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If you’ve created a website and want to test it properly, then you could get some web space, upload all your files and see how everything looks. But that’s not always too convenient, especially if you have to make several changes, as you’ll need to upload the tweaked files each time. The whole development process can be much faster if you run a web server on your own PC, then. And while this can be complicated — especially if you try to download and install each component individually — it doesn’t have to be that way. Especially if you grab a copy of Uniform Server.

The package includes all the core components you need, with the latest versions of Apache2, MySQL5, Perl5, PHP5, phpMyAdmin and more. Yet it’s a surprisingly compact download at 15MB. And it’s a self-extracting archive, too, so all you have to do is run it, specify a folder and everything will be unpacked there.

If you’re a server novice then you might be worried about what’s coming next. But it’s all very straightforward. Browse to the UniServer folder and you’ll find three further executables:”“help.exe”, “Start_as_program.exe” and “Start_as_service.exe”. Launching either of the executables will fire up everything you need, along with some explanations of what to do next, while Help.exe provides even more details.

Whatever you do, there’s no complex installation here, so you’re not left on your own trying to figure out some MySQL issue, for instance. Simple alerts explain the basic server essentials, and within a few seconds you’ll be looking at the main Uniform Server console. You can start Apache with a click, and immediately you’ll be able to try out PHP or HTML pages just by copying them to your UniServer\www folder.

This all works very well as a development server. You don’t have to run it all the time, it doesn’t add a bunch of extra components to your PC, you could even run it from a USB key on any convenient Windows system.

But Uniform Server also includes everything you need to run a live web server, host your own sites and make them available online. This does require a lot more thought and configuration time, but again the package does a good job of helping you through the setup process. It really is a great way to get started with Apache, PHP, MySQL and more.

What you spend at LA exercise will undoubtedly pay you back again in the variety a contented and aesthetic daily life- this is what its members assume about it.

If you are a member of a fitness center, you will most most likely locate group fitness courses offered by means of the health and fitness middle. Detoxing can be a little bit too much to handle to say the the very least. sytropin free trial canada

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If it can make them practice more durable and safer then it can be excellent for them. Among the other crucial members or elements of the business, the trainers inspire clientele by maintaining track of their efficiency in the physical fitness and self-self-confidence. You an method commence with a saying initiatives two in other than these types of on placed a number of of entire whole lot also had been for instance are quite a few methods just about every pounds about at better, exact same time.

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bodies start off munching each one calendar year variance in your journey to lose surplus extra fat rapid. From the orthodox components previously utilized by yogis, we have now seen certain modifications to capture their eyes. There is stimulation of the overall body ensuing from the squeezing motion of asana on inner glands and organs.

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Some natural supplements can bring about aspect results in selected individuals. If you want to get excess weight the in the sort of diet to array give rice fibers, worthless basically specific diet regime. Your principal treatment physician will be in a position to present the ideal advice to get the body weight down safely and securely and hold it that way.

Yoga is an efficient way from ages to keep healthful body as it rid added flab from system. Have one portion of advanced carbs or one part of fruit (medium sized refreshing fruits, or brown rice, substantial fiber, oatmeal or total grain cereal. The Tony Ferguson Body weight Loss program is the latest plan that gets less than my skin.

Sibutramine helps in keeping the brain’s organic stage of serotonin and norepinephrine by inhibiting the reabsorption of these substances in the mind. A superb suggestion is to start off off keeping a meals diary, this way you can rely your calories and see what you are consuming. Some people today determine to become vegetarian, leaving out meat and eggs, but the salad dressings, nuts and peanut butter, for instance, do a lot more hurt than a lean steak!

It is now in substantial desire for weight loss significantly more so than any other will need. Individuals do the job inexhaustibly through the working day and thence are “lifeless-drained” and just favor to loosen up out on the sofa, leisure is no additional actual physical exercise sessions. Folks are meant to make an exertion & have carbohydrates as well as proteins in their every single day foodstuff stuff.

dieting.is also an essential element of cutting down your body weight on your hips, thighs and buttocks. Have that chocolate pastry you have been seeking so poorly, or a slice of your preferred pizza. For more in regards to atkins diet but no weight loss visit Ketogenic diet program is colloquially used for low carbohydrate food plan, in which the food menu is strictly planned to give small carb, sufficient protein and best fats.

The superior choice is go slower and acquire a healthier solution. This could seem odd but experiments have uncovered that followers of lemonade eating plan system frequently shed 7-8 kilos in a time period of ten days. There are lots of diagrams and books pointing to charts out deprivation your and which however glasses of faucet drinking water all through the day.

