Building Oasis of the Seas ~ Great Video Gallery!

Thanks to gCaptain for emphasizing the great gallery of videos on the Oasis of the Seas build-website! The latest is of their revolutionary rescue boats, but one of my favorites is of Central Park on board!

Elephant Birth ~ Struggle For Life at Safari Park!

Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting Elephant Birth...

Myomo ~ Cool MIT NeuroRobotics Innovation!

Very cool to have Myomo CEO Steve Kelly share with our MIT Neurotechnology Ventures class the story of his neuro-driven robotic rehabilitation spinoff venture from MIT. Winner in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (back in the $50K days), Myomo is pioneering...

"...a new category of non-invasive medical device technology to help people relearn how to move severely weak or partially paralyzed limbs. Originally an acronym for "Muscle-Motion," Myomo (pronounced MY-O-MO) was re-defined as "My-Own-Motion" by one of the first patients to ever use our device."

Very cool! Check out their e100 NeuroRobotic system in use at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital...

Sourcemap ~ Unshackle Your Supply Chains!

Very cool to see my Media Lab colleagues ramping up Sourcemap, an open info system helping consumers grok their supply chains -- i.e. knowing the root source of your stuff. This helps people be informed purchasers of product by replacing opacity with transparency and letting clarity rein in complexity. You might, for example, chose to live a more sustainable lifestyle as a consequence...

More Nobels? ~ Systems Sciences & Applications

In an Open Letter to the Nobel Prize Committee, co-authors Larry Brilliant, Rodney Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Tim Hunt, David King, Lynn Margulis, Steven Pinker, Peter Raven, Frans de Waal, and E. O. Wilson propose...

1. "The creation of Nobel prizes for the Global Environment and Public Health. The new prizes would focus on applications of science rather than basic research. As with the existing peace prize, organisations would be eligible. The environment prize would recognise successes in promoting sustainability, mitigating climate change or reducing biodiversity losses. The public health prize would recognise improvements in global health, such as the reduction or eradication of disease. (We present these lists as examples; they are not intended to be complete)."
2. "The expansion of, or an addition to, the prize for physiology or medicine to recognise contributions from across the life sciences. Fields that are currently excluded, such as ecology, would become eligible. More emphasis would be placed on the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience. This could be achieved by expanding the existing prize for medicine or physiology or by the addition of new prizes for fundamental biology (including ecology, genetics and cellular, molecular and evolutionary biology) and behavioral science (including psychology and neuroscience)."

Interesting, but do these really go far enough?

Flipped ~ How Private Equity Extracts $$$...

Eye-opening NYTimes piece by Julie Creswell on Profits for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soared and related video Flipped: How Private Equity Dealmakers Can Win While Their Companies Lose. Wild.

Scaling Education ~ Sramana Mitra on Strategy...

Forbes columnist (and MIT alumna) Sramana Mitra writes in The Education Solution...

"...there is still a stigma attached to online education. Elite institutions do not want to dilute their brands by expanding the reach of their methodology using online channels. This is a mistake, a humongous lost opportunity, and one that needs to be revisited because an astoundingly large number of people in America need retraining and career makeovers right now. In India, China, Brazil and Indonesia, the sheer size of the populations suggests that nothing other than online education can meet the needs of billions of people hungry for an opportunity to learn and secure a passport out of poverty. The adoption of online education has happened largely in the for-profit education world..."

Yes, indeed, and Mitra goes on to spotlight University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, LA College, and others. And in our Development Ventures class (and sister offerings) we've been actively exploring mobile offerings and other ways of dialing-up scalable educational experiences for everyone, everywhere. This is a very compelling domain!

The Great Migration ~ African Trek on 60 Minutes

Check out The Great Migration in jeopardy on 60 Minutes...

Breakfast Machine! ~ Performance Food Prep ;-)

Thanks to Mark Wilson at Gizmodo for spotting this...

Young Scientist Centre ~ Kids Learning-by-Doing!

Cool to read Sarah Ebner's SchoolGate column in the LondonTimes on the launch of the Young Scientist Centre at the Royal Institution, a combo of museum, eventspace, playground, and exploratorium. In an inspired strategically philanthropic move, the global cosmetics giant L'Oreal is the prime underwriter for the new Centre which aims to...

"...emphasise that science must be more than just facts. [...] "Real science takes time," [says the Centre director] "Sometimes experiments don't work and you have to do them again and that's very time consuming. But it's vital to get a true understanding of the subject. These days it's so easy to download a fact, but do you understand it? What I feel is that sometimes, when things are taught without true experimentation, students don't understand it. And that needs to change. Children can do science at school, but they don't necessarily learn what a real scientist is -- planning an experiment, needing to repeat things, having a clear hypothesis and testing it."

Yes, indeed, that trial-and-error, learning-by-doing, and doing-it-yourself ethos is absolutely crucial for every kid everywhere to experience!

SKS Microfinance ~ For-Profit, Scalable, Mobile

The LondonTimes piece criticizing microfinance also mentioned...

