Make Like a Cylinder and Graduate! ~ Hector Hernandez Defends...

Just saw my MIT friend Hector Hernandez defend his doctorate! His world of extremophile organisms and biochemical pathways is beyond my merely 7.01 and 5.12 understanding, but he made a great presentation and showed some remarkable visualizations of chemical binding sites, plus lots of experimental data. As his advisor Prof Cathy Drennan pointed out, Hector's a get-it-done kinda guy and he cranked on a wide variety of experiments and instruments. Several hilarious Hector interludes, including his mentioning productive hours at the MIT Muddy Charles Pub while struggling to figure out what the hell was going on with his experimental system! His thesis co-advisor was the one who finally told him "Make like a cylinder and graduate!" after nearly 8 years;-) Congrats, Hector!

P.S. At the afterparty at Tommy Doyle's;-)

Recommended Readings...

Some interesting reads lately...

• The Economist spotlights a new bio by Simon Winchester of a brit historiographer Joseph Needham whose epic series Science and Civilization in China changed Western understanding of the tremendous advances (and curious stagnation) of the Middle Kingdom.
• Same Economist discusses the latest wave of Asian navy building -- an unfortunate misuse of precious money -- but does point out the remarkable Chinese treasure fleets of the 15th century which mysteriously, suddenly were ordered homeported with seafaring banned. The global voyages of discovery which thus did not continue are one of history's great might have beens!
• Economist Technology Quarterly has many tasty morsels including a survey of Desalination and a bio-piece on Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia fame.
• Newsweek writes about the Revenge of the Nerdette: Nerd Girls are smart, techie, and "hot".
• NYTimes cover story entitled For English Studies, Koreans Say Goodbye to Dad on Korean kids so passionate about learning English they go with Mom to New Zealand and leave Dad in Seoul.
• Very misleading FT article on MBA students entitled Sustainability not a priority for students with rather tepid commentary from MIT Sloan Dean Schmittlein. Must have been crappy questions because if the bottom line is that "The survey found 93 per cent of students feel the sustainability movement creates strong opportunities. About half plan to start their own businesses" then how can the title possibly be legit?
• Ethan Zuckerman on the Architecture of Serendipity which discusses, among other things, the powerful role of editors in influencing societal priorities by virtue of what's top-story and cover-page and what's elsewhere.
• On Slow Leadership has an interesting post entitled Many of My Most Useful Skills I Owe to Serendipity which I found through Existence is Wonderful
  
• I agree with Africa Unchained's Emeka Okafor's Extracting Intelligence from its People about Tom Friedman's NYT column recently. (And, for that matter, recommend many of the other blog entries...)
• Marginal Revolution surveys Elisabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores
• Greg Mankiw points out some humorously obvious economic essentials, including Law of Demand and So You Want To Be Fair;-)
  

Orange Crush! ~ NL vs IT in Euro2008 ;-)

3-0! Glorious! Check out this Wesley Sneijder goal...

Vital Cities ~ NYT on The Next City

My MIT alumnus entrepreneur friend Cory Kidd pointed me to this lovely issue of New York Times Magazine published this past Sunday all about The Next City. I was especially interested to read about former Bogota, Colombia Mayor Enrique Penalosa who added dramatically to the sidewalks and bicycle pathways in his city and, as I've highlighted before, is a tireless advocate for green cities. Other interesting articles include one featuring Dutch design house MVRDV and their ideas for skyscraper pig farms and other greenscrapers! Yes, that's right, they've designed a Pig City (back in 2001)! It's both hilarious and still a fantastic idea!

Arabian Railways ~ Essential Translogistics

Ardent readers of Maximizing Progress will know I'm very keen on investments and infrastructure development, including Gigaprojects, worldwide, but especially in the MENACA region (Middle East North Africa Central Asia). In Saudi Arabia, there are very ambitious plans afoot to build road and railway landbridges spanning the peninsula, starting with East to West, then connecting current and under-construction Economic Cities, and ultimately linking to the Northwest, towards Jordan and Egypt, and South, towards Yemen... More generally, the GCC is thinking about cross-connections between the various Gulf countries... Ultimately, these links may well create a New Hejaz Railway linking to Jordan and the Vital Levant, and also extend from both Saudi Arabia and Oman through Yemen across the Bab al Mendab Straits into Djibouti linking ultimately with both North and Sub-Saharan African ways.

The Harmonium ~ Masterful Mechanotechnics & Neo Victorian Aesthetic

The Harmonium for Mechanical Fourier Analysis and Synthesis by Tatjana van Vark! Pretty amazing craftsmanship! Check out her larger collection of works.

