Rx for Survival ~ A Global Health Challenge

While reading about Partners in Health, I happened upon this WGBH/NOVA/Vulcan production Rx for Survival about critical and emerging threats to global health. It...

"Examines what makes us sick, what keeps us healthy, and what it would take to give good health the upper hand through two broadcast components -- a complete six-hour series and a special 2-hour program. [...] The ultimate objective of the project is to translate awareness into action."

See the Preview and here's an excerpt on transportation challenges... Addressing these challenges are what my D-Lab Health and Global Health Delivery colleagues specialize in at MIT.

Walking the Walk ~ PIH Helps Amputees in Haiti

Partners in Health (PIH) salutes recovering Haitian amputees...

"After she lost both her legs in the January earthquake, Carmen was determined not only to walk again, but to help others regain their mobility."

The huge January quake in Haiti crushed many limbs, many which needed to be amputated in order to save the patient. But this has led to great demand for affordable prosthetics, which is one reason I'm a big supporter of MIT's D-Lab Developing World Prosthetics activities!

Urban Economix ~ Glaeser on Power of Cities

Harvard Economics Professor Edward Glaeser writes about "the economics of cities, housing, segregation, obesity, crime, innovation and other subjects" in the NYTimes Economix column. Several of his pieces are especially worth reading, including...

• Cities Do It Better -- Megacities are successful partly because "urban scale and density strengthen markets by bringing together an abundance of buyers and sellers in an information-rich setting";
• Why Humanity Loves, and Needs, Cities -- Because cities "connect people and enable them to learn from one another, [so] an increasingly information-intensive economy will only make urban density more valuable";
• A Tale of Many Cities -- On "the enormous value that human beings place on being near one another";
• The Lorax Was Wrong: Skyscrapers Are Green -- "In almost every metropolitan area, we found the central city residents emitted less carbon than the suburban counterparts";
• What Makes Cities Great -- "America does not prosper because of its “amber waves of grain” but because the nation’s human capital, especially in its “alabaster cities,” thrives in a connected world";
• Slumdog Entrepreneurs -- The "Dharavi neighborhood of Mumbai is often described as the largest “slum” in the world. [...] The hygienic conditions are awful, but the area doesn’t feel desperate. It is a hive of economic activity";
• Why Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities? -- "Globalization and technological change have increased the returns to being smart; human beings are a social species that get smart by hanging around smart people. [...] Knowledge moves more quickly at close quarters, and as a result, cities are often the gateways between continents and civilizations."
  

Automation & Parking ~ Robostorage Solutions

Time to revisit again the suite of solutions for automating and densifying and deuglitizing car parking. If you spend any time at all in a sprawlville area you know that the dominant use of nearby ground level space is not gardens or widewalks or greenery or bikelanes or any actively useful and aesthetically pleasing asset. Most street and open space is swallowed up by car storage. Our very best locations are dedicated to warehousing metal and plastic ugliness. What's the alternative? Enter robostorage solutions! First, Automotion Parking's install surveyed by Popular Mechanics... Second, Apex Skypark... Third, FATA Skyparks... And PerfectPark -- which has the USA rights for TreviPark... And thanks to Paul at GeekPress for spotting this Wöhr Multiparker. What I'm especially keen on is combining this efficient, secure, affordable storage mechanism with parking spot markets and economic mechanisms for true-pricing car use and mobiles & mPayments to call for your car efficiently in anticipation of your needing it.

Automobbed Pune ~ Where Are We To Walk?

Thanks to Velo Mondial for spotting this documentary set in Pune, India asking Where are we to walk?

Twisit Jordan ~ Crossing-Cultures with Air Miles!

Jordanian Queen Rania just launched a clever new tourism and bridge-building campaign using twitvid to encourage exchange between peoples. It's called Twisit Jordan...

"2 people from Jordan will swap locations with 2 tourists for 1 week. How? Well, if you've never been to Jordan, we'll pay for you and a friend to come and visit the country. If you live in Jordan, we'll swap you and a friend (temporarily!) with the other winners and take you on a tour of their country. It's cross-cultural dialogue with air miles!"

Positive Psychology ~ Harvard's Tal Ben-Shahar

Tal Ben-Shahar teaches the most popular class at Harvard...