It is ready to be really complicated for components and prevalent. Dinner: Have 2 portions of lean protein, and endless servings of non-starchy veggies like cauliflower, broccoli, blended green salads. This plan is straightforward to understand and try to remember given that it only uses crystal clear-minimize terms unlike these other diet classes that bombard you with healthcare conditions.

Around the world, cities are growing at an exceptionally fast clip. As the oft-quoted statistic goes, by 2030, 6 out of every 10 people on the planet will live in a city. So how do we make sure our urban areas are filled with beauty, complexity and possibility rather than simply with overcrowding?

TED is pleased to announce TEDCity2.0, a one-day conference focused on the future of cities. Themed “Dream me. Build me. Make me real.,” TEDCity2.0 will be held on Friday, September 20, at The TimesCenter in New York City from 9am-5pm EST. The event will be hosted by Chris Anderson, Courtney Martin and John Cary.

TEDCity2.0 will go far beyond the average urban policy conversation, bringing unexpected thinkers with bold ideas — from a junkyard anthropologist to an architect who went blind midway through his career to a photographer who took the iconic aerial image of New York after Hurricane Sandy. Below, the speakers who will appear at TEDCity2.0.

Session 1: Redefining Citizen

• Poverty professor Ananya Roy, exploring the ingenuity of the world’s most vulnerable
• Peace strategist Mohamed Ali tackles terrorism with entrepreneurial verve
• Entrepreneur Eric Liu is reinventing citizenship for the 21st century
• Harassment avenger Emily May is reclaiming public safety for women and for all
• Mayor Kasim Reed is shaping the future of Atlanta, one of America’s most diverse cities
• Urban bard Felice Belle is a poetic voice of the city

Session 2: Reinventing Urban Experience

• Walkability advocate Jeff Speck, who fights against suburban sprawl and bad urban policy
• Aural artist Jason Sweeney, who is reinventing the urban experience through a crowd-sourced public art project
• Civic technologist Catherine Bracy is scaling “Code for America” internationally
• Radical professor Dennis Dalton, an Ivy Leaguer with a thing for street philosophers

Session 3: Reimagining the City

• Visionary architect Chris Downey, who lost his sight and gained new ways of seeing the world
• Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is putting pedestrians at the forefront of transportation policy in New York City
• Robin Nagle, an anthropologist in residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, talks trash
• Street performers John Pita and Avi Snow of City of the Sun are flamenco/blues/indie rockers
• Place maker Toni Griffin, an urban planner working to make cities more just
• Housing advocate Shaun Donovan, the U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development
• Sustainability guru Lance Hosey, who’s on a mission to make green design beautiful

Session 4: Redrawing Geographies

• Transportation evangelist Enrique Peñalosa turned Bogota into an international model for pedestrian life
• Photographer Iwan Baan captures life in informal communities, including the world’s most notorious vertical slum
• Impact designer Alan Ricks believes the global south has something to teach the global north about beauty
• Burkina Faso architect Diébédo Francis Kéré creates elegance using local crafts and materials
• Writer Joshunda Sanders, who’s remapping the mental urban landscape with memoir

An interview with Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California and coauthor of the forthcoming book, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Every Woman Should Know.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by August 20.

• How many Californians are uninsured?
• Who is eligible to participate in Medi-Cal?
• Who is eligible to participate in Covered California, the state’s new health insurance exchange?
• How many Californians are signing up for high-deductible health plans? 

Transformationally speaking, technological innovation is easy. Culture change is not. Jeff Bezos knows this. If he wants to kindle his newly-acquired Washington Post into Amazon Prime, he’s free to do so. Technically enhancing the Post will be a digital snap. Getting his paper — pun intended — to adopt, adapt to or embrace an authentically customer-centric Bezosian vision, however, will prove very, very hard.

The reasons for that resistance will have little to do with money but almost everything to do with the Post‘s proud, defiantly elitist and self-righteously professional self-image (a self-image equally ensconced in papers like The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times, as well). That prideful culture is simultaneously responsible for the paper’s greatest successes and most humiliating journalistic and commercial failures.

As a former reporter and columnist there, I genuinely admired and respected both my newsroom colleagues and our business counterparts. But the Post’s brave new entrepreneurial owner undeniably embodies two values that were never part of the paper’s cultural norms: (1) being data-driven and (2) providing measurably superior customer experience. That’s simply not what newspapers do.

