Mobile Phone apps for election monitoring – a quick look

I was recently pinged ny a friend who wanted to know what was the latest and greatest in election monitoring software and apps, particularly in places where citizens need to play a much more obvious role in ensuring transparency and the right to have one’s real vote counted. Here is my quick Skype response: Q: […]

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‘Network Thinking’ – TEDxBerlin talk

We spend time thinking about ‘social networks’, and happily attend ‘networking’ events. And when we look at networks from a more academic perspective, we explore social graphs, mapping the connections between nodes. And yet, there is much more to networks. This talk makes a distinction between network infrastructure and network flows – the traffic that […]

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TEDxKrakow Talk is back again! ‘How Things Spread’

For some reason my talk was one of 20 or so on the TEDx YouTube channel that got removed a month ago. Fortunately the TEDx team were able to repost my video. It meant I lost a lot of views that I had the first time the video was released, but I’m just happy the […]

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Handling People with Negative Opinions

I’ve had several conversations in the last month or so with people expressing negative – or super-negative viewpoints – on things like humanity, specific human traits, and technology. “Facebook is stopping people going out and having social experiences” “I’m worried about all this information available on the Internet – it’s making everyone stupid” … And […]

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TedXKrakow: ‘How Things Spread’ – Mark Turrell

How do things spread? Ideas? Behavioral change? A brief run through the fundamental components of spread, and then some unusual examples of how to apply the concepts in oppressive societies – namely Zimbabwe and Libya. Presentation made in Sept 2012 at TedXKrakow and video produced by the TedX team.

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1. Introducing The Spread Papers

How do you spread things? How do you spread ideas? How do you spread behavioral change? How do you spread products and services? The Spread Papers is a collection of papers written by Mark Turrell that describe the emergent ‘Science of Spread’. In each paper, Mark develops a concept that underpins Spread, and highlights the […]

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TedXKrakow – my script for talk on “New Lens” plus Libyan Revolution

[holding glass / water bottle] In 1660, a ‘crazy’ Dutch scientist called Anton van Leeuwenhoek started writing scientific papers about how he saw small things moving about in water. The man was clearly mad. Because if you look at a glass of water with the naked eye, even if you really squint, you can’t see […]

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Why ‘Americans are Self-Centered’ is Wrong

A thought piece on how to shape the attitudes of the masses – the importance of linguistics in shaping potential strategies People other than Americans are also self-centered, and the phrase ‘Americans are self-centered’ has an availability effect so that hearing it creates the impression that they are the only ones. Better would be to […]

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Working on sanitation and rural development in India – my interest in the Great WASH Yatra

Although I might have a reputation more on innovation, technology and revolution, I am deeply interested in applying my skills – and the science of spread – to all types of social challenge. So, when I came across WASH United, and their goal of improving human lives through better sanitation, I was very interested both […]

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Jail Time – Introducing Downside in an Upside Only World

Nicolas Robinson made a mistake. The 23-year old from Borough, south-east London stole a £3.50 pack of water bottles from a Lidl store during the UK riot. Matt and Adam made a mistake. They were running a bank that required a massive billion pound bailout. The Northern Rock bail-out added £100 billion to the National […]

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