Punchcard Chemistry ~ Prakash's Cheap Fluidikit

Media Lab alum, now Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash (of FoldScope fame) and team win the Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK) for their ultra-affordable punchcard-programmable chemistry fluidic kits! Thanks to Medgadget for spotting!

Boston Cluster ~ On BBC's Next Silicon Valleys...

The BBC's Richard Taylor reports in the Next Silicon Valleys series that Boston breaks through: Speed reading and life-size robots making a lot of noise over the supposed east vs west coast rivalry...

"What grates here is that Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, but before long took the social network to the other side of the country [...] all too often Boston start-ups end up being snapped up by their bigger, West Coast brethren; witness Google's recent purchase of another local robotic success story, Boston Dynamics. The challenge for Boston, it seems, is not just to develop the talent, but to hold on to it too."

Sorry, what most grates is that Taylor entirely missed the real story which is that Boston has intentionally been exporting innovation -- i.e. successfully distributing the enabling pieces, processes, and philosophy of progress and prosperity -- for over a century.  MIT people, for instance, went out to co-found Stanford University and then later Stanford's Research Park, Hewlett-Packard, Watkins-Johnson, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semi, Intel, Kleiner-Perkins, and dozens more essential elements which actually made Silicon Valley possible in the first place.  The problems of our planet are too many for us to be geographically parochial and not spread the innovation ethos everywhere.

FoldScope ~ Ultra-Affordable Bio-Diagnostic Tool!

Wired's Greg Miller spots Manu Prakash's paper FoldScopes! Plus here's Manu's TED talk...

How Big is Amsterdam? ~ Interactographic Map

Nice interactive map comparing metropolitan Amsterdam to other geographies. Here's vs Boston... And here vs Silicon Valley centered on Stanford... Vs Cape Town... Vs Doha... Vs Aqaba+Eilat... Vs Mumbai... Thanks to MapPorn for spotting.

SynthCam ~ Levoy's Clever Mobile Camera App

Thanks to MIT Media Lab colleague Ramesh Raskar for spotlighting Stanford professor Mark Levoy's SynthCam...

Epicenter ~ NSF-funded Stanford Edu Initiative

Cool, check out Stanford's NSF-funded Epicenter initiative!

Mother of All Demos ~ Epic Engelbart NLS Debut

The Mother of All Demos is SRI innovator Doug Engelbart's 1968 public reveal of UI ideas which are now ubiquitous. He introduced the computer mouse, video & teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, WYSIWYG, proto-Powerpoint, hypermedia, and a collaborative real-time text editor. Epic! Here's a nice WIRED 40th anniversary piece by Dylan Tweney and here at the Stanford archives, a nice selection of clips from the demo, and, yes, SRI's own archives.

SU's SEED ~ $150M for Development Innovations

Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies just launched, enabled by a $150M gift from Dorothy and Robert King...

"Known informally as SEED, [the Institute] seeks to stimulate, develop, and disseminate research and innovations that enable entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders to alleviate poverty in developing economies. SEED's work is based on the belief that a critical route for economic growth is through the creation of entrepreneurial ventures and by scaling existing enterprises."

Fantastic!

R.I.P. John McCarthy ~ AI, LISP, Big Ideas Pioneer

Alas, John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, coiner of the term Artificial Intelligence (AI), and founder of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) has deanimated at 84. This is a major loss. While his formal professional achievements are epic, it turns out I know him most through his Sustainability of Human Progress writings, an enormous influence on me and one of the prime root sources of my blog name, Maximizing Progress. Among the highlights of his thinking...

"Humanity has progressed over hundreds of thousands of years, but until about the seventeenth century, progress was a rare event. There were novelties, but a person would not expect a whole sequence of improvements in his lifetime. Since then scientific progress has been continual, and in the advanced parts of the world, there has also been continued technological progress. Therefore, people no longer expect the world to remain the same as it is. [Very likely, the greatest rate of progress for the average person occurred around the end of the 19th century when safe water supplies, telephones, automobiles, electric lighting, and home refrigeration came in short order.] This page and its satellites will contain references to articles, my own and by others, explaining how humanity is likely to advance in the near future. In particular, we argue that the whole world can reach and maintain American standards of living with a population of even 15 billion. We also argue that maintaining material progress is the highest priority and the best way to ensure that population eventually stabilizes at a sustainable level with a standard of living above the present American level and continues to improve thereafter."

Big ideas and bold thinking, both highly needed in these trying times.

Jobs Advice ~ Pursue Dreams, Think Different

Jobs keynoted Commencement at Stanford in 2005...

"Do what you love. [...] Keep looking, don't settle. [...] Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

PS Special bonus! New Apple CEO Cook keynote at Auburn in 2010...

Stanford Prison Study ~ Psycho Experiment @ 40

Alastair Leithead writes in the BBC that Stanford prison experiment continues to shock...

"Forty years ago a group of students hoping to make a bit of holiday money turned up at a basement in Stanford University, California, for what was to become one of the most notorious experiments in the study of human psychology. The idea was simple -- take a group of volunteers, tell half of them they are prisoners, the other half prison wardens, place them in a makeshift jail and watch what happens. The Stanford prison experiment was supposed to last two weeks but was ended abruptly just six days later, after a string of mental breakdowns, an outbreak of sadism and a hunger strike. [One of the prisoner-students] Mr Ramsey felt the experiment should never have taken place as it had no true scientific basis and was ethically wrong. "The best thing about it, is that it ended early," he said."The worst thing is that the author, Zimbardo, has been rewarded with a great deal of attention for 40 years so people are taught an example of very bad science." But Prof Zimbardo calls this "naive" and argues the work was a very valuable addition to psychology -- and its findings were important in understanding why abuse took place at Abu Ghraib. "It does tell us that human nature is not totally under the control of what we like to think of as free will, but that the majority of us can be seduced into behaving in ways totally atypical of what we believe we are."

See also the slideshow of the experiment and the trailer for Quiet Rage docu on the study...

University Park @ MIT ~ Tech Innovation Zones...

I was just recollecting for a visitor from Chile about the history of business park development, both here at MIT -- including Technology Square -- and at Stanford -- their Research Park. One of the most recent in Cambridge is the University Park @ MIT complex Master Planned and orchestrated by Forest City developers on longterm leasehold from the Institute. This and other such parks are key example innovation zones helping seed and accelerate progress.

Stanford Innovation Survey ~ Eesley @ MIT-West

Nice to see MIT alumnus now Stanford Professor Chuck Eesley conducting the Stanford Innovation Survey! Curiously enough, back in the 1990's I went out to Stanford when I was running the MIT Founders Project, results of which were published by BankBoston in the MIT: Impact of Innovation report. I met with then Dean of Engineering Gibbons and also the resource development folks at Stanford. No interest then in doing a parallel project to what MIT was up to! And that's despite Stanford having been architected by MIT's then-President Walker! And MIT alumnus Fred Terman having been so instrumental in the creation of Silicon Valley! Better late than never, so please tell your Stanford compatriots to participate in Professor Eesley's Survey.