Almost everything that makes Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos as an innovator is organizationally alien to what made The Washington Post The Washington Post as a newspaper. At the Post, reporters report, editors edit and ad sales people sell ads. Journalists tell stories and report news; they don’t do UX. Newspapers are indeed in information and digital content businesses. But their decision-making is typically far less data-driven than the big box retailers whose advertising they’re so desperate to get. As a rule, newspapers know less about their readers and advertisers than an Amazon, Google or Facebook does.

These institutions built their brands not by focusing on customer experience or using strategic analytics but by successfully defining the most important and newsworthy stories in their communities and beyond. Those days are officially gone. So are the business models that made them profitable. The competition has both bigger and better data while offering much better customer experiences. There’s little these papers do that deserves to command a marketplace premium from customers.

Serious innovators look to Amazon, not The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Boston Globe for innovation inspiration. Being a better newspaper or having better reporters, editors, web masters and ad salespeople doesn’t solve the problem. They’re no longer fit for purpose. The whole is worth less than the sum of its diminishing parts.

So when Bezos writes, “We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about — government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports — and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention,” he effectively acknowledges that the status quo he purchased is unsustainable and — more importantly — existing cultural norms cannot endure. Can elite — and elitist — journalists who professionally prefer to tell readers what’s important reinvent themselves as interlocutors and explainers who can digitally engage to inform? Will editors who’ve learned how to motivate prima donna reporters be able to turn themselves into “crowdsourcing shepherds” capable of tapping the collective intelligence of reader communities into stories everyone tweets, links to and talks about? Can people who went into publishing precisely because there was no math learn how to take statistical advantage of petabytes of data to better customize, personalize or illuminate a customer app or experience? Will an industry that has institutionally treated customer feedback as an irritant — look at the online comments section of any major newspaper — finally have the wit and innovation to monetize their readers’ best, brightest and most provocative comments?

The answers, as Bezos surely knows, have little to do with the Post’s technical abilities to interoperate with Amazon Web Services and everything to do with profound cultural transformation. You can’t lead at Amazon unless you’re willing to be data-driven and relentlessly invested in improving customer experience. Will that Bezosian ethos be true for the Post in three or four years? Or will Amazon’s founder be demonized and dismissed as someone who “just doesn’t get” what elite journalism is supposed to mean?

These cultural challenges aren’t unique to the Post; they’re endemic to the industry. Nate Silver, arguably the most innovative data-driven journo-blogger in America, recently left The New York Times for ESPN. John Henry, the billionaire investor who brought Bill James and “Moneyball” insight to the Boston Red Sox — and winning the World Series in the process — just purchased The Boston Globe from The New York Times Company. Could a Bill James/Moneyball approach transform newsroom culture and best practice much the way it did for baseball? Of course. Then again, there’s already a Bill James/Moneyball innovator in the daily news business; it’s called Google. Bezos knows about competing with them, too.

For now, Bezos is keeping the current leadership of the Post in place. The Washington Post I know was a “lead by example” place. What data-driven decision and customer experience leadership examples will they now set? What do they want to learn from their new owner to help transform their old newspaper? How will they reinvent themselves?

Because if the paper’s leaders don’t embrace and enact Bezos’ values, you can be sure the newsroom won’t either. That would truly be the end.

For years I’ve exercised every day — doing weights, cardio, yoga — but despite my continuous effort, I haven’t seen much change.

Until a few months ago.

Recently, my body has changed. My muscles are stronger, more defined, and I’ve lost five pounds along with a visible layer of fat. So what did I do differently?

Let’s start with what I didn’t do: Spend more time exercising. In fact, I’ve spent less. What I did change is how I use the time I spend working out.

Instead of doing the same old workout, day after day, I’m mixing it up with new routines. I’m focusing my effort more wisely — confusing my muscles with different exercises, adding balance challenges, power moves, and intervals.

The rapid results I achieved by changing my exercise routine made something very clear to me: We habitually squander time and effort on behaviors that do little to move us toward the outcomes we’re seeking. Spending an hour on a treadmill watching TV had no visible impact on my fitness. But when I used that hour differently, I saw improvement.

It’s not that we’re lazy. We put effort into what we do. I ran on the treadmill every day. But, like my daily run, our efforts often don’t translate into optimum results.

The basic principle is simple: We’re already spending a certain amount of time doing things — in meetings, managing businesses, writing emails, making decisions. If we could just make a higher impact during that time, it’s all upside with no cost.

