R.I.P. Qian Xuesen ~ Father of Chinese Rocketry

Sad to hear that Qian Xuesen passed away at the end of October, 2009 at age 97. After finishing his engineering studies at MIT, he went to CalTech to finish his doctorate under Theodore von Karman. Later as a CalTech professor, Qian co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But when he applied for US citizenship, the organs of the State accused him of Communist sympathies, stripped him of clearance, and detained him under house arrest for years. In 1955, he was allowed-told to leave and thus, after arriving in Mao's China, Qian went on to become the Father of Chinese Rocketry. A fascinating tale including plenty of political stupidity and governmental incompetence, but also heroic inventiveness and resilience. At this present time of US space program incoherence and growing, multiple, open fears of Chinese space initiatives, the saga of Qian is worth remembering.

Kenya's Street Teens ~ Changing Their Struggle...

CNN's David McKenzie spotlights Kenya's street teens struggle to survive. Not good. And sadly repeated in cities and situations worldwide. Surely we can and must do better as a society than to allow such circumstances to continue. See for yourself Joan's reality...

Via Inhabat ~ Greenscrapers & Cleanways!

Thanks to Inhabitat for more clean and green delighters! Click on...

Lions on the Edge ~ F2F with the Big Game!-)

Again the Daily Mail brings on the big game in this piece by Sara Nelson, Jeepers... are you sure this thing is safe? Amazing 'invisible' cage which puts you a whisker away from lion's jaws. I'm not sure I'd be so sanguine on safari......except that it's the new Lions on the Edge exhibit!

Being Nemo ~ A Rather Sharky Situation;-)

The Daily Mail shows us the extraordinary lengths wildlife photographers -- such as diver Amos Nachoum -- go to in order to secure the shot. Quoth he: "I have a 100 per cent safety record." Is that so? Well, seems he had no troubles with Smiley the Shark here...

IDE ~ Al Doerksen & Zenia Tata @ D-Ventures!

Great to have both Al Doerksen and Zenia Tata visit our MIT Development Ventures class to share their experiences operating and growing International Development Enterprises (IDE). The core IDE mission is...

Creating Income Opportunities for the Rural Poor

...something they've pursued since 1981. Using enterprise-oriented approaches to increase incomes, they concentrate on improving market access, increasing agricultural production, and creating sustainable local businesses. Their projects are country specific and aim at increasing income for those living on less than a dollar a day and have collectively helped more than 19 million farmer-entrepreneurs lift themselves permanently out of poverty. I've written in the past about IDE founder Paul Polak, including his Pop!Cast talk and his visit to MIT at the launch of his book, Out of Poverty where he asked "Is Charity Ethical?" Be sure to check out latest updates via the IDE news blog. Also interesting to hear was the Board-level decision to concentrate resources on being the premier global supplier of affordable core farmer technologies, with special emphasis on irrigation and all things water...

Optical Neurotech ~ Boyden @ Sing Summit!

More thanks to Michael Anissimov for posting Singularity Summit 2009 videos, including this talk by my MIT colleague Ed Boyden on Optically Engineering the Brain to Augment Its Function...

Vaccines & Global Health ~ MIT Spotlight 11/9

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge's Innovation Series spotlights Vaccines & Global Health: New Technologies Create Global Opportunities this coming Monday, November 9, 2009 6-9p in the MIT Stata Center's Kirsch Auditorium...

"From SARS to HIV, infectious disease remains a global public health concern for emerging and developed nations alike... Pharma has recently cut a number of deals with emerging biotechnology companies piloting new approaches to infectious disease therapy to both address a pressing market need and help fill their pipelines. New funding for projects from basic research to vaccine development, has afforded academia and industry additional incentives to renew the commitment to developing new approaches to treating disease."

Value priced, especially for students! Keynote address by Dr Andrin Oswald, CEO, Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics Division, and a panel discussion featuring:

• Dr David Anderson, Vice President Immunology and Co-founder, Variation Biotechnologies
• Mustapha Leavenworth Bakali, CEO, Genocea Biosciences
• Michelle Dees, Director Innovation Fund, Internation AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI)
• Moderator ~ Dr Una Ryan, President and CEO, Waltham Technologies, former President and CEO AVANT Immunotherapeutics

Supporting Organizations include Mass Bio, the Licensing Executives Society, the Harvard Biotechnology Club, and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. Organized by the incomparable Pearl Freier of Cambridge BioPartners!

Validation Trajectory ~ Rick's Startup Whiteboard

Great to see MIT Media Lab alum entrepreneur Rick Borovoy's Startup Whiteboard! Check out Episode #3 on designing a Validation Trajectory for your startup...

Hype Cycle ~ Gartner on Emerging Tech 2009

Gartner's 2009 Hype Cycle Evaluates Maturity of 1,650 Technologies...

CJ Johnson ~ 3PlayMedia Co-Founder on MP.tv!

Great to have MIT alum entrepreneur CJ Johnson on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight! Co-founder with three other MIT Sloan alums of 3PlayMedia, CJ shared his founding story, how the team coalesced through class and extracurricular projects, and how they address the critical market need for Intelligent Transcription by operating a full service transcription and captioning provider offering high-quality and fast-turnarounds. Why call themselves 3 Play? Because each media file gets a three-fold treatment...

Fastest Meets Fastest ~ Usain Bolt + Cheetah!-)

Ruud spots World's Fastest Man adopting World's Fastest Cat!

Natural Recycling ~ 5,000 Larvae vs 2 Fish!

