A New Way of Seeing

ORIGINAL: The Scientist
By M. Joan Dawson

September 1, 2013

Inspiration and controversy attended the birth of magnetic resonance imaging, a diagnostic technology that changed the course of human medicine.

MIT PRESS, AUGUST 2013

Thomas Huxley, in his presidential address to the Royal Society in 1885, observed: “What an enormous revolution would be made in biology if physics or chemistry could supply the physiologist with a means of making out the molecular structure of living tissues comparable to that which the spectroscope affords to the inquirer into the nature of heavenly bodies.”

Andrew Huxley, a grandson of Thomas, noted in his own inaugural address in 1980 that his grandfather’s wishes came true with the invention of zeugmatography—better known today as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI—by Paul Lauterbur in 1971. MRI would change the course of medicine. It became a leading diagnostic tool because it images the soft tissues of the body anatomically, biochemically, and functionally. It is noninvasive and safe, and unlike X-rays or CAT scans, uses no ionizing radiation. My recently published book, Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI, is the story of the man, who was my husband, and his invention.

One day in 1971 Paul happened to observe some nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements on normal and malignant tissues and saw that the signals differed markedly. But the tissue samples were being cut out of rats, and Paul thought such measurements could never be very useful in research or medicine. “It didn’t seem right to kill the patient to diagnose the illness,” he wryly said to me. “It was a bloody messy affair, not the sort of thing chemists are used to seeing. As a naïve chemist, I couldn’t imagine cutting people up to see if they were sick or not.”

He felt there had to be a better way. If he could find a way to localize the NMR signals to specific places in a patient without using harmful invasive procedures, well, that would be a different matter altogether. Physicians could then peer into any part of the body remotely to discern what the problem was, and the patient would be unaffected by the analysis.

That same evening he figured it out. He had taken a fast-food dinner break from work with a friend. “On the second bite of a Big Boy hamburger,” just as he was explaining that the physics of NMR precluded imaging, in midsentence, he arrived at the principle of MRI. “I realized that inhomogeneous magnetic fields labeled signals according to their spatial coordinates, and made a leap of faith to the conclusion that the information could be recovered in the form of images.” Paul ran out to buy a notebook at a nearby drugstore. He spent much of the night refining his thoughts and convincing himself that he was not just on a wild-goose chase. By morning the book was bursting with ideas. This notebook not only describes the fundamentals of MRI but also predicts a great deal of its development during the following 25 years, and into the future.

The early days of MRI were fraught with obstacles. The first and rather blurry images, published in a 1973 issue of Nature, were of two tubes filled with deuterium oxide (D2O). Those images—created with what Paul named zeugmatography after the Greek zeugma, “that which is used for joining”—did not conjure up visions of modern medical diagnosis in anyone’s mind. As the technique developed it was met both with derision (“It violates the Heisenberg uncertainty principle!” said some detractors) and with claims by others to have invented it. SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Raymond Damadian famously published an ad in major newspapers around the world showing the Nobel Prize printed upside down when he was not included in the award for MRI in 2003. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI chronicles the life and work of Paul in MRI and other fields, as well as early work of other MRI researchers, including Damadian and Peter Mansfield, Paul’s Nobel corecipient. The story of the basic science behind MRI’s birth has already been told in the literature. My book looks deeper to tell the tale of the technology’s rocky journey to clinical utility.

M. Joan Dawson is Associate Professor Emerita in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She studies function and metabolism of living tissues using NMR spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging. She was married to Paul Lauterbur from 1984 until his death in 2007. Read an excerpt of Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI.

Artificial-intelligence research revives its old ambitions

ORIGINAL: MIT
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office
September 9, 2013

A new interdisciplinary research center at MIT, funded by the National Science Foundation, aims at nothing less than unraveling the mystery of intelligence.

Illustration: Christine Daniloff/MIT

The birth of artificial-intelligence research as an autonomous discipline is generally thought to have been the monthlong Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, which convened 10 leading electrical engineers — including MIT’s Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon — to discuss “how to make machines use language” and “form abstractions and concepts.” A decade later, impressed by rapid advances in the design of digital computers, Minsky was emboldened to declare that “within a generation ... the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.”

