"A visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours. Ocean surface current estimates updated every five days. Ocean surface temperatures and anomaly from daily average (1981-2011) updated daily. Ocean waves updated every three hours."
"Morrill is hardly a household name today, but his legacy is immense, felt in every single state. That’s because of a single bill he proposed, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. In the midst of some of the worst fighting of the Civil War, Congress passed a visionary piece of legislation that created more than 100 universities and reshaped the way Americans thought about higher education. [...] The result was nothing less than the creation of a new educational order for the United States. Older institutions did not lose their preeminence, of course. But new kinds of universities came into existence, with a broad reach and a public purpose. Both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were born of the Morrill Act, a fact of no small relevance to the state’s future economic development. [...] Many of the most eminent African-American colleges, including Hampton and Tuskegee, also owe their origins to Morrill’s bill. Native American schools would also be added. In other ways, the Land-Grant Act became better over time. Many of the land-grant schools were early advocates of co-education and advanced the cause of educating women. Morrill added new legislation to fine-tune the program and secure additional funding. [...] Morrill’s is a legacy that is simply too large to calculate and expands every spring as millions of future Americans [and untold International students too] graduate from public universities."Wow! Epic and extraordinary. Truly heroic in the best sense! Check out Uni map...
"A powerful but homely creature, Snowzilla sounds like 10,000 hair dryers running at once and resembles a cross between an aardvark and a tollbooth. It sits on railroad wheels, weighs 26,000 pounds, and measures 8 by 12 by 27 feet -- though most of that length is taken up by its elongated snout. Its thirst for fuel is so great -- it guzzles 900 gallons in a single run -- that a tanker truck must follow it from station to station."
And here's it is in full blow!
The Globe's Scott Kirsner spotlights the revitalized Somerville, MA Ames Business Park and its many creative tenants in his Innovation Economy column this Sunday... "The obituary of the Ames Safety Envelope Company was written in February 2010. [...] Most of the equipment was sold at auction, and the factory went dark. [...] The descendants of Ames’ founder considered selling the property, but weren’t sure they could find a buyer. And they fretted over filling the 290,000-square-foot complex with tenants. “I thought it was an almost impossible task,” says Arthur Fitzgerald, grandson of the company’s founder, John W. Fitzgerald. Skip ahead four years: The final chunk of space in the Ames complex was leased this month. And what is now known as the Ames Business Park is not only fully occupied, it also has become the entrepreneurial epicenter of Somerville, home to a brewery, dozens of start-ups, [etc.] It’s a more diverse blend of people and ideas than you’d find in Kendall Square -- in part because rent is cheaper -- and it’s more densely-packed than Boston’s Innovation District. [...] Now, the question for Somerville is how to encourage similar “innovation villages” to spring up. What happened at the Ames complex was a rare confluence of empty industrial space, entities eager to fill it, and a light touch when it came to planning and marketing. [...] Ames, says [Somerville] Mayor Curtatone, “has really had an impact on our thinking as policy-makers about how to preserve such spaces, to allow for more startups and ideas to flourish in Somerville, and to grow that new economy in our city.” Magic can be hard to replicate -- but it’s worth trying."
Todd Feathers of the Globe spotlights the very compelling Students who had been written off now heading to college... "College Bound focuses its attention on those considered unlikely to succeed. They seek out dropouts, gang members, inmates, and others with setbacks in their past and aggressively push them toward college. [...] The paths taken by the students to reach Wednesday’s graduation ceremony are filled with heartbreak and hard choices. [Says rising graduate Sanjoana Fernandes-Centieo] “I am so proud about myself because I struggled so hard,” she said. “It’s not the end, it’s just one step to continue my education."This is epic and I salute the graduates as well as their supporters!
