Cool Kid ~ Cody McCasland's Pride of Prosthetics!

This is a cool kid! Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting in the Daily Mail, With five pairs of legs, I feel 10 feet tall! The boy, 7, who doesn't let a double amputation hold him back...

Snackshots ~ Tasty Morsels on Croc Menu ;-)

Clearly a quiet news day in the Northern Territory, Australia...

Did You Know? ~ Globalization & The Info Age

Thanks to my MIT colleague Jaime Mateus for spotting Did You Know? video (yes, he too was skeptical about some of the stats -- or at least analytics -- but it's cool visuals)...

Future Journalists ~ Cameras for Kibera in Kenya

Excellent to see Videoreporter Ruud Elmendorp spotlight aspiring Kenyan journalists like Julius Kasyoka with Cameras for Kibera...

Vertical Greenery ~ Living Walls in Urban Places

Thanks to Unique Daily for spotting WebEcoist on vertical greenery...

Beer & Civilization ~ Inspiring Hunters to Farm...

I overheard tonight at the MIT Muddy that beer was supposedly the central catalyst getting humans to civilize -- that is, settling, cultivating, and urbanizing. At first blush, very humorous. Inebriation = Civilization! But a quickie search reveals no less than George Wills on the Survival of the Sudsiest where he salutes the saving graces of tasty brews...

"The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way: "The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

I personally suspect that the tasty additional qualities of beer had a lot to do with its "rapid adoption" and, indeed, inspired many hunters to shift to farming;-) Especially precious is Wills' closing comments...

"...the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores. So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Future Visions ~ Imagining Possible Tomorrows

Thanks to Randy Krum for spotting this Microsoft 2019 Vision video... And there's other future visions videos from Apple... And more, including this Intel piece I pointed to a while ago. And there's also a really far-out end of this genre spectrum, including this World Builder vid pointed out by Ben Shultz crafted by the remarkable Bruce Branit...

Global Energy ~ MIT 2009 Conference Dials It Up!

Today's MIT Energy Conference 2009 is about tomorrow's global energy innovations!

Diane Darling ~ Doyenne of Venture Networking

Hey, one of my favorite people is in the local news today! Diane Darling, venture networker extraordinaire and founder of Effective Networking, is the subject of Irene Sege's Boston Globe piece A savvy, sought-after survivor of debt... My MIT colleagues Joe Hadzima and Yonald Chery and I invited Diane to address our Nuts & Bolts of Business Plans class this past January 2009 because so much of the "plan" is in fact the people and the process these people go through while planning! They get to know each other, their strengths and weaknesses, their core motivations, and their abilities to focus, persevere, thrive, get-it-done, and more. That's where Diane's advice enhances entrepreneurial effectiveness.

Development Ventures ~ MIT $100K D-Trackers

Excellent to see the Semifinalist announcement last night at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. This entirely student-run Competition has...

"...facilitated the birth of over 85 companies with aggregate exit values of $2.5 billion captured and a market cap of over $10 billion. These companies have generated over 2,500 jobs and received $700 million dollars in Venture Capital funding."

Lots of worthy ideas generally this year, but I want to spotlight the Development Track (or D-Track) especially as announced by MIT Sloan MBA student Carter Dunn, the track leader. Out of the two dozen entrants to the Track, five teams advanced forward to the Semifinals...

• Global Cycle Solutions -- Bicycle Peripherals for Income Generation;
• MobaSola -- Off-Grid Solar Thermal Solutions;
• One Earth Designs -- Appropriate Technology Alternatives to Biomass;
• SHE Sustainable Health Enterprises -- Sanitary Pads for Girl Empowerment;
• WaveWater -- Wave-powered Desalination Systems;

Plus there were at least a dozen additional ventures which were in other Tracks but are really also transformative Development Ventures, including these three Semifinalists!

• Dinube -- Mobile Cloud Financial Services;
• Graphite Power -- Energy Storage Innovation;
• Mobility-on-Demand -- Electric Wheels Everywhere;
  

Congratulations to all!

20 Years ~ MIT $100K Business Plan Competition!

Yes, indeed, this is the 20th year of what's now the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition! I'm proud to have been lead organizer for two years 1993-4 and 1994-5...

Penny Diagnostics ~ Microfluidics On Paper!

It's great to see MIT Technology Review special report Paper Diagnostics by Kristina Grifantini spotlighting Harvard Professor George Whitesides' work on cheap, easy-to-use diagnostic tests...

"Paper tests [...] could make it possible to diagnose a range of diseases quickly and cheaply. A small drop of liquid, such as blood or urine, wicks in through the corner or back of the paper and passes through channels to special testing zones. [...] These tests are small, simple, and inexpensive."

What's especially cool is that these kind of penny diagnostics are incredibly useful in a developing country context, which is exactly what spinoff company and 2008 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Winner Diagnostics for All is targeting!

Robots ~ The Big Picture Spotlights Automata!

Alan Taylor, impressario of The Big Picture, delivers the visual goods again, today with lovely pix of Robots, including these favorites (do you recognize the Governator;-)

Atlas Mugged ~ By Republicrats & Demoblicans...

