People Making a Difference – Page 42

Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Human Behavior, People Making a Difference

Girl cuts hair to buy house

April 28, 2012

It took four hours every week to wash her hair and an hour and a half to brush every day

There are certain drawbacks to having a five-foot-long mane of hair. Twelve-year-old Natasha Moraes de Andrade of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was proud of her hair, but it took hours to wash and comb it. Her family couldn’t turn on fans for fear of getting it caught. And riding a bicycle was out of the question. Still, getting her hair cut was a difficult decision.

‘I cried at first when I was at the hairdressers to get it cut,’ she says.

‘I was afraid I wouldn’t like it, and I was also scared I might not get the money I wanted for it…

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Scientists see solution to critical barrier to fusion

April 24, 2012

From left: physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates.

Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power…
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Futurist Thomas Frey interviewed about DaVinci Coders program

April 23, 2012

Futurist Thomas Frey took time out of his busy speaking schedule for a short interview with Larry Nelson at W3W3 radio. This time Mr. Frey conversed with Larry about DaVinci Coders, the new beginner based Ruby On Rails program that he is putting together at DaVinci Institute…

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Here’s how much body parts cost on the Black Market

April 23, 2012

If you were ever curious as to how much body parts can fetch on the black market,Medical Transcription created a snazzy infographic to show you. Some parts are shockingly cheap! Like would you want a new shoulder or a new iPad? Both cost 500 bucks.

Other organs are prohibitively expensive, like a kidney. That little sucker costs $262,000 in the US (other countries have it for cheaper)! Here’s the full list of body parts and their cost…

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Teacherless Education and the Competition that will Change Everything

April 20, 2012

Nephew Mikaia showing Grandpa Norman what he knows

Futurist Thomas Frey: Over the past couple months I’ve become enamored with watching my two-year-old nephew Mikaia learn the letters of the alphabet, colors, and numbers. Even though he doesn’t have them all perfect, he’s scoring in the high 90% when we quiz him verbally.

Next up, the periodic table of elements?

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Business, Education, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

Goldman Sachs code-theft conviction Reversed

April 16, 2012

Sergey Aleynikov, wearing a baseball cap, leaves Manhattan federal court Friday
after his conviction for stealing Goldman Sachs’ high-speed trading code was reversed

Before leaving Goldman Sachs to earn a millionaire’s salary with Chicago High Frequency Trading (HFT) startup Teza Technologies, Sergey Aleynikov made one last transaction. At 5:20pm on his last day, just before his going-away party, Aleynikov uploaded 500,000 lines of encrypted source code from the Wall Street firm’s proprietary HFT system to a server located in Germany. Following the clandestine upload, Aleynikov deleted the encryption program, wiped his command history, and headed to the party.

Although Aleynikov later managed to download the source code to his home computer in New Jersy before flying to Chicago, he was apprehended by the FBI while returning through Newark Liberty International Airport.

But after his conviction at trial and imprisonment during the appeals process (his dual US-Russian citizenship presented a flight risk), Aleynikov is now a free man.

The reasons why will touch the entire software industry…

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Creating a ‘Ripple in the Force’ of the Power Industry

April 13, 2012

Futurist Thomas Frey: Working with many early stage inventors, I often have the privilege of seeing some truly remarkable inventions and innovations. A few days ago I was shown a technology that snugly fits into that remarkable category, one that has the potential to radically transform the way cars and other vehicles are powered. In fact, vehicles using this power source will never need to stop and refuel.

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White House’s Tom Kalil on “Grand Challenges”

April 12, 2012

Grand Challenges create a new vision of the future.

Tom Kalil of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy gave a presentation today about Grand Challenges, such as the ones proposed by futurist Thomas Frey HERE. Kalil called them “ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology to achieve,” like NASA’s Green Flight Challenge and the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health. I think Tom’s speech, delivered to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, does a terrific job showing why the grand challenge approach is a powerful way to tackle some pretty daunting problems. He also puts grand challenges in the context of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation. (By the way, it must be nice to be authorized to use the Presidential PowerPoint template.) From Tom’s speech

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CISPA is SOPA 2.0

April 10, 2012

CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), is a successor, of sorts, to the loathesome SOPA legislative proposal, which was shot down in flames earlier this year. EFF’s chilling analysis of the bill shows how it could be used to give copyright enforcers carte blanche to spy on Internet users and censoring the Internet (it would also give these powers to companies and governments who’d been embarrassed by sites like Wikileaks).

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Printable Houses and the Massive Wave of Opportunity it will bring to Our Future

April 7, 2012

Futurist Thomas Frey: All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented called Contour Crafting to construct the world’s first 3D printed wall.

His goal was to use the technology for rapid home construction as a way to rebuild after natural disasters, like the devastating earthquakes that had recently occurred in his home country of Iran.

While we have still not seen our first “printed home” just yet, that will be coming very soon. Perhaps within a year. Commercial buildings will soon follow.

For an industry firmly entrenched in working with nails and screws, the prospects of replacing saws and hammers with giant printing machines seems frightening. But getting beyond this hesitancy lies the biggest construction boom in all history.

Here’s why I think this will happen.

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10 Bizarre Sex World Records

April 3, 2012

The worlds biggest mouth doesn’t hold a candle to some of these crazy sex world records.

From an 82-year-old prostitute to a 500 people orgy and the world’s gang bang record, meet some of the weirdest sex world records you may not see in the Guinness Book…

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Richard Branson to explore the Center of the Earth – April Fools Day Joke

April 2, 2012

What will the view be on the inside?

(Sorry, this was so brilliantly outrageous, we thought we’d play along.)

After filmmaker James Cameron set a depth record for exploring the Marianna Trench and Jeff Bezos found the engines from Apollo 11, entrepreneur Richard Branson felt a need to do something even more spectacular. The head of Virgin galactic is preparing to launch a journey to the center of the earth! The new company Virgin Volcanic, an offshoot of Virgin Galactic, has developed a vehicle called the VVS1 to tackle one of the Eight Grand Challenges – the Race to the Core.

Using patented carbon-carbon materials pioneered for deep space exploration, Virgin is proud to announce a revolutionary new vehicle, VVS1, which will be capable of plunging three people into the molten lava core of an active volcano…

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