Trophic Cascade ~ Discovery & Eco-Regeneration

PBS Nature shares The Serengeti Rules episode on keystone species in ecosystems and the notion of a "trophic cascade" plus ultimately the prospect of ecosystem regeneration via "upgrading". These ecologists and natural scientists used "living labs" to better disentangle the complexities of biomes, for example, comparing tidepool life with and without starfish, pond life with and without bass fish, Scottish highlands with and without grazing sheep, parks with and without wolves, and kelp forests with and without sea otters.

Sandbox Summit 2013 ~ Cities & Ventures!

Excellent to see the Sandbox Summit happening tomorrow Tues 11 June 2013. Great speakers including Robin Chase, Desh Deshpande, Clara Brenner, and more! And the overall theme is about Re-Imagining Cities Through Entrepreneurship, a topic near-and-dear to my heart.

MIT Energy Experiments ~ Campus as Living Lab!

Interesting and yet somewhat dismaying example of using MIT's campus as a testbed -- a Living Lab -- for experimental interventions and explorations. Rarely do you have a clear-cut controlled trial of comparables in energy efficiency, but the MIT East Campus parallel, equivalently symmetric dorm buildings were one such case. By fixing one set of "steam traps" while keeping the ill-maintained old group, we could see the performance advantages measured in steam consumption for a given temperature... This is trumpeted as a success-story, but, alas, the decisions which lead to decades of MIT deferred maintenance -- and consequent operational cost-waste -- have not been punished or recovered.

Gujarat Experiment ~ India Minus Red Tape...

Geeta Anand and Amol Sharma write in the WSJournal, A Glimpse at India, Minus the Red Tape...

"Western India's Gujarat state has transformed itself into one of the country's economic and export engines by presenting an alternative to the red tape and widespread corruption that have stymied big projects elsewhere in the country, turning it into a springboard for the apparent national political ambitions of its controversial leader [Narendra Modi]. [Gujarat] has averaged more than 11% economic growth in recent years, well outpacing the national rate. It accounts for 5% of India's 1.2 billion people but 22% of the country's exports. Gujarat's approach -- mirrored in a handful of other business-friendly states such as Tamil Nadu -- offers one model for how India can fulfill its economic potential in the next decade and pave the way for hundreds of millions of poor Indians to move from subsistence living to an industrialized economy that will be a potent rival to China's."

Of course there are controversies and complaints from many quarters, but this is a fascinating economic testbed and market microcosm for India as a whole to learn from.

Disaster City ~ Emergency Worker Learning Lab

Thanks to Der Spiegel for spotting Disaster City, part of the Texas Engineering Extension Service learning labs for training emergency response workers from around the world!

Arcosanti ~ Exploratory City w/ Eco-Architecture

Given the tremendous interest in ecological cities, for instance the carbon-neutral Masdar in Abu Dhabi, it makes sense to take a look at Arcosanti, a 40-year old "urban laboratory" in central Arizona...

"...demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. [...] Arcosanti is designed according to the concept of arcology (architecture + ecology), developed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. In an arcology, the built and the living interact as organs would in a highly evolved being. This means many systems work together, with efficient circulation of people and resources, multi-use buildings, and solar orientation for lighting, heating and cooling. In this complex, creative environment, apartments, businesses, production, technology, open space, studios, and educational and cultural events are all accessible, while privacy is paramount in the overall design. Greenhouses provide gardening space for public and private use, and act as solar collectors for winter heat."

It sounds wonderful and visionary, but I wonder why it has the aura of egomaniacal lunacy?

Social Evolution ~ MIT's Madan on Memes...

See here my MIT Media Lab colleague Anmol Madan from the Human Dynamics group speaking about his Social Evolution research (and be sure to see Anmol's PhD thesis defense on Wed 17 March 2010)... FYI, another colleague Ben Waber posted info about cell phone data collection examples and resources.

Practical Cycles ~ Useful Everyday City Solutions

I've written recently about several human-powered cycle solutions (and the corresponding metropolitan support infrastructure), including on:

• Giant and the enormous cycle maker sector
• Sammaan Indian cycle rickshaw innovations
• Global Cycle Solutions bike peripherals (DV Fall 2008)
  
• Robotic bike storage system
• BlooBike and other bike share ventures
• RevoPower and other in-wheel motor retrofits
  
• Cargo work bikes in Cambridge & Boston
• Bikeable Boston & Active Transportation in cities worldwide

This cycle powered saga will only escalate going forward since bikes are absolutely key to future green, clean, sustainable, vital cities! It's important for us to look at the lead user cities and countries as testbeds for showing the way globally. In this regard, here's a survey piece from Reuters about the Dutch Quest for Practical Bicycles...
And here's a Cycle Copenhagen special report... And the first A Billion Bikes episode about Copenhagen... Finally, I'm posting again this wonderful piece on Cycling Friendly Cities by former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia Enrique Peñalosa...

