Alan Brown, Chairman of Sias International University Foundation, delivers a speech at the forum on world internet & modern logistics of the 3rd World Emerging Industries Summit (WEIS 2015)

Shifting Focus for a Better World

Presentation to APCEO Summit

The 3rd World Emerging Industries Summit

April, 2015

Good afternoon. It is both a privilege and a pleasure to speak to you today and always an honor to be associated with APCEO.

Today I would like to talk with you about what I consider some of the most important topics in the landscape of emerging industries:

Education, Communication, and Environmental issues.

I would also like to touch on a few thoughts I have on how we must learn to think differently in order to create more and better industries.  I would be very happy to respond to questions after my remarks and look forward to them.

Before I begin I would like to tell you briefly about my background and affiliations. I am a clinical psychologist by training and have been a university professor in Arizona most of my professional career.  For the past ten years I have been on the Foundation board of Sias University in Henan Province.  Over the past ten years I have been involved with a number of different groups working both in China and the U.S. and many times with both.  My involvement has been in education reform issues, early child development, food safety and sufficiency, cyber terrorism and health reform among others.

Rather than simply highlighting the technology involved I will send those interested more information about specifics, if you leave me your card.   In the time allotted for this talk I would like to offer a number of ideas about shifts we need to make in a number of these areas – sometimes small but significant shifts with large positive consequences to master the potential of these industries.  These shifts will be in education, the environment, health and early child development.

Shift Number One:

Education:   From Traditional Education to Customization.

Some call the field of education “the last of the dinosaurs”.  The English poet William Butler Yeats reminds us that “Education is not the filling of a bucket, it is the lighting of a fire”.  However our education system as it’s traditionally practiced is clearly designed to “fill the bucket”.

With the use of new technologies new ways of educating and training become possible.  My group is pioneering the use of new technologies in tailoring education to individual student talents, environmental or contextual challenges and to social needs.

Our historical lecture oriented education mode prevalent in the 20th century is being greatly challenged by neuro sciences discoveries, the technology innovation, and the awareness that the model that we have come to "love" for the last 150 years will not be sustainable for the foreseeable future.  

We must not merely poke at the edges; but rather, we must consider a transformation that encompasses the results emanating from some very serious innovative explorations.

The costs of our current education process is unsustainable and not totally effective, therefore, it is undergoing significant scrutiny and  reconsideration of what processes might be more affordable and effective.  There is a growing recognition that personalizing and individualizing the curriculum is most effective.  In order for schools to present industry with the kind of talent they need to be globally competitive, they will need their education system to adopt these evidence based processes.  For an example in some countries; they acknowledge that their career educational institutions are graduating students whose skills are not adequate for the kind of industry they need to become globally competitive.  Therefore they are radically reforming the curriculum.  Education reform and open source technology are innovations that are just gathering momentum in the United States and worldwide.  Reforms will include development of Competency Based Learning (mastery) and Adaptive Curriculum.  Competency-based learning also has the potential to generate substantial cost savings, especially in higher and adult education (e.g., workforce retraining).  Students who demonstrate competency can move on quickly.  This reduces the costs of instruction, and can therefore reduce their costs for obtaining a degree or certificate.  Even students who move slowly are likely to save money, because competency-based learning assures that they will not need remediation later in their progress.

Adaptive curriculum – is the name given to a class of curricular materials that aim to increase the effectiveness of learning by leveraging cognitive science principles and information technologies to improve one or another aspect of instructional performance.

Adaptive materials typically perform some or all of the following functions:

Delivering knowledge-transfer:  instead of teachers giving lectures, adaptive materials incorporate computers that deliver the same content.

Interacting with students:  students provide information to, as well as take it from, the curricular materials, via built-in quizzes, worksheets, and so on.

Personalizing the materials to the needs of particular students, for example, making automatic adjustments for students with specific learning disabilities.

Recognizing early warning signs of student difficulty and calling them to the attention of the student and the instructor.

Diagnosing the particular nature of student difficulties quickly and accurately, for example, recognizing that a student’s incorrect answer is due to a particular, misunderstood concept.

Remediating student deficits: for example, by directing the student to a module for drill-and-practice on a misunderstood or unknown concept.

Shift Number Two:

Health:  From Reactive Treatment to Proactive Prevention

It is clear from most studies that the behavioral health issues are significant and continue to worsen in China and the U.S. according to data from the following:

World Bank

Chinese Ministry of Health

Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center

Ministry of Finance

National Bureau of Statistics of China

Chronic non-communicable diseases are becoming an even more intractable problem including:

Diabetes – China has largest in the world

Heart disease – 85% of total deaths in China

Oral Health problems – such as gum disease

The incidence of mental disorders climbed by more than 50% between 2003 and 2008.  It is estimated that 227 million Chinese suffer from mood and anxiety disorders.  More than 287,000 Chinese kill themselves each year.

