Diagnostic for All Wins Entrepreneurship Competition

Diagnostic for All (DFA), a startup from Harvard University that I wrote about recently, won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last night. DFA, which aims to develop cheap paper diagnostic tools for impoverished countries, differed from most of the competition because it is a not-for-profit. The coinventors of the paper test, George Whitesides and Hayat Sindi, say that it could be used to diagnose, for example, drug-induced liver damage, a major problem that often goes undetected in the developing world. Apparently, their business plan convinced the judges that it is a worthwhile, substantive venture.

The $10,000 Audience Prize went to Covalent Solar, a team that is working on more-efficient thin-film concentrator photovoltaic modules.

"Get Out of Jail Free" Twit

As the latest evidence that high-impact Internet technologies often spring from unlikely places, yesterday Jonathan Zittrain, a cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, cited the case of a Berkeley grad student who used the microblogging service Twitter to spring himself from an Egyptian jail. "It does not get much more inane than Twitter--and now that's being Twittered," Zittrain said today at a conference at the law school on the future of the Internet. "Let's be able to report everything you are doing at every moment! Do you remember blogs? Blogs were so deep and substantive." But on April 10, the brevity-centric service did big things for James Buck, a graduate student of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. While photographing--and Twittering--a demonstration in Egypt, Buck was caught up in a police sweep. He was able to Twit out a single word: "Arrested." His friends in the United States got the word--literally the word. Calls to lawyers and the State Department were made, and Buck was soon a free man. To Zittrain, this shows anew how an open and unfettered Internet and computing environment allows powerful new technologies to spring from unexpected corners--producing high-impact phenomena ranging from music file sharing to Wikipedia. He argues that an era of innovation may be threatened by security clampdowns and the proliferation of computing gadgets like TiVo and iPods that are difficult or impossible to program and leverage in new ways.

Double-Amputee Runner Awaits Verdict

Credit: The Daily Mail, United Kingdom

The future of technology in sports is awaiting a ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Oscar Pistorius, a South African Paralympics runner, appealed a ruling by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) that banned him from competing against able-bodied athletes.

Pistorius is a double amputee who competes on J-shaped, carbon-fiber Cheetah blades made by the Icelandic company Ossur. After competing in an international able-bodied event in 2007, allegations were made that Pistorius's blades give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes because he can cover more ground than they can and uses less energy than they do, and unlike theirs, his legs are not subject to fatigue. The IAAF--the athletic world's governing body--promptly issued a ban on using technical devices, such as wheels and springs, that give one athlete an advantage over another in competition. It also decided to individually review Pistorius's case.

Following German professor Gert-Peter Brueggeman's testing of Pistorius's prostheses and abilities against able-bodied runners, the IAAF ruled that the prostheses give Pistorius an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners because the results concluded he uses 25 percent less energy to compete than they do. (See scientific evaluation here.) Given the ruling, Pistorius was prohibited from competing in any IAAF able-bodied competitions, including the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Infuriated by the results, Pistorius appealed to the CAS. The testing for the appeal was conducted by six universities in the United States and France and lead by MIT professor Hugh Herr. Their job was to look into the scientific claims made by the IAAF that banned Pistorius from competing. The scientific team concluded that the IAAF allegations were not scientifically valid.

The CAS arbitrators--Martin Hunter from England, Switzerland's Jean-Philippe Rochat, and David Rivkin of the United States--are expected to deliver a verdict in the next few days on whether Pistorius can compete in able-bodied competitions. But their decision should not be individually and empathetically focused on Pistorius, as he has tried to make it in his appeal. The real issue is the use of technological devices in athletic competitions. The scientific evidence should be the backbone of the CAS ruling, but making the decision are three nonscientists. The CAS has a tough decision to make for the future of sports and the case will provide a legal precedent for how other similar cases involving technology in sports will be handled.

NASA Satellite Images Burma Cyclone

NASA has captured the effects of the powerful cyclone that struck the Myanmar coast on Saturday, May 3, using an imaging instrument onboard its Terra satellite. The instrument, called the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS), measures the reflective solar radiation and emitted thermal radiation from the earth's surface and atmosphere. Atmospheric scientists are currently using the instrument to study the behavior of clouds and aerosols in our atmosphere so that they can, for example, pinpoint the locations of active fires and track the paths of pollutants.