Work Bikes ~ Clean Transport for Vital Cities!

MIT's Jason Jay mentioned to me the other day that Frank Hebbert and friends did a study on Campus Work Bikes this past semester for an MIT class. Indeed, when I pinged him, Frank pointed me to their resulting video done in collaboration with the New Amsterdam Project here in Cambridge... One of the key ideas is that the MIT campus can be a pioneering testbed for trying these new modes and perfecting them for replication and scaling everywhere. I'm a big fan of this idea because then we at MIT will see the future first!

In this respect, the New Amsterdam Project is fascinatingly cool on multiple fronts. They are a "Boston Area Cargo Bicycles and Human-Powered Delivery Service" deploying cargo-capable work bikes (or more properly, I suppose, trikes... ...to service a dozen clients already. Radio Nederland did a nice story plus video about NAP's TriCycle Trucks... Such work bikes are the beginning of a vast movement, IMHO. This embraces certainly the bike messenger sector, but also the bike rental sector as represented by BlooBike here in Cambridge and Velib in Paris. Even fairly conservative Boston just approved 21 new permits for pedicabs, most going to the biggest player, Boston Pedicab...

NextBus @ MIT ~ Replacing ShuttleTrack...

Very good to see MIT Saferide replacing ShuttleTrack with the NextBus service as written up by The Tech in an article entitled Saferide Will Use New NextBus Tracking System Starting In July. It turns out I suggested the original proposal to iCampus for the ShuttleTrack idea to Bhuwan Singh (RIP) back in the early 2000's. Bhuwan talked the later student PIs into taking it on and it's pleasing to see it get going as an example of MIT campus as a transportation-solutions testbed. But ShuttleTrack became ill-maintained and flaky, so it's great to see NextBus.

MIT Project Mercury --> Center for Future Banking

It's excellent to see that Bank of America has committed to a multi-year research agreement with the MIT Media Lab. What I'm especially pleased with is that this is a direct decendent of the MIT Project Mercury proposal I first made in 2001-2 to think of the MIT campus as a wireless-mobile technology testbed where we could run exploratory product and service experiments. If done well, this would make the Institute a predictive microcosm of the world at large and allow us to see the future first.

Well, Project Mercury inspired my co-founding and running the Digital Anthropology class in 2003 which incubated the MIT Innovation Club which organized a dozen tech testbeds at MIT -- including ones with Nokia, HP, and RIM. The Project Mercury and Digital Anthropology initiatives also inspired a 2005 proposal (also entitled Project Mercury) in the Communications Futures Program. This was subsequently renamed LivingTheFuture in 2006, but it was still basically the same core thing. While LivingTheFuture was perhaps overly ambitious -- it required CSAIL, the Media Lab, Sloan, and MIT IS&T to all collaborate together on an MIT-wide effort reaching even into Cambridge & Boston -- the LivingTheFuture proposal did attract the attention of Bank of America who chose to concentrate resources on the Media Lab and encourage faculty and student to imagine and invent banking and financial services of the future through the new Center for Future Banking.

MIT Campus as Living Learning Lab

I had a great chat with Jason Jay and Elsa Olivetti at the MIT Muddy Charles Pub this evening about "Greening MIT" and turning the MIT campus into a Living Learning Laboratory for exploring energy and sustainability innovations. Rather than just studying or helping others be sustainable, the idea is to Walk the Talk and actually be ever more sustainable. Inspired by the new MIT Sloan Porter Building, which will achieve the highest level of LEED on campus, I suggested we try to generalize and begin to think about creating a LEED Campus (and for that matter aspiring towards LEED Cities, LEED Countries, and indeed, a LEED Planet).

Just a few hours earlier I hosted Professor Steven Lerman as guest speaker at our Understanding MIT seminar. Dean Lerman shared with us his experience starting and running Project Athena, a 1980's campus computing initiative. Project Athena was a remarkable technology testbed which also incubated several key inventions, including Kerberos authentication, X windowing system, and Zephyr instant messaging. Athena made it possible for MIT students to be among the first and fastest adopters of the web in the early 1990's. The key thing is that any anthropologist (or market researcher) observing student behavior would have seen the future first. Athena made MIT a predictive microcosm of the world to-come with people experiencing web-equivalent services -- e.g. anywhere email, online file storage, served applications, pervasive IM -- roughly 5-10 years before people in the rest of the OECD.

The ambitious Living The Future initiative (f.k.a. MIT Project Mercury) seeks to do the same thing at MIT for all things mobile and wireless.

This is starting to happen with energy and sustainability at MIT. Elsa's own efforts to document and minimize energy use in research labs lead to tangible efficiency gains. Other students are pushing for using biodiesel in campus vehicles. And more. But more coherent and faculty-driven support is needed to take this from being fragmented and extracurricular to central and enduring.