@MaryEggers is a Mom, wife, QT2 triathlon coach, yoga teacher, registered nurse, 6XIM finisher, three time Kona IronMan qualifier, and a crusader against cancer! (Holy SuperWoman, Batman!) She is the fitness coach for the Teens Living with Cancer Fit Program- a peer support program of Melissa’s Living Legacy Teen Cancer Foundation. Teens with cancer come together to realize they are not alone and to find a voice that is loud, strong and empowered.

When Mary saw that 7 time Tour de France winner and now fellow triathlete and cancer crusader – Lance Armstrong – was coming to Buffalo, a mere hour from her (and my) hometown of Rochester, NY, she tweeted out a challenge, not really expecting a reply.

Almost immediately (as in, nearly REAL TIME), Lance replied!

Lance accepted Mary’s challenge (check out the blog she wrote to him) and before long, the “Duel in the Pool” was raising money for both Mary’s TLC charity and Lance’s LiveStrong charity… and Lance was starting to realize that Mary was no slouch…

Mary kept all her friends, family and followers up to date on the plans and progress through her blog and twitter – and also posted to ask for donations. Mary wrote on her blog:

Not only did LiveStrong embrace us…… Roswell Park Cancer Institute, located in Buffalo welcomed us. The dialogue got going between Teens Living With Cancer and Roswell and a beautiful thing happened. Thanks to Lance and LiveStrong we are bringing a chapter of TLC to Roswell. We will share the money raised and teens in Buffalo will have a program expanded upon what is done here in Rochester!!

Mary’s tweet and Lance’s response were now not only raising money for the cause, but also helping to expand the program to change lives of teens living with cancer in Buffalo also!

Mary continued to say:

As I am writing this I am crying. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY COMMUNITY. Silly old me tweets Lance Armstrong. Who accepts. The University at Buffalo, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Teens Living With Cancer connect and come up with something bigger than raising money (although we will be!).

Mary had originally hoped to raise at least $1K for TLC. They took donations, they sold tickets, they sold t-shirts.  As the plans progressed, that goal became much bigger, and within 6 weeks, they have raised OVER $60,000 to help those struggling with cancer and continue to bring in donations.

I don’t know about you, but I can barely type that without getting choked up.  One simple tweet, responded to immediately – and so many people helped.

The race itself was not as important (though MARY WON!! YAY MARY!) – but what resulted. I am in awe, both in the fact that the real time web makes things like this possible – and moreso in the fact that people like Mary and Lance, like other members of the #140conf community, embrace it wholeheartedly and DO REAL GOOD with it.

 
Lance and Mary high five after The Duel in the Pool – Photo by Steve Morse

The Teens with Lance and Mary – Photo by Andy Flemming

 After the race, Mary wrote this to fellow Triathletes in their Google group:

What he said about me at the speech last night ….. I don’t think I deserved that kind of compliment but it left me with the feeling…… I need to really earn that kind of accolade.

We …. not me…. we…. you and I. Raised over $50,000. 

WE raised this money through individual donations, utilizing Facebook and Twitter as our primary avenues. You know the story about the pessimist and the optimist? While they were arguing on whether the glass was half full or half empty, the opportunist snuck in and drank it. While people are out there debating on whether Facebook and Twitter are good or bad…. we snuck in and used them to raise $50,000.

The power of community. Community meaning all of us as a human race.

Well said Mary – and you DO deserve major compliments for having hope, seeing a way, using the tools available to you and making a difference. You are definitely a hero!

Mary won’t stop here, she will use this experience to help even more Teens Living with Cancer… and anything else she sets her mind to.  I must say this – watch out @MichaelPhelps, Mary may be coming for you after London – in the name of charity!!

Read more from @MaryEggers on her blog at ironmomma.com, follow @TeensWithCancer on Twitter, and catch the latest from @LanceArmstrong’s foundation LiveStrong.org.

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Tina Clark (@140Conf) is Community Manager of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community.

—Steve Jobs quoted in Fortune magazine, November 1998.

Steve Jobs, the man whose genius expressed itself best in the art of marrying product design to product function (“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” he said) was perpetually striving to make the most sophisticated digital technology the most simple and the most fun to use. You can see it, plain as day, in the 317 utility and design patents he collected during his brilliant, all-too short career.

From now until July 8^th, 2012, you can see them, along with some assorted nostalgic Apple paraphernalia, at a Smithsonian exhibit in Washington, D.C., that pays homage to Jobs’ technological contributions to the world: “The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.”

Stretching on a concourse in a cavernous hall beneath the S. Dillon Ripley Center, visitors to the Steve Jobs Exhibit can see on display the patent certificates that list him among the inventors who conceptualized and hammered out the details involving many iconic Apple products, including computer cases, Macintosh computers, iOS-based devices, packaging, keyboards, mice and power adaptors, and even the glass staircases found in many Apple stores—shades of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead!

The exhibit is mainly a display of 30 panels, each 4-by-8-feet in size, made to resemble iPhones. Collectively, they showcase more than 300 patents and trademarks granted to Jobs throughout this career. To be precise, each panel displays facsimiles of the front pages of 12 patents granted to Jobs, totaling 312 of the 317 he acquired in his lifetime. The traveling exhibit was designed and created by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Museum in Alexandria, Virginia., where it originally was on display through February, 2012.

When Jeff Pulver heard that the exhibit would be on display at the Smithsonian, he dispatched Yours Truly to get the scoop. I rocketed down to Washington, D.C. on the Acela, only to find that the exhibit had just arrived on Wednesday, May 8, 2012, and was being unpacked from several great wooden boxes. Like the curse of King Tut’s belongings and the Hope Diamond, the exhibit had already claimed a victim—a case had squished a worker’s finger. But the unpacking and exhibit assembly went on as, one-by-one, out came all of the objects, including some from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History which were placed in a special display case at the exhibit’s entrance. The display case was filled with an original 1984 Apple Macintosh computer, mouse, and keyboard; a 1992 NeXT monitor, sound box, microcomputer, keyboard and mouse; and a 2003 Apple iPod.

It’s hard to believe that it was the little Apple Macintosh computer, with its diminutive black-and-white screen, that introduced to the public a real graphical user interface. GUIs took up lots of CPU processing power, all just to cater to non-hackers. Still it was the user-friendly GUI front ends to operating systems and application software that entranced non-hackers with its clickable icons instead of command lines to start and run programs.

Since the museum staff was a bit paranoid about me appearing out of nowhere and spouting Steve Jobs trivia as the crates were unpacked and the exhibit took form, I was referred to Richard Maulsby for an interview. Maulsby had been appointed to the newly created position of Associate Commissioner for Innovation Development at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by Commissioner for Patents Robert Stoll.

As the associate commissioner of the USPTO, Maulsby is at the forefront of the USPTO’s efforts to encourage and promote innovation as a key driver of the American economy.  He coordinates the agency’s efforts to assist independent, small entity and university affiliated inventors.  Maulsby also works closely with other government officials in support of the Obama Administration’s efforts to support small business and entrepreneurship that creates jobs.

Maulsby would be at the exhibit’s opening at 10 a.m. on Friday, May 11^th, but, graciously, I would be granted an interview ahead of time. Here’s how it went…

Richard Grigonis: I hear this exhibit was a three-way effort: First, the Department of Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO] owns the Steve Jobs patent material; second, it is being exhibited at the S. Dillon Ripley Center under the auspices of the Smithsonian; and third, the design of the exhibit is by the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Richard Maulsby: Yes, this started back toward the end of September 2011, shortly after Steve Jobs died. I was having a casual conversation with our Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director, David Kappos. He said to me, ‘We really ought to do something that’s pays tribute to Steve Jobs and that captures his contributions, his body of work.’

