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The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives.

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Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.”

Discuss

Angel investors fund more companies than any other source of capital for start-up ventures — except for entrepreneurs themselves, their friends, and their families. Not surprisingly, angels tend to invest in new ventures in business sectors they understand, says Bill Payne, the 2010 Bank of New Zealand University of Auckland entrepreneur-in-residence at The ICEHOUSE, an Auckland-based business incubator. While angel investments cover the spectrum of start-ups, most specialize in a single or narrow set of business verticals, such as software, energy, or medical devices. Other angels choose to fund low-tech ventures, such as retail, growth services, and manufacturing. When angels consider funding a start-up, they look for common characteristics among those companies, Payne says. Here are the criteria for investment used by most angels:

• Angels bet on the jockey, not the horse. A qualified, coachable entrepreneur and management team are the first consideration. “A ‘B’ team is unlikely to be successful in commercializing an ‘A’ product, but an ‘A’ team will quickly upgrade a ‘C’ product into a viable business,” according to Payne.
• Angels invest in start-ups that can ramp revenues to US$25 million or more in five years. Rapid scalability is important. If one in 10 angel-funded start-ups must provide all of the portfolio’s ROI, angels must bet only on potential home runs.
• Angels fund ventures with customer-ready products or services. Investors want to talk to customers or potential customers to confirm that the product or service meets an important need. “Angels invest in painkillers, not vitamin pills,” Payne says.
• A competitive advantage – a patent, trade secret, or huge head start in the technology space – is important to angels. They don’t fund companies with products that can easily be duplicated by more mature companies with deep pockets.
• Angels seek companies with solid sales and marketing plans. They fund entrepreneurs who know that products or services don’t sell themselves and understand the channels they must use to reach customers.
• Angels prefer to invest in local companies so they can kick the tires before investing and then coach, mentor, and serve on boards of directors of portfolio companies. Most are part-time investors with multiple interests, and many are motivated to give back to their communities by investing locally.
• Angels tend to invest US$200,000 to US$1 million in the first outside round of funding for new ventures at a valuation of $1 to $2 million and hold equity stakes of 20% to 40% after the first round of financing. Angels are not lenders who expect to be paid back with interest, but equity investors who purchase ownership in start-up companies.
• Angels expect entrepreneurs to have an exit strategy that will enable both the entrepreneur and investors to sell the start-up within five to 10 years, providing shareholders with a substantial return.
  For all of their trouble and risk-taking, there is good evidence that patient angels can earn about a 25% internal rate of return when measured over a 10-year period.

Source: NZ Herald News

by Tom Philpott

Hands-on education at Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard. Photo: Edible SchoolyardFor several years starting in the early ‘90s, I worked as a remedial math and writing teacher at Austin Community College. At that time—and, for all I know, now—the Texas public education system was mercilessly stratified: high-income districts lavished resources on schools, while their counterparts in low-income districts scraped by on bare-bones budgets. Predictably, college acceptance rates were much higher in the high-income districts.

That brazenly unequal system churned out plenty of customers for our remedial services. What struck me about many of my students was that they seemed to have never really been engaged before in a classroom: they expected rote, mechanistic, abstract assignments. And they expected to do poorly on them.

So I tried to engage them—cast around for topics they were interested in, concrete things, and use them to explain math concepts, or inspire an essay. And, more often than not, it worked—the students and I would hit upon something, amid much back and forth, that sparked genuine interest, and then they would be off and running, giddy in the pursuit of ideas. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of teaching that goes on in lots of private schools—the ones that routinely send students to esteemed universities, and not remedial programs at community colleges.

It’s not exactly a radical idea. Teaching is a form of communication; and focusing on concrete things has long been a favored communication strategy. In their celebrated guidebook to writing The Elements of Style, Strunk and White advise, “use definite, specific, concrete language.” The advice seems impeccable.

The Edible Schoolyard program, launched in Berkeley public schools by Alice Waters, is an attempt at putting that principle in action. It makes food, a material reality that everyone interacts with daily, an object of hands-on study. See that lettuce on your plate? Where did it come from? How do seeds germinate? What variety of lettuce is it? Why this variety and not another one? Why are only one or two available at the grocery store? Who owns grocery stores—and who decides what they offer. What makes plants grow? And so on.

The idea of having kids grow and cook food as part of the curriculum seems brilliant: a way to make concrete such potentially abstract topics as biology, chemistry, history, economics, and botany. It also promises leverage in another direction: in an age of de-funded, low-quality school lunches and surging diabetes rates among children, Edible Schoolyard has the potential to transform kids’ dietary habits.