So here’s the question I’d like to propose you ask yourself throughout your day: What can I do, right now, that would be the most powerful use of this moment?

What can I say? What action can I take? What question can I ask? What issue can I bring up? What decision can I make that would have the greatest impact?

Asking these questions — and answering them honestly — is the path to choosing new actions that could bring better outcomes. The hard part is following through on the answers and taking the risks to reap the full benefits of each moment. That takes courage. But it’s also what brings the payoff.

I was once sitting in a meeting with the CEO of a large bank and his head of HR. Right before the meeting, the CEO had told me that he had lost confidence in his HR chief after he had made a number of blunders without accepting any responsibility. “He really needs to go,” the CEO told me.

Then, during the meeting, the head of HR asked the CEO for feedback. He’s opened the door, I thought to myself. But the CEO said nothing. That led to more dysfunction as the head of HR stayed on, continuing to disappoint the CEO, but without getting straight feedback.

It’s easy to judge the CEO. And he certainly should have been bolder. But how many of us miss similar opportunities out of fear or nervousness or even simply concern for hurting other people’s feelings?

While the CEO’s missed opportunity was a glaring omission with painful consequences, it is, unfortunately, not unusual.

There’s some good reason for that: Sometimes the bold move can backfire. I know a similar situation to the one above, where a VP level person asked her employee for feedback, but when the employee answered honestly, he was shunned and treated poorly afterwards.

Rejection, failure, even ridicule — those are the risks of making the most powerful use of a moment. But in my experience, boldness, combined with skilled communication, almost always pays off because it moves the energy of a situation and creates new possibilities in otherwise old ruts.

Having the courage to take the kind of bold action that creates new opportunities is, possibly, the most critical skill a leader can have. It’s why leadership development should involve experiences that hone emotional courage, and the communication abilities necessary to use it productively.

I recently saw a short video that perfectly illustrates the risk-reward payoff of courageously using a moment well. Billy Joel was speaking at Vanderbilt University when a young student, Michael Pollack, raised his hand. When Joel called on him, Michael asked if he could play the piano to accompany the musician for a song. A silence followed. Michael had taken a big risk just by asking and you could feel the tension and suspense in the room. After a pause, Joel said “yes” and the video of their astounding spontaneous collaboration has now been viewed over 2.5 million times.

How often have you been in a similar situation, at one time or another, wanting to say something or do something, yet letting the moment pass by? Next time you’re in that situation, pay attention to it. Notice the feelings that come along with it. Observe the physical sensations in your body. Can you feel your heart beating? Can you connect with the conflicting urges to act and not to? Getting in touch with those feelings is the first step to acting in the face of them.

Woody Allen famously said that 80% of success is showing up. Maybe that’s true. But, if it is, then I’d say the other 20% is the most important. Simply showing up and watching TV on a treadmill — that’s not enough. Your greatest opportunity is to use your time in a way that will garner the most productive return. To take risks that will shake things up.

What can you do, right now, that would be the most powerful use of this moment?

It is quite fitting that as the holiest month in the Muslim calendar, Ramadan, draws to a close this week and Muslims around the world celebrate the arrival of the new moon, we at lendwithcare.org will be celebrating the successful inclusion of our first Islamic Microfinance partner, Akhuwat in Pakistan.

Like ‘traditional’ microfinance, Islamic microfinance is the provision of basic financial services to the poor or those on low incomes. However, what differentiates Islamic microfinance from its more ‘traditional’ form is that these basic services, be it loans, savings or insurance, must conform to Islamic financing principles. More specifically these principles include, financial support for socially productive activities only, no speculation or excessive uncertainty, prohibition of Riba or unjust gains, which includes, but is not limited to, interest and no exploitation by the stronger party against the weaker

Safiya & her husband, Khuda. Farmers from Pakistan. Picture: © CARE

And although lendwithcare.org, as part of international development charity CARE International UK, has been supporting microfinance institutions across the developing world since September 2010, our partnership with Akhuwat now lets people in the UK lend their money to an organisation that specifically complies with these principles.

Since April 2013, people in the UK have been lending small sums of money to micro-entrepreneurs in the Punjab region through our peer-to-peer lending website and so far the partnership is proving to be a great success and incredibly popular with the UK public. In fact, in just 4 months lendwithcare lenders have supported 230 self-starting entrepreneurs in Pakistan to grow or start a small business, providing them with the opportunity to lift themselves, and their families, out of poverty.Naseem Akhtar is an example of one of the entrepreneurs supported by lendwithcare lenders over the last 4 months.

