Vicki Arroyo on Climate Disasters

	Vicki Arroyo is the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center. She studies preparedness and resiliency with respect to climate-related catastrophes. “Traditional models of who is in charge in a disaster do not necessarily operate when you have a real disaster.” georgetownclimate.org

Amanda Ripley: Where the Smart Kids Are

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy. For Time Magazine and The Atlantic, she has chronicled the stories of American kids and teachers alongside groundbreaking new research into education reform. “Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation.” OFFICIAL BLOG: amandaripley.com

Nils Gilman: Deviant globalization

Nils Gilman discusses Deviant globalization, the global flow of “repugnant” goods and services like drugs, human trafficking and illegal wildlife. Such globalization leverages the mainstream infrastructure of the formal economy along with any downsizing in the role of the state. Gilman asks what this means for countries in flux like Greece and Libya.

Robert Neuwirth: Free Markets vs. Flea Markets

Robert Neuwirth tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

C.J. Huff : Resilience in the aftermath of the unthinkable

C.J. Huff is the superintendent of Joplin, Mo. schools who led his district of thousands of employees and students through the recovery effort that followed the infamous Joplin tornado. “We had children in the rubble...and there is no worse feeling in the world,” he said about the moments after the storm. “I can tell you, at this time in my life, I had 7,747 kids that I was responsible for, and I could only account for my two children.”

Claressa Shields: Female Fighter From Flint

Boxer Claressa Shields, age 17, clawed her way out of hardscrabble Flint Michigan to win the first ever Olympic gold medal for women’s middleweight boxing. She has won 31 fights -- and lost only one. “That fight made me work so much harder when I got back to the gym, even though I cried and I was sad. It made me hungrier.”

Laurie Leitch and Loree Sutton: Tapping social resilience

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, MD and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch, Ph.D., founded Threshold GlobalWorks to explore a neurobiological approach to social resilience. “We are all wired with it, in case you did not know that,” says Leitch. “We are born neurologically wired for resilience because our system is survival-based.”

Yossi Sheffi: The resilient enterprise

Yossi Sheffi explores the various flavors of redundancy, simplicity, flexibility and communications strategies businesses employ to make themselves resilient. “These are the most dangerous things; the things that have severe consequence and low probability…These are the events one worries about when one has to run a large organization.”

Eiríkur Hrafnsson: Iceland’s start-up scene

Eiríkur Hrafnsson calls his new company, Green Qloud, the world’s first green cloud computing company, bucking a frightening trend. “It is not far-fetched to imagine that in 30 or 40 years, 50 percent of our energy will be spent on IT.”

Mohammed Rezwan: Floating schools

Climate change is exacerbating flooding in waterlogged Bangladesh. Already, hundreds of schools get wiped out during the monsoon season. Mohammed Rezwan builds floating schools, healthcare facilities and libraries. “If 20 percent of the land goes under water, which may happen in the next 10 to 20 years, where will these people go? We don’t have enough space, enough land. People have to live on the water in some way.”

Víðir Reynisson: Iceland's disaster response

Víðir Reynisson, head of the National Commission of Icelandic Police, coordinates the country’s response to natural disasters, including the infamous Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and oversees the country’s search and rescue teams. Iceland has developed a nimble crisis management model. “With all disasters, with all crises, comes opportunity.”

Stephanie Coontz: Gender gaps

Stephanie Coontz, an historian of the family, discusses how globalization has brought more women into the paid work force. Coontz urges us to redefine our notions of gender equality, arguing that every worker has a right to a family life.

Lloyd and Zimbalist: Memory mapping the news

Alexis Lloyd and Michael Zimbalist, both from the New York Times R&D Lab, describe a new app for memory mapping the news, which they created for PopTech's iPad app. Unlike the old model of top-down publishing, it allows consumers to combine news with their own personal memories. Users can see timelines in real and perceived time and view stories from the archives within the context of their own lives.

Paul Needham: Owning electricity

Paul Needham’s organization, Simpa Networks, makes solar energy available to the poor. By using a pay-as-you-go pricing structure modeled after mobile phone cards, Simpa gives its customers ownership of the electricity. Once the initial cost of the equipment is paid off, the device belongs to the customer and their electricity is free.

Krista Donaldson's Design Revolution

Krista Donaldson runs D-Rev: Design Revolution, which creates world class products—market and user driven—designed to meet the needs of the four billion people all over the world living on less than four dollars a day.

Alyson Warhurst: Risk mapper

Alyson Warhurst is CEO and founder of the risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft, the leading source of extra-financial risk intelligence for the world’s largest multinational corporations, asset managers and governments. “We can really start telling a story in terms of predicting risk in the future…We are actually able to engage in policy change to be able to shape the future growth environment and prevent disaster.”

Didier Sornette: Predicting risk

Didier Sornette is a professor of entrepreneurial risks in Zurich. He explores data patterns to help predict crises and extreme events in complex systems, like global financial crises. “Most crises are endogenous. They are not coming out of the blue, like a black swan. They are knowable. They can be diagnosed in advance.”

George Bonanno: Measuring human resilience

e	George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology, mines massive data sets for surprising revelations about how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity. “There isn’t one thing that predicts resilience. It’s not two things. It is not necessarily in us.”

Andri Magnason: Iceland, human experiment

From the Icelandic food store chain, Bonus, to the midnight sun, everyday Iceland inspires activist poet Andri Magnason. His poetry and children's books reflect his deep connection to his homeland as does the way he's schooled himself—and the public—on preserving Iceland’s beauty and natural resources.

Eben Upton: Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, shows how he is hooking a new generation of kids on computer programming. “I remember sitting down with my wife for dinner…and we had this sudden, appalling realization that we had promised 600,000 people that we would build them a $25 dollar computer.”