Simone Brunozzi

I fly about 110 to 120 times a year, as you can easily guess from my Dopplr page.

In my case, roughly half of these flights are longer than 4 hours, and involve a noticeable, but not huge, difference in time zones. In fact, since I live in Singapore, most long flights go “vertically” south to north or vice versa, and not “horizontally”. India is usually two and a half hours behind Singapore. Hong Kong is on the same Time Zone. Australia might be up to three hours of difference, and so on.
But why I mention this?

It seems that Jet Lag may cause stupidity. Part of the article says that:
Jet lag poses a serious health threat, said study coauthor Erin Gibson of the University of California, Berkeley. Studies have shown that people with work schedules that require them to frequently change their sleep patterns have higher rates of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer.

I’m a little worried.
Flying around is easier than ever, and airports and planes are much more comfortable than they were ten or twenty years ago.
I always fly economy class, and never business class, with only two notable exceptions in my entire career. I think that the level of discomfort that you can experience on a long flight, sitting in economy class, might increase the negative effects of jet lags, or an unpredictable food regime, and things like that.

What’s the solution? There are many, at least to mitigate the problem. I’m not a Doctor or an expert in medicine, but I think that the following makes a lot of sense:
1) Tune up your food regime: in my case, I decided to turn vegetarian, after reading some books on the matter, and especially liking Dan Ornish’s The Spectrum.
2) Try to exercise at least two, three times a week.
3) Avoid flight food as much as you can or, if allowed, take fruit or vegetables only. (the quality of airline food is usually poor, with a few exceptions such as Singapore Airlines). When you eat, eat slowly, enjoy every single bite.
4) Rest, long enough. Don’t pack your days with too many meetings and calls, otherwise you’ll end up being poorly effective, and seriously stressed.
5) Meditate, if you know how to do it, it’s great to reduce tension even if done for only 15 minutes a day. Easy to do during flight. Music can help concentrate.
6) Reserve some nice time for you: this means, try to do things that you like and make you happy. I enjoy great espresso coffee whenever I can, because I love it. I take photographs. I talk with strangers. I occasionally play Sudoku on my phone for a few minutes a day, or chess. I read interesting books.
7) If possible, avoid checking email on your mobile every five minutes, at least during meals. Your productivity isn’t affected that much, but your stress level goes down if you silence the phone for at least twenty minutes. This should be the rule even if you don’t travel.
8) If you can, fly business class on long flights. Your blood circulation, and sleep quality, will thank you.

Well, that basically what I can say.
When I adhere to these rules, they work superbly. That’s what I suggest to people when they ask me how can I cope with the amount of travel I do.

Thank to Lisa, I discovered a great initiative by The Sandwich Shop, here in Singapore. Read below.

This is great!

Sir Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms.

Almost true. Read this article, it takes a sad but almost true snapshot of the current situation in Italy for young and brilliant minds. Snippet: the solution is to escape abroad.

The last ten years Fredrik Härén inspired others to be more creative – now he needs your help.
He has been selected as one of five finalists to the Swedish Knowledge Prize.

If you think that his work of inspiring creativity is worth awarding then it’s time to vote for him!

It is fast and easy:
1) Go to www.kunskapspriset.se
2) Click RÖSTA/Vote under Fredrik Härén
3) Click NÄSTA/Next
4) Enter your email address the click NÄSTA/Next
5) Select your gender and age group then click NÄSTA/Next then you’re done!

In case he wins, the entire amount of €25,000 will go to his charity fund in helping develop a much needed children’s hospital in Coron, Palawan, Philippines.
Remember, Einstein said “Creativity is more important than knowledge – so let´s give a knowledge prize to a ambassador of creativity!

I moved to Singapore in January 2010. It has been nine months now, and I can finally say that I know Singapore “a bit”.
Today, on “Today” free newspaper, they write an article called “Challenge for Singapore is to grow pool of entrepreneurs: MM Lee“.
Minister Mentor Lee is the founding father of Singapore.
And he’s right. It’s a challenge.
This is what he said during the Russia-Singapore Business Forum yesterday: “We’re largely Chinese and Indians. Both Chinese and Indians, the best go into Government, they don’t go into enterprise.”

I think he’s right, and I also think that this problem is easily fixable: give an INSTANT Visa to any graduate from selected Universities that requests it, or from any US/EU University, or from specific nationalities (EU/US/Iceland/Switzerland/Russia/Australia/New Zealand) to start with.
You might ask them to pay, say, 2,000 SGD (Singapore Dollars), or 5,000 SGD, if you think that too many people are going to apply. Or give it for free to the first 10,000 applicants.

That’s an easy way to increase the non-Indian and non-Chinese population, and bring more entrepreneurship in Singapore.
Otherwise, these people will look somewhere else, and go somewhere else.

Simple things work better.

As an off-topic, I’d also like to mention something else that MM Lee said, answering the question “Are you happy?”: “A person who’s happy all the time, I think won’t make much progress”.
Not true. I’ll explain in a longer post on happiness.