Has it worked in practice? That’s a fair question. The program has been around for nearly 15 years now—it started in 1995 at Martin Luther King public middle school in Berkeley, and has expanded to affiliates in New Orleans, among other places across the country. Similar programs have sprouted up elsewhere, inspired by its example. Has it succeeded in catching students’ interest and making them better learners? Has it helped them develop healthier eating habits?

In a scathing piece in The Atlantic, the writer Caitlin Flanagan raises those questions but doesn’t answer them. Or, more properly, she declares the program a disaster—the piece is titled “Cultivating Failure”—without even coming close to driving home her case.

In her 3500-word polemic, the only hard evidence she brings to bear for her verdict of failure is this:

Indeed, Hispanic students do particularly poorly at King Middle School. According to the 2009 Federal Accountability Requirements, statewide, more than 39 percent of Latinos are proficient in English and 44 percent in math, but at the King school, those numbers are a dismal 30 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Where do Berkeley’s African American and Hispanic middle-schoolers do well? At a gardenless charter school called Cal Prep, where 92 percent of the students are black or Latino, where the focus is on academic achievement, and where test scores have been rising steadily.

So at King, Latinos are underperforming on standardized tests, while over at Cal Prep, “test scores have been rising steadily.” You don’t need to be a social-sciences graduate student to marvel at the logical gymnastics on display here. Correlation does not show causation; students could be underperforming at King because of the garden program—or because of some other reason. And so on. The numbers she cites may call into question the efficacy of Edible Schoolyard, but they by no means settle the case.

And that’s her last nod to bringing empirical evidence to bear. (In another jaw-dropping section, she seeks to debunk the concept of food deserts—the idea that residents of low-income areas tend to have less access to fresh food—not by scrutinizing the considerable academic research on the topic, but rather by making a 20-mile trip to “the most famous American hood [sic], Compton,” to check out the grocery scene.)

Her point seems to be this: working the land and cooking are lowly tasks, work that should be fled and not aspired to. It’s unconscionable to urge Latino students, some of whose parents may work as migrant laborers, to garden as a form of learning. Students, particularly those struggling with basic reading and math, should be forced to hit the books, not weed the carrots.

That line of reasoning seems brutally reductionist—and certainly doesn’t reflect my own experience as a remedial teacher. More importantly, Flanagan makes no effort to actually engage the program she is trashing (or, indeed, the book she’s ostensibly reviewing—her piece is ludicrously packaged as a review of Thomas McNamee’s 2008 biography of Alice Waters).

And the idea that farming and cooking—and even getting one’s hands dirty in the garden—are beneath respectable middle-class aspiration is deeply problematic. Such thinking reinforces an unjust food system that exploits cheap labor as a matter of course, propped up by a largely invisible army of migrant workers who do the dirty work of tending fields,  slaughterhouses, and kitchens.

The sustainable-food movement has matured enough and gained enough force that it’s coming under withering criticism from a variety of quarters. That’s good for the movement—hard questions need to be asked, assumptions questioned, received ideas reconsidered. And authors who perform those tasks will find a market from editors desperate to generate attention with contrarian poses.

But I wish we could expect more thoughtfulness, and less hack work, from such critics.

Related Links:

Anti–school garden campaigner Caitlin Flanagan, on Colbert back in ‘06

Raj Patel on Colbert

Taking distributed energy seriously

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) has won an appeal in federal court against Canadian drug company Xenon in a case clarifying that co-ownership of patents is controlled by contracts, when they exist. The lawsuit brought by WARF dealt with Xenon’s handling of patent rights to an enzyme that can lower cholesterol levels. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin discovered the enzyme in 1999 and two years later the Foundation licensed the technology to Xenon, which partially sponsored the work. The Foundation gave Xenon an exclusive license to commercialize the discovery and market any resulting products in exchange for a share of the profits. In 2005, the Foundation filed a lawsuit claiming that Xenon violated its contract rights by entering into a partnership with Swiss drug maker Novartis without paying the required fees. Xenon argued it had a right as co-owner of the patent to enter into the Novartis agreement without being subject to the terms of its deal with the Foundation. In 2006, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled that Xenon had broken its contract and awarded the Foundation $300,000 in damages. The appeals court agreed, ruling that Xenon broke the contract and the $300,000 in damages was justified.