More Resource Furniture ~ A Lot Into A Little...

Resource Furniture fits lots into little...

"...the finest quality transformable furniture, wall beds, modern wall beds, modern ‘murphy’ style beds, modern space saving beds and modern space saving furniture; manufactured by Clei in Italy and Sellex in Spain"

Earth Days ~ Meadows on The Limits to Growth

See here a clip from Earth Days where Dennis Meadows explains the exponential growth, overshoot and collapse of societies drawing from his collaboraton on The Limits to Growth...

Cycling City ~ 's-Hertogenbosch's Ambitions

Thanks to the cycle-savvy David Hembrow for his piece 's-Hertogenbosch strives to become a "cycling city" spotting Mark Wagenbuur's video about the ambitions of Dutch city 's-Hertogenbosch to become the best possible city for bikes...

Birth Tourism ~ Paying $1,500 for US Citizenship

Eye-opening to read in the Washington Post this piece by Keith Richburg, For many pregnant Chinese, a U.S. passport for baby remains a powerful lure...

"What can $1,475 buy you in modern China? Not a Tiffany diamond or a mini-sedan, say Robert Zhou and Daisy Chao. But for that price, they guarantee you something more lasting, with unquestioned future benefits: a U.S. passport and citizenship for your new baby. [The couple] run one of China's oldest and most successful consultancies helping well-heeled expectant Chinese mothers travel to the United States [...] for a three-month stay in a center -- two months before the birth and a month after. A room with cable TV and a wireless Internet connection, plus three meals, starts at $35 a day. The doctors and staff all speak Chinese. There are shopping and sightseeing trips. The mothers must pay their own airfare and are responsible for getting a U.S. visa, although Zhou and Chao will help them fill out the application form."

While I certainly understand the attractiveness of this generous loophole in the US Citizenship laws, I still don't understand what possible social good favors the spawn of some rich tourist over the thousands of adult, intelligent foreign students studying science, engineering, business and other innovation-oriented fields. While the automatic baby-citizens are useless burdens, the smart, hardworking non-citizen graduates are summarily kicked out of the country. Surely this is stupidity.

Superclass ~ Global Power Elite Rules Planet...

Interesting to read in the IEET about David Rothkopf's book Superclass which investigates the role of some ~6K people who each have...

"the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide."

Rothkopf's both an entrepreneur and himself connected to nodes in this power elite. See here his talk at the Carnegie Endowment...

CIVETS ~ Most Dynamic of Emerging Markets

There's new spinonyms popping up all the time! Today I first heard of CIVETS -- short for the emerging markets of Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa. Here's Schott's Vocab commentary and Hutchinson at MorningMoney (with a deeper, but very skeptical tour of each country) and Thomson's piece in the WashPost and Margolis's piece in Newsweek, which actually clued me in! Reuters quotes HSBC CEO Michael Geoghegan who coined CIVETS...

"Each has a very bright future […] Each has large, young, growing population. Each has a diverse and dynamic economy. And each, in relative terms, is politically stable. Emerging markets will grow three times faster than developed countries this year and are driving global recovery, he said. "Within three years, for the first time, the economic firepower of emerging markets will overtake the developed world, measured by purchasing power parity. It's a defining moment." The size of the emerging market middle class will swell to 1.2 billion people by 2030, from 250 million in 2000, he said."

Jonathan Russell of the Telegraph wonders if Geoghegan's...

"...thought this one through though? Apart from a dubious link between six fairly disparate countries the only other thing a civet is, is a small cat-like tropical animal that is of little use to any economy, other than in its liking for coffee beans. And our liking for those same coffee beans -- once they have passed through its digestive tract. “Exotic dung coffee”, one of the most expensive coffees in the world, has first passed through the bowels of the Asian Palm Civet."

Mmmm, tasty. But read Geoghegan's full speech in Forbes (or PDF)

Breath of Life ~ Low-Cost Portable Ventilator

Thanks to MIT's In The World rapporteur David Chandler for his Breath of Life piece spotting the low-cost portable ventilator project born in MIT Professor Alex Slocum's core mechanical engineering course Precision Machine Design in collaboration with Dr Jussi Saukkonen of Boston University Medical Center. Grad student Abdul al Husseini, Amelia Servi, and team...

