Longtime readers know that my blog is hosted by my daughter’s jewelry company, Luna & Stella. As it happens, both my children are entrepreneurs!
John’s company is Optics for Hire, and his staff in Ukraine and Belarus have invented many technologies that I haven’t known how to describe. Until now. This time my son’s team in Ukraine has invented LED technology for a knife sharpener that tells you how sharp the knife is, and Farberware is using it in a new product. Check it out here.
It’s really been fun hearing how the technology developed from the germ of an idea about the sharpness of hockey skates. (John’s son and daughter are both ice hockey players.)
Photo: H. Prümers / DA. A 3-D animation put together using data from lidar shows the urban center of Cotoca, a lost city in the Amazon.
Today’s story is about a section of the Amazon that, thanks to new aerial studies, is starting to reveal long-hidden secrets.
Brian Handwerk reports at the Smithsonian that mapping technology has “cut through the canopy to detect sprawling urban structures in Bolivia that suggest sophisticated cultures once existed.
“The Amazon is one of the planet’s last great wildernesses, but legends have circulated for centuries that lost cities existed deep within the forests. A search for El Dorado, a supposed city of gold, lured many Spanish explorers far off the map and some of them never returned. …
“Now the plot has taken a new twist, as scientists have discovered that ancient cities really did exist in the Amazon. And while urban ruins remain extremely difficult to find in thick, remote forests, a key technology has helped change the game.
“Perched in a helicopter some 650 feet up, scientists used light-based remote sensing technology (lidar) to digitally deforest the canopy and identify the ancient ruins of a vast urban settlement around Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon that was abandoned some 600 years ago. The new images reveal, in detail, a stronghold of the socially complex Casarabe Culture (500-1400 C.E.) with urban centers boasting monumental platform and pyramid architecture. Raised causeways connected a constellation of suburban-like settlements, which stretched for miles across a landscape that was shaped by a massive water control and distribution system with reservoirs and canals.
“The site, described [last month] in Nature, is the most striking discovery to suggest that the Amazon’s rainforest ‘wilderness’ was actually heavily populated. … Co-author Heiko Prümers, of the German Archaeological Institute, [says that] ‘a lot of people didn’t want to see that there were archaeological sites here that merit exploration.’ …
“Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, wasn’t involved in the research but has been studying urbanism in the pre-Columbian Amazon for nearly two decades. He notes that elements of the settlement at Llanos de Mojos like moats and causeways, and a modified landscape of parklands, working forests and fish farms, have been seen elsewhere in the ancient Amazon.
“But the new research unveils something quite new. Previous examples of urbanism in the Amazon include the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon where Heckenberger works with the Kuikuro Nation. Such settlements might be described as groups of villages networked together. They aren’t technically urban, some experts have argued, because they lack clearly defined larger centers, with monumental architecture like platform mounds and U-shaped temples.
“But those urban centers can be found at Llanos de Mojos. ‘This is in my mind the clearest case of a fully urbanized Amazonian landscape,’ Heckenberger notes. ‘It’s a marvelous piece of work.
‘It shows really remarkable range of things that humans did in the past to work with their landscapes and work with larger and larger populations.’