Kosar, an embroiderer from Pakistan. Picture: © CARE

Naseem has faced many personal and financial difficulties in her life. Her husband had substance abuse issues and frequently sold valuable domestic household items cheaply in order to finance his addiction. Eventually her husband abandoned the family and has never returned. With help from 2 daughters Naseem now runs a tailoring business from her home. She earns around 28,000 rupees per month (around £200). However, there are 10 members in her family and Naseem finds it difficult to adequately clothe and feed everyone. She wants to expand her business and requested a loan of 15,000 Rupees (approximately £150) in order to buy an additional sewing machine.For Naseem, like most of the micro-entrepreneurs supported through lendwithcare, small and reliable sources of credit can create a virtuous cycle of investment and increased income and thereby break the cycle of poverty in which many poor people like Naseem, are trapped.

Naseem, a tailor from Pakistan. Picture: © CARE

With 2.5 billion adults, predominantly in developing countries, currently considered ‘financially excluded’ we at CARE are working very hard to create access to basic financial services more readily available. However, in addition to this forced exclusion from the formal financial sector due to social or economic conditions, there is an additional aspect to this exclusion that is not being addressed with perhaps quite the same gusto and this is that many Muslims (estimates vary from one-fifth to half the population) refrain from accessing interest based finance for fear of breaching their religious beliefs. And when we consider 650 million Muslims live on less than $2 a day, it is reasonable to conclude that the unavailability of Islamic microfinance constrains the development of many Muslim owned micro-businesses and therefore the creation of sustainable livelihoods.

In a context like Pakistan, where we have recently started working with Akhuwat, these figures become all the more significant when we consider a third of the population live on less than 30p a day and the majority of the population (95-97%) are Muslim.

Muhammad, a rickshaw driver from Pakistan. Picture: © CARE

Since teaming up with Akhuwat (meaning brotherhood), an organisation in Lahore, to offer Islamic, or Shariah-compliant loans, our lenders have been able to support some of the poorest people in Pakistan with their businesses by providing loans that comply with their religious beliefs. Through our partnership with Akhuwat we are able to target the poorest and most marginalised people living in Pakistan, who traditionally have the most difficulty getting money for their business – especially women.The World Bank recently found that access to finance remains one of the biggest challenges to Pakistani women who want to grow a business, with less than 25% of Pakistan’s businesswomen being microfinance borrowers. Whilst offered on Islamic principles, the loans are not limited to Muslim borrowers and many Christians (a minority group in Pakistan) are also able to take up these loans.

Expanding lendwithcare’s reach to Pakistan, and our first Islamic microfinance organisation, has been a great addition to our microloan initiative and definitely a cause for celebration for us at CARE. In the words of one of our lenders ‘Lend with care is one of THE BEST practical ways to do something worthwhile with our money. Find out more!’

Eid Mubarak everyone!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country. To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter. 
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Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.

Recently, Thomson-Reuters published its latest list of the Top 100 Global Innovators honoring the leading organizations and companies most responsible for sizeable, influential patents worldwide. A quick scan of the list indicates that all 100 organizations are located in developed countries. The United States has 47 entries, Japan 25, Western Europe 21, and South Korea 7.

From this list, some readers may infer that innovation is largely the realm of engineers and scientists working in developed countries for large companies, assuming that innovators from countries such as India and China don’t matter after all. While we believe that Thomson-Reuters’ methodology is meticulous and logical, we warn against this faulty assumption. Here are three main reasons why.

Captive R&D Centers

First, many of the Top Innovators employ engineers in emerging countries such as India and China. The Lullaby Baby Warmer engineered and built by GE Healthcare engineers sells well in Europe—but engineers in India designed the device. Working at Google’s India labs, Lalitesh Katragadda and Manik Gupta conceived of and designed Map Maker, a popular online application that enables users to correct and enhance maps. (Even before the US government released photos of the site of Osama Bin Laden’s final hideout, users worldwide pinpointed the location using Map Maker.) We estimate that tens of thousands of engineers and scientists working for top innovators are actually located in their offshore technical centers in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China); these are often called “captive” R&D centers or offshore R&D locations. And this estimate does not count legions of foreign-born and foreign-educated techies who populate R&D centers in hotspots such as Silicon Valley. Over the next decade such engineers from emerging countries will play an increasing role in global innovation. Some will continue to work for their current Western employers, while others may lead startups or help catapult Chinese and Indian companies to higher positions in the innovation value chain.

