The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Ashoka U Exchange is a working meeting between social entrepreneurship educators, students, practitioners, employers, and investors who are actively engaged in building the field of social entrepreneurship education. Together, we will ask: How can colleges and universities drive positive global change?
From their website: “The Economist believes that human progress relies on the advancement of good ideas. The Ideas Economy brings together top thinkers from around the world, and you, to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time.”
Comment: “..the most important ideas of our time.” Cost: between $595-$1,595 (+$9.95 fee). Why not have a more affordable entrance fee if the ideas are the most important? At least stream the event live for a very affordable fee (or free).
Speakers:
+Vivek Kundra – Chief Information Officer US
+Frank Gehry – Partner of Gehry Partners
+Nicholas Negroponte – Founder/Chairman of One Laptop per Child
+Richard Newell – Admin U.S. Energy Info Admin
+Henry Cisneros – Chairman CityView
+Judith Rodin – President The Rockefeller Foundation
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Programme/Agenda
Related:
+ Representatives of The Economist Magazine Have Attended Nearly Every Bilderberg Meeting Since 1978
+ World Economic Forum live stream
The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.
“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.
But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.
The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.
http://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org
Global donations will determine which entrepreneurs gain admission to esteemed mentorship program
BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Starting Jan. 20, 45 social entrepreneurs will showcase their ventures in an online platform called the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace (http://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/). For 50 days, people from around the world are invited to vote with their wallets on the most viable ventures. The first 25 of the 45 finalists to raise $8,000 in the Marketplace will earn access to the highly acclaimed six-week mentorship program at the Unreasonable Institute. At the Institute, these social entrepreneurs undergo rigorous training sessions, including personal and entrepreneurial skill development, intensive workshops and hands-on guidance from leading thought leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors.
The 45 finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants in 60 countries. Each applicant had to present a financially self-sustaining venture that has the ability to scale to serve the needs of at least 1 million people and demonstrates customer validation through sales or pilots. The finalists this year include a Chinese engineer with a prototype for waterless composting toilets; a 2010 CNN Hero from Kenya who has distributed over 10,000 solar lanterns; and an American inventor with a water purification system that can roll up to the size of a ruler.
Continue reading “45 Social Entrepreneurs Showcase at “Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace””
Tiny, standardized spacecraft are making orbital experiments affordable to even the smallest research groups
By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and Bob Twiggs | February 9, 2011 (latest issue)
Ever since Sputnik kicked off the age of space satellites more than fifty years ago, big institutions have dominated the skies. Almost all the many thousands of satellites that have taken their place in Earth orbit were the result of huge projects funded by governments and corporations. For decades each generation of satellites has been more complicated and expensive than its predecessor, taken longer to design, and required an infrastructure of expensive launch facilities, global monitoring stations, mission specialists and research centers.
In recent years, however, improvements in electronics, solar power and other technologies have made it possible to shrink satellites dramatically. A new type of satellite, called CubeSat, drastically simplifies and standardizes the design of small spacecraft and brings costs down to less than $100,000 to develop, launch and operate a single satellite—a tiny fraction of the typical mission budget of NASA or the European Space Agency.
(full article requires subscription)
Comment: the article mentions the idea of “printing” low-cost materials as well.
Related:
+ Crowdfunding for a Satellite to Widen Net Access to Help Benefactors to Help Themselves
+ Brooklyn Space Program (weather balloon + iPhone + camera recording most of the flight into space and back)
The flooding in Australia is almost certainly related to the latest ongoing La Nina episode.
What was the role of warmists in the Queensland flood disaster?
Australia was told to prepare for droughts as a result of climate change, and let down its guard against flooding, writes Christopher Booker
See Also:
The ‘anomalies’ of Dr Rajendra Pachauri’s charity accounts
Why did the Charities Commission let the European wing of Rajendra Pachauri's empire get away with such poor accounting, asks Christopher Booker.
Watch the intro video on the idea of imagining that you, as president, have instigated an initiative in 2020 to collect ideas and participation from throughout the world to help cure an incurable disease 100 million Americans are infected with http://foresight.breakthroughstocures.org
Also see: http://blog.breakthroughstocures.org
