Name History ~ Map Describing Root Origins!

Mapping why we call "where" "what"!-)

Urban Farms ~ WSJ Spotlights NYC Agriculture...

Inside Urban Green spots WSJ on the Big Apple's farms and adds...

"Brooklyn Grange, BrightFarms and Gotham Greens are featured in this Wall Street Journal report. New York City gets all kinds of media publicity for these commercial urban agriculture projects. The iconic New York skyline is a media magnet. The paradox is that our consumer horticulture education is from the dark ages. There is no institution in the city that teaches about modern methods of personal food production such as portable micro gardens, sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) simplified hydroponics and aquaponics. Even though we have two of the most historic botanic gardens in the U.S. (New York Botanical Garden and Brooklyn Botanic Garden), there is not one public demonstration garden that features modernity."

Hiware Bazar ~ Village with Savvy Waterworks...

Thanks to Rupreet Soni for spotting the story of Hiware Bazar...

"Lying in one of the worst drought-prone regions of India, the village of Hiware Bazar battled many decades of sparse rain and failed crops. However, 20 years ago, the entire village came together to script a silent revolution by designing a rainwater-harvesting model that saved every drop of the scanty rain they received. Today, the village is literally an oasis in the middle of the desert, boasting of bumper harvests, dairy co-operatives, millionaire families and visionary farmers. Hiware Bazar still receives the scanty amount of rainfall it used to in the heart of its most trying years, but what has changed is the way it has managed its water and created a miracle with this most precious liquid resource!"

I-Corps ~ NSF's New MIT-Style Action Teams...

Check out the new I-Corps...

"The National Science Foundation (NSF) has established a new opportunity to assess the readiness of emerging technology concepts for transitioning into valuable new products through a public-private partnership. The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program will bring together the technological, entrepreneurial, and business know-how to bring discoveries ripe for innovation out of the university lab. [...] "The United States has a long history of investing in -- and deploying -- technological advances derived from a foundation of basic research," says NSF Director Subra Suresh. "And the NSF mission connects advancing the nation's prosperity and welfare with our passionate pursuit of scientific knowledge. I-Corps will help strengthen a national innovation ecosystem that firmly unites industry with scientific discoveries for the benefit of society." [...] The I-Corps program will initially support up to 100 projects per year, at $50,000 a project. "The Deshpande Foundation is pleased to be part of the NSF effort to bring innovators, mentors and entrepreneurs together in a meaningful way to create economic and social impact," says Desh Deshpande, Trustee, Deshpande Foundation."

Born of MIT roots, mimicking our Deshpande Center I-Teams program (which was named by yours truly;-) Cool! (Of course, my fundamental question about this is why should taxpayer money be spent on something currently handled by angels, VCs, and private individuals and companies? It's a neat idea, but it's unclear to me why a bunch of politicos should meddle here...)

Crowd Crime ~ Flash Mobs Rob Multiple Stores...

Watch here as urban vermin flash rob multiple stores... Here is some constructive commentary about this vile trend...

Blocked Lanes ~ NYC Bicyclist Protests Back;-)

This film starts with one of NYC's finest porkers being stupidly ham-fisted with a biker. Snorteth he -- "Always stay in the bike lane." Watch as Casey Neistat takes this admonition literally...

Population 2050 ~ Science on Demographics...

The latest Science is a special issue on Population...

"Social scientists can be a contentious lot. Since Thomas Malthus issued his dire warning in 1798 -- and probably before then -- scholars have been arguing over how many people the planet can support. There are “doomsters” who continue to predict the worst, and there are “boomsters” who argue that population growth, while worrisome in many ways, can be an engine of economic growth. [...] Debate continues over how best to address [...] problems and over whether rapid population growth is best dealt with by expanding family planning programs or implementing policies that will improve livelihoods and increase the education of girls and young women -- or both. Still, many experts remain optimistic that with the right mix of policies, countries can harness the opportunities for economic growth and development offered by a young and educated workforce, congregating in dense, networked urban environments."

