April 2013
2 posts
8 tags
Chicago's 3D Printer Experience: On Ratus...
I would know that rat anywhere. The curve of his spine, the delicate perfection of his rib cage, legs bent in classic rodent crouch and that built-for-mischief rodent skull. The rat, or, more specifically, his white plastic skeletal facsimile, is a star, a celebrity whose photo has been splashed all over geek publications, including Wired magazine.
So when Tom Burtonwood, master printer at...
14 tags
3D Update: Try This at Home / Biomimicry...
Great tech innovations have a way of morphing from gee whiz wonder to part of the daily landscape in the blink of a cyber eye. Life before smart phones and tablets? Barely imaginable. Life before the Internet? Really?
The current torrent of 3D printing breakthroughs is a little different. The gee whiz came with the realization that it could be done by almost anyone. Now it is about the riff...
March 2013
1 post
13 tags
The End of the Beginning: The Starter League and...
No one wanted to leave on Friday night. The Starter League Class of Winter 2013 clustered near the entrance of Chicago tech hub 1871 for a long time after the “Starter Night” festivities wound down. We were a herd of newly minted proto-developers in black hoodies, not quite ready to be history. After 11 weeks of having our brains bruised and battered by the quirks and complexities of...
January 2013
2 posts
10 tags
A Juncture in the Narrative: The Starter League,...
Boston roads are based on 17th century cow paths. At least that’s what I was told on my first traffic-addled trip to Boston oh so long go. “You should have no trouble getting around if you can just think like a 17th century cow...”
I still haven’t figured out Boston roadways, but, like a good 17th century cow, I have now trod the path often enough to recognize landmarks...
8 tags
Maps: What You See and What You Don't—On Birds,...
I spotted this map posted on a wonderful tumblr called Exp.lore, the latest digital project from that indefagitable seeker of “interestingness,” Maria “Brain Pickings” Popova.
It reveals far more than perhaps even the mapmaker realized.
Just as footprints in the snow mark a path, suggesting a story, these dashes suggest all kind of things we cannot see. Why are there...
December 2012
4 posts
18 tags
When the Planet Has a Fever and the Kids are Sick:...
It has been a record-breaking year for breaking records. Heat waves. Cold snaps. Floods. Tornadoes. Super storms. Blizzards. Wildfires. Cyclones. Polar melts. Equatorial droughts. Rising seas.
Crops failed. Infrastructure buckled. Forests burned. Subways drowned. Shorelines vanished. Neighborhoods blew apart. Mold grew.
It is not hard to connect the climate change dots when there are so darn...
11 tags
A Solstice Encore: Imaginary Carl Sagan, a Holiday...
A few years ago, Maria “Brainpicker” Popova and Mel Exon of BBH Labs put together an online holiday mix tape. Friends were asked to claim a date, suggest a song and write something about the season. I drew the winter solstice, December 21. What a hoot.
This year, I was so distracted by the Mayan media frenzy, I nearly forgot the date had another meaning.
I’ve reprinted my...
9 tags
File Under "Good, Evil and the Neutrality of...
Two stories that spun me awake this morning, zipping through Zite and flipping through Facebook…
Harvard archeologists literally reconstruct the past with 3D tech (via Wired):
…”This is conservation and protection for the cultural world similar to that undertaken for the natural world,” Greene says. “3-D imaging can be used not only for objects, but also for standing...
17 tags
The Fab Age: 3D Printing, Biomimicry, the Moon and...
The hardest thing about 3D printing turns out to be keeping up with all the breakthroughs. Stories from just the past couple of weeks range from…
• the breathtaking (civilizations out of moondust!)
• to the commercial (3D at Staples)
• to the violent (build-a-gun)
• to the medical (printing cartilage)
• to the racy (sex toys)
• to the sparky (conductive printable feedstock)
• to the...
November 2012
2 posts
15 tags
Smart Power Mining: There's Megawatt Gold in That...