With no word for prevention in the Chinese language and most health and behavioral problems being addressed only as crises arise and/or by over- burdened medical staff – it is clear that a major change in approach must be both immediate and innovative. 

What has been clear for a long time (however not always acted upon) is that there is not now nor will there ever be enough expertise and resources to make a significant impact upon social problems by being reactive to them.  Thus the need for effective prevention and early intervention strategies are the most viable ways in which a society can reduce and or ameliorate many of its health and social problems.  We have the technology now. We’re not using these solutions to the same degree we focus on the problems.

Shift Number Three:

Early Child Development:  From School-age to Early Childhood

Over the last two decades a new body of scientific literature has unfolded, telling us that early childhood experiences and exposures – during the first three years in particular – interact with our genetic make-up to build the foundations for lifelong health, emotional well-being, intellectual functioning and more.  So we need to shift focus away from school age to infants and toddlers – zero to three in order to develop more healthy and productive adults.  This doesn’t mean we should neglect school age children, but we should change the emphasis to include the early years.  In addition we need to shift how we interact with babies

Let me explain:  Researchers observed two sorts of conversations occurring between parents and their infants in their study.  Parents they described as “taciturn” often limited their conversations with their children to “business” – statements related to what needed to be done.  “Finish your food,” “Hold out your hands,” “Let’s get in the car,” and “Time for bed.”  Business conversations with infants are not rich or complex; they are simple, direct, here-and-now conversations.  The impact of “business” interactions on cognitive development is relatively limited.

The words that truly matter are spoken in a posture that researchers term “language dancing” where the parents are engaged face to face with the infant and speak in a fully adult, sophisticated, language—as if the infants were listening, comprehending, and fully responding to the comments.

Language dancing is not talking more business.  It is talking about “what ifs,” “do you remember,” “shouldn’t you”, “wouldn’t it be better if,” and so on.  These often take the form of questions that invite infants to think deeply about what is happening around them.  Language dancing entails chattiness, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and on what the parent is doing and planning.  Interchange of this sort has been shown to cultivate curiosity in children and the development of more neural pathways.

There is a strong connection between what neuroscientists are learning about how the physical brain functions and the observations that extra talk, or language dancing, leads to keen auditory skills, which in turn leads to improved learning capacity.

When a parent engages in extra talk – speaking 48 million words to an infant in its first 36 months of life – many, many more of the synaptic pathways in the child’s brain are exercised and refined.  This makes subsequent patterns of thought easier, faster, and more automatic.

This means that children who have been lavished with extra talk have an almost incalculable cognitive advantage compared to those who have not been.  Their brains have been “wired” to think in much more sophisticated ways than those of children whose synaptic pathways have not been extensively developed and lubricated through use.

Shift Number Four:

Environment: From talk to action and from single discipline research to interdisciplinary work. 

Environment is today on the forefront of all of our concerns or should be.  With rapid environmental degradation the challenges of stopping or reverting the current degradation trends are considerable.  My concerns here are that we worry about it more than doing anything.  I’m reminded of the Chinese proverb.  “Talk doesn’t cook rice”

Fortunately, an important event, the 2015 Paris Global Summit on Climate Change in December 2015, will bring 196 countries to sign a new climate change agreement. With the right political leadership, it can lead to ambitious outcomes that will have a real impact on tackling climate change. Countries like the US and China are working to ensure an outcome is likely in 2015 and the French government is determined to succeed.  A strong deal will make a significant difference to the ability of individual countries to tackle climate change. It will provide a clear signal to business, to guide investment toward low carbon outcomes. It will reduce the competitiveness impacts of national policies, and create a simpler, more predictable framework for companies operating in different countries. Vitally, a strong climate deal will help to meet international development aims, which are at increasing risk from rising global temperatures. Eliminating poverty, improving health and building security are all outcomes linked to tackling climate change.

My second concern here is about the need for more interdisciplinary initiatives and communication.

We are all aware of the power and necessity of communication.  In our global society, the importance of communication is even greater but, and at the same time, it poses conferrable linguistic and cultural challenges.

The understanding of complex issues that are a key to our broader success and even our existence are not well understood or not very successfully communicated to various audiences who need this information. Successful communication of interdisciplinary knowledge is particularly challenging. 