A lot of people, including GeekPress impressario Paul Hsieh and WSJournal columnist Stephen Moore, are comparing the fiscal profligacy and contemporary statism of the basically equivalent (while narrowly rivalrous) Bush-Obama governmental factions to their parallels in Ayn Rand's epic Atlas Shrugged. Rand used the medium of speculative fiction -- over fifty (50) years ago -- to evoke a world of Republicrats and Demoblicans who differ on trivia but agree that they have the right to essentially view citizens as serfs, as chickens to be plucked, as sheep to be shorn -- i.e. to tax without representation, to spend with abandon, to impose various flavors of political correctness, to extract value without recompense, and worse. How awful. Each of us -- that is, all of us who are actually productive members of society, and especially those who are innovators and entrepreneurs -- we are Atlas. What we most urgently need now is a new freedom movement -- let's maybe call it Atlas Unleashed -- a libertarian centrism which respects the financial and property rights of all while allowing the social choices and personal empowerment of each individual. But it's worth asking why is this so difficult when it is so obvious? We need to insist that politicians actually live up to the American Declaration of Independence and US Constitution and stop telling us what to do and stop stealing from our wallets what is ours. Anything else continues to mug every one of us individually while cynically pretending that it's for all of us collectively.

Lightning ~ Glorious Terrestrial Electrification!

Lightning is probably one of the most compelling and glorious natural phenomena reality provides on our planet! Yes, earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanoes have their disastrous place, but Earth's daily discharges are both dangerous and delightful... And, of course, lightning strikes on the 'Tube...

Geoffrey von Maltzahn ~ Top MIT Grad Inventor!

Congratulations to Geoffrey von Maltzahn for winning the 2009 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Invention Prize! Geoff's particular inventions are both a new class of targeted thermal cancer therapeutics and a new approach for enhancing drug delivery to tumors and have already lead to eight patent applications, nearly twenty papers, and starting up two companies, Nanopartz and Resonance Therapeutics. Today's prize announcement also spotlighted runner-up finalists Aviva Presser and Erez Lieberman and last night's special event hosted by past Lemelson-MIT honoree David Berry at Flagship Ventures featured the rest of the candidates for the prize including such fantastic people as Amos Winter, Alex Sappok, Leo Bonnani, Anna Jaffe, and more!

Steam Café ~ One of MIT's Few Delightful Places

I'm sitting outside the Steam Café at MIT just now. That's the fourth floor space around the inner dome of Lobby 7. It's an attractive place for all sorts of people to pop by; indeed, I've already had three serendipitous meetings with people from Urban Studies, the International Development Initiative, and from Mechanical Engineering. And it's a well-lit space with big windows and great lines of sight so you can see who's about and yet sit at one of the several tables and slurp on some coffee and WiFi. A lot of the core aesthetic and appeal of the Café and environs was established by these two guys, Architecture graduate students Scott Francisco and Nick Senske... As Sasha Brown wrote in her piece Students' idea for new café serves up nicely, this is one of the few cases where MIT actually listened to students and implemented something beautiful and sensible -- and have actually mostly kept it up!

Köppen Climates ~ Mapping Global Geo-Biomes

One key worldmap of global climate classifications is Köppen's...

Planet F#<&ers ~ Saul Griffith Fears For Earth...

Inhabitat's Olivia Chen sums up the recent GreenerGadgets conference in her post Greener Gadgets Buzz From Around the Web. Keynote genius MIT alum inventor-engineer Saul Griffith uncorked, decrying wasteful eco-trashers as Planet F#<&ers. I still haven't sussed out whether this means he thinks we're probably all doomed already or whether, like soberly optimistic MIT Professor John Sterman, he hopes there's "just enough time" to stop screwing everything up. Or maybe he's just being hyperbolic to penetrate thick skulls? Probably shades of all three. Gristmill summarized Saul thusly...

"...narrowly focusing on one ingredient of "going green" means missing the larger environmental picture. A carbon footprint calculation alone is not enough. It's not nearly enough. What about toxins released into the environment? What about water consumption, or waste? Energy consumption? If we nail it on recycling but not on environmental hazards, for instance, we release "a litany of horrors."

Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher in her GG09 summary adds additional elements, including the...

"...need to create ‘Heirloom Gadgets’, and foster a culture of maintenance and repair of existing electronics, rather than constantly upgrading and replacing cheap electronics every year. Hearkening back to a time when there were watch repair shops everywhere, people held on to their watches for years and even passed them down to their grandchildren, Saul Griffith suggested we change the name of the conference to ‘Greener Electronic Objet D’Art’, and focus our efforts on creating BETTER, longer-lasting products that people will form emotional attachments to and will want to keep for years."

Yes, Timeless Technologies, Enduring Innovations, and Forever Wares!

Yes They Can! ~ Hans Rosling's Big World View

The wonderful Gapminder founder -- Professor Hans Rosling -- here gives another fact-based talk on global trends as part of the Gapcast video series, this time titled Yes They Can! -- about developing countries indeed being able to "Live Like Us"... We at MIT need an introduction to global challenges class run along these lines! As a further illustration, here's another great video showing that developing countries have and can even Beat The Rich in achieving key Millennium Development Goals...