Among the challenges are getting a grip on the scale of the demographics -- forecasting fecundity, so to speak. The 9 Billion? piece by Leslie Roberts elaborates...

"All population projections are uncertain, as they are entirely dependent on assumptions about the future -- for instance, how many children a woman will have 20 or 30 years hence. In that sense, these numbers can be considered best scientific guesses, not destiny. What's more, the further out one looks, the cloudier these projections become. Still, they offer a window into what the world might look like in 2050."

Mihag Gedi Farah ~ Face of East African Disaster

Wil Longbottom writes in the DailyMail of the growing humanitarian disaster in East Africa, a situation we all can see from the essential images by photographer Schalk van Zuydam...

"Cradled in his mother's arms, this is the face of a skeletal seven-month-old baby starving to death in the Horn of Africa. Weighing just seven pounds -- as much as a newborn -- Mihag Gedi Farah stares wide-eyed, his skin pulled taut over his ribs and tiny arms. Mihag is just one of 800,000 children who officials warn could die across the region in the worst drought for decades. Aid workers are rushing to bring help to dangerous and previously unreached regions of drought-ravaged Somalia. Many starving children and adults remain in the country far from the feeding tubes and doctors in field hospitals in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Sirat Amine, a nurse-nutrionist with the International Rescue Committee, said Mihag has just a 50-50 chance of survival. The little boy should weigh three times what he does now. His mother, Asiah Dagane, said: 'In my mind, I'm not well. My baby is sick. In my head, I am also sick.' A nurse at the camp said Mihag was 'severely, severely malnourished'. She added: 'We never tell the mother, of course, that their baby might not make it. We try to give them hope.' Mrs Dagane brought Mihag and four siblings from Kismayo to Kenya after all their sheep and cattle died. Their journey took a week."

How the hell could this happen?! What the F#<& is going on?

"Tens of thousands of Somalis are fleeing the starvation, many of them on foot, from Kismayo and the capital Mogadishu. The UN estimates that more than 11 million people in East Africa are affected by the drought, with 3.7 million in Somalia among the worst-hit because of the ongoing civil war in the country. Somalia's prolonged drought became a famine because neither the government nor many aid agencies can operate in areas controlled by Al Qaeda-linked militants."

So what we have here, as a minimum, is a natural disaster in an environmentally and economically vulnerable region compounded by yet more religio-fascist terrorism turning the situation into an enormous humanitarian atrocity.

P.S. On 11 Nov 2011, the DailyMail writes that Minhaj Gedi Farah is...

"...now recovered after being treated by the International Rescue Committee's hospital in Dadaab [...] After three life-saving blood transfusions and intensive feeding with Plumpy’nut, a vitamin-enriched peanut paste, Minhaj reached 4.1kgs (9.03 pounds) and was released from the hospital and treated for tuberculosis in an IRC outpatient program. Today, three months after he was released, Minhaj is unrecognizable. 'His mother never thought he would recover. Every member of his family is happy,' said Sirat Amin, a nurse-nutritionist."

Canal du Midi ~ Fighting Ecological Trauma...

The Guardian's Angelique Chrisafis writes French to say au revoir to canalside trees. They must chop down thousands of trees alongside the Canal du Midi as...

"An unstoppable fungal disease has left the French state no choice but to reach for the chainsaw, bringing down the ceiling of leaves covering the nation's most romantic waterway. The felling of these 200-year-old trees is seen as a national tragedy. Cyclists, walkers and canal-boat owners are gutted, and local politicians are panicked that the canal's Unesco heritage status will be revoked, wrecking tourism."

The Canal du Midi is a centuries-old, 240 km long southern French transport route helping link Atlantic and Mediterranean. An epic infrastructure and logistics "gigaproject" in the 17th century, today the canal is a beautiful and much-loved waterway for vacationers.