“Previous hands-on archaeological work and other remote-sensing efforts had revealed hundreds of isolated sites across more than 1,700 square miles of the Llano de Mojos region, including settlements inhabited year-round by the Casarabe, who hunted, fished and farmed staple crops like maize. Some 600 miles of causeways and canals had also been identified. But the logistical challenges of mapping them in a remote tropical forest hampered efforts to connect the dots and see if, or how, they were related to one another. …
“From an aircraft, a lidar system fires down a grid of infrared beams, hundreds of thousands per second, and when each beam strikes something on the Earth’s surface it bounces back with a measure of distance. This produces an enormous cloud of data points, which can be fed into computer software that creates high resolution images in which scientists can digitally deforest the Amazon. By scrubbing away trees the maps reveal the Earth’s surface and the archaeological features on it. In this case, the images clearly showed 26 unique sites, including 11 that were previously unknown. …
“Difficult as they can be to locate in the forest, earthworks clearly built by humans, designs known as geoglyphs, have been found in several other Amazon locales. In 2018, scientists using satellite images reported that large areas of Amazon forest in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, once thought to have been sparsely inhabited at best, were dotted with villages and oddly-shaped earthwork geoglyphs. Even here, away from large rivers, many hundreds of villages could have housed up to a million people between 1250 and 1500 C.E. in an area that represents only about 7 percent of the Amazon basin. However if larger urban centers anchored these populated sites, they haven’t yet been identified. …
“The aerial view with trees stripped away revealed two centers, each anchored by a large network of regional settlements connected by numerous causeways. Those passageways radiate out from the centers like spokes on a wheel, and stretch for several miles. These connect sub-urban settlements, ranging from small settlements closer to the centers to more distant and even smaller sites that may have been used as temporary campsites. Similarly, canals also stretch from the main centers and connect to rivers and Laguna San José, which apparently delivered water to Cotoca.
“ ‘Basically they remolded the landscape in terms of their cosmology, which is mind blowing,’ says Chris Fisher, a Colorado State University Archaeologist not involved in the study who specializes in Mesoamerica. ‘The only problem is that this architecture was made from mud brick. So while at the time it was as fantastic looking as anything in the Maya region, the Maya monuments have endured because they had limestone while these just weren’t as durable.’ …
“Such discoveries of settlements were the result of very hard work. Despite the large and sophisticated populations that once thrived here, lasting evidence of urbanism has proven difficult to find in the remote and thickly forested Amazon. But lidar technology seems set to rapidly boost the pace of future discoveries.
“ ‘Lidar has been transformative for archaeology and this work is a great example of that,’ says Chris Fisher. ‘These researchers were able to see patterning that’s just not visible from the ground, and that pattern clearly showed two very large settlements, embedded within a settlement system, with a level of social complexity that really hasn’t been demonstrated very well in the Amazon,’ he says. ‘It’s absolutely amazing.’
“While it appears that the Amazon once teemed with human activity, many ancient sites have remained almost undisturbed for some 500 years, something Prümers cites as a big advantage. ‘The region has very low population density, and that means that we are finding the relics of pre-Spanish cultures over there almost untouched,’ he says.
“But the Amazon is changing rapidly. Forests are being eliminated to promote farming, ranching, energy production and the roads and dams that support such efforts. Many of those undisturbed areas, with their hidden records of past cultures, won’t remain so for long. Fisher advocates for large scale lidar scanning of the Amazon, and far beyond, through an Earth Archive project aimed at capturing what remains of the past before it’s lost to the future.
“ ‘We’re running out of time because we’re losing the Amazon,’ he says. ‘And we’re going to lose things that we never knew were there. To me that’s a real tragedy.’ ”
Photo: Dazzle Club/Cocoa Laney Members of the Dazzle Club in February 2020 demonstrating techniques to subvert facial-recognition technology.
In my early online years, I naively thought I could protect my privacy by using a different photo at all my social media sites: the blog, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … Now I know hiding my face is a lost cause.
Interestingly, there are young people in England who don’t believe the cause is lost. A March PRI (Public Radio International) story explains how you can go to a protest and not be tracked when you exercise the Right of Assembly (US term). I couldn’t resist sharing the story because recently individuals that Dickens’s Sam Weller would call “The Law” have started covering their own faces despite demands to see yours. Irony.
So if you are a Yellow-Vest Mom and your Covid face mask seems insufficient, consider makeup.
Orla Barry reports, “It’s a rainy evening in East London and a group of people with their faces daubed in bizarre make-up is making their way silently through the neighborhood’s busy streets. Nobody speaks although many commuters and tourists stare. This is The Dazzle Club.