I then talked with David Fink, who is the president and CEO of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is operated on the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia, by Invent Now, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering invention and creativity. We at the USPTO do a number of joint projects with them, and they do all of our exhibits, including our museum.

David Fink is himself an inventor, having worked for Disney. He really came up with the idea of capturing the concept by taking Steve Jobs’ patents and giving them a strong visual presentation, which was implemented by his people. In a sense the creative design and implementation is their intellectual property but they assigned it to us, or something like that [chuckle]. That’s the way it is, you know, when you work for a company such as, say, IBM, you may be the inventor, but you assign it to company.

In any case, we all were surprised, quite frankly, at the number of patents with which Jobs was associated. I had always thought of Apple, well, Steve Wozniak was the inventor, the guy who worked in the garage on the hardware. Jobs to me was the great entrepreneur, businessman, marketer.

But after we started doing some digging around, we found all of these many patents with which Jobs is associated. Just last week, by the way, on May 2, 2012, Steve Jobs was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Wozniac, however, is an interesting guy in his own right. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here, but he was an important part of the video that was produced for the exhibit.

Anyway, I kicked around some ideas, and they came up with this concept of taking all of Steve Jobs’ patents—there are over 300 of them—and make digital images of the front page some of the patents,  so it looks just like the patent itself, with his name on it, and the co-inventors, and a description of what the patent is about, and the seal, the ribbon, and all of the stuff that is signed by the undersecretary at the USPTO.

Those digitized patent images are placed on panels, each one of which resemble the face of an iPhone. At one end of the exhibit is, again, the iPhone where it’s almost like, you know, if an iPhone screen that you can scroll across. The images that go across these bigger screens are all of his trademarks.

So the modest purpose of this exhibit was somehow to capture something that said, hey, this is the foundation of this man’s success as an entrepreneur, a marketer, an innovator. It’s his patents and his trademarks: over 300 patents and hundreds of trademarks as well.

I can only think of two other people in American history who combine those unique qualities of an innovator, marketer, entrepreneur: Walt Disney and Thomas Edison.

Richard Grigonis: You might also include on that list Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid and of instant photography fame, who garnered 444 patents over the years. But, getting back to this Steve Jobs exhibit, it appears to have already done some traveling.

Richard Maulsby: This exhibit first appeared in November 2011 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s campus in Alexandria, Virginia, in the atrium lobby of the Madison Building. We had it there until January 2012. I was quite taken aback by the huge number of people who came to see it. I mean, we’re out here in Alexandria, Virginia, it’s not like the Mall in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people came to the exhibit and they really would get off on taking pictures—with their iPhones—of themselves with the patents relating to the iPhone itself.

Richard Grigonis: Yes, I remember that, at the time, the USPTO’s Intellectual Property Director, David Kappos, said, ‘This exhibit commemorates the far-reaching impact of Steve Jobs’ entrepreneurship and innovation on our daily lives. His patents and trademarks provide a striking example of the importance intellectual property plays in the global marketplace.’ Interestingly, the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO, Teresa Stanek Rea, said that when she would leave the office late at night she would typically find the lobby chock-full of people just standing there contemplating the patents.

Richard Maulsby: Then what happened was, well, we have done a number of projects the last couple of years for the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s Secretary, Wayne Clough, sent to our campus one of his senior curators, who really like the exhibit and said, ‘We’d love to host this at the Smithsonian.’ So we’re doing that right here at the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center for about two months.

Prior to this, the exhibit was on public display in the atrium of the new World Intellectual Property Organization [WIPO] building in Geneva, Switzerland, from March 30, 2012 right through to World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2012. The exhibition got a lot of coverage and related well to 2012’s World Intellectual Property Day theme, which was ‘Visionary Innovators.’ The exhibition was co-organized by the WIPO and the USPTO and supported by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva.

Richard Grigonis: When the exhibition opened in Geneva, the WIPO’s  Director General, Francis Gurry, remarked that Steve Jobs was, ‘…one of the most influential technology thinkers and actors of his generation… A visionary innovator is measured by the extent of transformation that their innovation achieves in society and the economy… Steve Jobs certainly had vision—his ambition to make digital technology simple and accessible gave rise to a new paradigm for the delivery of entertainment.’

Moreover, Ambassador Betty E. King, U.S. Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, said the exhibit was ‘an opportunity to see how Steve Jobs, at the helm of Apple, acted upon his vision, and in doing so shaped the means by which our world functions and communicates on a daily basis.’

Richard Maulsby: And now the exhibit is here at the S. Dillon Ripley center until July 8, 2012. At the end of the summer the exhibit will be traveling to Los Angeles for the Los Angeles County Fair. There are other people worldwide who have interest in hosting it, too.

Obviously, Steve Jobs clearly struck a responsive chord with many, many people. I know the Smithsonian is doing a number of things—they’ve added a few artifacts, and they are planning a program, I believe, with his biographer. (Editor’s Note: Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, was scheduled to be interviewed by Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough on the evening of June 6, 2012.)

It’s all our effort at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to pay a tribute to this man by trying to capture something to symbolize his tremendous body of work. I also there’s a message here that, of course, patents and trademarks and intellectual property protection is the foundation of this nation’s economy; it’s the reason why people like Steve Jobs are able to flourish. It always has been that way.

Editor’s Note: The Steve Jobs exhibit will be on display in the S. Dillon Ripley Center concourse from May 11 to July 8, 2012. The Ripley Center is open daily from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. It’s situated at 1100 Jefferson Drive, next to the Smithsonian Castle and 100 yards east of the Smithsonian Metro station, Mall exit. The Center is underground and is accessed by entering the kiosk that appears in the photo above.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

But the love, the passion one has for a brand that does everything right (we can all probably think of only a very precious few), didn’t start until college.  That’s when I realized that Wegmans had something SPECIAL. You walk in and it feels welcoming, comforting. They have great products, great quality, give back to the community and, above all, put their customers first in every way.

In the past couple years, Wegmans has expanded into social media. But they’re not just using it to tell you about new products or Veggie Party info (though they are great about that too) – they use it to respond to their customers… within minutes!

As I was researching recipes for Leige Waffles last week, I saw that a key ingredient was Belgian Pearl Sugar – hard to find in the US.  A tweet to @Wegmans got me an immediate reply and shortly thereafter, an answer.

And soon I got my answer – YESSS!! (I seriously cannot wait to try making Leige Waffles!! Aisle 13A here I come! )

Aaron Thompson (@aaronistic) and Erica Tickle (@ebtickle) of Wegmans recently spoke at #140cuse about “Using Twitter with Media to Break into a New Market” – here is their talk:

Wegmans really is a wonderful example of how to “do” social media right. It’s not a change in philosophy, it’s continuing a tried and true philosophy in a new medium – and doing a top notch job at it – like they do with everything else related to their business.

Check out the various ways Wegmans uses the Real Time Web to make their customers smile: @wegmans, Fresh Stories Blog, YouTube vids, iPhone App, or find your local store on Facebook.

“Numbers are nice, but smiles are better.”  @Wegmans, you make me smile!

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Tina Clark (@140Conf) is Community Manager of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community.

—Walt Whitman, Passage to India

In kicking off this short series of blog entries on futurists, you can’t help but notice two things: First of all, the whole world craves knowledge of the future of everything and anything, in any way possible, be it boring statistical analyses by government forecasters, pronouncements by eminent scientists, stock market infotainment, raving political punditry, astrology columns, psychic predictions, the Weather Channel, and so forth. Even science fiction/fantasy is more popular now than ever. In giving the public what it wants, a whole futurist industry thrives.