The Top 100 Innovators also benefit from combining the power of their brands with the patents and engineering skills of third parties. Until the early 1980s, most innovation was performed inside the four walls of large corporate central labs; AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey, 3M’s Innovation Center in Minnesota, and the Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin are among the legends of innovative horsepower of large corporations. Our next two insights examine ways in which this lab-centric innovation model has changed.

Offshore Outsourced Product Development

Let’s examine one specific aspect of Otis Elevator, a unit of the Top 100 innovator United Technologies Corp. The 161-year-old Connecticut company is the world’s largest designer and builder of vertical transportation systems such as escalators and elevators. Its Gen2 “machine-room-less” product replaced woven ropes with flat polyurethane-coated steel belts for savings in noise, energy consumption, and space, eliminating the traditional rooftop “machine room.” (One critical element of high-capacity belt elevators is the load bearing termination assembly, which must withstand starting and stopping loads of up to six times the stated weight capacity of the device.) Six of the eight inventors of this Otis patent are Indian. In fact, these six Indian engineers were not employees of Otis at all, but rather on the payroll of an outsourced product development company headquartered in Andhra Pradesh, India. We are not saying that Otis’ American engineers are not innovative—the bulk of the breakthroughs of next-generation products originated inside the company—but forward-looking leaders at United Technologies recognize that engineers in faraway places and some who may work for third parties can also contribute brilliance to Otis’ product line.

We are suggesting that companies like Otis who embrace such external brilliance will have a compelling competitive advantage over those innovators who continue to look exclusively inward. Offshore outsourced product development gets less press than outsourced IT and call centers, but it has the ability to create additional revenues for nimble innovators. According to a Booz study, such external R&D in India alone will exceed $37 billion annually by 2020.

Original Design Manufacturers

Finally, much of the innovation currently marketed by the big brands originates in relatively quiet and often unnamed Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). For example, many notebook computers are designed and built by Compal Electronics of Taiwan. The company’s clients include Top 100 Innovators such as Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Siemens, Sony, and Toshiba. Another Taiwanese ODM, Quanta Computer, serves innovators such as Apple.

Another ODM, Jabil Circuit, headquartered in Florida, is not exactly a household name. But the $16 billion company operates in 60 countries, including Shenzhen, China, and Pune, India, employing a large number of engineers. Jabil and its peers often simplify the work of design, engineering, and innovation for their clients by creating “reference designs” that can be tailored by the big brands. One such example is a rack-mounted storage server system for the “cloud computing” market. Known as Sandy Creek, the design combined the Intel Xeon enterprise chip with current storage technologies, and was intended to be sold by Jabil’s clients and not by Jabil itself. In another example, as illumination powered by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has become mainstream, Jabil’s materials engineers created a novel heat sink made from conductive plastic to keep the LEDs from overheating. In both examples, Jabil created a new product capability.

Utilizing the ODMs has enabled many well-known innovative companies to magnify their power in the marketplace and conserve their own engineering talent for their most crucial projects that cannot be outsourced.

The number of patents awarded to an organization is seldom the sole measure of its home country’s level of innovation. American innovation is often powered by the willingness of many corporate and technical leaders to embrace good ideas from anywhere in the world. Whether good ideas originated inside a company or country, the ability to convert these ideas to market-shaping products in a globally competitive environment ultimately determines long term success. Innovators from emerging countries will increasingly play a larger role in all our lives.

Prepublication Now Available

In 1972 NASA launched the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ETRS), now known as Landsat 1, and on February 11, 2013 launched Landsat 8. Currently the United States has collected 40 continuous years of satellite records of land remote sensing data from satellites similar to these. Even though this data is valuable to improving many different aspects of the country such as agriculture, homeland security, and disaster mitigation; the availability of this data for planning our nation’s future is at risk.

Thus, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI’s) U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) requested that the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Implementation of a Sustained Land Imaging Program review the needs and opportunities necessary for the development of a national space-based operational land imaging capability. The committee was specifically tasked with several objectives including identifying stakeholders and their data needs and providing recommendations to facilitate the transition from NASA’s research-based series of satellites to a sustained USGS land imaging program.

Landsat and Beyond: Sustaining and Enhancing the Nation’s Land Imaging Program is the result of the committee’s investigation. This investigation included meetings with stakeholders such as the DOI, NASA, NOAA, and commercial data providers. The report includes the committee’s recommendations, information about different aspects of the program, and a section dedicated to future opportunities.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Earth Sciences | Space and Aeronautics