“Set up by four artists, the group dons camouflage make-up and leads a silent public walk once a month in protest of live facial recognition police cameras in London. The make-up is called CV Dazzle and, when applied correctly, it tricks the cameras into being unable to detect a face. Artist Evie Price, who leads the walk on a February night, worries about what the police do with the information the cameras observe.
” ‘What are they doing with the data that they’re collecting?’ said Price. ‘They say it’s for safety purposes and preventative policing, but we have no evidence that what they’re actually using it for is working.’
“London is already one of the most surveilled cities in the world with around 420,000 CCTV cameras in operation. Washington, D.C., has around 30,000 in comparison. …
“Civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch believes the technology could alter how the police view members of the public. Director Silkie Carlo compares the cameras to a police line-up.
‘It actually starts to reverse the presumption of innocence. It means that members of the public in our everyday lives are effectively being subjected to a constant police lineup, constantly having our identities checked to make sure that we’re not criminals,’ Carlo said.
“The cameras [work] by scanning people’s faces and then comparing those images to a list of suspects police have already inputted into the system. London’s assistant police commissioner, Nick Ephgrave, said the technology does not store images of people’s faces, unless they are on the list. …
” ‘The only images that are retained are those where there has been an alert. And they are retained for a maximum of 31 days,’ Ephgrave said.
“London police claim the cameras are 70% accurate, but that does not concur with the findings of an independent study into the technology. Professor Pete Fussey, an expert in surveillance with Essex University was commissioned by the police to review the effectiveness of the system. His results differed greatly from those of the police.
‘On the six trials that I observed, there were 42 times in which the facial recognition system alerted operators that someone passed the cameras, who matched the database. In only eight of those cases, was it verifiably correct that the person was without any doubt the person that had been matched,’ Fussey said.
“That’s an accuracy rate of 19%.
“But despite the independent report, London police are not the only ones pushing for the technology to be expanded. Retailers across Britain have also started to use live facial recognition cameras in their stores. Facewatch, one company that provides facial recognition technology, says the failure of police to tackle low-level crimes, like shop-lifting, is driving more shop-owners to use the cameras. Facewatch CEO Nick Fisher says they’re proving very effective. …
“The Dazzle Club doesn’t yet know if the camouflage makeup will truly fool police cameras. Artist Georgina Rowlands, a fellow Club founder says they haven’t been able to access the software the London police use. …
“After an hour, the silent walk comes to an end and the group all head to a local pub to have a beer and chat. Claudia and James, who didn’t share their full identities, joined the walk that night for the first time. Claudia says she found the experience uplifting. …
“James said he was worried about the extent to which the cameras are already being used around the world. ‘Facial recognition is a huge thing already and especially when you look at what’s happening in China. [The walk] just seemed a really nice way of, you know, pushing back against that.’ ” More here.
Note that “a beer and a chat” probably went on lockdown shortly after this story was published.
Photo: Diamond Light Source Ltd
Here’s the team taking on the challenge of reading scrolls charred by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Recent technology is making the impossible possible.
In the always-new-angles-in-archaeology department, here’s a recent story about using advanced technology to read ancient scrolls once thought beyond deciphering.
Nicola Davis writes at the Guardian, “When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79 it destroyed the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, their inhabitants and their prized possessions – among them a fine library of scrolls that were carbonised by the searing heat of ash and gas.
‘But scientists say there may still be hope that the fragile documents can once more be read thanks to an innovative approach involving high-energy x-rays and artificial intelligence.
“ ‘Although you can see on every flake of papyrus that there is writing, to open it up would require that papyrus to be really limber and flexible – and it is not any more,’ said Prof Brent Seales, chair of computer science at the University of Kentucky, who is leading the research.
“The two unopened scrolls that will be probed belong to the Institut de France in Paris and are part of an astonishing collection of about 1,800 scrolls that was first discovered in 1752 during excavations of Herculaneum. Together they make up the only known intact library from antiquity, with the majority of the collection now preserved in a museum in Naples.