Secondly, there is the matter of the accuracy—or lack thereof—of the futurists. Like the eras in which they prognosticated, futurists have come and gone, having enjoyed varying degrees of success. The seemingly endless procession of soothsayers includes Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian O’Leary, Bruce Sterling, H. G. Wells, Lewis Mumford, Michael Dertouzos, Peter Drucker, Reyner Banham, Steve Jobs, and so forth. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky even wrote a book poking fun at the miscalculations and boo-boos of the learned, The Experts Speak.

Most futurists play it safe by diluting their predictions with plausible or even self-evident phraseology. Toffler, for example, could crank out hundreds of such urbane drolleries as, “Under conditions of high-speed change, a democracy without the ability to anticipate condemns itself to death.”

A few futurists, such as Clarke, made some really accurate predictions. Clarke is perhaps best known for his 1945 proposal for a system of geostationary communications satellites, which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. However, even had Clarke patented the idea, the patent would have expired the year before the first communications satellite was placed into orbit. Clearly, most futurists tend to earn their living simply by making predictions, and not off of actually being correct now and then.

Ah, but there are rare individuals who not only predict the future—they make it happen. These remarkable people are among the ultimate “movers and shakers” in society. Unlike the typical futurist or expert that zigzags around the country from talk show to talk show, bloviating about the possible size of the next iPhone, the people we’re looking at here really aren’t like you and me, and really do have something that you and I don’t—the ability to see what the future needs, and to personally galvanize those around them and bring about positive change on a massive scale. These people, like Carlos Ghosn, Steve Jobs and, yes, even our own Jeff “Voice, video & social media over-the-Net” Pulver, not only offered a vision of a world transformed, but went ahead and actually inspired and disrupted for the better our otherwise complacent society, altering our lives beyond all normal expectations. At the very heart of the matter is found the essential difference between the Leader and the Follower.

In the case of automotive titan, global strategist and management genius Carlos Ghosn (pronounced “Go-an”), every one of his Nissan Leaf electric cars is an expressed belief in the future.

Ghosen is in many respects a citizen of the world. Born in Brazil in 1954 to Lebanese parents, at the age of six he moved with them to Beirut, Lebanon. He attended secondary school there, the Jesuit Collège Notre-Dame de Jamhour. Then he completed his classes préparatoires at Lycée Stanislas in Paris, graduating with engineering degrees from the École Polytechnique, with his final year’s specialization accomplished at the École des Mines de Paris in France, where he is a citizen.

Ghosn’s automotive career began in 1978 at Europe’s largest tire maker, Michelin, where he worked for 18 years, ascending from plant manager to chief operating officer, successfully managing both Michelin’s South American and North American units. In 1996 he joined Renault as executive vice president, and was sent to Tokyo in 1999 to revitalize Japan’s second biggest carmaker, Nissan. Perhaps “resuscitate” would be a better word, as Nissan was near bankruptcy.

At the time, few experts thought that Ghosn could do much with Nissan, given the fact that he was a foreigner and that Japanese corporations are notorious for being in the iron grip of Japan’s legendary business culture. Nissan had greater organizational inertia than a European or U.S. company, owing to many centuries of Japan’s shared (indeed, monolithic) values, mindsets and customs. However, in the case of Nissan, the ancient ways were preventing it from adapting to dramatic new conditions that threatened its survival, and so a leader of extraordinary ability was absolutely necessary to substitute a new organizational culture.

As it happens, Ghosn was perfectly suited to handle the immense task of turning Nissan around, particularly because of his remarkable, multicultural background and understanding of different types of corporate cultures found around the world. He’s lived in Brazil, the U.S., France and Japan, and has dealt with corporate crises over the years while working for three different companies on four different continents. He’s fluent in English, French, Arabic, Portuguese and is catching up in Japanese. He knew that you dealt with employees one way in Brazil, another way in France, and yet a different way in Japan.

His “Nissan Revival Plan” initially earned him the moniker of “Le Cost Killer” as he dismantled the long-entrenched keirestsu (a set of companies and subcontractors with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings), closed five assembly plants, slashed the Nissan workforce by 21,000 and eliminated promotion by seniority—organizational reforms carried out to a degree and on a scale never before seen in Japan. However, when the plan actually worked—and even sooner than was initially projected—Ghosn found himself a Japanese hero and a superstar.

Ghosn was able to brilliantly persuade each department to ignore their gripes about other groups and make changes in pursuit of some clear-cut, self-evident, common objectives. Although Ghosn is not a politician and has no political aspirations, his ability to find common objectives among groups resembles what used to be called in America “The Great American Compromise”—in fact not really a “compromise” at all, but rather a clever way for a great statesman to move the body politic toward a desired goal in a swift series of increments.

As Nissan’s profit skyrocketed, Ghosn was compared with the samurai of old, who embodied the Bushido (or “way of the warrior”) code and way of life, consisting of self-control, sincerity, honesty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, justice, refined manners, purity, modesty, frugality, martial spirit and honor.

In 2002 Ghosn was named both Man of the Year by the French magazine Le Journal de l’Automobile and Businessman of the Year by Fortune magazine. In 2003 he was the highest-placed European in the annual Financial Times / PricewaterhouseCoopers rankings of the world’s most respected business leaders.

Ghosn is regularly mobbed by fans seeking his autograph. Aside from being the subject of books, magazine articles and academic theses, in 2002 Ghosen’s life story became a 7-chapter superhero comic book series in Japan, entitled The True Story of Carlos Ghosn, later published as a separate book by Shogakukan. Japanese veneration of Ghosn was even manifested in the gastronomic realm when a “Carlos Ghosn bento box” appeared on Tokyo restaurant menus. (Bento boxes are fast take-out meals sold in Japanese convenience stores, bento shops train stations, and department stores.) It was an unheard-of honor for a foreigner.

Today, Ghosen not only is the CEO and president of Renault and Nissan (the “Renault–Nissan Alliance”), but also on the board of Alcoa, Sony and IBM. He splits his time between Paris and Tokyo, zipping about to meetings, examining factory plants and dealerships, and launching innovative new vehicles at car shows worldwide.

And now, at the peak of his great success, Carlos Ghosen has embarked on his greatest challenge and gamble: bringing about the world’s adoption of the electric car—beginning with the Nissan Leaf (LEAF: Leading, Environmentally friendly, Affordable, Family car), the first all-electric plug-in car from a major carmaker in decades. If the plan works, Ghosn will be enshrined in the history books along with Karl Benz, Henry Ford, Nikolaus Otto, and Gottleib Daimler.

As Ghosn said in 2008: “Nothing can stop the car being the most coveted product that comes with development, and more efficient conventional engines are not the answer. We must have zero-emission vehicles. Nothing else will prevent the world from exploding.”

Ghosn calls the all-electric car “the anti-crisis weapon” that is immune to  fluctuations in the price of crude oil.

Ghosn’s clever promotion of the Nissan Leaf, a five-door hatchback, is to market it not as an advanced science fiction-like vehicle, but as an ordinary family car, albeit one that is powered by lithium ion batteries, has a range of about 100 miles and a top speed of 90 mph. It debuted in the U.S. in 2010 with a price tag of $32,780 (upped in 2012 to $35,200), with U.S. Federal tax credits now reducing that to around $27,700. (California’s state tax credits further trimmed the cost down to around $20,000, as did the programs of several other states.)