"...devised a better way to keep patients breathing in places that lack standard mechanical ventilators, or during times of emergency such as pandemics or natural disasters, when normal hospital resources may be overextended. [...] There is a substantial need for such devices in many developing nations, especially in rural areas that have no access to existing ventilator technology. [...] “it’s likely there would be millions of cases worldwide” that could benefit from such a device. In addition, a U.S. government study in 2005 found that in a worst-case pandemic scenario, this country alone might need more than 700,000 mechanical ventilators, while only 100,000 are now in use. The kind of ventilators used in modern hospitals can cost up to $30,000, but the newly developed device can be produced for about $100, [...and...] for 98 percent of cases, this simple inexpensive device could do the job..."

What I hope is up next is for this project to go through our MIT Development Ventures process and turn into a viable, scalable venture spreading this technology widely!

Instant Cities ~ Images of China's Building Boom

Photographer Christoph Gielen and writer Tim Doody's NYTimes opinion piece and photoessay showcase China’s Instant Cities...

"This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed. The construction sites, surrounded by concrete walls, are almost impossible to enter without a guide who knows how to get past suspicious guards. But once inside, it’s like entering a science fiction novel. Even in the middle of the night, bulldozers, cement trucks, and workers swarm the sites as muscular cranes hoist cargo to ever-greater heights. Bamboo scaffolding and mesh encase the partially built residential high-rises, giving them the appearance of gargantuan cocoons. Entire neighborhoods arise within months of groundbreaking."

Given how slow, inefficient, and often grossly incompetent the majority of construction activities have been in Cambridge at and around MIT, this is stunningly impressive.

Cycling Copenhagen ~ Streetfilms on US Views

Very interesting to see latest Streetfilms piece Cycling Copenhagen, Through North American Eyes... Thanks to Copenhagenize for spotting this.

Psychometric Credit Scores ~ Harvard's EFL...

Very interesting to read in in Bloomberg Businessweek A Test to Identify Entrepreneurs by Caroline Winter about the workings of Harvard's Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) at the Kennedy School's Center for International Development. They have...

"...devised a psychometric test to help banks in emerging markets easily screen loan applicants. The goal is to spur lending to small and midsize companies, a vital sector often underfunded in the developing world. These companies are too big to rely on microfinance, yet not big enough to be served efficiently by the banks. "There are millions of businesses in developing countries that could earn significant returns on additional capital that aren't financed," says Bailey Klinger, EFL's director. "And it's not that banks aren't interested in them. Quite the opposite. They just don't have the right tools." The 40-minute computer-based test assesses traits like honesty, ethics, intelligence, and motivation."

South Africa's expansive Standard Bank is the first commercial scale-up customer and our MIT Development Ventures alum-student DJ DiDonna is spearheading the effort!

Sneaky Pussy ~ Margay Mimics Monkey for Prey

National Geographic delights with this Daily News that Jungle Cat Mimics Monkey to Lure Prey -- A First...

"The margay, or tree ocelot, mimics monkey calls to draw in prey, the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced Thursday. Scientists in the Amazon rain forest's Reserva Florestal Adolpho Ducke, near Manaus, Brazil, heard a margay imitating the call of a baby pied tamarin monkey in 2005. It was the first -- and so far, only -- scientifically documented case of a cat imitating a prey species in the Americas, team member Fabio Rohe, a researcher for the New York-based nonprofit WCS, said."

The Creativity Crisis ~ Predicting & Intervening

Thanks to a great troika of recommenders -- Joshua Schuler, Jose Gomez-Marquez, Lily Kim -- for spotting The Creativity Crisis piece by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Newsweek. Starting a half-century ago, some 400 Minneapolis children completed a series of creativity tasks designed by Professor Paul Torrance...

"In the 50 years since [then, researchers] have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed. Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ."

Fascinating stuff and food for thought about what a parent might do to provoke, encourage, cajol, intrigue, and otherwise inspire their children. The punchline of the story is that the creativity indicators have been dropping since 1990. There's debate about why and what to do about it. Read the piece!

Coronal Rain ~ Stellar Weather in a Solar Storm!

Thanks to NASA's TRACE Project for this Astronomy Picture of the Day of Coronal Rain, Solar Storm...