"The World's First Family Robot [...] JIBO is the perfect robot for everyone in the family. Because JIBO is an open platform, his skills and applications will grow, helping and delighting in ways even we haven’t even imagined. [...] We have an amazing team to make Jibo a reality! While not everything in the video will necessarily be there at launch, the JIBO skills described above are part of the core skill set. The core skill set will be released in 2015. And, because of the rich platform and ecosystem we're building, everything in the video beyond the core skills will be possible -- and more! With our developer community, we will continue to improve the product and add new and exciting features over time."See also Scott Kirsner's InnoEco piece Robot startup Jibo unveils a multi-purpose ‘social bot’ for the home.
"As children’s play spaces evolve, the spirit behind the original 19th-century “sand garden” is on the rise again. [...] in 1885, one charitable group decided to offer something of an experiment to the local children: a pile of sand, deposited for the summer in the yard of a chapel on Parmenter Street. Little did any of them know how much it would change the experience of childhood in America. [...] The spot -- across the street from what is now the North End public library branch -- was an immediate hit with children, who spent long afternoons digging with small shovels and making sand pies. [...] Today, playgrounds look nothing like that simple sandpile. Over the next century, playgrounds were filled in with dangerous but thrilling monkey bars, swings, see-saws, and metal carousels, all on beds of dirt or asphalt. Then, starting in the 1980s, a new trend began, in which these sometimes rusty and risky structures were replaced by standardized plastic structures, the asphalt giving way to rubber matting. Modern playgrounds have become so predictable, cushioned, and programmed that they are now coming under attack as a symptom of everything that’s wrong with contemporary childhood. [...] The most ambitious play thinkers argue that the ultimate goal should be returning the places we live -- or at least neighborhoods -- to kids. [...] Not all opportunities for play, in other words, need to be look like playgrounds. They don’t necessarily need to be permanent, expensive, or complicated. As Johnson puts it, “We ought to have play that comes and goes. We ought to dump some sand piles in the summer.” What people thought children wanted in the 1880s, it turns out, might be the same thing they want today."Here's just a couple of the Globe's archival playground pictures!
"Scientists find way to harvest without taps or buckets or, even, what you’d call trees. Cutting-edge maple syrup production experiments at the University of Vermont show that maple sap can be vacuumed from the slashed-off trunks of saplings."
The Globe's Leon Neyfakh asks If urban farming took off, what would Boston look like? "Not every farm looks like a farm any more. A new type of agriculture has been sprouting up in urban centers [...] and Boston’s new ordinance opens the city up to a whole range of ideas about how to integrate food production into city life. [...] On the more inventive side, entrepreneurs are trying to reimagine the traditional mechanics of agriculture so that it might be woven into the built landscape of a dense and busy city. Now that Boston has officially signaled its interest, the possibilities are vast -- maybe Boston can even become home to North America’s first skyscraper farm"Neyfakh goes on to spotlight several specific ideas...
"It's a kind of robotic hand that looks and feels a lot like a stress ball. Filled with a granular material, in one mode it is squishy enough to envelop an object it's trying to grab. Then, when a vacuum is created inside the ball, the granules get pulled together, solidifying around the object. The unique design enables the gripper to pick up a wide range of different objects, which can weigh up to 20 pounds. Empire has dubbed its product Versaball."
"When you put together the complete list, in 2014 there will be more places in Boston than Cambridge where you'll have a coterie of entrepreneurs working in the same office. [...] Here's an annotated Google Map I created of all these new incubators, accelerators, and shared office spaces in downtown Boston and the Innovation District."
"Many years ago, a little girl was rushed to a rural county hospital from summer camp for an emergency appendectomy. As a teenager, she received antibiotics for a bad case of pneumonia. When she grew up and was about to deliver her first child, fetal monitors indicated that the baby’s heart rate had slowed, and a Cesarian section was performed urgently. In middle age, she underwent laparoscopic repair of an injured knee. The little girl, the teenager, the young mother, the middle aged woman, was -- is -- me. My medical history isn’t remarkable -- and that’s the point. Like most people alive today, I’ve been the fortunate recipient of treatments now so routine that we take for granted they haven’t always been available. Yet, a century ago, or even less, I could easily have died at summer camp or succumbed to pneumonia; my baby and I might not have lived through that pregnancy; and if I had survived to middle age, I would have done so limping and in pain."And that is simply epic, not a miracle at all but the glorious consequence of technological progress and human rationality applied to healthcare.
