Carpenter’s Symphony
26 minutes ago
Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
It has me wondering about other potential offshore development opportunities. One thought in the article particularly struck me: it was the comment about augmenting land-scarce cities like NY with services they need. Why not build condos -- even communities -- near-shore? Or office buildings? People love the water, the view and proximity to the city. This is a viable solution to a real estate crunch. Think South East Asia. Plus, there is already ferry service in the Boston Harbor, in NYC, and SF. People vaction on house boats, take cruises, and travel to islands ... why not live there!Indeed, said I, pointing out that the powers that be -- brighter minds than ours -- are already on it! Check out these multi-million dollar accomodations moored off New York City. Hundreds of people already live there... Seriously, though, this is a damn great idea. Floatable stuff is fast: fast to install, fast to change, fast to improve, fast to remove. All excellent qualities, worldwide.
"large networks of metropolitan regions that are linked by environmental systems and geography, infrastructure systems, economic linkages, settlement patterns, and shared culture and history." The U.S.'s primary mega-regions are highlighted with blue boundary lines on the map below.
U.S. mega-regions will account for 50% of the nation's population growth and 66% of its economic growth over the next 45 years. Given those projections, it's clear that considerable investment will pour into these regions. This article describes the major U.S. mega-regions, evaluates their relative position of strength for sustaining economic growth, and outlines emerging areas of collaborative opportunities within the mega-region framework.
...a computerized pen that records as you write and digitally syncs the audio recording to the notes. Write or draw on specially patterned paper; then tap the pen on a word or sketch, and it will play back what was being said when you made those marks. The pen can also solve equations and define or translate words.
With all due respect to Energy Initiative folks and our Walk The Talk leadership, I think Energy alone is NOT enough for even our initial efforts.
This is not merely a quibble over selecting our top short-term tactics, but a matter of core strategies and overarching vision.
I deeply believe the Institute needs a much broader -- and more inspiring -- action agenda. We ought to aspire towards Regeneration & Vitality in the large. This means embracing economic renewal, environmental sustainability, worthy aesthetics, and transformative innovations in physical infrastructure, operational excellence, institutional leadership, and beyond.
If we at MIT can't get our own house in order by 2015-2020 (or sooner), what moral standing do we have for advising others, and what hope do we have for our planet more generally?
Indeed, the MIT of 2020 should be a microcosm of what we want our civilization to become. Using our campus-as-testbed would allow us to see the future first. Plus using our campus as exploratory learning-lab both lives up to our Mens et Manus motto and educates and inspires new generations of innovators. We urgently need to ramp-up our efforts to do this not merely in Energy, but across many different dimensions, including at least:We need to BE how we want the world to BECOME. Aspiring to anything less means becoming irrelevant.
- Aesthetics -- The MIT campus could use an intense aesthetic upgrade, with greenways, widewalks, bike lanes, underground parking, greenroofs, indoor foliage, informal cafe-style seating, proper maintenance, essential repairs, and more. The best of these initiatives would offer two-for-one. For instance, attractive roofgarden cafes would also boost our LEED qualities. It is inexcusable that MIT today owns and just land-banks ugly surface parking lots in the heart of Kendall Square, along Amherst Street, and along the premier pedestrian and urban thoroughfare of Mass Ave.
- Environmental -- In addition to pure aesthetics, many of the tangible aspects of campus energy are predominantly environmental in nature, for instance, localized air temperature control, fresh-air access, insulated entry-doors and windows, wide-spread recycling, waste minimization initiatives, emissions remediation, garbage handling, transportation solutions, and more.
- Information Technology -- Lots of new energy ideas would benefit from MIT having a campus-wide Project Athena Version 2.0, this time a distributed mobile-wireless network enabling sensors and distributed information mining, and most important, the feeding forward of essential info to users via mobile phones and other highly distributed end-points. We could mine social patterns of energy-use and transport behavior and fast-iterate accordingly.
- Economic -- Our near-neighborhood is too much of an economic monoculture of bland office parks and corporate labs. Those are certainly essential, but alone insufficient. We need to extend the mixed-use aspects of University Park to pervade greater-Kendall Square, the Mass Ave axis from MIT-through-Central, and the edges of the Institute along Main, Vassar, Portland, and Albany. This means ground-floor retail, a mix of residences and offices, and orchestrating a few investments in conference facilities, entrepreneurial incubators, and university coop residences. (Plus the aesthetic improvements noted earlier).
- Organizational -- Many of the underlying challenges here are actually driven by the Institute's loosely-coupled organizational form. This structure works wonders in allowing for distributed innovation and fast-action at small-scales, but can impede bold cross-connections and big moves. If our institutional leadership neither gets this nor understands how to both weave together an integrative vision and inspire people to rally around it, then we will continue to remain stuck where we are -- more muddling. In this regard, MIT is yet again a microcosm of the nation and world at-large.
Universities offer a thriving ecosystem that lends itself particularly well to entrepreneurship among students, faculty, and staff. My belief in the ability of the institution of higher education to foster entrepreneurship comes first hand from my experiences as a student entrepreneur at the University of Toronto, as well as my work with Young Inventors International, a non-profit organization that has taught hundreds of student entrepreneurs at universities across North America about innovation and bringing new products to market.
Dr. Martin Fisher is transforming the lives of thousands of poor African farmers through a combination of technological invention and system-wide business development. In collaboration with his co-workers, Fisher, the 2008 recipient of the Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability, has already enabled over 310,000 people to rise out of poverty.
Fisher will accept his award and present his accomplishments to the public at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the second-annual EurekaFest, a multi-day celebration of the inventive spirit, June 25-28, presented by the Lemelson-MIT Program.