"In India, Vikram Akula, the founder of SKS Microfinance, the country’s largest micro-lending bank, says he is modelling his growth plans on "Coke, Starbucks and McDonald’s." He describes Yunus as his "inspiration", but says it is time for a younger generation of bankers to "push it to the next level... with the unabashed goal to be extremely profitable."

Interesting ambitions! See here two interviews with Akula... And, since I wrote about the WSJournal's piece on microfinance slum bubble credit crisis, I urge you to read Akula's scathing rebuttal letter.

Microfinance Hype? ~ Critical Questioning...

In today's LondonTimes, Tony Allen-Mills writes World poverty guru ‘fails’ to spread wealth, noting that...

"Microcredit is not a transformational panacea that is going to lift people out of poverty," said Dean Karlan, a Yale economics professor who studied the phenomenon in the Philippines. "There might be little pockets of people who are made better off, but the average effect is weak, if not non-existent." [and] While few dispute Grameen’s success in improving the lives of many Bangladeshi women -- the principal recipients of small loans intended to help them start their own businesses -- economists and poverty experts note that little research has been done on the net effect of microlending compared with, for example, constructing a rural factory that creates hundreds of jobs. In the Philippines study, Karlan and a colleague, Jonathan Zinman, examined users of a microcredit bank to see what differences existed between poor people who received loans and those who were denied. Their answer was disheartening. Not only were there few significant differences between the two groups over a number of months, but many of the loan recipients used their funds for household expenses instead of setting up businesses. Some bought new televisions."

MIT's own Jameel Poverty Action Lab researchers weighed in...

"A similar study of micro-lending in Hyderabad, India, found no effect on health and education in families that received small loans. A study by poverty researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found minor benefits, but the real problem, according to Esther Duflo, an MIT professor, was the expectation aroused by the glowing image of Grameen. "Why did we expect all these things to happen?" Duflo told The Boston Globe. "Microlending is useful, but it’s not like the miracle drug to end poverty."

XO Progress ~ Towards One Laptop Per Child

Thanks to the Economist for highlighting Education in Uruguay ~ Laptops for All...

"Nearly all of Uruguay’s 380,000 primary-school pupils have now received a simple and cheap XO laptop, a model developed by One Laptop Per Child, an NGO based in Massachusetts. The government hopes this will help poorer and disadvantaged children do better in school while also improving the overall standard of education. These ambitions will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects. The rest of the world should be intrigued: the first country in Latin America to provide free, compulsory schooling will become the first, globally, to find out whether furnishing a whole generation with laptops is a worthwhile investment."

Certainly there are challenges, as the article goes on to note, but it's excellent to see this effort be tried at scale. And XO's are being deployed in several countries. Thanks to Dutch videojournalist Ruud Elmendorp for spotlighting Small Machine, Big Mission: The XO laptop exciting children in Kibwezi, rural Kenya...

Relax, It's FedEx ~ Even An MBA Can Do It;-)

Ooooh, snap! Ayusman Sarangi spots FedEx ad on ease of use;-)

Inhabitatable ~ Going Green is Good!

Inhabitat continues to delight-by-design!

Companions ~ The Healing Power of Pets

Wonderful to read When Illness Brings You Closer to Animals in the NYTimes by Tara Parker-Pope, as well as her earlier piece, The Healing Power of Dogs. And also see the slideshow on Stefanie Rinza: The Animal Rescuer.

Adi Dassler ~ German Original Sportsman!

Timelapse Typhoon ~ Nangka over Hong Kong!

Thanks to UniqueDaily for one hell of a blow job!

MIT International Development Fair ~ Fri 10/2 1p+

The MIT International Development Fair
Friday, 2 October 2009, 1-3 pm
Lobby 13

I'm proud to be one of the co-founders and historical organizers of the MIT International Development Network (IDN)! We connect everyone who engages in practical and ethical international development at MIT and beyond. To accelerate this 2009-10 academic year, on Friday October 2nd, we host our eighth annual MIT International Development Fair to help introduce incoming students and other members of the MIT community to the many student groups, classes, centers, programs and academic departments at MIT who, through their activities, have demonstrated an interest in sustainable international development. Throughout the year we organize large-scale Institute-wide events spotlighting and celebrating aspects of International Development at the Institute, including an end-of-semester Fall ID Celebration on December 10th, the International Development Night in the early spring, and the end-of-semester Spring Showcase event again featuring all the student projects from the D-Lab family of classes.

Moments of Science ~ IgNobel 2009 Performance!

Just got back from Harvard's Sanders Theatre where demoguru extraordinaire Daniel Rosenberg and I ran our nth Annual Moments of Science at the IgNobel Prize Ceremony! Two demos this year, modestly aligned with the RISK theme of the Ig's:

• Golfball Atmosphere representation of gas laws!
• Tesla Coil exciting a Fluorescent Tube (a.k.a. the GlowBar in homage to Nobelist Roy Glauber who crafted the demo in the first place!-) Thanks to Isabelle R for slipping it to Daniel!
  

See Daniel's explanations! Someone asked, "Are we Mad Scientists?" "No, Angry Engineers!-)"