The villa in which they were found is thought to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.
“Experts have attempted to unroll about half of the scrolls through various methods over the years, although some have been destroyed in the process and experts say unrolling and exposing the writing to the air results in the ink fading.
“Seales and his team have previously used high-energy x-rays to ‘virtually unravel’ a 1,700 year old Hebrew parchment found in the holy ark of a synagogue in En-Gedi in Israel, revealing it to contain text from the biblical book of Leviticus.
“However, while the En-Gedi scroll contained a metal-based ink which shows up in x-ray data, the inks used on the Herculaneum scrolls are thought to be carbon-based, made using charcoal or soot, meaning there is no obvious contrast between the writing and the papyrus in x-ray scans. …
“As a result the team have come up with a new approach that uses high-energy x-rays together with a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. The method uses photographs of scroll fragments with writing visible to the naked eye. These are used to teach machine learning algorithms where ink is expected to be in x-ray scans of the same fragments, collected using a number of techniques.
“The idea is that the system will pick out and learn subtle differences between inked and blank areas in the x-ray scans, such as differences in the structure of papyrus fibres. Once trained on the fragments, it is hoped the system can be used with data from the intact scrolls to reveal the text within. …
“As for what the scrolls contain, the researchers say they are excited.
“ ‘For the most part the writings [in opened scrolls] are Greek philosophy around Epicureanism, which was a prevailing philosophy of the day,’ said Seales. Another possibility is that the scrolls might contain Latin text. While classical libraries are believed to have had a Greek section and a Latin section, only a small proportion of scrolls from Herculaneum have so far been found to be in Latin, with the possibility there is a Latin section within the villa yet to be excavated.
“Dr Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist and classicist at the University of Oxford who has been involved in training the team’s algorithms, … is hoping the scrolls might even contain lost works, such as poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Antony wrote on his own drunkenness. ‘I would very much like to be able to read that one,’ he said.”
Hmmm, the scrolls are from the home of Caesar’s father-in-law? I never heard mention of him, and now all I can think about is he must not have raised his daughter to be “above suspicion.” Or was she falsely accused?
Photos: Viaggio nei Fori Special multimedia light shows will be enriching Roman history at the forums of Caesar and Augustus until November 11 this year.
Recently, I was talking to the amazing Margaret, who was diagnosed with my sister’s horrible cancer more than eight years ago and has never had a recurrence. She had just returned from volunteering with a Jesuit refugee organization in Rome and showing her nephew the sights of the city. She described how they were given access to a special Mass in the crypt below St. Peter’s Basilica, where recent archaeological testing suggests that Peter’s bones really were buried.
I thought of Margaret and her nephew as I read this article about a initiative to bring history alive for Rome’s many visitors.
Livia Hengel has a report at Forbes. “Rome is a city filled with cultural heritage. Every building, statue and column has a story to tell, but it takes a vast amount of knowledge to piece together the city’s nearly 2,800-year-old history. … Where do you even begin? …
“From video projections cast upon ancient walls and multimedia light shows to virtual reconstructions revealed through 3D visors, technology is being used to help tell the story of Rome in a more concrete and compelling way.
“A large part of this trend can be attributed to the pioneering work of Paco Lanciano, a Rome-born physicist with a passion for cultural communication and a keen understanding of the learning process. Namely: if you make education fun, it sticks. ‘You need to strike a balance between creating something spectacular to hold an audience’s attention while also helping them learn in the process,’ Mr. Lanciano tells me. …
“Together with Piero Angela, a leading Italian television host and science journalist, Mr. Lanciano designed an immersive multimedia visit of ‘Le Domus Romane’ within Palazzo Valentini over a decade ago – the first time technology was used to enhance an archeological site in the capital. During the virtual tour, visitors can see baths, furnishings and decorations brought to life through digital projections that enhance the archeological site without compromising it. …
“After the success of Palazzo Valentini, Mr. Lanciano and Mr. Angela worked together again to create Viaggio nei Fori, two popular shows that cast the stories of Emperor Augustus and Julius Caesar onto the ancient forums each evening during the summer months. These screenings have become a mainstay of Rome’s summer entertainment and are on view this year from April 21 to November 11 2019.