When I first started covering energy stories, I was amazed to learn how much energy is simply wasted. Depending on the power generation source—coal being the least efficient*—as much as a third of energy produced evaporates as heat or dissipates along transmission lines on the long journey from power plant to power outlet.
• Switching to more energy-miserly appliances and light bulbs and...
29 tags
Design and Innovation for the New Normal: When...
They are passing out free blankets in New York City—25,000 in a city where a million people are still without power, shivering as the temperatures drop and forecasters talk about a possible nor’easter. It sounds Dickensian, but the scope of the disaster grows more daunting by the day. It’s hard to help so many suddenly thrust into such need.
Still, people—lot of people—are trying...
October 2012
1 post
30 tags
Shelter from the (Super)Storm: Some Thoughts on...
BACKDROP
Monday: As I write this sitting safely at my kitchen table in Chicago, looking out on a sparkly sunny fall morning, a storm of truly epic proportions is churning unstoppably toward the East Coast. I know that in a matter of hours, cities will be be flooded, scarred and thoroughly beaten up. Infrastructure will float away. Building facades will be nicked and scoured by a barrage of...
September 2012
1 post
13 tags
On Imaginal Disks and Innovation: Business Lessons...
The poetry of metamorphosis is inescapable, even when pared down to the “just the facts ma’am” bare bones science. The transformation of chubby grubs into precision aerialists, or hungry caterpillars into nector-sipping butterflies and moths, or fish-ish tadpoles into operatic frogs is as matter-of-fact and breathtakingly wondrous as Cinderella’s pumpkin-turned-carriage...
August 2012
2 posts
10 tags
Life at 10x and Beyond: Lichens, a Liverwort, a...
(from the archives: This article was originally posted in July, 2008 on an iWeb blog called Germtales. Germtales went into cyber-hybernation. iWeb gave up the ghost… - j.a.g.)
It was bound to happen. The only wonder was it hadn’t happened sooner. Someone finally sat me down in front of a microscope and said, “Look!” It was a “British Soldier” (Cladonia...
14 tags
Publish, Perish & Disruptive Innovation:...
Disruptive innovation is fun—especially when the industry being disrupted is hopelessly lame. Few industries can match academic publishing on that score: (in)famously slow, pricey and capricious. Scholars, or their university departments, can pay thousands of dollars to submit a paper for review, then wait months, or longer, to find out whether it has been accepted, and then months, or longer,...
July 2012
3 posts
12 tags
Biochar'med: A One Stop Shop to Improve Soil...
Finally, an answer I can dig my hands into. It arrived wrapped in a canvas bag with the words BLACK REVOLUTION and an image of a hand making a peace sign stenciled in red. Inside, a plastic gallon ziploc containing a mix of compost, coir (shredded coconut husk) and biochar, the secret sauce of terra preta, the rich black earth that helped pre-Columbian cultures thrive in the otherwise...
17 tags
Bouncing Onward: Climate, Consequences, Crops,...
It is amazing what summer soaker can do. Three or four of such storms over the course of a few days can bring back the seemingly dead. For weeks I have given feeble garden hose life support to frying hosta lilies and parched grass, always making sure to water a spot near a robins’ nest so the parents would have a fighting chance of finding a few worms and grubs to feed their peeping young....
13 tags
Hot Topics: On Weather, Preppers and the Promise...
It was subtle at first. It stopped getting hotter. It was more comfortable outside at ten in the morning than it had been eight. Winds began to blow life back into Lake Michigan’s tepid water, sending white-capped waves to shore. Sweaty air dried out. Colors returned. Thought was possible.
What difference a few degrees and a good breeze can make. A few days ago, electrical transformers...
June 2012
3 posts
19 tags
The Good, the Bad and the Myopic: What Nora Ephron...
Techweek 2012 is a wrap. Despite some organizational stumbles, the sheer mass of programming and the crowds guaranteed good things would come of it. They certainly did for me.