The problem, of course, turned out to be much more difficult than AI’s pioneers had imagined. In recent years, by exploiting machine learning — in which computers learn to perform tasks from sets of training examples — artificial-intelligence researchers have built special-purpose systems that can do things like interpret spoken language or play Jeopardy with great success. But according to Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor of Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, “These recent achievements have, ironically, underscored the limitations of computer science and artificial intelligence. We do not yet understand how the brain gives rise to intelligence, nor do we know how to build machines that are as broadly intelligent as we are.”

Poggio thinks that AI research needs to revive its early ambitions. “It’s time to try again,” he says. “We know much more than we did before about biological brains and how they produce intelligent behavior. We’re now at the point where we can start applying that understanding from neuroscience, cognitive science and computer science to the design of intelligent machines.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) appears to agree: Today, it announced that one of three new research centers funded through its Science and Technology Centers Integrative Partnerships program will be the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), based at MIT and headed by Poggio. Like all the centers funded through the program, CBMM will initially receive $25 million over five years.

Homegrown initiative
CBMM grew out of the MIT Intelligence Initiative, an interdisciplinary program aimed at understanding how intelligence arises in the human brain and how it could be replicated in machines.

“[MIT President] Rafael Reif, when he was provost, came to speak to the faculty and challenged us to come up with new visions, new ideas,” Poggio says. He and MIT’s Joshua Tenenbaum, also a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, responded by proposing a program that would integrate research at BCS and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “With a system as complicated as the brain, there is a point where you need to get people to work together across different disciplines and techniques,” Poggio says. Funded by MIT’s School of Science, the initiative was formally launched, in 2011, at a symposium during MIT’s 150th anniversary.

Headquartered at MIT, CBMM will be, like all the NSF centers, a multi-institution collaboration. Of the 20 faculty members currently affiliated with the center,

• 10 are from MIT, 
• five are from Harvard University, and the rest are from  
• Cornell University,  
• Rockefeller University, 
• the University of California at Los Angeles, 
• Stanford University and the  
• Allen Institute for Brain Science. 

The center’s international partners are the  

• Italian Institute of Technology; 
• the Max Planck Institute in Germany; 
• City University of Hong Kong; 
• the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India; and 
• Israel’s Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University. 

Its industrial partners are  

• Google,  
• Microsoft,  
• IBM,  
• Mobileye, 
• Orcam,  
• Boston Dynamics, 
• Willow Garage,  
• Deep Minds and  
• Rethink Robotics. 

Also affiliated with center are  

• Howard University; 
• Hunter College; 
• Universidad Central del Caribe, Puerto Rico; 
• the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras; and  
• Wellesley College.

CBMM aims to foster collaboration not just between institutions but also across disciplinary boundaries. Graduate students and postdocs funded through the center will have joint advisors, preferably drawn from different research areas.

Research themes
The center’s four main research themes are also intrinsically interdisciplinary. They are 

• the integration of intelligence, including vision, language and motor skills; 
• circuits for intelligence, which will span research in neurobiology and electrical engineering; 
• the development of intelligence in children; and 
• social intelligence. 

Poggio will also lead the development of a theoretical platform intended to undergird the work in all four areas.

“Those four thrusts really do fit together, in the sense that they cover what we think are the biggest challenges facing us when we try to develop a computational understanding of what intelligence is all about,” says Patrick Winston, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT and research coordinator for CBMM.

For instance, he explains, in human cognition, vision, language and motor skills are inextricably linked, even though they’ve been treated as separate problems in most recent AI research. One of Winston’s favorite examples is that of image labeling: A human subject will identify an image of a man holding a glass to his lips as that of a man drinking. If the man is holding the glass a few inches further forward, it’s an instance of a different activity — toasting. But a human will also identify an image of a cat turning its head up to catch a few drops of water from a faucet as an instance of drinking. “You have to be thinking about what you see there as a story,” Winston says. “They get the same label because it’s the same story, not because it looks the same.”