To address this problem, some universities have chosen to develop centers both for specific multidisciplinary research and, in addition to those, develop communication centers dedicated solely to advancing communication of the research produced by the multidisciplinary centers. 

Other universities are exploring the integration of art programs and art practices into networks of research universities that generate knowledge and resources to address complex, global society and lead change through their programs.  A part of their focus involves visual and multimedia literacy and communication of their research.

Our group is focusing on science and technology communication that is essential and critical for innovation and new ideas and concepts.  Our work focuses on the need for a more seamless, interdisciplinary team program.  The program includes entrepreneurial partners and employs multimedia and visual techniques to communicate results to the full range of audiences.  Audiences range from internal and specific groups such as policy makers, educators, or media, to the general public.

The benefits of such communication  is enormous: they allow for implementation of precisely defined and effective programs; they promote the efficiency of actions and fiscal responsibility; and they help create informed and engaged actors and citizens, all essential ingredients for success of not just emerging but also established industries.

To think across disciplines and learn from other fields of study is limitless in its potential.   It is hardly possible to overrate the value of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike each other.

And Finally Shift Number Five:

From Scarcity to Inaccessibility.

Let me explain:  History is littered with tales of once rare resources made plentiful by innovation.  Most time the issue is not scarcity but rather, is an issue of accessibility.  Aluminum was once more scarce and expensive than gold.

Aluminum’s rarity comes down to chemistry.  Behind oxygen and silicon, it’s the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3 percent of the weight of the world.  Today it’s cheap, ubiquitous and used with a throwaway mind-set, but --- this wasn’t always the case.  It never appears in nature as a pure metal.  Instead it’s found tightly bound in a claylike material called bauxite.

Separating out the pure metal ore was a complex and difficult task.  The first person to do this was a village goldsmith who was then ordered beheaded by the Emperor in the Roman Empire who thought this would reduce the value of his gold if people suddenly had access to a shining new metal rarer than gold.

It was the creation of a new breakthrough technology known as electrolysis, discovered in the 1850’s that changed everything.  The process uses electricity to liberate aluminum from bauxite.  Suddenly everyone on the planet had access to ridiculous amounts of cheap, light, pliable metal.

Scarcity is often contextual:  Imagine a great cherry tree packed with fruit.  If we pick all the cherries from the lower branches, we are effectively out of accessible fruit.  Cherries are now scarce – But once someone invented something called a ladder, we suddenly have new reach.  Technology is a resource liberating mechanism.  It can make the once scarce now abundant.

The point is this:  When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce, but they are inaccessible.  Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our thinking.  Focusing only on scarcity will lead to tensions, fights and wars.  Focusing on inaccessibility on the other hand, may begin to create new technologies and ways to solve problems.

Progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, broadband networks, nano materials, synthetic biology and many other technologies are

enabling us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years.  Breaking down human needs by category – water, food, energy, healthcare, electricity, freedom, there are dozens of innovators making tremendous strides in each area.

There is coming technology that can transform polluted water, salt water or even raw sewage into high quality drinking water for less than one cent a liter.  There is emerging technology which replaces traditional agriculture methods to a system that uses 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, 100 percent fewer pesticides and zero transportation costs.

As technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, violence atrophies, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and happiness increases.  The stunning impact of all of these gives us plenty of reason for optimism.

The ancient Romans had a saying that “the beaten path is the safe one”.  That approach may work if you don't mind always following the footprints of others.   If you want to lead in the modern world, it is wise to note that those who dare to think differently are the ones who change the world.

Many people see all the problems in the world and give up because they find them too overwhelming. They say, "I'm just one person.  What can I do?"  Imagine the negative impact on the world if the following individuals had said, "I can't do this because I'm only one person."

Edward Jenner would not have discovered a vaccine to prevent Small Pox.

Mother Theresa would not have inspired the missionaries who have tended to millions of the poor and dying in India

Zheng He would not have used a compass to find true north in  his voyages

Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone

Like those people, if you decide where to focus your efforts, you might be amazed at the impact you can have. 

So what is possible? Imagine a future world of nine billion people with clean water, accessible art, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tiered medical and dental care and non-polluting, ubiquitous energy.  Think of a world with all major diseases eradicated.  Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge – but if you start to think differently, we can rise together to meet it.

When you can see obstacles and think of them as opportunities for advancement and when you see problems and view them as possibilities for progress, you will have ignited your potential to design great innovations and impact the future.

Then the shifts I have spoken about today in Education, Health, Early Child Development, Environment and Thinking will become approaches for new industries and a markedly better world.

Thank you very much for your attention and I would be happy to take questions.