From its introduction on December 3, 2010 in a ceremony held at Nissan’s global headquarters in Yokohama, more than 27,000 Leafs were sold worldwide through the end of March 2012. The top selling markets are Japan, with 12,000 units sold by mid-March 2012, and the United States, with 11,426 units sold through March 2012.

Since the “weak link in the chain” for all electric vehicles is the battery, Nissan is supporting research into improving lithium-ion battery technology. The company is also persuading governments to subsidize installation of publicly available charging infrastructure.

As Ghosn has said, “the batteries [for electric vehicles] are still too heavy and expensive. The evolution of the battery is extremely important for development in the 21st century.”

In his keynote speech at the 2012 New York Auto Show, Ghosn continues to stand behind his prediction that electric vehicles will comprise 10 percent of the automotive market by 2020 in those countries where they are sold. Ghosn also anticipates that Nissan will sell 1.5 million of their zero emission cars by 2016. “I don’t want you to take a one-month or two-month sales result in one particular market to try to make your opinion about the evolution of a very important technology for the industry,” Ghosen said. “I think the electric car will hold its promises. All the stars are lining up to make it a very important segment… I am not at all changing my bullish approach.”

In 2011 Ghosn announced that Nissan will build an all-electric vehicle in China for the Chinese market, thanks to a joint venture, Nissan-Dongfeng. The new “Chinese” vehicle will sell under the Venucia brand name, will appear by 2015, and will share many components from the Nissan Leaf.

Ghosn believes that it is time for the automobile industry to step up to the plate (to use some baseball parlance) and make the future happen. Pundits have long said that failure to do so could eventually lead to the collapse of civilization itself, so it is heartening that someone in the extraordinary position of Carlos Ghosn has used his great power and influence to make an enormous decisive move in an effort to set the world on its proper course, in open defiance of short-sighted naysayers, reactionaries, and other living tools of the status quo.

For Ghosn, spectacular innovation and moving mountains are not all-consuming demons. He has a wife, Rita, and four children, is known for spending quality time with his family, and the title he treasures most is his being named Father of the Year by a Japanese community group in 2001.

Every one of us should wish Carlos Ghosn all the luck in the world—for the future of the world itself is at stake.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Jeff Pulver: Everyone sees life differently. I certainly see life differently than others do. I’m Jeff Pulver. Some of you know me, and my uncle, Jerry, who is here. He made it here all the way from where he lives, Winnemucca, Nevada. There are few others of you here who know me, but I’ll argue that, really, no one really ‘knows’ me. In fact, no one really knows you either. The ‘you’ that you’re willing to share may not be the ‘you’ who you are. There are different ‘you’s’ here, even if you are same person—and I’m not talking about anyone with mental ‘issues’ [Laughter.] I’m talking about people who are just being people, who you have a chance to connect to.

It’s funny. When you go to college—if you go to college—people tell you can start a new identity, that you can be someone who you weren’t in high school. That’s true for the first day of college, maybe the second day. [Laughter.] But unless you truly are polymorphic, it’s very hard for you to be the ideal person who you are not. Then again, maybe you have a chance to simply become the person who you really are. I like the words ‘simply become who you are.’ Some people spend their entire lives not knowing who they are. Some people spend all their lives trying to figure out who they want to be, but they spend so much time trying to be somebody else, they never have a chance to be themselves. That’s hard.

One of the interesting things regarding the world of social is that you can be somebody who you want to be, or you can be somebody who you think your friends want you to be. But at the end of the day, are you really you? Are you connecting to the person who you are? Are you true to yourself? If you tweeted to yourself, would you talk back? [Laughter.] Would you ‘friend’ yourself on Twitter? What’s up with ‘poking’ yourself? Oh, that’s something else. [Laughter.]

But when you get down to it, we have a chance to be raw and to be real, if you let yourself be. But it’s really hard to be real. It’s really hard to be true to yourself. We can joke about it. You can make fun of others. But at the end of the day, you have a chance to have a channel that’s you. And it doesn’t matter about technology. It’s all about people. It’s all about how you want to be: How you want to be understood. How you want to be remembered. It’s all about how you want to be who you are, or give yourself a chance to connect to be that person who you are. Because, again, no one really knows you. Not your parents, not your sisters, not your brothers, not your friends. Sometimes even you don’t know you.

As a result, ‘social’ gets to be very confusing, because if for the first time you want to be honest with yourself, and you come out in Facebook or Twitter and say something which is real and genuine but people don’t think it’s ‘you’ because you’re not the kind of person who normally says such things—well, how do they know this? And how do you know where you fit in? How do you know where you are to be in the world? It’s so hard to be adaptive to environments which are otherwise hostile. It’s hard just to grow up. It’s hard to be an adult.

Is see that some students came here today. Are you guys in college or high school? Ah, seniors in high school, so your average age is 17 or 18. Alright, so one thing people will probably never tell you is that you never have to worry about getting old. Right? The thing is, when you’re 18 to 38 years old, you’re still the same person. The skin on your outside may get a little harder, but your soul is your soul. And the voices that gave you direction when you were 18 years old hopefully will still be giving you direction when you’re 68 or 78. It’s the same thing. It’s just that the context of living changes. But you are who you are.

So, if you get nothing else out of this conference, just remember that you’re never going to get ‘old.’ But sometimes you have to learn to listen to yourself, to the voices that guide you through life. Sometimes the challenge is trying to understand who those voices are and appreciate what they’re saying.

Life is like taking a multiple-choice test. Let’s say that, arguably, you answer ‘C’ to a question. Then, you have second thoughts. You come back and change your answer to ‘B’. But it turns out that ‘C’ was right all along. And you knew it was right, dammit. But your brain stepped in and ‘overthought’ it, or maybe it was a question with emotional impact, and you ‘overfelt’ it. But something about your soul gave you the right direction, at least initially. And you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to get connected back to the thing that was trying to steer you in the right direction, because it seems that your soul knows what to do.

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever discovered about having friends is that they don’t have a clue as to who I really am. Even today. And that has made me sad. But it’s true. Even so, I refuse to pretend to be anybody other than who I am. And I refuse to be who they want me to be. I want to be who I want to be. I’m willing to be fickle. I’m willing to be—crazy. I’m willing to do what I want to do to have fun today, because if I’m not here, I can’t have fun.

My father told me several things before he died. One of the things he said, relevant to the adults in the audience here today, is that a vacation with your family is no vacation at all. [Laughter.] It’s not for the kids. But another thing he said was really a lament that ‘youth is wasted on the young.’ I think that’s true too. And when you get older, your parents actually seem wiser than they ever were. That’s also true, guys, but you’ll figure that out later. [Laughter.]

The thing is, you all have the chance to live and do whatever it is you want to do. It doesn’t matter what your age is. That’s all relative. You have to give yourself a chance to be honest, if with no one else in the world, then at least with yourself, as to who you are. Allow yourself to be centered, at least enough to connect, and to feel.

The world of social is kind of hard, because on one level you’re trying to create an identity which is the ‘me’ that people think they are. Then there’s the ‘me’ I really am today or the ‘me’ I want to be tomorrow. That creates so much confusion. How could you not be the same person? What about authenticity? What about ‘realness’? At the end of the day, you’re a human being. We have feelings. Kids have feelings. In fact, many people don’t remember the importance of feelings. But we have them. And sometimes those feelings never go away. It’s hard to be who you are, to be connected and still be ‘real.’ Social has all sorts of aspects, but for me, social media today is such that it’s nice to have open communication with people that know me, or think they know me. But what’s really nice is to see that the whole world is connecting and communicating, because I think that, as society grows, humanity is on the rise for one reason only—we have new and open lines of communication with each other. We’re able, in this room today, to find common ground with strangers. We’re able to realize that, once and for all, we’re all in it together, whether we like it or not.