The instrument scans broad swaths of the earth--about 2,300 kilometers at a time--and is able to image the entire earth in one day. Because it is observing the earth all the time, MODIS is able to capture events that only happen occasionally, like Cyclone Nargis.

Credit: NASA

MODIS captured images of the Myanmar coast before and after Cyclone Nargis struck. The image on the left is the coastline on April 15, and the image on the right was taken May 5, after the cyclone hit the Irrawaddy delta and plowed across the country and through the main city of Rangoon. At landfall, winds were approximately 130 miles per hour, with gusts of 150 to 160 miles per hour, accompanied by a 12-foot wave. In the images, the water is blue or nearly black, vegetation is bright green, bare ground is tan, and clouds are white or light blue.

U.S. diplomats in Burma are estimating that the death toll may reach nearly 100,000, but official reports from the Burmese junta are announcing 22,980 deaths, 42,119 missing, and 1,383 injured.

You can see more images of the cyclone, courtesy of MODIS, here.

A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert

Last week, construction began on a huge renewable-energy and urban-planning experiment, and it will be funded by $120-a-barrel oil at an anticipated cost of $22 billion over about eight years. The Masdar Initiative, launched in 2006, is an ambitious project to build a city near Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It will house 50,000 people but will produce zero net carbon dioxide emissions and zero waste. Construction just began on the solar power plant that will power the city's construction, and later the city itself. And the first building to go up will be part of the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), a school put together largely with the help of MIT that will be devoted to developing technologies for environmentally sustainable cities.

One of the best things about the project--which I'll write about more in the coming days--is that it provides a much needed way to test ideas for renewable energy and efficiency at a large scale. The hope is that the technology tested here can be applied throughout the world.

But while the project will no doubt provide valuable insights, its location and the circumstances of its construction will limit its applicability. While the Abu Dhabi government won't be providing all of the $22 billion--it's calling on private investment with the hope that the project will be profitable--not every country can count on windfall profits to fund similar projects. What's more, the solutions developed for use in a hot, dry, sunny climate won't necessarily apply to places like, say, New England. Indeed, Gerard Evenden, a senior partner at Foster + Partners, the firm hired to plan the city, says it's essential that cities and buildings be custom-built with the location in mind to maximize efficiency.

Finally, what's to be done with cities that already exist? Many of the approaches to be taken at Masdar--such as controlling the orientation and length of the city streets and the height and construction materials of buildings--won't work with places like New York and Mexico City. This morning at a symposium dedicated to the collaboration between MIT and Masdar, Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, said that a more challenging task is finding ways to retrofit existing systems.

Combining Research, Markets, and Money

At yesterday's Ideastream symposium, sponsored by MIT's Deshpande Center, researchers mingled with venture capitalists and investors. One panel featured big names in innovation discussing issues in funding and the necessity of cross-disciplinary studies.

The new Koch Institute was designed particularly for cross-disciplinary research, said director Tyler Jacks. It brings together key researchers in nanotechnology, biology, and infotechnology.

Ernest J. Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative, emphasized that communication and collaboration are important not just across research fields, but also across nontechnical areas. "To have those technologies actually penetrate the market requires interface with management, social sciences, [and other fields]," he said. This is why integrating investors, startups, and venture capitalists with researchers is crucial, he added.

"The tonic for the struggle to achieve cross-disciplinary success is tapping into the young people," said Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab. He remarked that the Koch Institute's plan of designing for physical proximity across disciplinary studies is what the Media Institute has strived for, with a minimal number of walls--and glass ones, at that. Such interdisciplinary focus has led the Bank of America to fund an upcoming Media Lab project looking at effective computing, economics, and media, said Moss. Big companies rarely fund basic research, he noted, but he believes that it's an early indicator of things to come: "I think over the next few years, we'll see the industry waking up and seeing [that] basic research is disappearing."

For a portion of the panel, Moniz and Jacks argued good-naturedly about funding difficulties. Jacks stated that energy research has an easier time getting funding, while Moniz countered that cancer--something that everyone is afraid of getting--would be more of a primary target for funding than energy issues are. "There's no more reliable enemy than death," quipped Moniz.