Deficit 101 ~ Khan on Govt Financial Condition

Salman Khan on Government's Financial Condition... Frightening and disgusting.

Fair Shares ~ African Participation in Bonanza!

The Guardian spotlights one of the truly biggest ideas in development finance and innovation in this analysis piece by World Bankers Shantayanan Devarajan and Marcelo Giugale -- How Africa can extract big benefits for everyone from natural resources -- something I've been calling Percapitization or Per Capita Participation...

"Transferring a portion -- or all -- of the income from Africa's natural resources directly to citizens could help to reduce poverty and fight corruption. [...] Is there a shortcut to better accountability in the management of natural resources? Yes, there is: direct transfers of resource dividends to citizens. Around 35 African countries already transfer cash directly to their poor -- through smartcards, debit cards, mobile phones, or in person. This is getting cheaper and safer. The coverage of banking and mobile phone services is expanding rapidly. So is biometric identification with mobile devices. Logistically, there is nothing that prevents governments from transferring a portion -- or even all -- of the income from natural resources directly to every citizen, not just the poor. This kind of direct dividend payment is not new -- Alaska has been doing it since the early 1980s. Why would giving people a share of commodity revenues help avoid, let alone reduce, corruption? Because if you know you are getting a portion of the oil revenues, you will surely be interested in the total amount -- not to mention in what the government does with its share. [...] Dividend transfers and fiscal integrity can go together [...] giving people a direct stake in their country's riches can buy time, and goodwill, for the slow-but-necessary construction of better governance institutions."

This is an epic and transformative prosperity policy! Distributing so-called "national" assets to the people is a far better pathway than having it be pocketed by corrupt politicians (e.g. Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, etc) or squandered by an inefficient state (e.g. PEMEX, PdVSA, etc) or privatized to the rich (e.g. TELMEX, etc) or to outside MNCs. Percapitization is really the only moral and democratic pathway.

Urban Maths ~ Geoffrey West on Cities at TED

Physicist Geoffrey West at TED describes how complex systems such as cities are governed by simple laws...

"We desperately need a scientific theory of cities. This means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles, which can be put into a predictive framework. That is the quest."

Laser Scalpels ~ Surgical Tools of Tomorrow...

Forbes interviews Dr Harvey Fishman on future laser surgical tools...

Peyton Shares the Air ~ Anatomy of Niche Meme!

MIT alumna Amanda Peyton dissects the Share the Air niche meme!

Rio Cycle Chic ~ Lovely Brazilian Movements!

Several lovely images recently from the original Cycle Chic spotlighting Brazilian beauties on bikes in Rio...

The Village ~ Tilt-Shift Timelapse Rural Scenes

Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting this tilt-shift timelapse village!

Something Ventured ~ Risk & Reward for 1st VCs

Check out trailer for Something Ventured which...

"...tells the story of the creation of an industry that went on to become the single greatest engine of innovation and economic growth in the 20th century. It is told by the visionary risk-takers who dared to make it happen…Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Dick Kramlich and others. The film also includes some of our finest entrepreneurs sharing how they worked with these venture capitalists to grow world-class companies like Intel, Apple, Cisco, Atari, Genentech, Tandem and others."

FYI, movie screening this Thurs at CIC near Venture Cafe!

Africans Mobilized ~ A Tele-Economic Revolution!

Thanks to Harvard's Calestous Juma for highlighting Killian Fox's piece in The Guardian about Africa's mobile economic revolution...

"Half of Africa's one billion population has a mobile phone -- and not just for talking. The power of telephony is forging a new enterprise culture, from banking to agriculture to healthcare. [...] Africa has experienced an incredible boom in mobile phone use over the past decade. In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500 million. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life. It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on."

Read more about case study 1, a mobile money micro-economy and case study 2, farming with a smartphone...

Cyberpunk ~ Vintage SF Visions of the Future!