In his legal blog Patently-O, Dennis Crouch, associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, writes that Xenon’s argument is based on the law of concurrent patent ownership, which generally does not require a patent co-owner to share licensing revenue with other co-owners. The district court found that the contract between WARF and Xenon was controlling over the patent law default rule. The Seventh Circuit affirmed that ruling, making it clear that the “statutory default rule controls unless there is an agreement to the contrary.” The appellate panel went on to characterize the agreement between WARF and Xenon as an “agreement to the contrary.” The negotiated exchange between the parties provided that the Foundation would forego its right to separately license the patent in exchange for receiving a share of the profits from Xenon’s commercialization of the technology, either directly or via a sublicense to a third party. Xenon cannot avoid paying royalties or sublicense fees to the Foundation simply by labeling the Novartis transaction a “license” rather than a “sublicense.”

Sources: The New York Times and Patently-O

Find out how to meet and exceed corporate expectations and de-risk your IP for a faster, smoother and more lucrative deal by attending “Shrink Wrap” Your University’s Technologies for Industry: Packaging Your Innovations to Minimize Corporate Risk and Extract Optimum Licensing Value, a unique distance learning event scheduled for January 27th. Innovation and licensing expert Nick Webb will reveal:

1. How to incorporate a “stage gate” process into your innovation launch procedures.
2. What analytical tools you should be using when evaluating an innovation … and which ones to avoid.
3. How to “shrink wrap” your technologies for a quick and profitable transfer.
4. A step-by-step process for creating compelling technology offering memorandums.
5. How to avoid the five “deal killers” when negotiating your technology licenses.
6. How to use technology “dovetailing” to optimize the value of your IP.

This 90-minute audio program will bring you critical new insights into the corporate licencee’s decision-making process. For complete details and to register, CLICK HERE.

Also coming soon:

• Patent Prosecution: Best Practices for Reducing Costs While Improving Patent Quality – Tuesday, February 9, 2010
• Tech Transfer Marketing on a Shoestring: Guerilla Tactics in a Budget-Cut World – Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Cynthia Koehler is Senior Attorney and California Water Legislative Director for EDF.

This weekend’s Celebration of the Life of Tom Graff at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland was all that one might imagine. Hundreds of Tom’s friends, family, fans, colleagues old and new came together to share favorite stories, fond memories, laughs and of course a tear or two, or more, for California’s foremost eco-Godfather (or Delta Force, as a legal rag once notably labeled Tom). Looking out over the standing-room only crowd filled with public officials, water agency folk, enviros and so many friends, it was impossible not to be struck by Tom’s extraordinary reach and breadth.

Speaker after speaker noted not only Tom’s braininess, strategic acumen, and analytical skill but also and more critically, the man’s fundamental humanity, his graciousness, kindness, unfailing humor, love of life, family and his fundamental regard for people of all stripes. Not merely an ardent and effective “lawyer for fish,” Tom was a listener, a teacher, the one in the room who could find the way to ‘yes’ without compromising integrity or principle.

My own association with Tom began more than 20 years ago in a courtroom presided over by a massive pink plastic salmon hung on the wall by a judge determined to keep the lawyers’ collective eyes on the prize. That trial resulted in the famous Hodge flows to protect salmon on the Lower American River, and marked a turning point in California’s water history. The recent Delta legislation may well prove to be another such turning point, and was an effort that Tom followed with intense interest.

In our conversations about the bill’s progress over the course of the summer and fall, Tom’s focus – just like all those years ago on the American River — was on the public trust flows, the eco-requirements of the natural world and how to most effectively assure them over time. Certainly Tom did not support the water bond, and was disappointed (as were we all) when the beneficiary pays and fee provisions were excised from the package. But he was quite pleased that through all of the negotiations the bill retained the provision directing the SWRCB to determine the Delta’s public trust needs, and he exhorted us to retain the primacy of the public trust, something the bill does explicitly.

Tom passed the morning that the Delta legislation was signed, and standing on the levee listening to the Governor give the first of what would be many tributes, it struck me that Tom’s reaction to the final product most likely would have been to grin and say, with his trademark twinkle, “Good job, but let’s get more next time.” Absolutely. Ensuring that the environmental promise of the Delta legislation becomes a reality is perhaps one of best legacies we can strive for in the wake of this extraordinary man

Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) and the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) have developed MPEG4-SLS (scalable-to-lossless coding), the world’s first adaptive audio streaming technology using the MPEG-4 SLS audio standard. The technology was unveiled at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by Exploit Technologies, the commercialization arm of A*STAR. MPEG-4 SLS is being test-bedded online at www.songsofcampus.com. “Our research team developed this technology to answer the needs of a new generation consumers who want hi-fidelity music entertainment at the appropriate quality and on demand — anywhere, anytime,” says Lye Kin Mun, PhD, I2R’s deputy executive director for research. “This is also in line with upcoming trends of moving away from traditional to new media in the infotainment world.”