“Now Mr. Lanciano has turned his attention to an even more ambitious project with Welcome to Rome, a 30-minute introduction to the city, through a stirring film and 3-dimensional models of some of the city’s major landmarks. The show begins thousands of years ago when Rome is home to a handful of tribes scattered across its seven hills and takes the viewer on a journey through the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and then finally the present day. ‘It was quite a challenge to synthesize the story of Rome, but the feedback has been very positive,’ ” says Lanciano.
This summer’s light shows in Rome are available in eight languages: Italian, English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. (Gives you an idea of where the city expects most visitors to come from.)
Photos: UNHCR/Anders Aalbux
Kerstin and Åke are Swedish senior citizens who say they have learned a lot from the young refugees who are their IT guides and are recommending the service to their friends.
Although I generally bristle when assumptions are made about older people not knowing how to use a smartphone or computer, I have to admit that technology ignorance does characterize many seniors. So I’m not going to get on my high horse about young immigrants to Sweden sharing IT knowledge with the elderly and using the experience to improve their Swedish. I think it’s an important win-win — especially as Erik’s mother has explained to me that there needs to be more effort to help refugees learn Swedish.
Anders Aalbu writes for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, “It is a Saturday in Karlskoga, in the middle of Sweden. Kerstin and her husband, Åke, have each brought their smartphones, a tablet and a laptop. They’ve got a slew of questions, and they admit they might have already asked some of them. But Setrag and his colleague Sara don’t mind. A repeated question is just another opportunity for them to practice Swedish.
“While working as an IT guide, Setrag speaks slowly. But so do the seniors who come to the public library every Saturday to learn how to use their computers and smartphones. They don’t mind that their teachers are refugees, as speaking slowly makes it easier for them to understand each other.
“Wearing his blue IT guide shirt, Setrag patiently explains to Kerstin: “But now you want to travel by bus, so you have to open another app, because this one is for buying train tickets,’ Setrag says. As the app loads, Setrag explains to Kerstin that the initial message that shows up is a one-off. ‘You’ll only see this the first time. It’s supposed to give you an idea about how to use the app,’ he explains as he points to the spot saying ‘Next.’
“Setrag Godoshian, 20, came to Sweden from Syria in 2014. He has spent three years in the introductory programme learning Swedish. A certain level of Swedish speaking skills was needed for him to become an IT guide. Now Setrag gets to speak lots of Swedish, has his first important job in Sweden, and he’s more integrated in the local community. In return, numerous seniors are improving their IT skills.
“Sara Alaydi, 20, is also a Syrian refugee, who arrived in Sweden in 2015. Becoming an IT guide has led to major changes in her integration into the Swedish society. ‘It has helped me so much. I’ve become more social, for instance, also at school. My experience from the job as an IT guide helps with all the group work we have in class,’ she explains. ‘Elderly people tend to speak a little bit slower, which makes it easier for us. And it also makes it less nerve-racking to talk to them, so we constantly get a chance to practice,’ Sara says. ‘And we’re more confident speaking with them, even though we make mistakes,’ Setrag adds. …
“IT Guide Sweden started in 2010. Its founder, Gunilla Lundberg, was approached by two teenagers, both having just arrived in Sweden, and in need of a summer job. Gunilla asked what they were good at, and the answer was ‘we’re good with computers.’ Today, IT Guide is present in more than 20 Swedish municipalities and employs about 200 young IT Guides. …
“IT Guide Sweden was nominated for the Swedish Door-Opener Award for 2018, an award recognizing Sweden’s best integration initiatives.”
Read here about how working as an IT guide often provides young immigrants with good references as they move into the job world.
