On The Edge

In this this third episode we welcome a pioneer of social network analysis, Valdis Krebs who is founder and chief scientist of the company OrgNet. He has studied many different types of networks, from the 9/11 terrorist cells, to the innovation networks of Silicon Valley, both of which we discuss in this episode. He has shown that you are only as smart as the networks you are embedded in, and in a nutshell he describes the art of networks to be to connect on your similarities, and benefit from your differences!  In other words he has analysed and demonstrated the value of cognitive diversity and multiple perspectives, which we call the difference dividend. This episode begins with the story behind his classic paper, Uncloaking Terrorist Networks, which was produced using only public information and newspaper clippings, and has been called "the most cited public analysis of the 9/11 terrorist networks”. 

In this second episode we are very pleased to welcome Nora Bateson, a filmmaker, lecturer, writer, and interloper. She made an award winning film ‘An Ecology of Mind’ about her father Gregory Bateson - the groundbreaking anthropologist, philosopher and cyberneticist. She also wrote a great book called ‘Small Arcs of Larger Circles’, and she now runs what she calls Warm Data Labs all around the world which she mentions in this episode. Her work draws upon her own personal history including her grandfather William Bateson, who was a Professor of Biology at Cambridge University, who first proposed the term “genetics”, back in 1906. To find out more about An Ecology of Mind see here: http://www.anecologyofmind.com/ To find out more about Small Arcs of Larger Circles see here: https://www.triarchypress.net/small-arcs.html To find out more about Warm Data Labs see here: https://hackernoon.com/warm-data-9f0fcd2a828c And to find out more about The International Bateson Institute please see here: https://batesoninstitute.org/ Lastly, to follow Nora on twitter, please do so here: https://twitter.com/NoraBateson

In this first episode we are very excited to welcome James Burke, who has been called “one of the most intriguing minds in the world". In the late 1970’s he created a 10 part documentary series called Connections, which tells many stories from the history of science and technology and shows how everything really is incredibly connected, which was the starting point for the first half of this really interesting and wide ranging conversation recorded in a cafe in London a few weeks ago. Part 2 of the same conversation will be shared as a follow up called The Age of Abundance in the next episode.  To see episode one (The Trigger Effect) of the Connections series discussed in this podcast please see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ  And to find out more about James Burke's latest project the Knowledge Web please see here: https://k-web.org/