Martha Bonilla-Peñalosa ~ On Urban Innovations

Great to have Martha Bonilla-Peñalosa join me on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight! Martha's an urban planner and development economist most recently working as the global program coordinator for the Green Hub initiative at the CoLab Community Innovators Lab and teacher of the MIT IDG practicum class. This practicum had a dozen city planning students from MIT connect with their local partners from Universidad Tecnologica de Bolivar (UTB) over fall and MIT's IAP January period thinking about efficiency, mobility, and food security and the future plans for a Cartagena urban marketplace. She and I know each other from when she orchestrated the first Institutional Leadership Dialogue, a remarkable MIT program called The Renewal of Research Universities: Building Capacities for Technological Innovation with two dozen university presidents from her home country, Colombia, seen here on my MIT Innovation Tour of campus...

End Love ~ OK Go's Latest Timemorph Video!

Thanks to Jeff Lieberman for trumpeting his latest project with Eric Gunther directing the End Love music video with OK Go. Timemorphing! At least five orders of magnitude at one point...

Imaging the Oceans ~ Brian Skerry @ TED

Some of my favorite underwater imagery captured by photographer-journalist Brian Skerry who shares his story at TED Feb 2010...

Natural Born Engineers ~ Kids Solving Problems!

Thanks to Winnie Hu for writing in the NYTimes on Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It about engaging young children in learning-by-doing and building things...

"Spurred by growing concerns that American students lack the skills to compete in a global economy, school districts nationwide are packing engineering lessons into already crowded schedules for even the youngest students, giving priority to a subject that was once left to after-school robotics clubs and summer camps, or else waited until college. Supporters say that engineering reinforces math and science skills, promotes critical thinking and creativity, and teaches students not to be afraid of taking intellectual risks. "We still hear all the time that little kids can’t engineer," said Christine Cunningham, director of Engineering is Elementary, a program developed at the Museum of Science in Boston that offers ready-made lessons, for about $350 each, on 20 topics, and is now used in all 50 states, in more than 3,000 schools. “We say they’re born engineers -- they naturally want to solve problems -- and we tend to educate it out of them.” The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition, which will distribute $4.35 billion in education stimulus money to states, favors so-called STEM programs, which stands for science, technology, engineering and math."

Excellent initiatives! We need more such STEM programs and other Tools of Mass Construction! And on that note, please be sure to check out this week's EurekaFest at MIT starting Wed 16 June 2010 which is all about celebrating the human inventive spirit, especially involving and inspiring our youth!

Freedom Watch ~ Libertarian Honesty on Fox

Thanks to Brian Stelter for his NYTimes piece Libertarian Talk, Now on Fox Business Network spotlighting the new Freedom Watch show hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox. Finally we have a libertarian perspective on the stupidities of contemporary governments from someone who promises to...

"...be the night watchman for the public, to expose when the government does wrong things, steals property, steals freedom, violates the Constitution."

Onward! Maximizing Progress towards Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality!

Methuselah Biotech ~ Beyond Aging Frontiers

Remarkable to read guest columnist Christoph Westphal's OpEd piece in the Globe about Biotechnology’s new frontier, especially his bold assertions about overcoming disease and aging...

"A number of drugs that target aging genes, developed by several biopharmaceutical companies, are now in clinical trials. It is likely that these types of drugs, which should increase healthy life span, will reach the market over the next three decades. After converting several fatal illnesses into chronic diseases, biotech could in the next 30 years bring an even more powerful revolution. Many researchers are now working on the tangible goal of increasing healthy human life span, by replacing diseased tissue with stem cells, and targeting aging genes to treat diseases of aging."

Wonderful! But will the deathist religious wingnuts try to stop progress?

Tech Star ~ Tell Me What You Want !-)

Thanks to Dr Anmol Madan for having far too much time on his hands now that he's defended his MIT Media Lab doctorate and thus having the spare cycles to spot this hilarious venture vid, Tech Star...

g-speak Spatial UI ~ John Underkoffler @ TED

Lovely to see MIT Media Lab alum John Underkoffler from Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group demonstrate his Oblong Industries' g-speak spatial operating environment at TED Feb 2010! Thanks to Cliff Kuang for pointing to this in his Fast Company piece The Genius Behind Minority Report's Interfaces Resurfaces, With Mind-blowing New Tech, where he notes...

"Oblong hasn't previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video, including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate a SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00). Underkoffler thinks these gestural systems -- which offer far more robustness than Microsoft's Project Natal or PlayStation's Move -- are five years from being commonplace. And he thinks they're not only cool, but necessary: "Much of what we want computers to help us with is spatial," he says. And much of what computers do is easiest to understand and navigate if we tap a visual system we've spent millions of years evolving."