Thanks to my MIT D-Lab colleague Gwyn Jones for spotting this enthralling timelapse footage of 5,000 Larvae dining on 2 Fish! This kind of natural recycling is actually quite important. Indeed, the Swiss Eawag Aquatic Research Institute's Department of Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries has an entire Solid Waste Management research theme dedicated to the Conversion of Organic Refuse by Saprophages (CORS)...

"Saprophages are all organisms feeding of dead or decaying matter. Typical examples are earthworms, millipedes or insect larvae. Conversion of organic refuse by saprophages is an innovative technique to treat organic waste in low and middle-income countries, with degraded organic matter and saprophage organisms themselves as treatment products."

The resulting end-products are in-turn used as feed for fish farms or other livestock or are otherwise converted to beneficial use.

Trash Is Cash ~ Phillie Says YIMBY to NYC Waste

Thanks to NYTimes reporter Manny Fernandez for spotting that Philadelphians Reap Rewards from New York’s Trash...

"New York City pays Waste Management, the company that runs the landfill complex, and Waste Management in turn pays millions of dollars in fees to its host municipalities, in addition to making other donations and contributions that have turned the landfills into an unusual source of civic pride for many residents. People in Falls Township have their trash picked up for free by Waste Management. The company donated four-wheel-drive vehicles to the Morrisville Police Department. Nearly 740 people in Tullytown recently received checks in the mail, an annual gift to property owners [who] used to get $1,500 each. But business is booming at the landfills: This year, each check was for $5,000 [...] "New York’s trash is our cash," chuckled Dan Dougherty, a 56-year-old foreman watching Game 2 on Thursday night at Dacey’s Pub on West Philadelphia Avenue in Morrisville."

NIMBY? No way. Here it's YIMBY!

Whole Brain Emulation ~ Anders @ Sing Summit!

Thanks to Michael Anissimov for posting Singularity Summit 2009 videos, including this delighter by Anders Sandberg...

Desertec ~ Huge Saharan Solar Power Deal

Good to read in the BBC that Sahara Sun 'to help power Europe'...

"A sustainable energy initiative that will start with a huge solar project in the Sahara desert has been announced by a consortium of 12 European businesses. The Desertec Industrial Initiative aims to supply Europe with 15% of its energy needs by 2050. Companies who signed up to the $400bn (£240bn) venture include Deutsche Bank, Siemens and the energy provider EOn"

R.I.P. Robert Rines ~ IP Giant & Inspiring Educator

Very sad to hear Robert Rines passed away yesterday at age 87. I first met him -- as did so many fellow MIT engineers -- in the classes he taught for nearly a half-century, 6.901/6.931 Inventions and Patents/Development of Inventions and Creative Ideas. Well before our contemporary appreciation for intellectual property, Rines wrote Create or Perish and championed the power and rights of the inventor. As fellow MIT alum-entrepreneur Z Holly poignantly remembers, Bob was a...

"Friend, mentor, philanthropist, amazing renaissance man. Who else can claim they played violin with Einstein, invented high-resolution image-scanning radar, founded a law school, won an Emmy for television-turned-broadway musical, found evidence of the loch ness monster, and taught and inspired thousands of MIT engineers?"

Indeed, perhaps Bob's most epic accomplishment is founding the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire, which today is among the country's top places specializing in intellectual property law. The interesting back-story is that this was supposed to be the MIT School of Law -- but Rines was turned down by then MIT President Jerry Weisner, something I still think was a big mistake!

iGEM 2009 ~ Genetically Engineered Machines!

The iGEM 2009 Jamboree has been taking place at MIT over the past few days thru now! This international Genetically Engineered Machine competition has student teams compete to design and assemble engineered machines using advanced genetic components and technologies. Randy Rettberg, the director of the iGEM competition provokes us, asking...

"Can simple biological systems be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells? Or is biology just too complicated to be engineered in this way?"

I'm delighted to see this happen, especially since I recall my conversation back in the day with TK about the power of student competitions and independent activities as an inspirational and inventive force. Lots of goodness has blossomed since then!

President Magnanti ~ New Uni Hires MIT Prof...

Great to see Singapore announce the formal selection of MIT Institute Professor and Engineering Dean-Emeritus Tom Magnanti as the Founding President of the new Singapore University of Technology and Design. This new Uni will be quite unique in having inter-disciplinary programs across four prime domains, including Architecture and Sustainable Design, Engineering Product Design, Engineering Systems and System Design, and Information Engineering and Design. Magnanti has long ties to Singapore, including helping start and run the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) and serving as founding director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (Smart). I personally know him from his time running the MIT School of Engineering where he championed the new Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the UPOP Program, and was a strong supporter of the Lemelson-MIT Invention program and student-run MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Mixed-Up ~ Celebrating A More Diverse World...

British geneticist Aarathi Prasad writes in the Telegraph that It's a wonderful, mixed-up world...

"...my daughter, and approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race. Families like mine are on the rise -- nearly one in 10 British children now lives in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was a child [...] All my instincts as a geneticist make me question the notion of what it means to be "pure". As for it being a good thing, the potential for inherited disease in children of related individuals, or people from small communities, tells us that inbreeding is generally not a great idea. And there are very few communities in the world that are sufficiently inbred to be able to confer upon themselves the dubious honour of being "pure-bred". On the other hand, nature repeatedly shows us that genetically, diversity must be better: more diverse genes mean that animals are better at adapting to changing environmental conditions, and at fighting off and surviving infections."

Interesting stuff. Read the rest of the article for further elaboration of this sometimes touchy topic.