It seems that Facebook and the UK Government made a deal: the Government is going to use Facebook to share information and whatever else with their citizens through Facebook.
David Cameron, UK Prime Minister, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder.
It’s quite clear that Mark is reading a pre-baked text… But anyway…

I don’t trust Facebook that much, and I have some doubts about this deal. Nevertheless, it shows intention to innovate for the UK Government, which is good.
You might be interested in watching David Cameron’s TED Talk (before he became Prime Minister). Interesting.

Mrs. Polverini, who recently won the regional election in region Lazio (the one where Rome is located, thus one of the richest region in central Italy), is now under a heavy storm of critics related to a conversation that was captured by a cameraman a few days ago. Another politician, Mr. Zaccheo, tells her that he was able to bring votes, and asks “Not to forget his daughters”, as a form of reward for his job. This is the Youtube link (video in italian).

As usual, I don’t like to spend time on the specific details of this single incident, but I’d rather look at the general situation that is so common in Italy.

To be honest, most italian politicians, from small pawns to powerful ministers, HAVE TO use these techniques and practices to win votes and thus elections.
For Mrs. Polverini, being “catched” like this means that she will probably face legal action, but in a general sense she’s no different than all the other politicians.
To be clear: this is NOT to justify her, but just to focus on the broader problem.

Our politicians live in a sick environment: there’s NO WAY to be a politician without facing the thousands of requests for favor that come from everywhere.
We would need to introduce a great transparency, at every level, to avoid these situations in the future.
One way could be to have Open Data; to have transparent and legit job selections for public administration positions, and to introduce meritocracy at every level.
This path, however, doesn’t capture the votes, and therefore no politician is going to go after it.
Do you see a big difference, here, between left and right wings? I don’t.

I think that the solution can come from a popular movement, from the ground, bottom up, possibly sustained by a neutral platform, and guided by energetic and capable people. People willing to change Italy and happy to be part of this change.
Change doesn’t have to go through politics, to start with. It has to be on a parallel track, without becoming part of it. It should be “super partes”, neutral, and hunt down all the old ways of doing politics, forcing the opening towards the real desides that voters have.
I don’t see any signal like this one.

For some reasons, I think that Larry Lessig doesn’t get all the rewards he deserves for his work (above all: FixCongressFirst.org) to change politics and life.
I think that if a person doesn’t get that recognition, that person has the right to say “I’ll stay home, with my family”. That person would be right.
Perhaps, there should be another way, then.

A possibility could be that an old crazy billionaire invests some tens of millions of Euros in a Foundation, and hires young honest people to make this change. I’ll cross my fingers.

Instead of focusing on this Polverini scandal only (which is important, of course), let’s ask ourselves what we would need to stop corruption, stop this sick way of doing politics.
Well, this would be a huge change for Italy.
And I admit that I’m one of these people that don’t think that Universal Suffrage is necessarily a good idea.
We could discuss this in person, if you’ll meet me somewhere.

Maybe, using a pure “Unix” approach, we should use drastically simple rules:
- No politician over 40 years old;
- Public Administration employees can be fired;
- Every politician should disclose his monetary assets and earnings;
- the national television company, RAI, has three channels: let’s convert one of them to English, another to Chinese, and keep the third one in Italian.
- We hire Lessig and let him create a true Politics 2.0 platform.

Well, this would already be enough to breathe fresh air.

What do you think?

Most people know about my past Second Life project, Assisi in Second Life. I don’t spend time in Second Life anymore, because I’m too busy working, and in fact the land is FOR SALE.
So, I frequently get asked the question: “Is Second Life dead?”
I answer: “Well, quite the opposite!”. In fact, Second Life, despite newspapers and magazines are not covering it as often as they did two years ago, is growing very fast.
Read this great Washington Post article and get a sense of where its economy is going. (via @JeffBarr)

If you’re interested in getting involved in my Assisi project (buying the land, renting it, doing something with it), feel free to email me (email is on top of the page).

This very interesting talk sums up, with great realism, how our life could be in the future, dominated by the evolution of Farmvilles and the like. Games, Advertising, Big Brother.

These are the new advertising nightmares that are listed:
- Cereal boxes with screen
- Soda cans with Wi-fi
- Tatoos with Adsense
- REM in-ear entertainment
- Sensors that sense our emotions
- Government rewards for supporting political candidates
- Eye sensors that track our reading

This is what the speakers concludes:
Our grandchildren would know every book that we’ve read.
That legacy will be there, we’ll be remembered.
And you get to thinking:
Is it possible maybe that, since all this stuff is being watched and measured, I should change my behavior a little bit, and be a little better than I would have been?
It could be that this system of mass commercialization is terrible, but it’s possible that they’ll inspire us to be better people if game systems are design right.
I know this stuff is coming.

Personally, I’m not optimistic at all. I believe that economic interests, together with invincible tools, will transform us into consumption puppets. How to react, how to avoid it? I don’t know.