Category: Historical Perspectives

Impact Lab > Historical Perspectives
Culture, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives

Ikaria, the island where people forget to die

Ikaria

Stamatis Moraitis, a Greek war veteran, came to the United States in 1943 for treatment of a combat-mangled arm.  He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

 

 

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Art, Breakthrough Thinking, Entertainment, Great New Product, Historical Perspectives, New Inventions, New Viewpoints, Photo Perspectives

Cloud Dome shines light on your nether regions

Get perfect product photos every time with the Nimbus Dome by Cloud Dome.

Cloud Dome produces a revolutionary line of photography products, each one specifically designed to make you a better and faster product photographer.

Cloud Dome recently won the Consumer Product of the Year Award and was one of the featured exhibitors at the DaVinci Inventor Showcase which took place on Oct 13, 2012 at the Denver Merchandise Mart. A full list of award winners can be found HERE.

Cloud Dome inventor Cindy Lichfield took a moment to answer some questions about cameras finally being able to take 8 megapixel pictures, developing the Cloud Dome and the Smartphone user market…
Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News, top 10

Top 10 technological breakthroughs of the past 45 years

 

The world wide web

We have experienced a continuous revolution of new vs. old, manual work vs. automation, digital vs. analog in the past 45 years. In that time, thousands of sophisticated IT products fueled a series of information revolutions that transformed the business and consumer worlds.

 

 

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Analysis, Brain, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Humans are getting smarter

Don’t be surprised when your toddler can operate your laptop.  There’s a rise in IQ levels all around.

James R. Flynn explains how he came to understand how our minds have gained in cognitive skills during the 20th century in an excerpt from his new book, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century.

 

 

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Breakthrough Thinking, Entertainment, Great New Product, Historical Perspectives, Music, New Inventions

Dash into a smart phone augmented car stereo

Dash by Devium maximizes your phone’s musical potential.

Smartphones are evolving at a fantastic rate. New phones with increased capability hit the market every 3-4 months. Traditional car stereos cannot keep up. To leverage consumers investment in their smart phone, Devium created a new class of car stereo, The Dash Platform.

Dash is a platform that grows with the customer, allowing our users to take advantage of a phone’s power capabilities while continuing to have access to traditional car audio experiences. Dash has HD AM/FM broadcast radio options as well as hands free calling capabilities that allows users to work with and listen to every app on the phones platform, auxiliary input or preamp out while also charging the phone.

Devium is one of the featured exhibitors at the DaVinci Inventor Showcase, which takes place on Oct 13, 2012 at the Denver Merchandise Mart. This is your chance to experience Dash and many other amazing innovations.

Recently, Devium CEO Paul Lizer took a moment answer some questions about guerrilla marketing, the annoyance of inoperable stereos, and Kickstarter funding…

 

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Business, Historical Perspectives

Family run companies in the U.S. that have been around 100-plus years

Trimper’s Rides has been operating continuously for 122 summers on Ocean City’s famous Boardwalk.

It;s not uncommon for customers at Carl Heimerdinger’s family retail store for customers to bring in scissors for sharpening that were purchased there decades ago by a parent or grandparent.

 

 

 

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Breakthrough Thinking, Culture, DIY, Education, Entertainment, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend, People Making a Difference

Why every single one of you should learn a little code

Either you get with the code or get left out in the cold.

As technology becomes more and more ingrained in our everyday lives, you have to make a choice: Are you a consumer of tech, or are you someone who understands it?

Buying the latest iPhone and keeping up with the who-works-where, who’s-launching-what tech gossip is all good and fine, but if you can’t code, you ain’t no kind of techie.

Startups like Codecademy are making it easy to learn coding online — easy enough for school children, in fact. More intense programs like DaVinci Coders take learners from total noob to novice programmer in an 11 week bootcamp. And one game, Coderacer, will have you on the ground and coding in just five minutes…

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Analysis, Business, Historical Perspectives, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Is the era of the personal computer over?

PCs consumed the majority of memory chips since sometime in the 1980s until 2012.

We have been hearing for years about the so-called Post-PC Era.  But now it seems pretty hard to argue with.  Personal computers no longer consume the majority of the world’s memory chip supply as of this year.

 

 

 

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, DIY, Education, Historical Perspectives, New Inventions, New Viewpoints

The five big lies of inventors: Common misconceptions can cause the best ideas to fall flat

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The DaVinci Inventor Showcase will take place on Oct 13th

The economic downturn has forced us to rethink our lives. For many, this means a time of stepping into the workshop to give shape to ideas that have been waiting for the right opportunity to emerge.

While Hollywood likes to portray inventors as the wacky mad-scientist type, nothing is further from the truth. Inventors may be wired differently, but for the most part they are very dedicated, hard-working individuals bent on making the world a better place.

But in the business world, few things go according to plan. New products are especially prone to commercial failure. Many of the failures stem from common misconceptions that steer us radically off course. Here are five big lies that will give you a more realistic picture of how to make the grade in the world of invention…

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Analysis, Food, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

Top 20 most important inventions in the history of food and drink

Science experts rank the refrigerator as Invention #1.

The UK’s national academy of science, The Royal Society asked a question: What are the most meaningful innovations in humanity’s culinary history? What mattered more to the development of civilization’s cultivation of food: the oven? The fridge? The plough? The spork?

 

 

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Analysis, Big Problems, Business, Economy, Education, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference

First generation of computer programmers to die and skill shortage will leave software vulnerable

 Where will qualified younger programmers come from when the older generation retires?

T’S a looming crisis not even dreamed of when computers were the new frontier, and all those working on them were young pioneers.

But fast-forward a few decades – and now experts warn that essential systems that control areas like defence and banking are about to be left without qualified people to run them, as the first generation of computer programmers retire and, sadly, die.

Seventy-two-year-old US digital forensic examiner, Robert E Johnston, said that the skills shortage in computer programming carried with it serious consequences…

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