June 21, 2011

June 21, 2011 Dr. Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology Harvard University William James Hall 970 Cambridge, MA 02138 33 Kirkland St. Dear Dr. Pinker: It is our pleasure to invite you to contribute to Connected Dots, a new collaboration between Seed Media Group and the Santa Fe Institute. Interdependencies, juxtapositions, counterintuitive and surprising connections. Systems thinking. At Seed, we've long been fascinated by the many ways in which nature and culture, science and society, shape our world. We are proud to announce a new partnership with the Santa Fe Institute, the epicenter of complex systems research, to continue the systems thinking discourse. The Santa Fe Institute seeks to expand the boundaries of scientific understanding by bringing together diverse, creative minds in the search for fundamental principles and commonalities underlying complex systems. Last year, in the long shadow of the economic crisis, we invited leading thinkers in fields ranging from marine ecology to national security to help us think anew about repair and re-growth using science as their lens. Could we learn something about financial markets from studies of food webs? What does ecology have to say about limits to economic growth? We feel that answering these questions is required to ensure that we don't simply rebuild structures of the past, but anticipate and adapt to the unprecedented challenges of a rapidly changing world. The result was the Global Reset, a compendium of essays that we launched in Davos at the World Economic Forum. Connected Dots will be designed as an iPad application that prompts systems thinking by engaging users to explore the interconnectedness and interdependencies all around us. As a distinguished expert in your field, we would like to invite you to contribute to this special project: EFTA01093080 In 200-500 words, make an unexpected connection — between two ideas, concepts, or happenings. Connect the dots. For example: Food Security + Obesity, Rising Oil Prices + Happiness, Size of Cities + Energy Consumption, Foraging Behavior of Bees + Urban Traffic Patterns, etc. Please send us your contribution (or at least a first draft) by July 31 and include any supporting data points/sets, graphics, or links. We should emphasize that we aren't seeking prescriptions or solutions. We are most interested in your connection, whether raw or refined, causation or correlation, published or unpublished. We will publish your contribution, along with 99 others, in a ground- breaking, interactive, 3-D data visualization on the iPad. Users will be able to explore connections between concepts, words, disciplines, experts, and data points. Our goal is to promote new modes of informed thinking and decision-making that take the complexity and interconnectedness of the 21s' century into account. The app will be launched at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. To maximize the attention the project generates at launch, we kindly request that you keep it under wraps until then. Our hope is to generate something dynamic and exploratory, scientifically rigorous, yet open to creative interpretation. We will continue to update the app with more experts and more connections over time. It will be an ever-evolving map of the complex ideological topography of our times, and it would be our distinct pleasure to include your contribution. Kindest regards, Adam Bly Founder & Editor-in-Chief Seed Media Group Dr. Geoffrey West Distinguished Professor & Past President Santa Fe Institute Dr. David Krakauer Chair of the Faculty & Professor Santa Fe Institute EFTA01093081