Techweek ran the gamut, from Howard Tullman’s tour-de-force talk on the data-sliced present/future, full of utopian potential and dystopian risk, to Dennis Manarchy’s stunning oversize Vanishing Cultures...
8 tags
And now for something a little different...
“I See I Learn” is a new series of children’s books by my friend / colleague, Stuart J. Murphy. Just for fun, I created a little “webdoc,” promoting his publisher, Charlesbridge’s, booth at the American Library Association conference, which is just getting underway in Anaheim. Webdocs are free one-off, one page websites that offer drag’n’drop,...
26 tags
The 3D Adventures of Henry and Balley!
Last fall, I was invited to TEDxMidwest, a TEDx on steroids that goes on for a day and half, after-parties included. In between the Big Ideas and the small food, I stepped back, looking at the 1,000+ crowd and thought, “There are a lot of interesting people doing a lot of interesting things here in Chicago.”
Professionally, my opportunities in recent years have been mostly with...
May 2012
1 post
8 tags
Science Hack Day: Basic Brilliance
A couple of weeks ago, teams of scientists spent the night at the Adler Planetarium—a starship of a building jutting out into Lake Michigan at the juncture of water, earth and sky. Here, an ethereal world, or perhaps a galaxy, away from Chicago’s burgeoning tech scene, they camped out for the city’s first ever Science Hack Day.
Unlike most “hackathons,” which focus on a...
April 2012
1 post
10 tags
Everything Old is New Again: Time to Get Growing...
Finally, thanks to Kickstarter, I am going to get my very own bag of biochar and couldn’t be more thrilled. If you hurry, you can get some, too.
Biochar (a.k.a. “char,” “agrichar”) is charcoal made from plant waste burned in a low oxygen kiln called a pyrolizer. It really truly is a better answer: a rare “two-fer” that improves soil fertility while absorbing CO2.
...
March 2012
3 posts
24 tags
DATELINE SOUTHERN-CALI-CAGO: Speedy Spring
For years, I joked that Chicago would be one of the few climate change winners. My home city sits next to 20% of the world’s fresh water, surrounded by some the most fertile soil anywhere (thank you, Pleistocene glaciers). While a flooded New York City would be distributing buckets for citizen bail brigades, Texas would toast and the West Coast would crack, erupt, drown-by-tsunami and otherwise...
9 tags
Why a Good Cheese is So Much Better Than a Bad App...
When it comes to innovation, nothing beats microbes. Naturally agile, they iterate early and often and can pivot in a flash. And when you put them in milk, they can make cheese. Can any of the fancy apps being swooned over at this week at the SxSW conference do anything nearly as useful? Or tasty? Not even close…
By contrast, even the last place finisher at the recent biennial World...
15 tags
Abundance for Whom? Diamandis, Big Pictures,...
On the first day of the annual TED conference last week, environmentalist Paul Gilding and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis squared off on our species’ prospects. It was a pairing of a decidedly gloomy bad cop (Resources depleted!) and irrespressibly cheerful good cop (We can tech our way to abundance!). I really do admire Diamandis’ optimism. The technologies he talks about are...
February 2012
5 posts
10 tags
A Chicago Tale of Parking, Innovation, Bad Deals...
SpotHero has, indeed, become my hero. The Expedia of local parking—pre-selling parking lot spaces, often at a discount—has made Chicago a little more do-able in the aftermath of the now fomer Mayor Daley’s parking privitization fiasco.
Bargains can be especially good in the evening. And there is something slightly “treasure hunt” about it, too. Once you purchase a space...
10 tags
On Order from Chaos and Purpose from Principle:...
I am not a geek. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know what geeks are thinking, even if I can’t quite follow along on all the details. Programmers—as political consultant-turned-author Clay Johnson points out—are the new scribes. Quite literally, they give shape to content, define form that defines function and create tools that can reveal, or obscure.