Epic!

TheSmarterCity ~ IBM on Systems of Systems

I'm pretty impressed with IBM's TheSmarterCity initiative (and Smarter Planet ideas more generally). Centered around interwoven themes of Transportation, Public Safety, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Education, and Development, the company is spotlighting challenges, sharing lessons from and between cities, and, of course, positioning their own product and service offerings. This makes a lot of sense since not only is half of humanity urbanized today, but several billion more people will be by 2050. This means the creation of the equivalent of several Manhattan's per month, every month, for the next 40 years. And dealing with the interconnected web of consequences. Just some ideas spotlighted:

• Smart toll systems to reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions;
• Shifting public safety systems from responding to events to anticipating and preventing them;
• Managing energy usage down to the level of individual networked appliances;
• Telemedicine for affordable care and health services;
• Cooperative purchasing for systematic efficiency and cost-savings;
• Boosting attractiveness to new businesses and citizenry;

This is all quite relevant and interesting given our own interest at MIT in Living Labs and new ventures for deploying urban innovations.

Vital Shanghai ~ Century of Developments!

Images of historic and present Shanghai! First the Bund 1930s... Mid-2000s... And now, as of March 2010, renovated and more pedestrianized! And then across the Huangpu River, the Pudong area 1930s... 1990... Today 2010...

Story Visit ~ Nokia & Sesame's Distance Reading

Check out Story Visit by MIT Media Lab alums Hayes Raffle, Jofish Kaye and colleagues at Nokia and Sesame Workshop!

Singularity Ahead ~ Mind + Tech = Human 2.0

Ashlee Vance in a NYTimes piece opines Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday about the Singularity Movement and aspirations for merging technology and the mind, what some think of as...

"...techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity -- a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state. At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. [...] "We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human -- to extend who we are."

Yes, that would indeed be Maximizing Progress!

Boston Med ~ Docs, Nurses, Patients Reality TV

Don Aucoin writes in the Sunday Globe about Doctors on the cutting edge of reality, a new reality TV show -- or rather a "docu-medical" according to the producer -- called Boston Med...

"The series brings viewers inside high-stakes medical dramas -- from a double-lung transplant to a rare face transplant -- at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Children's. As physicians and nurses treat patients who are sometimes teetering between life and death, the surgeon’s words echo: If anybody can fix it, they can. Yet as "Boston Med" vividly illustrates, there are times when they can’t. "These are situations that most of us will experience in some form in our lifetimes, either for ourselves or our loved ones," says David Westin, president of ABC News. "It is important for us all to understand both the possibilities and the limitations of medical science, and to realize that it’s a complex and subtle ecosystem."

Such a show is valuable and important service.

Shark vs Octopus ~ An Aquatic Battle Royale!-)

Thanks to Mr Boat for spotting this aquatic battle royale!

IDTechUp ~ Novartis Kenya Fellows Thur 6/17!

Come one, come all this Thursday 6/17 5-8pm to the Venture Cafe at One Broadway / Cambridge Innovation Center for the IDTechUp where you can meet the Seeding Labs / Novartis Kenya Fellows!

"This spring, Seeding Labs and Boston area research centers sent a 40-foot container of lab equipment to Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. Thousands of Kenyan students will be getting a better hands-on education. And now four of their professors are spending the summer in Boston. They are the 2010 Seeding Labs/Novartis Fellows. They're here to work in the labs at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and to meet new friends and colleagues -- including you!"

Anatomy of a Disaster ~ BP's Texas City Blow-Up

Thanks to Harvard's Daniel Rosenberg of In Demo Veritas and Moments of Science fame for spotting the Anatomy of a Disaster safety video and the definitive incident investigation report about the BP Texas City refinery explosion by the US Chemical Safety Board... BP seems to have an unfortunate history of major screw-ups.

Acid Test ~ NRDC's Ocean Change Documentary

Thanks to Lars Torres for spotting this Acid Test documentary by NRDC on "The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification"...

Government Lies ~ Judge Napolitano on Reason

Check out libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano's discussion with Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie about Lies The Government Told You, the saga of "Myth, Power, and Deception in American History"... Part II...

Interface Inventions ~ Twixt Us and our Artifacts

Thanks to Gwen Frederick for spotting interesting user interface innovations, including the EyeWriter, and some more recent examples, for instance, LucidTouch ~ A See-Through Mobile Device... And Manual Deskterity ~ An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input And Curious Displays...

Boston's Greenway ~ WBUR's Ragusea Surveys...

WBUR's Adam Ragusea and colleagues report on Bringing Life To Boston’s Greenway. See also the Planning Guidelines.