Experience Economy & Beyond ~ MIT Sloan alumnus Joe Pine

I was chatting last week at the Muddy with a couple of the newly arrived MIT Sloan Fellows -- an excellent group of over 100 technology and business executives drawn from the most diverse ever pool of countries worldwide -- and I mentioned how some past alums have turned their theses into books. Joe Pine comes especially to mind since his thesis on Mass Customization became a best-selling book! I appreciate Pine's later work especially his book on the Experience Economy where he discusses the evolution of economic value and how companies can best respond and profit from this new world. Listen to Pine for yourself, especially the video on his webpage.

This Land Is Whose Land? My Land and Yours!

I'm blogging right now at Otto's Royal East restaurant in Cambridge, MA, purveyor of choice to generations of MIT students, faculty, and Presidents alike. It's just glorious to be WiFi connected, plug-powered and eating a great meal of potstickers, steak, chicken, rice, tea and beer! But what's especially cool is the girl at the next table over. Clearly the kid of immigrants -- her parents are here too, obviously from "somewhere" in Asia -- she's singing This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land, in English, mind you, with her parents and friends all speaking their native language. This is glorious, absolutely the captured essence of the American Experience! People migrate here and both embrace a cultural ethos of integration and even assimiliation -- AND they retain their deep roots to family, society, homeland, and rich history. This is so fantastic. Richard Florida captured some of this dual-ethos in his books about the Creative Class.

Clever Hack at MIT's West Coast Spinoff ;-)

Yes indeed, MIT faculty headed west to help dial-up a small technicians school and create what's become today's CalTech;-) (Fear not CalTechies, you're in good company: MIT President Walker also architected and thus co-founded Stanford University;-) In any case, this is a great hack...

Cosmology is Cool! ~ Going Waaaaay Beyond Our Cradle

I was blown away this morning when I watched MIT Physics Professor Max Tegmark survey the beyond galactic landscape of facts and theory about our Universe! Not only did he crack me up with his witty asides, but he really helped me and a thousand fellow alums understand the glories our our place in space at Technology Day 2008! Professor T shared the saga of ever more and better data supporting Big Bang and Inflationary Universe theories. Most exciting is his idea for a Fast Fourier Transform Telescope, a massive cheap array of antennae and computes based on Moore's Law enabled advances in cellphone and everyday PC technologies. This FFTT would dialup our data detail by a few orders of magnitude beyond the best of current 'scopes!

Pumped Up! ~ Big Musculature in Mammalia ;-)

Whoa, I just saw the trailer for Bigger Stronger Faster......and it's gotten me thinking about all the ways we naturally and artificially pump up Mammalia. Outlier humans like this bodybuilder with massively steroidal arms (in 'cuffs for distributing the drugs, something the libertarian in me rejects -- the illegality, that is)......and outlier bovines such as the Belgian Blue supercow resulting from a natural myostatin gene mutation...

MIT's Creative Connectors ~ The Graduates at Today's Commencement 2008!

Delightful to see another generation of over 2,300 MIT undergrad and grad students finishing up at Commencement 2008! Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus was the keynote and spoke eloquently about the power of social business, including his own work founding GrameenBank, the micro-credit pioneer, and GrameenPhone, the mobile telephony provider, both in Bangladesh. Yunus challenged each student to tackle problems at whatever scale they find tractable and then to iteratively escalate. While I have deep differences with his anti-capitalist stance -- or at least his simplistic straw man characterization of capitalism and profit-seeking -- he did well by urging people to listen to their own conscience and follow their own pathways. GSC President Leeland Ekstrom was quite eloquent in his brief remarks, followed by 2008 Class President Phi Ho presenting his record-setting class gift. President Hockfield charged the graduates to keep up the "do-something optimism" and continue the "constructive irreverence" which has made MIT such an epicenter of innovation!

By and large the program went smoothly, with the rain holding off for the most part. A few quacks tried to crash the party, but they soon waddled off... Afterwards I hung out in Lobby 10 and chatted with various passers-by, including Beth Garvin, Luis Ortiz, Barun Singh, Brian Hughes, Leeland Ekstrom, Paul Gray, Hiroshi Ishii, Diana Strange, Drew Endy, Dave Danielson, Amy Smith, Sarah Bird, GJ la 'O, Steve Brown, among others!

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...

Have Space Suit, Will Travel... Fashionably!

Popular Mechanics speculates about next generation spacesuit design by MIT Professor Dava Newman and motorcycle gearco Dainese... Dainese has done some steller stuff, including this D-air Motorcycle Racing suit with built-in Airbag! Check out the demo video...

Beyond Our Cradle ~ Map of the Neighborhood!

Paul H of GeekPress spotlights this Fark item courtesy of NASA: a modest map of the near neighborhood around Planet Earth and our Solar situation...