If I have any...
22 tags
Libraries on the Digital Edge: NYPL Labs, eBook...
Few things are quite as delicious as a serendipity day in New York City (even minus snagging a lottery ticket for “Book of Mormon.” Hasa Diga Eebowai…)
I had flown in for a conference, unexpectedly arriving just in time for the start of Social Media Week—an annual celebration of the power and joy of digital connection—which this year took place in a dozen cities, from Hong...
13 tags
The Information Diet: You Are What You...
If this is indeed the Information Age, then we are in big trouble. In a talk titled “Is SEO Killing America?” at last week’s Tools of Change digital publishing conference in New York, former political strategist, open source information advocate and author Clay Johnson compared the commodification of information (content farms) to the industrialization of agriculture—with...
9 tags
Baby Clothes, Sharing, Paradigm Shifts &...
(9/12: UPDATE. Great things have happened for Good Karma over the last six months, including a residency at the Excelerate Labs accelerator program and a reincarnation as Moxie Jean, an online consignment business.)
There are plenty of inspired ideas swirling around, but only occasionally does one come across an idea that also charms. Good Karma, a new web-based subscription service for used...
January 2012
4 posts
12 tags
The Age of 3D / Let's Play!
3D printing just gets better, cheaper and funner. Whether it spreads as fast as tablet tech remains to be seen (JP Morgan predicts over 46 million iPads to ship in 2012 and close to 100 million tablet devices over all). But clearly, this is the Next Big Everybody-Wants-One Thing.
I certainly want one. Or access to one. Enter NY-based start-up Shapeways, a kind of Kinko’s-meets-Etsy...
12 tags
Slimey Smarts
There is genius in ooey gooey mold, no brain required.
Slime mold is so good at answering to the only question that really matters to it—Where’s dinner?—scientists think they can learn a thing or two about how complex computations by studying it.
“Humans are not the only living things with information-processing abilities. Simple creatures can solve certain kinds of difficult...
13 tags
Cool. Even Cooler? What ELSE It Can Do: The...
At some point, my “smart phone” is going to morph into a just plain “smart”—its phone component having been demoted from the title for being its least interesting and least reliable feature (Hello A&TT…)
It’s a camera! It’s a book! It’s a game! It’s a clock! It’s a map! It’s a translator! It’s just wonderful!
One...
14 tags
And You Can Print That, Too...
There will come a day—very soon—when 3D printing won’t be amazing. It will be assumed.
From body parts and tools, to jewelry, furniture, footwear and iPod covers, a vast array of printed things were on display recently at EuroMold, a manufacturing trade show in Frankfurt, Germany.
(Don’t be put off by the word “dentistry” in this video. By the time they get to the...
December 2011
13 posts
16 tags
LEDs, New Paradigms, Fashion Glow, Implications...
As any little girl who grew up making cake-oids and pretzel-ettes with an Easy-Bake Oven knows, light bulbs give off a lot of energy in the form of heat.*
Which is why, in an bid to improve the nation’s energy efficiency, a law was passed five years ago phasing out 100 watt incandescent bulbs in the US, beginning January 1, 2012—although a Tea Party-backed rider to the spending bill...
14 tags
Innovation Squared
It is the genius of the obvious: applying the “Lean Launchpad” methodology of entrepreneurship to science-driven startups.
It turns out there is not much difference between the scientific method (hypothesis / experiment / analysis / refine hypothesis / repeat) and the codified common sense business development strategy pioneered by serial entrepreneur and Stanford b-school legend...
15 tags
The Eyes Have It
Why follow the bouncing ball? Well, for starters, this particular ball may be following you. Designed by a team at the Technische Universität Berlin, the “Eye Ball”—as the clever editors at MITs Technology Review dubbed it—is tricked out with three dozen synchronized cell phone cameras, each snapping a single two-megapixel image coordinated by a sensor, which triggers when the ball...