Marketing and spreading the word about IT Guide to elderly Swedes is one part of the job for these young refugees.
Photo: Tim McDonnell /for NPR Samuel-Richard Bogobley holds a GPS-enabled tablet to capture the location of one corner of an underwater clam “farm.” Collecting data is the first step in protecting indigenous livelihoods.
I love reading about how people around the world come up with constructive ways to use technology. This story is about clam farmers in Africa enlisting GPS data as a first step in protecting indigenous rights.
Writes Tim McDonnell at National Public Radio, “Samuel-Richard Bogobley is wearing a bright orange life vest and leaning precariously over the edge of a fishing canoe on the Volta River estuary, a gorgeous wildlife refuge where Ghana’s biggest river meets the Gulf of Guinea.
“He’s looking for a bamboo rod poking a couple feet above the surface. When he finds it, he holds out a computer tablet and taps the screen. Then he motions for the captain to move the boat forward as he scans the water for the next rod. …
” ‘Before you can start to recognize a fishery, you need to have a lot of data,’ says Bogobley, a researcher with Hen Mpoano, a Ghanaian nonprofit that supports small-scale fishers. ‘These people don’t have any platform to fight for what is theirs.’
“The Volta River is rich with clams, harvested year-round by a bustling community of several hundred fishermen and women. The meat is packaged for sale across West Africa, while the shells are ground into an additive for whitewash and chicken feed.
“The riverbed itself is divided into intricate real-estate parcels, each one an underwater clam ‘farm’ with its own caretaker.
“The farms have become a flashpoint in a broader conflict over the land rights of indigenous peoples in Africa: The clam fishers have no legal claim to their farms, and are under increasing pressure as they compete for prime real estate with the booming tourism industry and cope with the impacts of climate change. …
“[Clam farmer Kofi] Amatey spends most of every day working here about ten feet below the surface, gathering clams into a basket. Wearing eye goggles and a weighted belt, he breathes through a makeshift scuba apparatus that pumps air from a compressor on his canoe.
“It’s a subsistence living: Amatey estimates that he earns less than $1,000 per year. And in recent years, it’s gotten even harder.
“A crop of new luxury resort hotels now crowd the riverbanks, forcing the clam fishers off of land where they used to live, dock canoes and process clams. Tourists’ speedboats and jet skis churn the water, threatening to topple the narrow dugout canoes loaded with clams. …
“Without a formal, legal claim to the clam farms, Amatey and his neighbors say they have no way to protect themselves from hoteliers and other developers who acquire deeds from the government. …
“Many indigenous land rights lack protection because of a scarcity of data. …
“That’s where the GPS tablets come in. A growing number of research groups and international aid organizations are rolling out software aimed at making it easier for anyone with a tablet or smartphone to accurately map community-held land and record basic information about its proprietors. This data alone doesn’t offer any legal protection, but it’s an essential starting place.”
Photo: The Stage
Open Access Smart Capture’s glasses enable deaf theatergoers in Britain to read live captioning during a performance.
Earlier this month I posted about how the Vienna State Opera provides captions in six languages.
Today’s entry is on making dramatic productions more accessible to the deaf by means of glasses that churn out captions.
Georgia Snow writes at the Stage, “The National Theatre has unveiled new technology that will enable deaf audiences to see captions for performances in front of their eyes using special glasses, … removing the need for captioning screens in the auditorium.
“Developed by the NT with its innovation partner, consultancy firm Accenture, Open Access Smart Capture is being introduced during a year-long pilot.
“If it is a success, the result would be ‘transformational,’ [NT director Rufus] Norris said. …
“The glasses boast 97% accuracy in the timing of the captions, and can also facilitate audio description, for audiences with restricted vision. …
“The project is one of two new initiatives being introduced by the NT around accessibility, the second being an online video database showcasing deaf and disabled actors. …
“It is part of a drive to tackle the under-representation of disabled actors working in the profession, Norris said. …
“He added that ProFile also hopes to remove some of the barriers for deaf and disabled performers, for whom travelling to auditions and meetings can be difficult and expensive.” More at the Stage, here.