We can’t always solve our problems, but we can agree to disagree and we can agree to agree. We can agree to be fools and we can agree to be friends, and we can do it with a smile. There’s no need to do it with hatred. You can be strongly opinionated. You’re allowed to be who you are, because you’re a person and your voice matters. This is the hardest part of the matter. So many people grow up in a world where they have to repress their voice. And I’m not talking about totalitarian regimes. I’m talking about here in America, where you’re not allowed to speak up because you may offend somebody—well, maybe I shouldn’t say that! [Laughter.] But you’re allowed to have a voice, because your voice really matters.

We’re living in a time right now where I question our ability to have freedom, because freedom sometimes comes from the inside. I’m just talking about giving yourself a chance to be you. Discover the brilliance, the beauty, the effervescence of you. And social is very scary in that regard. As a kid growing up on long Island, I could tell, very quickly, that I was alone. Really alone. So much so that I found my ‘soulness’ in the craziness of radio. When I was a 9-year-old kid I had no friends, no real friends, or maybe I just didn’t feel the friendship, even if they were there superficially. So I discovered AM radio at night. I used to listen to the AM dial. Frankly, last night I was here in Iowa and I was very happy to tune in some AM stations and see what was coming in here from New York. It was nice.

In any case, when I was a kid I went to my uncle’s Fred’s office. My Dad told me to check it out. So I ended up having the opportunity to have a really surreal experience. I had no idea as a kid why I was in my uncle’s office. There I was, and he turns on this box on his desk, and it made some noise. It made some squeals. And, at the end of the day, it all changed my life, because this box was a radio and many voices coming out of it. My uncle tuned the dial a little bit and he found a clear spot. He said something that was very hard for me to understand. He said, ‘CQ, CQ. This is K2QQM calling CQ.’ He said it again. What he didn’t tell me is that he had a ham radio; he assumed that I knew. ‘CQ’ comes from Morse Code. It means ‘seeking you.’

Every day, I go out on Twitter, and I tweet ‘Good morning.’ That’s the equivalent of me saying ‘CQ’ with a ham radio. Every day I’m out there looking for a meaningful relationship, a meaningful contact, a chance to say, ‘Hey, I’m alive and you matter too.’ But we really don’t have an easy way to do that. As a kid, however, I started to learn. I started to understand. I could say ‘CQ’ too just like my uncle. Standing there in my uncle’s office, for an entire hour I was mesmerized as he talked to random strangers from all over the world. He said, ‘My name is Fred. I’m in Farmingdale, New York,’ and he gave a report.

After the hour had passed, I looked at my uncle, then I looked at his desk and the ham radio atop it. I realized then that my uncle had the cure for loneliness. It was this box, this ham radio. I could simply take this box and bring it back to my bedroom at home, and then I’d always have friends. I’d never be alone. I tried to take the radio home with me, but he wouldn’t let me. You see, that was his radio. [Laughter.] Moreover, to be a 9-year-old ham radio operator was not so easy. I needed to get a license. I actually needed to learn Morse Code, of all things. Can you imagine? I had to learn about electronic theory normally taught at the college level. And I had to learn about the rules and regulations governing ham radio. It took me until I was 12-and-a-half years old. It was a struggle, because I was studying for and taking tests to become a full-fledged ham radio operator.

So my life from 9 to 12-and-a-half years of age really sucked. [Laughter.] I was trying to be me. I was having a hard time connecting. A really hard time. But then I ended up getting a ham radio license when I was 12-and-a-half, and I’ve never shut up since. [Laughter.]

As a kid, the thing I learned from the whole experience was that radio was a great platform, a great preparation for the future of social media. Why? Because if you’re a 12-year-old kid on Long Island in New York, and you’re not listening, connecting, sharing or engaging with a stranger on the radio, they’re not going to talk back to you. You have no standing with them whatsoever. But if you have the ability to let yourself be a little vulnerable, let yourself feel something, maybe for the first time, and feel someone else’s feelings, then it opens you up to a whole world out there. And then, whether or not everyone is a phony or fake doesn’t matter, because it is you who is real. I make this a point: everyone has a need to feel liked—more than merely ‘Facebook liked’. Everyone desires to feel needed. Sometimes you don’t get that from the outside world, so you have to find it on the inside. And that’s really hard.

Social networks do give you that chance to feel good. I believe that if you feel something, go ahead and feel it, say it, experience it. Don’t put it off until tomorrow. Tomorrow may not happen.

I ended up become a ham operator, becoming a bit obsessed with it, which got me involved, 20 years later, with the Internet. My life was actually saved because I was a ham operator, for in 1995 some software appeared that enabled me to talk over the Internet. I cheered, ‘Yea! My hobby is back!’ IT was like ham radio, but now I could talk over the Internet. It was voice over IP. Well, I got fired from my day job because I got so involved with that. I didn’t know what to do about it. It was hard. But I discovered that it was okay to be fired, because it can save your life. Consider this: I had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald at the World Trade Center. Yes, I worked at One World Trade. About 700 Cantor Fitzgerald employees lost their lives on 9/11. I was spared because I was a ham operator. I discovered that the person sitting next to you really can change your life if you let them. You just have to give yourself a chance to feel and connect with others.

I’ll end this talk on a point about ‘digital breadcrumbs.’ You see, the thing that is going to define the life of an 18-year-old that doesn’t define the life of a 48-year-old person is that, for the next 30 years, the 18-year-old has a chance to be remembered because of the technology. You see, in my generation, if wanted to be a rock star, you had to be a real rock star. But today the world’s media cares about and notes everything that you do, for whatever reason. Legacy is not something you ask for, it’s something that comes with the territory. Imagine growing up right now. Unless you are a major celebrity, there’s not a lot written about you—certainly not anything your future family and descendants will ever see. But today, we’re also in a world that gives us Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and everything else. I think an absolute other side of the argument about Twitter and about status updates is that if you’re alive, then your voice really matters. After all, when you’re dead, it’s hard to tweet! [Laughter.] When you’re alive, and you have something to say, say it. What you don’t realize is that you are in a sense talking to your future kids or grandchildren, who you may never meet. You have a chance today to live a life and for others in the future to understand it by looking at your timelines, tweets, Instagrams, YouTube videos and videos that people had created for you to view too.

In the not-too-distant future, your life will be documented, whether you like it or not. You don’t have to be on a reality TV show. You just have to be alive. Can you image the impact that you will have on others? So, if you’re having a shitty day, say it! Because someone else, a future descendant of yours, may have a bad day too and could be helped by viewing what you say today. Why should they feel all alone just because they are having a bad day? Life doesn’t have to be great. Sometimes it sucks. But it’s life. We choose that over the alternative.

And so, to the extent that you have the opportunity to leave digital breadcrumbs wherever you go, leave them! But don’t be overexposed in terms of privacy. Privacy matters. I’m not saying you should put yourself in harm’s way. But remember—you’re alive. Live your life. Follow your dreams. Inspire others—because you can.

I’m @jeffpulver, and thank you for listening. Stand up and give your friend a hug, please!

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Before her death, however, Avery’s parents did create a heartfelt, inspirational blog, “Avery’s Bucket List”—a blog ostensibly written from Avery’s point of view—that went viral online (You can also follow/discuss Avery on Twitter at @AveryBucketList and you can Like her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/AverysBucketList). One of the blog’s goals is to raise $1 million in donations in Avery’s honor for Sophia’s Cure Foundation, which helps fund the SMA gene therapy research of Brian K. Kaspar, Ph.D., Principal Investigator in The Center for Gene Therapy at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Department of Neuroscience at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

Kaspar has developed an SMA gene therapy program that will undergo human clinical trials by early 2013. An anonymous donor gave $400,000 to fund the gene therapy program’s pre-clinical work. The same donor, deeply moved by Avery’s story, has committed to match, dollar-for-dollar, every contribution made in Avery’s honor to Sophia’s Cure Foundation—up to $500,000—with the proviso that the FDA must officially approve the program for a human clinical trial.