13 tags
Old Farmers, Big Problems, Hacking the Farm Bill...
The average age of the American farmer is 57 years old. I learned that at a screening of The Greenhorns, a documentary about young farmers, which drew an SRO crowd last week at The Plant, Chicago’s vertical farm and food business incubator. Although filled with inspiring stories of dedication and organic bounty, that’s the little stat that popped out and stunned.
Astonishingly, 30%...
11 tags
Ben Franklin Would Have Loved This: Hackerspaces...
Public Libraries + Hackerspaces. Brilliant. And yet another reason why public libraries—and public librarians—are an essential part of a free society, fostering the kind of innovative, productive, creative, healthy, expansive culture worth a good chest thump. Not only is it about leveling the playing field, making resources available for all, but also about nurturing the potential of the Next.
...
8 tags
When Good Intentions Meet Good Design
Good, bad or indifferent, design is part and parcel of everything we do and everything we touch. It can add value (most things Apple), annoy (refrigerator-size parking lot pay machines with change slots located a foot from the floor) or lead to unintended outcomes (remember “butterfly” ballots?).
Design isn’t “frosting” to be added after the fact. Whether or not a...
11 tags
Innovation Diced & Sliced: Analyzing Past Success...
There are, according to the designers at Doblin, exactly Ten Types of Innovation (R). And they should know, having diced and sliced through thousands of case studies involving hundreds of companies over nearly 14 years.
The tool that emerged, rendered as a simple color-coded chart, is genius. It works essentially as a lens that makes it easy to focus on strengths and weaknesses. Considering...
14 tags
Innovation, Impact, a Darn Good Party and What...
If there had been a collective speech bubble over everyone’s head at last night’s “Founders” party for Impact Engine, a new social innovation accelerator program just revving up here in Chicago, it might have read, “Well, about time!”
In Boston and New York, techs, investors, ad execs, designers, scientists and journalists literally trip over one another....
16 tags
Think Bigger
It seems so sensible: Add voice to text messages. A smart phone is still a phone, designed to transmit sound. Which is why I found myself completely entranced by utellit, a small Chicago startup, at a recent “pitch” evening sponsored local website Technori.
Founder Rishi Khullar’s epiphany? Profound annoyance at the rote Facebook response to the news of a friend’s birthday, i.e. “Happy...
10 tags
Social Innovation, McKinsey & Democracy Gone Daffy
I get it: Create a competition to draw attention to the most innovative social businesses, leveraging social media to spread the word. Encourage people to vote for their favorites. Fun for everybody!
Well, no. There is something just plain off about pitting social enterprises against one another in what amounts to a popularity contest. Which is exactly what consulting powerhouse McKinsey has...
12 tags
Startups...and Downs
Short answer: a mini-MBA, finishing school, geek-fest and gold rush. Color coordinated team t-shirts de rigueur.
Long answer: see Hari Sreenivasan’s excellent overview for PBS Newshour: “Can Tech Startup Schools Teach #TheNextBigThing?
Simply put, why do in a year what can be done in three months? Business incubators look downright dowdy next to accelerators, whose very...
10 tags
China Hacks Hackerspaces
Despite being personally craft-impaired, machine-intimidated and electronically inept, Maker culture makes me happy. There is something deeply comforting about all that creative comradery and geeky can-do spirit.
My occasional visits to Chicago’s Pumping Station One (PS1)—with its signature TARDIS tucked in a corner and quotes by Mandela and Burham adorning the walls—always leave me...
12 tags
"The Innovator's Dilemma: Health Care Edition"
Chistopher Mims at Technology Review nails it: Spiraling health insurance costs are taking a hit on American innovation:
Tech startup founders who have it all—a great idea, a pile of cash, and enthusiasm to burn—are still missing one thing. The ability to provide basic health insurance to themselves and their dependents. It’s a powerful disincentive to creating jobs in an economy that...