Thanks to Matthew Borgatti for spotting this vintage 1990 Cyberpunk documentary, both prescient and quaintly archaic at the same time. The narration is a bit hyperbolic, but it exemplifies the visionary influence of SF on the inventors of real futures...

Real Life Social Network ~ Understanding Circles

Check out this Presentation That Inspired Google+

Cloudy Disruptions ~ McNamee on Future IT...

Thanks to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at Business Insider (and Dan Frommer at SplatF) for spotlighting Facebook Investor Roger McNamee Explaining Why Social Is Over, that we're in the post-PC era, social is now a feature, HTML5 is key enabler, vast mobile experience improvement needed, Google index-search no longer so dominant, and more...

Auteur vs Committee ~ Who Decides on Designs?

NYTimes' Randall Stross compares The Auteur vs. the Committee...

"At Apple, one is the magic number. One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O. By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions. The contest is not even close. The company that has a single arbiter of taste has been producing superior products, showing that you don’t need multiple teams and dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices."

Philosopher King versus the Wisdom of Crowds. Hmm. See here John Gruber's Auteur Theory of Design...

Vertical Farms ~ Feeding An Urbanized Planet?

Fabian Kretschmer and Malte Kollenberg write in Der Spiegel about Vertical Farming: Can Urban Agriculture Feed a Hungry World?

"Vertical farming is an old idea. Indigenous people in South America have long used vertically layered growing techniques, and the rice terraces of East Asia follow a similar principle. But, now, a rapidly growing global population and increasingly limited resources are making the technique more attractive than ever. [...] By 2050, the UN predicts that the global population will surpass 9 billion people. Given current agricultural productivity rates, the Vertical Farm Project estimates that an agricultural area equal in size to roughly half of South America will be needed to feed this larger population. Vertical farming has the potential to solve this problem. The term "vertical farming" was coined in 1915 by American geologist Gilbert Ellis Bailey. Architects and scientists have repeatedly looked into the idea since then, especially toward the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences and microbiology at New York's Columbia University seized upon the idea together with his students. After having grown tired of his depressing lectures on the state of the world, his students finally protested and asked Despommier to work with them on a more positive project. From the initial idea of "rooftop farming," the cultivation of plants on flat roofs, the class developed a high-rise concept."

The photo gallery spotlights a few example greenscraper designs...

Bindi Frees Willy ~ Croc Hunter's Actress Kid...

Bindi Irwin, Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's daughter, starred in the latest Free Willy flick! Bindi seems like a chip off the old block in this 2010 interview with Gordon and the Whale's James Wallace...

Place Pulse ~ Crowdsourced Urban Evaluations

Check out Place Pulse, a new project by Media Lab colleagues Phil Salesses, Anthony DeVincenzi, and César Hidalgo to...

"...generate evaluative maps of cities from crowdsourced questions. Use it to identify preferences within a population or to find similar areas between two cities. [...] Place Pulse allows the creation of comparative studies in which both cities and its neighborhoods can be contrasted and compared. Place Pulse is a tool that helps improve our society’s ability to measure our urban environments, and can provide valuable feedback for the design and evolution of current and future cities."

Latin Characters ~ Evolution of the Alphabet!

Russky Island ~ New Vladivostok Developments!

I've long been fascinated by Vladivostok, the premier port city of Russia's Far East in the Primorsky Krai province. Together with nearby Nakhodka, this terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway is the key Eurasian translogistics node linking Russia and east Asian neighbors, the Koreas, Japan, northeast China, and beyond. Beautifully situated at the southern tip of the Muravyov-Amursky Peninsula, Vladivostok is extraordinarily well-positioned to become something akin to an easterly Saint Petersburg and northerly Hong Kong. Indeed, the latest developments include building an epic bridge southward to the just-offshore Russky Island and preparing the site for the APEC 2012 Summit and subsequent use as campus by FENU, the strategically expanding Far Eastern Federal University... Russky Island was a closed military zone in Soviet times, but with these latest developments -- plus prospective investments and wise leadership -- it is poised to help greater-Vladivostok become an educational and tourist zone and prospectively a new technological innovation epicenter -- much like the Boston-metro Hub is and as Skolkovo near Moscow aspires to be. For background, see here RT's 2007 report Russia Close-Up: Primorsky's forgotten island... And definitely check out this really epic-bridge building video!