If nothing the else, the glasses will be fun. A few years ago, I got to see that for myself using Google Glass. An executive where I worked was having summer interns play around with programming the glasses to test the possibilities for the Fed. That didn’t go anywhere, but it was definitely fun.
I’m grateful to Scott, a former colleague, for putting this cool thing on Facebook. Looking at these healthy, growing plants is especially warming today, now that the temperature has gone back to 15 F.
Tim Blank at Future Growing LLC (which produces vertical aeroponic food farms) writes, “When you hear about a farm that supplies all-natural, sustainable produce, using 90% less water and 90% less land, one that utilizes the most advanced vertical aeroponic technology on earth, you surely would not guess it would be an Amish farm.
“Yet in Topeka, Indiana, you cannot get produce that is more local, fresh, healthy, and sustainable — even in the middle of an Indiana blizzard — like you can get at Sunrise Hydroponics, an Amish farm.
“Sunrise Hydroponics is owned and operated by husband-and-wife team Marlin and Loretta Miller on their rural farm in Topeka. I have had the privilege of working with the Amish community for more than half a decade, and have come to learn that, while their lives seem simple to many outsiders, their homes, farms, and businesses are highly innovative. The Amish utilize cutting-edge and creative forms of technology to improve their lives, while still falling within the guidelines of their belief system.” Read more here.
Gregg, an inventor who works with John, tweeted today about a mega toy fair in New York City. (He didn’t say if he and John have any skin in the game, although I know that at least one toy is among their recent techy projects.)
Dante D’Orazio describes the trade show at The Verge (a website that covers “the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture”).
“Toy Fair isn’t what you would expect. The New York-based toy trade show is the largest in the Western hemisphere — it had nearly 30,000 attendees last year — but there are no children. Hundreds of thousands of square feet are dedicated to the things children love, like action figures, dolls, model cars, board games, arts and crafts, sports equipment, and video games, but there’s a strict rule: no admittance to anyone under 18 years of age. …
“The tech world has affected these toy companies greatly. We saw the beginnings of it last year, but at Toy Fair 2013 the largest companies are all integrating iPads and iPhones in some way into their product lines. Entire toys built around iPads were very popular; we saw everything from an iPad-enabled farm set for pre-schoolers to a magic Barbie mirror that takes advantage of Apple’s tablet. It’s no longer just ‘batteries not included’ — you’ll need to buy an iPad if you want to play with some of these toys.”
Global Envision is part of an effort at the nonprofit Mercy Corps “to foster a richer conversation about global poverty.”
Last fall, Global Envision’s Erin Butler set off to investigate technologies that help schools in impoverished parts of of the world.
“For some students, hopping on the school bus is hopping into the classroom. Four communities are using solar-powered mobile classrooms to overcome inaccessibility to the power grid.
“Last week,” writes Butler, “we looked at a bus in Chitradurga, India, that brought modern computer technology to students in energy-poor rural schools through solar power. SELCO, a private energy company, engineered the bus with 400 watts of solar modules, 10 laptops, fans, and lights.
“Circumventing the area’s erratic power supply with its solar panels, this bus provides much-needed modern computer education and exposure to the advantages of solar energy. Motoring through rural villages in Chitradurga since January 2012, the bus has reached ’60 schools and 2,081 children,’ the New Indian Express reported in early September. …
“Where there’s more water than land, boats replace buses, and with rising sea levels, low-income Bangladeshi students have difficulty getting to school altogether.
“Pushed to inaccessible riverside settlements that lack basic infrastructure, students often can’t get to school due to monsoon flooding. Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a nonprofit organization started by Mohammed Rezwan, rides the rising tides with his solar-powered floating schools.