Similarly, Winston explains, development is its own research thrust because intelligence is fundamentally shaped through interaction with the environment. There’s evidence, Winston says, that mammals that receive inadequate visual stimulation in the first few weeks of life never develop functional eyesight, even though their eyes are otherwise unimpaired. “You need to stimulate the neural mechanisms in order for them to assemble themselves into a functioning system,” Winston says. “We think that that’s true generally, of our entire spectrum of capabilities. You need to have language, you need to see things, you need to have language and vision work together from the beginning to ensure that the parts develop properly to form a working whole.”

20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't Get

ORIGINAL: Forbes
7/23/2013

 

I started Docstoc in my 20’s, made the cover of one of those cliché “20 Under 20” lists, and today I employ an amazing group of 20-somethings. Call me a curmudgeon, but at 34, how I came up seems so different from what this millennial generation expects. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I see this generation making their own. In response, here are my 20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don’t Get.

Time is Not a Limitless Commodity – I so rarely find young professionals that have a heightened sense of urgency to get to the next level. In our 20s we think we have all the time in the world to A) figure it out and B) get what we want. Time is the only treasure we start off with in abundance, and can never get back. Make the most of the opportunities you have today, because there will be a time when you have no more of it.

You’re Talented, But Talent is Overrated - Congratulations, you may be the most capable, creative, knowledgeable & multi-tasking generation yet. As my father says, “I’ll Give You a Sh-t Medal.” Unrefined raw materials (no matter how valuable) are simply wasted potential. There’s no prize for talent, just results. Even the most seemingly gifted folks methodically and painfully worked their way to success. (Tip: read “Talent is Overrated”)

We’re More Productive in the Morning – During my first 2 years at Docstoc (while I was still in my 20’s) I prided myself on staying at the office until 3am on a regular basis. I thought I got so much work done in those hours long after everyone else was gone. But in retrospect I got more menial, task-based items done, not the more complicated strategic planning, phone calls or meetings that needed to happen during business hours. Now I stress an office-wide early start time because I know, for the most part, we’re more productive as a team in those early hours of the day.  

Social Media is Not a Career – These job titles won’t exist in 5 years. Social media is simply a function of marketing; it helps support branding, ROI or both. Social media is a means to get more awareness, more users or more revenue. It’s not an end in itself. I’d strongly caution against pegging your career trajectory solely to a social media job title.

Pick Up the Phone – Stop hiding behind your computer. Business gets done on the phone and in person. It should be your first instinct, not last, to talk to a real person and source business opportunities. And when the Internet goes down… stop looking so befuddled and don’t ask to go home. Don’t be a pansy, pick up the phone.

Be the First In & Last to Leave ­– I give this advice to everyone starting a new job or still in the formative stages of their professional career. You have more ground to make up than everyone else around you, and you do have something to prove. There’s only one sure-fire way to get ahead, and that’s to work harder than all of your peers.

Don’t Wait to Be Told What to Do – You can’t have a sense of entitlement without a sense of responsibility. You’ll never get ahead by waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Saying “nobody asked me to do this” is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Err on the side of doing too much, not too little. (Watch: Millennials in the Workplace Training Video)

Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes – You should be making lots of mistakes when you’re early on in your career. But you shouldn’t be defensive about errors in judgment or execution. Stop trying to justify your F-ups. You’re only going to grow by embracing the lessons learned from your mistakes, and committing to learn from those experiences.

You Should Be Getting Your Butt Kicked – Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” would be the most valuable boss you could possibly have. This is the most impressionable, malleable and formative stage of your professional career. Working for someone that demands excellence and pushes your limits every day will build the most solid foundation for your ongoing professional success.

A New Job a Year Isn’t a Good Thing ­­– 1-year stints don’t tell me that you’re so talented that you keep outgrowing your company. It tells me that you don’t have the discipline to see your own learning curve through to completion. It takes about 2-3 years to master any new critical skill, give yourself at least that much time before you jump ship. Otherwise your resume reads as a series of red flags on why not to be hired.