Yasmin Sanie-Hay of Silkmotel on HighTechFever

I hosted Yasmin Sanie-Hay of Silkmotel on my HighTechFever TV show tonight. Yasmin shared the backstory and latest prospects for her venture idea of a motel chain along the roadways of Central Asia, starting in Kazakhstan, the northern way of the ancient Silk Road and key state in the contemporary MENACA region! It turns out that she knows the business need from personal experience: this past Summer 2007, Yasmin and her younger cousin Tina Roshdi participated in the Mongol Rally -- a 16,000 Kilometer, 20 country, 1 Litre engine-car road race for charity from London, England to Ulan Bator, Mongolia -- driving together as the Yaksi Taxi team! That was a delightfully crazy experience in its own right, but the central lesson-learned was that while there is tremendous road traffic -- i.e. truckers, businessmen, tradesmen, families visiting relatives, and, of course, Mongol Rallyists -- there are few proper hospitality accommodations. This spells "Market Opportunity" and Yasmin focussed on this in the MIT Developmental Entrepreneurship seminar I co-taught in Fall 2007. Her next step is further market research and partnership development this Summer 2008 with the partial support of an MIT DE-IDRC Seed Grant!

Accelerating Convergence ~ The Growth Report Policy Recommendations

Martin Wolf of the FT writes today about Useful dos and do nots for an economy set on growth, sharing the essential insights of the recently published Growth Report. As I spotlighted a month ago using Gapminder and posted as Waves of Convergence, various countries worldwide have gotten their acts together at different times and grown disproportionately in GDP/capita until they converged with the wealthiest economies. Towards the goal of intentionally accelerating convergence, Wolf highlights the practical policy recommendations of the Commission on Growth and Development...

The most important is the emphasis on growth itself, underplayed by many advisers and activists in the 1990s and early 2000s. Growth is not everything. But it is the foundation for everything. The poorer the country the more important growth becomes, partly because it is impossible to redistribute nothing and partly because higher incomes make a huge difference to the welfare of the poorest.

Wolf then summarizes the reports recommended Do and Do Not policies, plus a list of "ingredients of rapid growth." He concludes...

This report, then, should be seen as a pragmatic guide to policies for accelerating growth in developing countries.

African Agriculture ~ Promising Opportunities & Developments

I wrote a month ago about Paul Collier on transforming Africa and spotlighted the dialog in the FT both Collier and Martin Wolf had about revolutionizing African agriculture -- see Collier's comments on Martin Wolf's FT article entitled Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture.

Along these same lines, yesterday in the FT was Part 2 of a series by Alan Beattie entitled Seeds of Change: Africa seeks to engineer an agricultural revolution giving hard data about the state of African agriculture and covering several interesting elements, including the need for innovations in crop seed, irrigation, transportation, and market-mechanisms. Plus Beattie gives a taste of the debate between those who prioritize helping the small farmholder first versus those who seek to support medium to larger farm enterprises.

And then today, in an FT article entitled Abu Dhabi looks to Sudan for food supply, we see the very exciting investment news that Abu Dhabi's development fund is pouring money into a large-scale 70,000 acre agri-project north of Khartoum in the Sudan, a key state in the MENACA region. The Sudan has an estimated 100 Million acres of agricultural land, of which only 20 Million is being used today, and only 2 Million acres being farmed intensively with irrigation and modern methods. This enormous, supposedly pariah country -- Sudan is as big as Western Europe, but with long-time internal conflicts -- is one of the potential bread-basket countries of Africa. And this will happen when they get their political house in order, welcome in Peacemakers and Peacekeepers for stability and security, attract US$ Billions of investment in infrastructure, irrigation, and more, and generally focus on improving the lives of everyday Sudanese of all backgrounds.

RISD Resurgent! ~ First Maeda, Now Garvin...

Rhode Island School of Design in Providence has now recruited both Professor John Maeda as President and Beth Garvin as VP for Institutional Engagement! I've known John from his decade as Media Lab professor and Beth from her work first on Tech Day reunions (she roped me into Chairing the committee;-) and most recently her role as CEO of the MIT Alumni Association. RISD is a wonderful but heretofore somewhat underappreciated epicenter of the arts in all their forms. The School's a bit of a microcosm for design as a field and Providence as a city, curiously enough: all are finally blossoming as people realize they're diamonds in the rough, just as my MIT alum entrepreneur friend Owen Johnson -- founder of Connect Providence -- has long clued me onto!

Silk Roads & Routes ~ Land & Sea, East to West

The Silk Road or Route was named after the dominant trade good of the day, Silk, a fantastically attractive luxury good derived from worms, their cocoons, and a painstaking process. Various maps illustrate the general prime pathways, both by land and sea. Generally it's important to realize that neither Silk alone, nor any one particular pathway, was dominant. This map shows other variants... While the classic Roads & Routes withered due to war and the boom & bust of civilizations, these bridges betwixt East and West remain crucial and, indeed, there is a whole new generation of infrastructure activities afoot to build modern Silkways, including the Trans-Asian Railway, key links for the larger MENACA region! (Postscript: Liz from PocketCultures suggests reading widely about the vibrant scene blossoming on the modern Silk Road, including, for instance, this Saudi Aramco World article entitled Hearts Of The New Silk Roads about cultures and towns of central Asia.)