China-Congo Infrastructure Deal ~ Win/Win?

As I wrote a few days ago, there's a pressing need for rail infrastructure in Africa. In today's BBC, there's a comprehensive article entitled China to seal $9bn DR Congo deal about a massive trade -- road & rail investment in exchange for copper and cobalt mining rights. The Congo is one of central Africa's largest states and desperately in need of infrastructure upgrades. Hence the deal, which is murky and secretive and sends rights activists a-tizzy. But compared to nothing, this seemingly apolitical exchange is probably an improvement. The Congolese get "about 2,400 miles of road, 2,000 miles of railway, 32 hospitals, 145 health centres and two universities." If you have a chance, check out the video with Paul Fortin, the key negotiator.

Amazing Whale Breach!

Another example of citizen-science, capturing amazing footage of natural wonders! Here a large whale breaches... They have a good sense of humor about it too!

The Screaming City

Two new pieces today focus on a worrisome trend -- extreme noise pollution. In a New York Times cover story entitled A City Where You Can’t Hear Yourself Scream, author Michael Slackman writes of extraordinary ambient sound levels in Cairo, "like living with a lawnmower next to you." In the London Times, Stefanie Marsh writes in Noise: the sound and the fury that "Life nowadays -- in shops, bars, cafes; even at home -- is conducted against a background of growing, incessant noise. The stress of it kills 3,000 people a year."

MIT in the News ~ 14 April 2008

Several interesting news & opinion items connected to MIT today, including...

• President Susan Hockfield's OpEd piece in the Globe entitled Numbers that can change the world where she spotlights the Poverty Action Lab, and Amy Smith (who runs the International Development Initiative & D-Labs), and the student-run Global Poverty Initiative which hosts the multi-school Millennium Campus Conference this weekend, concluding with OpenCourseWare.
• The Wall St Journal spotlights the tight relationship between Institute Professor Bob Langer and Polaris Venture Capitalist Terry McGuire in an article entitled Scientist Gives VC an Edge.
• Finally, the FT interviews new MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein and spotlights a few key students, including Jenny Kwan. I'm a bit non-plussed, however, that the Dean "wants to recapture the intellectual high ground" since I thought MIT Sloan was already there. I believe the prime problem has been a failure of articulation, not one of execution.

Enrique Penalosa on Cycling Friendly Cities

Enrique Penalosa, the most transformative mayor of Bogota, orchestrates this video on Cycling Friendly Cities...

Livable City ~ Building a Better SF

Just ran across an interesting organization, Livable City, dedicated to...

...create a San Francisco of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, where public spaces are beautiful, well-designed, and well-maintained, and where housing is more plentiful and more affordable.

They've also written a Path to a Livable City doc available online. They argue for many sensible things such as walkable streets, effective mass transit, greater density, mixed-use, and greenways woven throughout the city... I hope we can apply these ideas to Boston-Metro and especially the near-neighborhood of MIT.

Select Energy Flows

Global Gigafacts & Gigatrends in GDP & Energy Percapita

Russian Science & Space Heroes ~ Kardashev's Scale

Thinking about Yuri Gagarin reminded me of Sergei Korolev and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. And those three got me thinking about just how many remarkable Russians have imagined and inspired and engineered us to a better future beyond our cradle planet earth. One perhaps less known is astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, creator of the Kardashev Scale...

...a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is. [...] The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet [~10¹⁶ Watts], Type II of its solar system [~10²⁶ Watts], and Type III of its galaxy [~10³⁶ Watts].

Visualizing Future User Experiences

IDEO produced several futurist videos for Intel imagining how users might experience computers and consumer electronics of tomorrow...

(Re)-Building Abu Dhabi

Nice article in The Province, part of Canada.com, entitled The man who built Vancouver has a grand plan for Abu Dhabi about former Vancouver master planner Larry Beasley's move to the UAE capital city. Abu Dhabi's blossoming as a city and region to rival neighbor Dubai, with such gigaprojects as Masdar. And Abu Dhabi has the money to make it happen, with $150M per day flowing into their coffers.

Yuri's Night ~ World Space Party!

On April 12, 1961, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of Russia was the first human to escape Earth's gravity, fly in space, and orbit our planet. Amazing! To celebrate, we now have Yuri's Night, a world space party, in part to inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts and future explorers. Gagarin died young in an accident, but everyone remembers him, including US Astronauts. (In my opinion, it's perhaps even more important to salute the planners and engineers behind the mission, for instance, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, or even the inspirational thinkers who imagined the future so far before, for instance, rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who published his Rocket Equation in 1903 and left us these immortal words...

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.

CO2 Emissions Map ~ US

Popular Science has a nice article entitled Animated Map Visualizes Greenhouse Gas Sources... Check out the anime version...

Francophone World ~ Vestiges of Bygone Empire

Ophelia Dahl of PIH ~ Exceptional Woman Spot!

What better way to wake on a Sunday morning at 7:30am than to the inspirational words enabled by Gay Vernon & Candy O'Terry on their Exceptional Women radio show on Magic 106.7. This morning Gay interviewed Ophelia Dahl, co-founder and Executive Director of Partners in Health (PIH), provisioners of health care and social services to the poorest of the poor. At 18, Dahl met Dr Paul Farmer, then 23, in Haiti some 25 years ago. They founded PIH to do something practical and tangible about the illness and poverty around them. They started by focusing on one small area in Haiti, organizing and running one health clinic. Today PIH operates in a half-dozen countries, employs over 5,000 people, mostly locals, and has influenced global health policy. Dahl shared aspects of her personal and family stories as well, including her recent time as a Davis Scholar at Wellesley College where she was asked to give the 2006 Commencement Address. Wonderful! (For more about the PIH story, I highly recommend Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains)

World Food & Price Maps

Penthouse Suites ~ Four Seasons, Big Bux...

The Penthouse Suite of Four Seasons Hotel At $30,000 a Night...

Cellphones & Global Poverty

In a nice article entitled Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? in the NYTimes, Sara Corbett writes about the emerging transformative role of mobiles in the lives of the next 2-3 billion customers, those at the bottom of the economic ladder. She spotlights especially the role of anthropologist and market researchers from Nokia, Motorola and other consumer electronics giants seeking to understand this market dynamic.

Close Up Shot of Lion ;-)

Zoom, zoom!

Retro Encabulator ;-)

Remarkable energy technology innovation...