard Moskowitz, an expert in the field of psychophysics, and author of the upcoming book Selling Blue Elephants. He joins Phil, Matt, and Scott in a discussion of his research and how technology might take advantage of it. They also discuss how China and other countries hunger for success, while the west is becoming complacent.

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, speaks with Dr. Moira Gunn about his new book "The Long Tail," and answers the critics.

Rick Lowe has given new meaning to the phrase "artist-in-residence." This Heinz Award winner and former Loeb fellow at the Harvard School of Design is the founder of Project Row Houses, an organization that merges art and architecture with social activism. In an audio interview with Globeshakers host Tim Zak, Lowe describes how this experiment in "social sculpture" is redefining the role of art and artists in society.

The networked economy is transforming the way we capitalize business and culture. Yochai Benkler, one of the top thinkers on commons-based approaches to managing resources, weaves together several fascinating threads to argue that decentralization and collaboration are shifting the balance of power to the people in the production of knowledge, goods and services; creating an economy where resources are not owned and outputs are shared.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Richard Morgan, author of the science fiction / future noir novels featuring the character Takeshi Kovacs. They'll talk about what he sees a society's future social issues.

The Metaverse: the social, media-rich, 3-dimensional Web. In this panel at Accelerating Change 2005, entitled "Building the Metaverse", two examples of the emerging Metaverse are demonstrated. Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, shows off Second Life and David Alan Smith, creator of "The Colony", demonstrates the Croquet project. What emerges are two similarly powerful interactive systems that are allowing people to interact and be creative together in ways never before possible. As computation spreads ever deeper into our lives, we will all increasingly live in the Metaverse. When you can build the ideal world, what do you build?