Perhaps what’s so surprising about all this is that, like many little-known diseases, SMA turns out not to be not so uncommon. It’s the #1 genetic killer of children under the age of 2, occurring in nearly 1 out of every 6,000 births. And 1 in 40 people are genetic carriers for SMA.

We really don’t realize how many diseases, syndromes, disorders, etc., can afflict us. There are infectious agents, genetic diseases and spontaneous mutations. Over 600 neurophysiological problems alone have been catalogued. Indeed, a total of something on the order of 10,000 diseases have been described by medical science. However, given the size of the human chromosome and its penchant for mutation (spontaneous or otherwise), the number of possible truly rare maladies that manifest detectable symptoms could easily reach 10 million or so.

Then again, there is the radical theory of MIT-trained chemist Raymond Francis, who claims that there “is only one disease”—cellular malfunction—and that all manifestations of that disease have only two possible causes: nutritional deficiency and toxicity.

It does not matter, of course, what theory one believes in, be it genetic fallibility, infection, or toxic agents; the degree of pain and death and the demoralizing effect on the victim’s family and friends remain the same, one explanation yielding no advantage over any other.

Though SMA is a disease that has found its poster child, there are many more afflictions that have yet to capture the public’s fickle interest. Take lupus, for example. The biggest response this blog ever received was for our account of The Lively Lupus Ladies of Twitter, who appeared on our 140 Character Conference stage in 2011, and my follow-up, You Too Can Save a Starfish. Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that, despite the best efforts of the Lupus Foundation of America (LFA), is a malady that remains “under the radar” for most of us. (FYI: May is Lupus Awareness Month and May 10^th is “World Lupus Day.”)

Perhaps it is because lupus is so unpredictably debilitating that it is almost as if it must be swept under the rug: the psychological fear of having lupus is considerable, as the victim knows that his or her own immune system has gone on the attack, its antibodies capriciously inflaming and destroying random parts of the body (skin, joints, organs, etc.), in defiance of the various medications devised over the years to combat it.

Readers of this blog have commented on my unusually distinct empathy for victims of lupus. As one person commented, “That you Richard have quite captured what it’s like for a chronically ill lupus patient; having to strive against the odds that lupus life often brings us.” Perhaps that’s because I have another, vaguely similar autoimmune malady, Crohn’s Disease, which usually expresses itself as an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but may occur anywhere from the mouth to the end of the rectum.

My first encounter with Crohn’s was following my sophomore year in college. Like many sufferers, it snuck up on me, inflaming the spot where the large and small intestines join (near the appendix). After some incorrect diagnoses, finally a most unpleasant barium enema and a barrage of X-rays revealed the real culprit. It was a severe case. At college, my fellow students residing in one of the dorms had a unique betting pool. Not on football, but on me—that is, if and when I was going to die. Indeed, my own father was convinced that my demise was imminent. He took out a $5,000 “burial insurance” policy on me. He was greatly relieved. (Note: He died in 1981. I’m still here.)

Things continued to get worse and, in 1979, a four-and-a-half hour operation was necessary to resection my intestine and seal up a number of fistulas. After the operation, I weighed myself in the hospital: I was now the original 98 pound weakling. Miraculously—and much to the chagrin of those who were betting on my passing—my intestine never became inflamed again. I totally recovered and started gaining weight—too much, as we shall see.

My physician at the time, a gastroenterologist by the name of Ziefert, was a wonderful fellow, but he had some 1950s-ish ideas about treating my condition. Ziefert said that the surgery had removed the section of my intestine that absorbed vitamin B12. He warned me that, unless I self-administered periodic injections of this vital substance, the functioning of my brain and nervous system would suffer greatly. He wrote out a prescription and I dutifully began my regimen of B12 injections.

As for Dr. Ziefert himself, he suffered from diabetes, which had resulted in the failure of his kidneys. He was on dialysis. But that didn’t stop him from enjoying his favorite candy bars. He would simply weigh the candy, eat the candy, measure out a sufficient quantity of insulin to counteract the sugar, and then inject himself! (He gave the phrase “Physician heal thyself” and whole new meaning.)

Within a few years, Dr. Ziefert had died of a heart attack. My new gastroenterologist informed me that Dr. Ziefert had been strangely misinformed as to the workings of the human body. Vitamin B12 is actually absorbed over much of the small bowel, and so my years of B12 injections had been totally unnecessary!

During the 1980s and 1990s I had slowly been gaining weight, about seven pounds a year. Also during this time I began to be physically irritated by what I thought were simple hemorrhoids. Although my new doctor was subjecting me to regular colonoscopies (tons of fun) in search of a possible new outbreak of Crohn’s Disease, he strangely never bothered to examine my “hemorrhoids,” blowing off discussion of it with the words, “Oh yes, hemorrhoids, the disease of modern civilization.”

In 2007 I relocated to southern New Jersey. My newest (third) gastroenterologist examined me and said immediately: “You don’t have hemorrhoids, you have a perianal fistula.” It was a new, insidious manifestation of my old Crohn’s. The inflammation increased. I couldn’t sit down, having to write thousands of words a day while standing up.

My new doctor told me that medical science had a treatment. It was found that in Crohn’s sufferers, the body’s immune system produces too much of what’s called the Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF). TNF regulates immune cells and can induce an inflammatory response and cell death. Having too much TNF has been implicated in such autoimmune disorders as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, plaque psoriasis, and refractory asthma.

Surgery was not really an option, as it would likely recur and cause other problems. Instead my doctor sent me for some amazingly expensive (about $8000 a pop) intravenous infusions of a TNF inhibitor called infliximab, better known by its commercial name, Remicade. It’s a monoclonal antibody (made from mouse proteins) that can knock out the TNF for about six weeks, but not stop the body’s production of TNF. Three treatments should have cleared things up for good—it didn’t. My doctor put me back on Remicade treatments. He said that “people can receive Remicade treatment for 10 years or more with no problems.”

I did my own research. What I found was that there are all kinds of scary possible severe side effects associated with Remicade usage, including runaway infections, leukemia and lymphoma. And those were just the “official” side effects. Nurses in charge of administering infusion had anecdotes about mental and emotional effects of the drug. Indeed, I was becoming more impulsive, bursting into fits of anger and finding myself screaming at my PC and telephone! I was way overweight, having spent most of my time working 18 hours a day writing material for three magazines simultaneously, along with other duties.

Suddenly, I decided to walk away from everything and start my own business. I quit my job. The economy was sinking, however. Nothing was happening. I spent a lot of time in my home office with no exercise and I weighed nearly 250 pounds. My health insurance was going to run out at the end of the year. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown.

At this point a friend of mine came to my aid, pointing out research indicating that the dreaded TNF was produced by fat tissue and that patients had been helped by losing weight and taking about 9 grams a day of flax seed oil. In response to his severe daily badgering over the phone, I went on an extreme diet and took four-mile walks after breakfast, lunch and dinner. Over a period of about seven months I lost 90 pounds and, in December 2010, went “cold turkey” on the Remicade treatments. The result…. I was free of symptoms! My friends had been of greater help to me than the professional physicians, who, after all, were simply in business to bill patients for colonoscopies, endo-rectal MRI’s, cat scans, infusions of expensive chemicals and what-not.

