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1 hour 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
"...an information revolution [is] sweeping India. It may be the world’s largest democracy, but a vast and powerful bureaucracy governs. It is an imperial edifice built on feudal foundations, and for much of independent India’s history the bureaucracy has been largely unaccountable. Citizens had few means to demand to know what their government was doing for them. But it has now become clear that India’s 1.2 billion citizens have been newly empowered by the far-reaching law granting them the right to demand almost any information from the government. The law is backed by stiff fines for bureaucrats who withhold information, a penalty that appears to be ensuring speedy compliance [...] and has clearly begun to tilt the balance of power, long skewed toward bureaucrats and politicians. [...] "This law has given the people the feeling that the government is accountable to them."Coupling such legislation with growing use of mobiles and proactive civic media and citizen empowerment tools promises to reduce corruption, boost transparency, and increase civic competence.
"Copenhagen embraces bicycle culture as part of daily life with nearly 40 % of residents riding a bike to work. Blogs and fashion photos are dedicated to bike style, and throughout the city you'll find bicycle bars on sidewalks so riders can rest their feet; green lights that change early for cyclists; and even friendly signs greeting "Hi Cyclist!" It's no wonder then that Copenhagen is innovating new ways of creating a bike-friendly city with a system of as many as 15 extra-wide, segregated bike routes connecting the suburbs to the center of the city"
"...closed farming system, which means that the bluefin tuna raised in their ocean tanks have never been in the wild. They're produced from hatched eggs, raised, and then fished for consumption. It's one of the few programs on the globe to successfully raise the delicate bluefin tuna. For three generations, Okada has helped successfully raise bluefin tuna for the world's gourmet restaurants."Some still consider this kind of hatchling-to-harvest ranching "unsustainable", however, because smaller wildfish are caught to feed the voracious tuna, but it's a major step in the right direction...
"...contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon. Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years."It still needs FDA approval, but as you can imagine, luddites and religious wingnuts of all flavors are already protesting noisily. P.S. Pollack writes on 21 Dec 2012 that Engineered Fish Moves a Step Closer to Approval...
"The Food and Drug Administration said it had concluded that the salmon would have “no significant impact” on the environment. The agency also said the salmon was “as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon.” While the agency’s draft environmental assessment will be open to public comment for 60 days, it seems likely that the salmon will be approved, though that could still be months away."
"...a descriptive review of companies and projects "extending the grid" for the BoP. The organizations and technologies featured in the upcoming posts are worth watching, based on their success thus far and their immense potential looking forward. This series will be broken up according to organizations that generate energy, and then those that render it useable."I'm especially interested to read in her second installment about M38 and Sodigaz,
"Developed from a professor's curriculum and the web site Nerdgirls.com -- both created by Dr. Karen Panetta, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University -- the "Nerd Girls" brand concept builds on Panetta's original initiative, encouraging women to change their world through science, technology, engineering and math, all while embracing their feminine power. Says MPH partner Jim Milio, "Popular culture has become obsessed with stereotyping young people. Young women seem especially vulnerable to narrow-minded labeling by their peers. We believe that empowering young women to demonstrate that 'geek is chic' and 'brains are beautiful' offers a potent and compelling message in today's media-obsessed society."Also check out their promo casting call video...
"... a video game that plops you into the role of being a city planner, trying to solve the sorts of business and environmental problems that grip today's modern cities. The ultimate aim for this so-called "serious game" is to teach laypeople how to better cope with complex modern problems by showing them the forest of solutions that have to be brought to bear, ranging from technological wizardry like smart grids, to better IT, to smart environmental policy."On the serious gaming front, see here Jane McGonigal's TED talk on Gaming Can Make A Better World... I'm very keen on serious games for helping us crowdsource solutions to complex problems as well as doing experimental interventions on randomized populations of social gamers. Experimental and synthetic sociology, here we come! Indeed, here WSJournal blogger Michael Casey writes Real Economist Learns From Virtual World about a virtual...
"...world controlled and influenced by the interactions of real people: the 350,000 real world subscribers to EVE Online -- its "capsuleers," as the spaceship-piloting gamers are known in their virtual existence. These people’s actions, economists say, offer a treasure trove of information to study and analyze, primarily because each one of their decisions leaves a trail, creating a vast database that economists can only dream of in the real world. In effect, it creates a giant laboratory within which to study human behavior, dramatically scaling up the kind of classroom-based experimental economics that were pioneered by 2002 Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith."
"The shop is open to ironworkers, who work at the top of the buildingFantastic inventiveness -- and the best views for lunch!-)as it goes up, as well as laborers, concrete workers, electricians and others on the lower floors; at any time more than 1,000 people can be on the job site. But they are not required to eat at the Subway. [Construction firm] DCM reviewed nine companies interested in opening a restaurant in an unfinished skyscraper. DCM wanted good food that could be prepared elsewhere and that required minimal packaging, [...] Subway won on the basis of its business and financial plan, she said. The ground zero Subway shop is now atop the chain’s list of unusual locations, which include an aluminum smelting plant in New Zealand, an air-conditioner plant in Georgia, car dealerships in California, a church in Buffalo and a riverboat in Germany."