Solvation

Where Are The Women Venture Capitalists? - Forbes.com

A VC friend recently mentioned that VCs are always slightly behind the curve, looking for the next big thing.  Another friend reported that the next big thing is evidently under-25 year olds, because they'll truly "get" social networking.

What women have had to do for millenia is to build social capital. It wasn't all that long ago when women couldn't own property (and the idea lingered for a while, even in the US... one of the impetuses for "keeping your own name" when getting married was so that property could be listed in the wife's name as well as the husband's). 

When you're not allowed financial power, and you don't have relative physical power, the only thing you CAN do is have a strong social network.  I strongly question where there's any more low hanging fruit under the category "ways for young people to hook up using social network software," but you know, porn drives technology adoption, so perhaps I speak too soon.

Yet I believe that there are far more women and people of lower socio-economic level and cultural backgrounds who have fresh ideas in this area than 25-year-old upper-middle-class white men.

Where Are The Women Venture Capitalists? - Forbes.com.

Indeed, in the first half of 2006, only 4% of VC-backed companies had women chief executives, and those companies with women at the top received just 3% of the total dollar amount raised, according to VC research firm VentureOne, in San Francisco.

Disaster Taxonomy

Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging, futurist, and all 'round nice guy, came up with a fine gift for those who find such things amusing or useful.  It's a bit of both, allowing us to define which particular type of apocalypse we're talking about.

Open the Future: Eschatological Taxonomy -- Now Suitable for Framing.

How should non-profits raise money?

Pursuant to a LinkedIn: Answers question:

What are the available models for sustainability for non-profits?

My response:

Think about asset types:
- Financial
- Social / Political
- Natural
- Intellectual

All organizations are mission-driven; the mission of some is to increase their financial asset base. For-profits traditionally have invoked the intellectual construct "externality" to avoid even thinking about how achieving higher financial weath can be exploitative long term; hence the concept "sustainability."

So first of all, when you say, "For the huge majority of non-profits, fund-raising is an extra-ordinarily expensive way to generate operating capital," you're probably not including the degree to which social capital is also generated alongside financial capital AND how little social capital it costs the organization to generate financial capital in this traditional way. Further,

Traffic magic

Figure out how long a commute should take at a given time and day, or what it would be like if you left at that moment.  This is a new feature. 511.org - Traffic: Predict-a-Trip

Find Satoshi project

In case you haven't heard, there's an ongoing live "Where's Waldo" game embedded in Perplex City. Find Satoshi project.

Generation X : Secretly Charitable and Generous

Are Generation X really surly slackers, trusting no one and grumbling cynically?  Or are they (secretly) benevolent?

In the Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Personal Finance Poll of 12/28/06, 94% of 35-44 year olds donated some amount of money to charity (up 5%) whereas 87% of 45-54-year olds did (down 2%). 

The average amount given for 2006 for 35-44 year olds was 11% more than the 45-54 group.
 

Panning for silver.

The EPA, thinking systemically, regulates nanotech. Beware The Silver Lining: A Risk Management Review Of Commercial Nanotechnology (TreeHugger).

Brotherhood

Highly recommended: Brotherhood, a increasingly fab show which evidently recently signed for its second season on Showtime in 2007, does a dance on this riddle: what's the different between organized government and organized crime?

It ties in strongly to issues about social capital as well (particularly the subset of political or social capital, and how those lines cross). Another relevant issue: how does "military might," a type of capital rarely mentioned get convoluted into social capital?

Activist Transparency

I think everyone knows the truth of the inability to monitor all advertising purchases. In Daily Kos: State of the Nation, Kos relays Spocko's interactions with the Disney juggernaut.

Here's how to phrase unsolicited pro-bono marketing feedback, excerpted from the link above:

 

Fairfax County Library brouhaha

A list I frequent had a thread about the article, "Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway?" where the Washington Post points out that Fairfax County library is being very ... aggressive ... at weeding out classic authors' work at the expense of trendy fiction.

Suspecting "social entrepreneurism" run amok, I did some research.  Thinking originally that they were desperately strapped for cash, I discovered that, nope, in 2004 they passed a $52 MM bond, so they clearly had lobbied the community successfully for funds; a quick google found this article from http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6298558.html:

According to library consultant Rhea Rubin, another way to evaluate library services is through user-oriented measures known as outcomes (see "Measure Your Worth," p. 10). The power of outcomes is in the revelation of whether you have touched lives with the work you do.

Look ma, no plugs.

From: Technology Review: Plastic Sheet of Power.

The position-sensing sheet relies on two types of flexible electronics. Using a technique similar to silk screening, the researchers printed an array of copper coils 10 millimeters in diameter. In addition, they used a modified inkjet printer to print an array of organic transistors. Both devices are thin and flexible enough to bend with a sheet of plastic.

Gadgets would need to be equipped with a coil and special power-harvesting circuitry to use the power pad.

...

Still, the flexible electronics used to make this prototype is still in its infancy. "There's a lot of space to improve," Someya says. The devices aren't quite reliable enough. They change their characteristics in a period of months, he says, due to oxygen and humidity, which attack organic semiconductors and electrodes. However, he says, he is optimistic because some commercial displays, called organic electroluminescence (OEL) displays, use similar materials, and in recent years the display market has helped drive improvements in these organic devices.

Someya estimates that it will take about five years to overcome the remaining technical issues. Ultimately, he hopes to create a rollable, portable, and reliable power system that could be built into furniture and homes. "Our final goal is to implement the device as infrastructure," he says, "embedded [in walls and tables] from the beginning." Imagine, he says, moving a flat-screen television from wall to wall, without needing to worry about plugging it into an electrical outlet.

US: the new USSR (part 2)

Happy New Year! 

The really good news: Congress changes.

The other news: This article enlightens us as to the nature of EU flights to the US and the data required for people travelling this-a-way.  I'd particularly like to point out that one of the pieces of surrendered information is "any religious dietary requirements."

You'd think if nothing else the Ivy League schools would be a bit distressed about this. So much for the international nature of United States academia.  Who would want their child educated at Harvard (or Washington State) if every time they went back to school you had to fret about them winding up on a no-fly list -- not to mention waking up at 2am after nightmares of their unsafe landing in Guatanamo.