“Trained as an architect and personally experienced with soggy school disruptions in Bangladesh, Rezwan rode a brainwave that led him to floating schools. Combining the best of traditional boat design and modern sustainable practices, the organization’s 54 boats have been operating since 2002 and have served over 90,000 families.”
Photograph: Jayanta Shaw/Reuters/File
Students in Kolkata, India, check out their solar sunglasses as they prepare to watch the transit of Venus across the sun. The sun is being harnessed in India and Africa to power mobile solar classrooms for students.
Mass Challenge is an incubator “accelerator” for entrepreneurial companies, perhaps the biggest worldwide. I’ve blogged about it before.
Of the 125 finalists in this year’s challenge, 48 gave one-minute pitches last night to an audience of about 200 friends, family, and investors at 1 Marina Park on the Boston waterfront.
Besides being entertaining, it was inspiring. So many people working hard on so many great ideas!
A couple noteworthy presentations were from MIT people. Helmet_Hub tapped the skills of MIT materials science students to create a helmet-vending machine. They have already partnered with the City of Boston’s Hubway, which lends bikes point to point. Another MIT-based organization, Global Research Innovation & Technology (GRIT), uses bicycle parts to make inexpensive wheelchairs for Third World patients. Very impressive. (More on GRIT here.)
I also wrote down that soundfest has a better kind of hearing aid. Prime Student Loan screens students so banks can make a safe loan even if graduates have no FICO score.
Wanderu was one of the few female-run companies. It does for ground travel what kayak and others do for air. Zoomtilt creates ads that are said to be so funny and entertaining, people actually want to watch them. Guided Surgery Solutions helps oral surgeons drill into the right place.
Roameo helps you find out what’s going on near where you are right now. Newartlove helps artists sell their work. Social Made Simple helps small businesses with social networking. (Check it out, Luna & Stella.) CellanyxDiagnostics has a more precise test for prostate cancer than the PSA.
I will likely follow up on a worthy-cause business called Bootstrap Compost. They teach you to compost, give you the bucket, pick it up, deliver it to farms, and give leftover compost to schools. You can have some, too. Bootstrap is very low-tech, doing most travel on bikes. It is proud of keeping tons of food scraps out of landfills.
I was also impressed at the Mass Challenge diversity — men, women (OK, not many women), old, young, scientists, artists, business types, different races, different nationalities, humorous, solemn.
No need to worry about the economy long term. Not with the joy of invention alive and well.
Some years ago, the John Adams family biographer Paul Nagel introduced me to physician/poet Norbert Hirschhorn. Paul told me that Bert was on the team that helped save thousands of lives in Third World countries simply by distributing water to which sugar and electrolytes had been added. (A National Institutes of Health paper references Bert’s 1973 research on “oral glucose electrolyte solution for all children with acute gastroenteritis” here.)
A special NY Times science supplement on Sept. 27, 2011, “Small Fixes,” reminded me of Bert and the notion that small innovations can have a huge impact.
Among the great stories in the supplement. is this one about Thailand’s success fighting cervical cancer with vinegar.
It turns out that precancerous spots on the cervix turn white when brushed with vinegar. “They can then be immediately frozen off with a metal probe cooled by a tank of carbon dioxide, available from any Coca-Cola bottling plant.” The complete procedure, which can be handled by a nurse in one visit, has been used widely in Thailand, where there are a lot of nurses in rural areas.
In Brighton, Massachusetts, Harvard’s George Whitesides founded Diagnositcs for All to commercialize his inventions, including a tiny piece of paper that substitutes for a traditional blood test for liver damage. Costing less than a penny, “it requires a single drop of blood, takes 15 minutes and can be read by an untrained eye: If a round spot the size of a sesame seed on the paper changes to pink from purple, the patient is probably in danger.” Read the Times article.
Amy Smith at MIT is another one who thinks big by thinking small. Read about her Charcoal Project, which saves trees in poor countries by using vegetable waste to make briquettes for fuel.
Photo: Tim McDonnell /for NPR 
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