SLS is a patented music coding format using an MPEG-4 audio standard that is capable of compressing music files, such as CD tracks, for playback without any loss in fidelity. It also allows for fine-grain pre-encoding of music files at different bit-rates so they can subsequently be streamed or played back at different quality, depending on the device type or available channel bandwidth. The technology allows for uninterrupted music streaming, regardless of bandwidth or internet traffic volume. MPEG-4 SLS’s scalability also means that a single encoded file can be played back in different environments with bit-rate cap determined by the service provider. SLS is particularly suited for use in broadcast and music production environments where its lossless performance allows multiple phases of the recording and editing process to be managed without signal loss. SLS also can ensure that the final production delivers a faithful and complete rendering of the uncompressed source material. The scalability of SLS gives users the ability to maximize sound quality during distribution, by matching the bit-rate to the available bandwidth.

Source: EurekAlert!

The sometimes unlucky-in-love Jennifer Love Hewitt will immortalize her greatest love lessons in a new relationship manual, The Dog Ate Cupid, debuting later this year. If you decide to pick it up, be sure to check out the chapter on decorating your catbag with crystals. On last night’s Lopez Tonight, J. Love recalled a heartbreaking split with a former flame. To cheer herself up, the Ghost Whisperer star allowed a friend to “Swarovski-crystal her precious lady.”

“It shined like a disco ball!” she beamed. “I have a whole chapter in there about how women should vajazzle their va-jay-jays.” Jennifer enjoyed the experience so much that she continues to regularly decorate her crotch. “I haven’t had any complaints,” the beauty teased.

Fishing can become a frustrating series of near misses and lost chances for the recreational sportsman. But John Caprio, PhD, George C. Kent professor in the department of biological sciences at Louisiana State University, has developed and licensed technology that takes the mystery out of reeling in the big one. Caprio, a specialist in aquatic vertebrate taste and smell systems, studies the chemosensory systems of common fresh and saltwater fish species. He has spent much of the last three decades researching and perfecting technology based on the natural impulses of a fish’s sensory systems, using the fish’s biology to increase the odds of making a catch. Caprio discovered the specific natural stimuli that activate taste sensors, resulting in nerve reflexes that cause the fish to ingest food or an appropriate fishing lure.

“If you look at how chemosensory input occurs in both our brain and that of a fish, you’ll see that smell input is to the forebrain whereas taste input is to the back — the highly reflexive part of the brain,” Caprio explains. “The take-home message from this is simple: fish learn and associate particular scents as food, but taste is an actual reflex for them. The taste of particular natural chemicals triggers a feeding response.” In other words, if a fish is exposed to certain taste stimuli, it cannot control its urge to bite. Obviously, this has huge implications for the fishing industry, but the technology doesn’t stop there. LSU’s Office of Intellectual Property worked closely with Caprio to forge a licensing agreement with Mystic (CT) Tackleworks, a company that develops scientific fishing lure systems. After licensing Caprio’s technology, Mystic brought in other fish sensory specialists to complete its Biopulse Lure System, which relies on decades of scientific studies on fish sensory systems. While other companies have developed lures that appeal primarily to a single sensory system of a fish, BioPulse is the only one based on providing the appropriate stimuli for each of the critical sensory systems used by the fish naturally in the capture of prey. “We are literally light years ahead of what’s out there right now,” says Greg Mitchell, the company’s founder, chair, and chief science officer.

Source: PhysOrg.com

It has been reported that Infiniti is set to expand their line of ‘G’ sedans with the introduction of the G25. The entry-level sedan will sport the same turbocharged 2.5 liter V6 engine that Japanese-market Nissan Skyline 250 GT uses.

The turbo is not set to be offered in the G37 – that will remain naturally aspirated. The purpose here is to offer a lower-priced entry-level sedan with better fuel economy to compete head-to-head with the BMW 328i.

The engine currently in use in Japan puts put out the power of 210 horses and 195 lb.-ft. of torque, compared to the 3.0-liter inline-6 that the 328i draws power from, which puts out 230 hp and 200 lb-ft. of torque.

The sedan is the only model slated for production as of now, but brisk sales will change that.

2010 Infiniti G37 Sedan:

– By: Stephen Calogera

Source: Edmunds

At CMS Watch we frequently have to explain to people why we have separate research streams for WCM (Web Content Management) and ECM (Enterprise Content Management). The explanation is frequently a response to the question, "aren’t they just the same thing?" The simple answer is no, they are not.

