Social Media – Changing the World
Dec 21, 2007

Yet another inspiring story about how social media can make a difference. Blogs, Twitter, Podcasting, etc aren’t tools being used to waste time. They aren’t just about being heard, and getting your voice out there. It’s about relationships. Connecting with people.

I personally haven’t gotten involved in this too much partly because I haven’t been on Twitter that much in recent weeks, and partly because I personally don’t know how I can really help (can’t donate online because I don’t have a credit card).

Susan Reynolds is an artist, author and just a really creative person. She’s been quite involved in Twitter and Second Life, and just building relationships in these digital realms. Recently, she has been diagnosed with cancer. After a “full afternoon and multiple stab wounds”, as she put it, she needed something cool to help keep bleeding down and relieve the pain, and finding traditional ice packs too heavy, she decided to use a bag of frozen peas. She took a photo of it, and shared her story on Twitter.

A few days later, Cathleen Rittereiser suggested that people donate the cost of a bag of frozen peas to fund cancer research. Susan’s friends took that off-the-cuff remark, and ran with it. And as of today, we now have the Frozen Pea Fund, which will be raising money for breast cancer research, in Susan’s name. Lots of people are contributing in different ways. Spreading the message by inserting peas into their avatars (pea-vatars as they call it), building the wordpress site, and many other ways I’m probably unaware of.

You can read more from Connie Reece. Or you can go straight to the Frozen Pea Fund and donate.

I just thought I’d try to help by spreading the word. Social media, all this blogging and Twittering and all, is about real people. It’s about real connections being formed. It’s about a real difference being made. Why don’t you join in?

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Sui Generis Weekly #2
Nov 19, 2007

The second episode of Sui Generis Weekly is here. If you subscribe to the complete blog, you won’t get the enclosures, but you can download or play the podcast from these posts as well. So, just to make it easier for you, you can subscribe to just the podcast (with enclosures) here. That subscription doesn’t include the other posts over the week, though, so I would recommend subscribing to both. Subscription buttons will be added to the sidebar by next week, so you might want to wait for that to subscribe.

If the embedded player fails, you can listen from here, or download the mp3.

Covered in this podcast:
– Importance of people and relationships
– Visit to NUS High*
– SHPS GEP dinner
– Letting others befriend you
– World Pool Championship Lessons
– Blogger Challenge
– Free-Range Drama Farm
– Quote of the Week, from Buddha*
– “Just Someone” by Natalie Gelman*

*New items: not mentioned previously on this blog

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Smartest People in the World
Nov 9, 2007

John P from One Man’s Blog has posted a “Massive List of Geniuses”. These are apparently the smartest people alive:

An interesting list. But what strikes me is how many of these people are unknown quantities. How many of these people have you heard of? Or do you know what they have done? Most of us probably know the likes of James Wood and Sharon Stone. A number will know who the Paul Allen is. But Philip Emeagwali? Or Kim Ung-Yong? As a math geek, I know of Andrew Wiles, but even then my knowledge is limited to the fact that he solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Non chess fans might not even recognize the names Robert Byrne and Judith Polgar.

I’m not trying to knock these people. I admire their intelligence, and I’m very sure they’ve done well in their field, and contributed in some manner. Full credit to them. But what I do want to highlight is how the people that have made the most contributions to our lives, the ones that have really pushed the boundaries and changed things, aren’t really on the list. From the world of technology, has Paul Allen’s contribution been any more than Steve Jobs, Steve Wosniak, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Larry Page, for example? I personally don’t think so. Is he smarter than all of them? I don’t know.

Also, it’s interesting to note that no prominent businessman, those whose products and decisions tend to affect our lives, is on the list. Donald Trump or Richard Branson, for example. Would anyone disagree if I said they are two very intelligent people? Certainly the decision-making and foresight of all these people (Steve Jobs, Donald Trump, etc) are really good as well. Just as good as the likes of Christopher Langan, perhaps?

What am I trying to say? Firstly, that I believe the IQ testing procedure is flawed. There are so many facets to intelligence. IQ tests tend to test more of the academia aspect of it, in my opinion. Jim Loy has a short, interesting writeup on it. A quote from there: “Someone once said that IQ tests measure your ability to take IQ tests.” I think that’s a very good statement. The controversies around IQ tests are well documented, I believe, so I won’t go into it much. But just want to say where I stand in the debate.

The second and more important point, if you ask me, a high IQ is not an accurate measure of the impact one can have on society, and the difference a person can make. I doubt anyone will say that Sergey Brin has made less of a difference in the world than Kasparov has. You don’t have to have a high IQ to be significant. And that’s the most important thing that the list reflects, in my opinion.

I doubt any of us have IQ levels of the people in the list (if you do, I would really love to hear from you). I know I don’t. But even then, it doesn’t mean you can’t change the world.

Link via Hoovaloo: The Massive List of Geniuses

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