"Since service began on Memorial Day weekend, the [CapeFlyer] train has transported nearly 9,000 passengers -- almost 900 of them last weekend -- between Boston and Hyannis. The increasingly popular venture has collected enough fares to cover the approximately $165,000 annual cost of operating the train, and the service may be extended until Columbus Day. [...] Train service between Boston and the Cape has been attempted several times over the years, but this iteration has a better chance of success [...] Bike racks in the first car of the train have hit capacity more than once, forcing the train crew to find other places to stow them. “It has opened up a crowd of people that wouldn’t normally come here because they don’t want to drive,” Wurfbain said. “Without taking that trip with the car, it’s so much more pleasant.” [...] Restored rail lines make the ride faster and smoother, he said, while high gas prices and the desire to avoid traffic jams like the 25-mile backup over the 4th of July weekend are prompting more people to leave their cars at home."
"The World Bank estimates that in 2011, immigrants living in America were responsible for $120 billion in remittances flowing to their home countries. The size of the circles below reflect the amount of remittances in billions..."
"I’m proposing a different kind of walk though Boston and Cambridge: an Innovation Trail that focuses on the past, present, and future of innovation here. We’ll always have Paul Revere’s place and Old Ironsides, but what about the incubator where Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell tinkered or the world’s only “Walk of Fame” for entrepreneurs? The Innovation Trail picks up just a few years after the Freedom Trail leaves off: The newest spot on the old trail is the Bunker Hill Monument, built in 1842. The oldest stop on this new trail is the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital, where surgical anesthesia was first demonstrated successfully in 1846."
While Scott offers more detail in his blogpost, in my opinion he overlooks a few especially key places, including...
"... a digital globe is a spherically shaped display screen. Like the old-school globes once common in classrooms, digital globes vary in size, but a typical model is about 24 inches across. Unlike the globes of your childhood, the image on a digital globe can be changed with the touch of a button. Controlled by a keyboard or tablet computer, a digital globe can toggle between familiar, static images, like the world’s political boundaries, topography or vegetation. It can animate complex phenomena, like the formation of weather systems, the effect of global warming on wolverine habitats or the annual pulse of sea ice. It can display the surface of the moon, the churning azure cloudscapes of Neptune or the celestial globe -- the night sky. A digital globe can illuminate the human planet: wars, colonization, the formation of diaspora, modern trade flows or air traffic. It can also help teach math, play games, show movies or serve as a blank canvas for one’s inner, spherical artist. [...] this brave new world is limited by only one rule: “Respect the roundness."Here's a couple case examples...
"A smartphone application known as Street Bump, developed by an in-house City Hall think tank and tested by 25 municipal employees, records the location of every bump a driver hits. Of the first 100,000 ride-jarring bumps registered by the app, traditional potholes accounted for a stunningly small percentage. They were vastly outnumbered by misaligned castings, according to the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the think tank that developed the app. [... They] are also behind Citizens Connect, the nearly four-year-old app that allows residents to send the city GPS-tagged photos and descriptions of problems such as graffiti or darkened streetlights. After the early success of that app, the team began to wonder if smartphones could be used to detect potholes automatically, without waiting for citizens to report them. They developed an app harnessing two smartphone components -- the accelerometer, which gauges the direction and acceleration of a phone’s movement, and the Global Positioning System receiver -- to register the jostling of a phone placed in a car’s cupholder or center console and to mark the location based on GPS satellites. And they set out to refine it to weed out false positives, such as speed bumps."The bottom-line is that new urban apps, data-driven priorities, and rapid responsiveness are the stuff of the modern vital city!
.svg.png)