ECM was originally and quite usefully coined by AIIM back in the day as a term to describe an overarching approach to managing all forms of content. Unfortunately, the term has been royally misused since. For some it is a rationale for installing a single big technology platform (or suite of content management tools). For others ECM is a business practice that encompasses all the different methods and process of managing any enterprise information. For others it’s simply a really big WCM system. For still others ECM is a layer in an Enterprise Architecture diagram.

I think the term ECM still has a place in the acronym pantheon, but that place is an increasingly limited one. (It would seem that we are not the only one thinking hard about this very set of issues, as quite coincidently John Mancini of AIIM blogged on this here yesterday…)

I believe that most buyers around the world actually want and buy document and records management systems. They don’t want or need a single system to manage all their enterprise content, no matter how wonderful or magical such a system may sound. Their specific needs include such applications as: the accounts payable process, handling medical records, managing legal case matter, and so on. In short, enterprises need to implement process-specific solutions.

We call these solutions document and records management systems. That’s what they have always been, and likely always will be. That is the key reason why we changed the name of our "mid-market" enterprise content management vendor category to "Document Management." We’ve also begun to separate out our market overviews (see our recent slideshare presentation), and will work toward renaming our entire ECM research stream in the next quarter.

ECM is an aspirational term for many, one that suggests a single layer/platform/system/methodology that will address your enterprise content needs no matter how complex, diverse, or voluminous. Some major vendors promote this approach, and buyers for such systems also exist, but they make up only a small minority in this market. So, though it may seem a little dull by comparison, from now on we will use the terms Document Management and Records Management where they apply, and will reserve the exotic ECM moniker for that rare breed of big, complex, and typically very expensive platforms that actually merit such a grandiose term.

Engineers at the University of Michigan have developed a biosensor consisting of a strip of paper infused with carbon nanotubes that can quickly and inexpensively detect a toxin produced by algae in drinking water. The paper strips perform 28 times faster than the method most commonly used to detect microcystin-LR (MC-LR), a chemical compound produced by cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. Cyanobacteria is commonly found on nutrient-rich waters. Even in very small quantities, MC-LR is suspected to cause liver damage and possibly liver cancer. The substance and others like it are among the leading causes of biological water pollution and believed to be a culprit of mass poisonings going back to early human history, says Nicholas Kotov, PhD, project leader and professor in the U-M departments of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and materials science and engineering.

The sensor works by measuring the electrical conductivity of the nanotubes in the paper. Before the nanotubes are impregnated in the paper, they are mixed with antibodies for MC-LR. When the paper strips come in contact with water contaminated with MC-LR, those antibodies squeeze in between the nanotubes to bond with the toxin. This spreading apart of the nanotubes changes their electrical conductivity, which is measured by an external monitor. The whole device is about the size of a home pregnancy test, and results appear in fewer than 12 minutes, Kotov says.

The biosensor provides a quick, cheap, portable, and sensitive test that could allow water treatment plants and individuals to verify the safety of water on a regular basis. “The safety of drinking water is a vital issue in many developing countries and in many parts of the United States,” Kotov points out. “We’ve developed a simple and inexpensive technology to detect multiple toxins.” A paper about the technique appeared online in Nano Letters. The university is pursuing patent protection for the IP and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

Source: Science Daily

Facebook has finally relented and introduced a feature that many of its users have been clamoring for, replying to a comment by email. Now, every time you receive an email notification of a comment on your profile or a photo, you will be able to reply to it from your email account without having to visit the site. As Facebook itself points out, this co… (read more)

Lois Lee, MD, MPH works in Children’s Emergency Department Injury Prevention Program

You often hear about children being left in cars in the middle of the summer, but did you know that it can be equally dangerous during the winter months?

Many parents probably understand the temptation to leave their young child in the car for “just a second” to run a quick errand, especially if the child is sleeping. But no matter how quickly you think you will be back to your car, you should never leave a child in the car alone.

Recently, a mother left her two young children in an unheated car in 28 degree weather for 18 minutes while she had a tanning session in a salon. Thankfully the children were unharmed, but they could have suffered from cold related injuries.

Unfortunately, the same scenario occurs at other times of the year. It is particularly dangerous if a young child is left in a car on a hot day when they can develop dehydration or hyperthermia, which can even lead to death.

There are other perils related to leaving children in the car unsupervised as well.

• They might be able to figure out how to start the car –  if the keys are left there.
• They could injure themselves either in the car or outside of the car –  if they are able to get out.
• The car could also get carjacked and the children kidnapped.

Some of these scenarios may sound far fetched, but they have all been reported in the news. So now matter how “quick” you will be, children should never be left alone in the car.

The dangers are real and it makes no sense to put your child at risk.

Read more of Lee’s injury prevention advice on winter sports safety.