Dangerous Passage ~ Mexico's Migrant Gauntlet

Nicholas Casey writes in the WSJournal about the horrors as Migrants Fall Prey to Mexican Gangs on Way to the U.S...

"Kidnapping Central American and Mexican immigrants is one of the latest rackets of Mexican organized-crime groups, which are expanding beyond drugs into pirated DVDs, illegal alcohol sales and business extortion. Just this year, more than 4,000 immigrants have been rescued by the Mexican army and federal police from their captors, according to government statistics. Because authorities say only a fraction of those kidnapped are ever rescued, the figures suggest that gangs kidnap tens of thousands of migrants each year. The victims, almost always headed to the U.S., are captured by gangs where they are ransomed back to relatives, forcibly recruited as workers or sometimes sold into prostitution."

This is seriously not good. Migrants are among the most vulnerable and yet ambitious of humanity and deserve special favor and protection. We ought to do and be better here.

Latin Singapore = Panama + Edu + Transparency

The Economist spotlights Panama's geography, politics, society, and economy in A Singapore for Central America?

"Latin America’s fastest-growing country has set its sights high. First it needs a government as impressive as its economy. [...] In one of the poorest parts of the Americas, somebody seems to have misplaced a chunk of Manhattan. The 50-storey skyscrapers of Panama City jut out of the jungle like nowhere else in low-rise Central America. Panama’s smart banks, open economy and long queues of boats at its ports have caused many to compare it to Singapore, another steamy success story. Panama’s president, Ricardo Martinelli, made his country’s first state visit there in 2010 and later said, “We copy a lot from Singapore and we need to copy more.” [...] Panama will soon overtake Costa Rica and Venezuela in GDP per head. Accounting for purchasing power, it is one of the five richest countries in mainland Latin America. [But] the “Latin Singapore” remains deeply un-Singaporean in two more ways. One is education, where Panama’s spending has not yielded good results. [...] More serious are weak institutions. Singapore is reckoned one of the world’s least corrupt countries. Panama, in contrast, is not even the cleanest in Central America, according to Transparency International, a pressure group. [Punchline?] The biggest long-term worry is that the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous state agency admired for its efficient operation, could be captured by the government and run as a short-term cash-cow. Pemex, Mexico’s creaking state-owned oil monopoly, is sometimes cited as a cautionary tale. Unless Panama cleans up its government, it runs the risk of becoming the next Mexico rather than the next Singapore."

Well now! I'd love to see Panama wear its rightful laurels as a top Latin entrepôt -- and to be more connected and engaged with neighbors Costa Rica and Colombia and beyond. Will the leadership do what it takes to be First World instead of Third?

Collaborative Consumption ~ Share & Swap...

The Guardian's Leo Hickman spotlights collaborative consumption, the core notion of Rachel Botsman's book, What's Mine Is Yours...

"...a cry for us to consume "smarter" by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership -- and the lust to own -- towards one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our "time and space". The notion of "collaborative consumption" is not, she notes, new -- it has been around for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking, coupled with "geo-located" smart phones, has super-charged a concept that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of our environmental and economic crises. Echoing the Japanese concept of muda -- the relentless hunt for, and eradication of, inefficiencies in any system -- collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise "idling."

Hickman is a bit skeptical, but spotlights a number of example new ventures helping urban dwellers live asset-light lifestyles. In any case, hear it from Botsman herself at TEDxSydney...

Unions Stifling US ~ Unproductive Labor Rules...

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association and director of the Center for Urban Innovation, opinionates in USA Today about How unions are stifling American growth...