Without the literally relentless help from my friends, I probably wouldn’t be around to write this. Similarly, in the case of many lupus sufferers, although their friends and families are emotionally affected too, they nevertheless do what they can in their role as caregivers. And with social media and networking, both caregivers and victims of all sorts of autoimmune diseases can reach out and help each other, sharing their combined wealth of knowledge derived from onerous real-life experiences. And so, spiritually replenished by the help we receive, social media makes it possible to express our gratitude toward those who cooperate with us by “giving something back,” and, in the process, enjoy the feelings of personal accomplishment that comes from working to alleviate a big problem, creating a better life for all of us.

After all, even the most healthy and successful among us have been helped, knowingly or unknowingly, by others. To get where you are today, somebody gave you a break. Perhaps you know who it was, perhaps you don’t. At any critical juncture in life, everyone who finds himself or herself in need wants to be helped by others, whether they consider themselves virtuous or not.

Our natural sociality—whether shaped by Darwin’s natural selection, prescribed by religion (“They helped everyone his neighbor, and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage…” Isaiah 41:6,7) or inculcated by our culture’s moral traditions resulting from its members’ myriad interactions—of course finds expression in an affiliation or attachment to those closest to us, but ultimately extends beyond kinship to more expansive moral emotions of mutuality and reciprocity encompassing the rest of us, too. The true source of this benevolence may never be known, but what is known was stated by the father of little Avery Lynn Canahuati in her blog:

“We are all born pure & innocent.  We can let the world change us, or we can change the world.”

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

As I’ve written previously about 9/11, I heard about the attacks at about 10 a.m. that morning: “I wish I could say I was right on the scene, camera and notepad ready, or at least engaged in something exotic like sitting at the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, sipping a Mai Tai and watching the events unfold on CNN via a satellite phone Internet connection. Alas, I was actually ensconced at my home in Harrison, New Jersey, working on the manuscript of my fourth book, a technical tome entitled Voice over DSL. I had toyed with the idea of journeying to the World Trade Center aboard the PATH train that day, as I had been doing some consulting for the world’s first all-Flash website, the now defunct Town24.com, the headquarters of which was only a block away. I searched my mind for an excuse to go there so I could partake of chef Michael Lomonaco’s comforting American cuisine at my favorite restaurant atop the World Trade Center, Wild Blue. (Its famous sibling restaurant-in-the-sky, Windows on the World, was one floor up.) But I was lost in thought that morning, typing away, and world events passed me by.”

In recent years, many pundits have concocted wild simulations in their respective heads over how, in a different technological milieu, victims trapped in the World Trade Center towers or on board the planes might have used social media and wireless technology to alert authorities sooner (or have been alerted by authorities sooner), not to mention the posting of frenzied, spine-chilling yet heart-rending goodbyes to family and loved ones. If 9/11 had occurred today, would Facebook and Twitter allow such material to stay online as a tribute? Or would families deem such horrific real-time tweets and images as too gruesome, traumatic and inflammatory to remain accessible to everyone worldwide? After all, the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were so psychologically devastating that even the mental health clinicians who provided care to the victims were afflicted with so-called secondary traumatic stress.

We’ll never know. In September of 2001, text messaging on some mobile phones was possible, though the average well-equipped user sent only about one or two of them a day (up from one message a month back in 1995). Facebook would not debut for another three years; its progenitor, Mark Zuckerberg, was still attending high school. Twitter did not even exist as an idea, nor did YouTube videos.

As it was, cellular voice traffic was eliminated and/or totally congested that day, though, initially, some people aboard the hijacked airliners and at the World Trade Center managed to use their cell phones, air phones, and office phones to make one last call.

Although there was email available, as well as blogs, Yahoo groups, chat rooms, and list-serves, most people on the scene were plastering posters of their loved ones over ever square inch of walls, payphones and lampposts throughout Manhattan—a gristly form of horror vacui that attested to the term’s Latin meaning (“fear of emptiness”) and still evokes haunting memories of a time and place.

When the 10^th anniversary of the disaster came around in 2011, Facebook collaborated with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum (http://www.911memorial.org/), to produce and launch an application as a tribute to the victims. Facebook users were able to dedicate their status, update their profile photo, and tell their family and friends how they recalled and honored the victims. At the time, Michael Frazier, director of communications for the museum, said that social networks had broadened the conversation about the 10th anniversary and allowed people from all over the world to “come together at once to recall, remember and reflect.”

This year, the organization behind the 9/11 memorial has commissioned two apps. One mobile app enables visitors to search for a victim’s name. (The organization has installed a Wi-Fi network at the site enabling iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone users to download the app.) Visitors can find and listen to recorded oral histories linked to certain names. For those visitors who have sponsored one of the thousands of cobblestones lining the memorial site (which do not have markings), the app will direct you to your stone. Even if a visitor shows up without a smartphone, the memorial has kiosks on the premises that can be used to look up victims’ names, and then print out their short profile with the exact location of where the name is on the memorial. Moreover, family members of victims can locate the name of their loved one by asking one of the guides onsite who tote iPads loaded with the app.

A second app, called Explore 9/11, was also released. It only works with the iPhone. Explore 9/11 enables visitors to take a tour around the World Trade Center site, see a timeline of photographs of the events of 9/11, and play audio stories and show photos related to each spot where they’re walking. It also has a sophisticated augmented reality functionality that can compare recent geotaged photos and videos with those taken on 9/11 and subsequent days at each location.

Some groups have used social media to provide support to the families of 9/11 victims. For example ‘Photo Outreach’ consists of a group of 50 photographers from around the New York City area who offered victims’ families one free night of photography services for any upcoming event. Photo Outreach alerted victims’ families to their existence via both social media platforms and fliers. The group also created a Facebook group, Twitter Profile, and a website. Within two weeks, over 40 different 9/11 victims, and their family members, contacted the group. The 50 ‘Photo Outreach’ photographers each devoted one night in which they would work at an event for these victims.

You too can follow 9/11 observances using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs. For example, you an follow the Flight 93 National Memorial Campaign (Facebook), 9/11 Day (Twitter), National September 11 Memorial & Museum (Facebook), 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance (Facebook) and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Blog.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Hello, my name is Tina Clark and I am the new Community Manager for the #140Conf, tweeting away as @140Conf (say hello).

I am not new to #140Conf, however, having been involved through Kodak since 2009.

Right away, the impact of #140Conf was obvious to me – it was a unique format that gave people a voice to talk about Twitter, technology and the Internet. About how the real-time web was changing traditional media, making new things possible, allowing people to connect with their favorite celebrities (yes, the Ashton/CNN competition was the spark for #140conf), creating new Internet celebrities, allowing brands to connect directly with their customers, and changing peoples’ lives.

And then there was Jeff Pulver – humanity, intelligence, compassion, and hugs wrapped in one purple package! If you’ve never met Jeff in person or heard him speak, you must, because he is an amazing person who will have an immediate impact on you!

Interviewing Jeff Pulver at the 140Conf

At that first #140conf, I remember being overwhelmed with inspiration – not just from meeting Jeff and from what the speakers had said, but from the PASSION they had for what they were speaking about.  If you could bottle the passion the speakers and attendees at #140conf events have, the world would truly be a better place… but what is most wonderful, is that you CAN bottle that passion, so to speak…

Inspiring tidbits and quotes are tweeted and shared with the world (the #140conf hashtag gets a workout). Attendees and Speakers are photographed. Video is streamed live out to thousands of people who cannot be there in person, then videos are archived to YouTube. The passion is captured and shared.

