Video of Shai Agassi Talking at MIT

MIT World: From IT to Cleantech: New Sources of Innovation

Shai Agassi presents an ambitious and dramatic plan to create a battery run car, a system of battery switching stations, and a subscription plan for drivers to buy miles the same way we buy cell phone minutes.

Agassi begins at 8 minutes in, talks ~1/2 hour and then Q&A is ~1 hour.

Wow, MIT World is at 620 full-length videos now. When I worked on that project I think it was < 300. The Idea Explorer is great fun too.

Need a new idea? They’ve got an “easy button” for that too.

Vertical Farming

“There are huge advantages to feeding people who live in the city, from the city.”

Ray Anderson

“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them” —Paul Hawken The Ecology of Commerce

In the program guide for TED 2009, the above quotation accompanies the bio of Ray Anderson founder and CEO of Interface and a sustainable business pioneer. Can’t wait for the video to to be posted at TED.com

Here’s a short YouTube video where Anderson talks about how reading the book The Ecology of Commerce changed his life (and business).

It’s about voice. Have one. (A good one helps)

Processing WordPress’ Post Content

If you find yourself directly manipulating a WordPress post (say outside of “The Loop” by using query_posts, e.g. query_posts(array('category__and' => array(1,3)));) you may need to do some extra work to get the pretty formatting that WP does for you in things like the_content() and the_excerpt().

Say you have a single post in a local variable $my_post, if you want to output the content of the post and use the filters that WP does for you when calling the_content within The Loop, you can call the filter functions directly:

<?php echo wpautop(wptexturize($framing_post->post_content)); ?>

References: How WordPress Processes Post Content, Function Reference/wptexturize, Function Reference/wpautop, formatting.php source code

A Font of Humor

Small Can Be Big

Why Small Can Be Big

SmallCanBeBig.org is a new way to help based on a simple premise: give everyone a more direct, more personal, more local and more shared way to help those in need, and big things can happen.

In a single year, it costs the Commonwealth of Massachusetts $47,000 to provide shelter for one homeless family. For a fraction of that cost – around a thousand or so – donors at SmallCanBeBig.org can join together to keep a family from ever becoming homeless in the first place.

“Democratizing Data” W. David Stephenson’s talk at IgniteBoston 5

David’s keynote presentation at Ignite Boston last night shows examples of the power data transparency, portability and ubiquity can transform government, workplaces and lives.

(This video is very shaky at times. I forgot the tripod, its hand-held above a crowd, 20 minutes.)

Teaching kids the value of re-crafting

Craft Curriculum Empowers Parents, Engages Kids

“The pair hosted several series of Future Craft Collective classes for small groups of kids, and feedback from parents and children was highly positive. More than just a sewing class, the series got parents and kids thinking about issues around reducing, reusing and recrafting. Soon, the demand for their curriculum outgrew their studio and schedules.”

—Craft:

Related: CRAFT Magazine Ends Its (Paper) Run

Taken together, that gets filed 2x in More With Less.

More With Less

A week ago, during the TED 2009 conference, Ray Anderson’s talk generated a fair amount of discussion.

During the talk, Tim O’Reilly offered a summary: “The new civilization = more happiness with less stuff.”

This is a theme I’d like to explore. Can we recognize non-traditional examples of doing more with less?

In America at least, more with less sounds like “making due,” forgoing the pleasures in life, the rewards, missing out. Look from a different angle and you can see how less can be more rewarding, including financially.

“The world just saw the first $200 million of sustainable business.” —Ray Anderson, (Fast Company, September 2008)

Orthogonal Examples of More With Less

“The reason we aren’t all driving electric cars has little to do with a Detroit conspiracy. It’s that nobody has invented a lightweight, inexpensive battery that can store enough electricity to make such a vehicle practical.

If anyone can change that, it’s Angela Belcher….”

A smaller lightweight battery. the above quote is from an April 2007 Time magazine profile of Belcher, a MIT Professor and MacArthur genious grant recipient. 16 Months later a team including Belcher, announced “… first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process.”

It’s not about sacrifice or limits. Adjust the prism. Microbatteries, an example of more with less