"Labor has become increasingly unproductive. Decades of government-sanctioned work rules and regulations that impede productivity while hindering management's ability to manage have caused construction costs to soar and efficiency to plummet. [...] This is a complaint about waste -- about organized labor's legacy of work rules, jurisdictional disputes and unproductive practices that cause costs to soar through delays and over-staffing."

Vitullo-Martin goes on to give specific and disgraceful examples of state-enforced private-sector pork -- i.e. contractually imposed and grotesque "no-work jobs" -- which infests multiple industry sectors, especially construction and manufacturing. It's pretty sickening.

Federal Fire Sale ~ Unload Assets to Pay Debt

Laura Meckler in WSJ writes Federal Land Up for Budget Grabs...

"White House and congressional negotiators, hunting for savings in the federal budget, recently came upon a juicy target: a 387-acre tract of land in the heart of ritzy West Los Angeles. It could be worth billions. [...] The government could raise $12 billion by selling unneeded federal land, with as much as $5 billion coming from this one Los Angeles property. "Sell it," said Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, adding that any business would do the same. No one in the room, from either party, disagreed. [...] Previously undisclosed plans -- to raise funds by offloading valuable government-owned properties -- are up for discussion. Potential target sites run the gamut, from the West Los Angeles plot owned by the Department of Veterans Affairs to a former Social Security Administration office in Flint, Mich. The discussions are evidence of how the budget battle has already had a profound effect on the national debate, even though its final outcome remains murky, by teeing up for slaughter a litany of sacred cows -- from pricey real estate to the federal government's social safety net. [Federal asset wastefulness is legion, and indeed,] the Government Accountability Office reported this year that 24 federal agencies own more than 45,000 under-utilized buildings that cost $1.66 billion annually to operate."

Of course, this one LA land sale is quite controversial, with every ankle-biter special interest group weighing in about why this particular cow is extraordinarily sacred. But this and literally thousands of properties will be part of the inevitable Federal fire sale needed to pay for the Ponzi politics and crony corruption that dominate the modern era. To help you envision the future, there's even a handy online Federal Excess Properties viewer...

Nationalism Rules ~ FP on The State as Cult...

Stephen Walt writes in FP that Nationalism Rules about The State...

"What's the most powerful political force in the world? Some of you might say it's the bond market. Others might nominate the resurgence of religion or the advance of democracy or human rights. Or maybe it's digital technology, as symbolized by the Internet and all that comes with it. Or perhaps you think it's nuclear weapons [But] the Strongest Force in the World would be Nationalism. The belief that humanity is comprised of many different cultures -- i.e., groups that share a common language, symbols, and a narrative about their past (invariably self-serving and full of myths) -- and that those groups ought to have their own state has been an overwhelmingly powerful force in the world over the past two centuries. [...] Nations -- because they operate in a competitive and sometimes dangerous world -- seek to preserve their identities and cultural values. In many cases, the best way for them to do that is to have their own state, because ethnic or national groups that lack their own state are usually more vulnerable to conquest, absorption, and assimilation. [...] Modern states also have a powerful incentive to promote national unity -- in other words, to foster nationalism -- because having a loyal and united population that is willing to sacrifice (and in extreme cases, to fight and die) for the state increases its power and thus its ability to deal with external threats. [...} Once established, a nation-state is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. [...] Unless we fully appreciate the power of nationalism, in short, we are going to get a lot of things wrong about the contemporary political life. It is the most powerful political force in the world, and we ignore it at our peril."

What's so especially distasteful to me about Nationalism is, alas, not explicitly spelled out in this piece -- but it's inexorably implied -- namely that those who support The State will do anything to keep it in power, to reinforce its position, to inculcate its importance, to endow it with mystical powers and mythological qualities. In short, to create the Cult of The State, something as poisonous to the planet and hurtful to humanity as organized religion.

Lovely Inhabitats ~ Green Design Delighters!

Yes, indeed, another delightful dose of Inhabitat design stories!