That’s the true beauty of what the real-time web, and Jeff Pulver’s conferences, bring to the world – passion.  And I am thrilled to be a part of it.

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Tina Clark (@140Conf) is Community Manager of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community.

Zambetti was involved in the development of Arduino, an open-source, easy-to-use electronics prototyping platform intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino has a battery of sensors that can detect what’s happening in the environment and affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators.

What’s more interesting to all of us 140conf “coincidence and synchronicity” enthusiasts is Zambetti’s graduate thesis project, “Occasional Coincidences,” which examined how systems that recognize and present meaningful coincidences can be designed.

According to Zambetti’s thesis, in the past, our lives and social consciousness we were all synchronized to some extent by the periodicity of scheduled TV and radio broadcasts. Housewives (as well as college students) would juggle their schedule to watch their favorite soap opera. Children upon hearing the introduction to their favorite detective or superhero show would run to their bedrooms to retrieve their secret decoder ring. Fathers would sit by the radio or television for the nightly news and then the family would gather around to listen to or view an evening variety show.

As we-make-money-not-art.com comments, “These now quaint examples… demonstrate how scheduled media broadcasts stimulated popular discussion and supported social behavior indicative of commonalities of interest. Unlike the collective cultural rhythm fostered by scheduled media broadcasts, today’s on-demand media has encouraged media isolationism. We’ve become immersed in ourselves, fiddling with personal media players loaded with enormous amounts of music and video in hopes of crafting the perfect soundtrack to our daily lives. However, the personal nature of our media selections offers opportunities to build meaningful media-related social behaviors and relationships. Coincidences of media selection can be a meaningful indication of similarity between people and can act as a mechanism to reintroduce media-centered social occasions.”

This is where Nicholas Zambetti’s inventiveness comes into the picture. As he writes: “These meaningful coincidences can act as a mechanism to reintroduce media-centered social occasions. An engaging design space is defined by the recognition and presentation of interpersonal coincidences.”

What Zambetti did as part of his research into meaningful interpersonal coincidences was to devise various design concepts for media-related coincidence systems.

Zambetti designed two “retro-looking objects” and special “musicincidence” software that can recognize synchronous coincidences as they occur:

Synch Television fosters dialog between and among friends who happen to be watching related TV shows or movies simultaneously. The Synch Television kit is a coincidence-aware television attachment that looks like an antenna and attaches to a network video player. When it detects a coincidence, it lets you know by bending and rotating in the compass direction of those other people who are tuned to the same “channel.” Touching the trembling antenna “calms it down” and displays a message on your TV screen informing you of the coincidence (“Coincidence Found: Your friend Jeff Pulver is watching a movie by the director who made the movie you are watching: Peter Jackson.”) and at the same time provides an opportunity for you to engage—social media style—the other people who are involved in the media coincidence.

Timely Speaker is a modified high-fidelity speaker, that demonstrates how digital media—in this case digital audio—can be used as a messaging channel between people. Written messages are “attached” to songs. The messages are revealed to listeners who stumble upon the song, but the Timely Speaker system only shows the message if the recipient happens to play the song at a precise date (e.g. Wednesday, April 25th, 2012) or during some recurring time interval (e.g. Thursdays between 2 and 4 P.M.) specified by the sender.

As Zambetti describes it, “The selection of a particular song during a time for which the song’s contained message was intended, defines the coincidence that drives this system.”

Musincincidence software is an application that enables people to actively search for coincidences on a real-time music map involving current and recently played songs of all people connected to the system.

By ‘listening’ to software jukebox programs, the Musicincidence application leverages the “Last.fm system” to record usage for reporting to a central database; each icon marker on the map represents a registered user. Clicking on a marker reveals information about that person and their listening activities. It also allows you to contact them via real-time chat if they have supplied contact information; a “Likelihood Slider” enables you to adjust the criteria and probability for coincidence detection (moving the slider to the left results in criteria less likely to result in coincidences and moving it to the right results in criteria more likely to result in coincidences); the Specific Criteria checkboxes control specific parameters of coincidence detection: tempo, song, artist, album, and record label, etc. Social opportunities such as the collaborative creation of a mashup song can be offered when tempo, artist, album, genre, or other criteria are met.

Zambetti’s ideas are intriguing. It may just be possible that synchronicity can be automated (and thus augmented at will) in a social media setting, bringing people together in a totally novel way.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

The old question of “youth and ambition versus age and experience” has been kicked around for the past few hundred generations, with oldsters proclaiming that they’ve “forgotten more than you know!” and other such nuggets of pseudo-wisdom. Young people have a habit of succeeding when trying something new and daring because no one has told them why they should fail (naiveté trumping wisdom), or they have told them but the old pearls of wisdom now sound like just another boatload of hoary old prejudices and preconceptions, and are ripe for disproof.

Some of the illustrious marshals of Napoleon’s Grande Armee were teenagers, the sons of peasants and clerks who, nevertheless, were quite adept at defeating the combined armies of Europe commanded by aging military masterminds.

Among scientists, physicists in particular are known to “peak” rather early: Isaac Newton made enough great discoveries to have immortalized the career of at least three scientists, and he did it all by his early twenties. His astoundingly prodigious intellectual achievements (Einstein is a distant second) ended during a period of what can perhaps best be described today as a “nervous breakdown.” Newton himself noted that, after this unpleasant episode, his mind no longer had “its former consistency.”

Albert Einstein was 26 years old when he sprang special relativity on a bewildered public—and an only slightly less bewildered scientific community, who, faced with the bizarre ideas of the theory (light as an ultimate speed limit; time as a function of velocity, etc.) and shocked in the realization that they would now have to learn tensor calculus, preferred not to believe it at all, as evidenced by the book 100 Authors Against Einstein. (“If I were wrong, one would have been enough,” quipped Einstein.)

James Clerk Maxwell formulated electromagnetic theory and had pretty much retired by the age of 35. “War es ein Gott der diese Gleichungen schreib?” (“Was it a God who wrote these equations?”) wrote Ludwig Boltzmann in 1893, paraphrasing Goethe’s Faust.

In the journal, Psychological Science, Texas A&M psychological scientist Darrell Worthy decided to test the mental abilities of people in their twenties against more senior thinkers. Wray Herbert, author of the book On Second Thought, commented on these experiments, citing a surprising essential difference between older and younger adults’ decision making techniques: “It appears that 20-somethings are more efficient at identifying the most rewarding choices, but slower to form hypotheses about the dynamic relationships between past and future choices. The latter form of problem solving, the scientists emphasize, is much closer to the dilemmas faced in real life. Aging may bring some cognitive declines, but it may also lead to the insight and wisdom needed for the best decisions.”

This is a far cry from the kind of worthless self-contradictory cracker barrel philosophy normally ascribed to oldsters: (e.g., “Look before you leap” but “He who hesitates is lost,” and “Out of sight, out of mind,” but “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”)

The valuable mental abilities of seniors should come as a comfort to people like 71-year-old former Vice President Dick Cheney as he recovers from his recent heart transplant. Cheney’s surgery rekindled debate over whether society should favor youth over age in terms of picking candidates for transplant surgeries. (More than 3,100 Americans presently wait for a new heart, and about 330 of them die each year before one becomes available.)

Still, many more mature folk, laden as they are with their regrets of the past, can’t help but express frustration over the exuberance of youth that often whimsically lapses into childish foolishness. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.” Or, as Henri Estienne more precisely put his finger on the matter back in the 16th century: “Si jeunesse savoit; si vieillesse pouvoit.” (“If only youth had the knowledge; if old age had the strength.”)

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.