People Matter More Than Perks – It’s so trendy to pick the company that offers the most flex time, unlimited meals, company massages, game rooms and team outings. Those should all matter, but not as much as the character of your founders and managers. Great leaders will mentor you and will be a loyal source of employment long after you’ve left. Make a conscious bet on the folks you’re going to work for and your commitment to them will pay off much more than those fluffy perks.

Map Effort to Your Professional Gain – You’re going to be asked to do things you don’t like to do. Keep your eye on the prize. Connect what you’re doing today, with where you want to be tomorrow. That should be all the incentive you need. If you can’t map your future success to your current responsibilities, then it’s time to find a new opportunity.

Speak Up, Not Out – We’re raising a generation of sh-t talkers. In your workplace this is a cancer. If you have issues with management, culture or your role & responsibilities, SPEAK UP. Don’t take those complaints and trash-talk the company or co-workers on lunch breaks and anonymous chat boards. If you can effectively communicate what needs to be improved, you have the ability to shape your surroundings and professional destiny.

You HAVE to Build Your Technical Chops – Adding “Proficient in Microsoft Office” at the bottom of your resume under Skills, is not going to cut it anymore. I immediately give preference to candidates who are ninjas in: Photoshop, HTML/CSS, iOS, WordPress, Adwords, MySQL, Balsamiq, advanced Excel, Final Cut Pro – regardless of their job position. If you plan to stay gainfully employed, you better complement that humanities degree with some applicable technical chops.

Both the Size and Quality of Your Network Matter – It’s who you know more than what you know, that gets you ahead in business. Knowing a small group of folks very well, or a huge smattering of contacts superficially, just won’t cut it. Meet and stay connected to lots of folks, and invest your time developing as many of those relationships as possible. (TIP: Here is my Networking Advice)

You Need At Least 3 Professional Mentors – The most guaranteed path to success is to emulate those who’ve achieved what you seek. You should always have at least 3 people you call mentors who are where you want to be. Their free guidance and counsel will be the most priceless gift you can receive. (TIP: “The Secret to Finding and Keeping Mentors”)

Pick an Idol & Act “As If” – You may not know what to do, but your professional idol does. I often coach my employees to pick the businessperson they most admire, and act “as if.” If you were (fill in the blank) how would he or she carry themselves, make decisions, organize his/her day, accomplish goals? You’ve got to fake it until you make it, so it’s better to fake it as the most accomplished person you could imagine. (Shout out to Tony Robbins for the tip)

Read More Books, Fewer Tweets/Texts – Your generation consumes information in headlines and 140 characters: all breadth and no depth. Creativity, thoughtfulness and thinking skills are freed when you’re forced to read a full book cover to cover. All the keys to your future success, lay in the past experience of others. Make sure to read a book a month (fiction or non-fiction) and your career will blossom.

Spend 25% Less Than You Make – When your material needs meet or exceed your income, you’re sabotaging your ability to really make it big. Don’t shackle yourself with golden handcuffs (a fancy car or an expensive apartment). Be willing and able to take 20% less in the short term, if it could mean 200% more earning potential. You’re nothing more than penny wise and pound-foolish if you pass up an amazing new career opportunity to keep an extra little bit of income. No matter how much money you make, spend 25% less to support your life. It’s a guaranteed formula to be less stressed and to always have the flexibility to pursue your dreams.

Your Reputation is Priceless, Don’t Damage It – Over time, your reputation is the most valuable currency you have in business. It’s the invisible key that either opens or closes doors of professional opportunity. Especially in an age where everything is forever recorded and accessible, your reputation has to be guarded like the most sacred treasure. It’s the one item that, once lost, you can never get back.

The #1 Career Mistake Capable People Make

ORIGINAL: LinkedIn

Greg McKeown

December 06, 2012

I recently reviewed a resume for a colleague who was trying to define a clearer career strategy. She has terrific experience. And yet, as I looked through it I could see the problem she was concerned about: she had done so many good things in so many different fields it was hard to know what was distinctive about her.

As we talked it became clear the resume was only the symptom of a deeper issue. In an attempt to be useful and adaptable she has said yes to too many good projects and opportunities. She has ended up feeling overworked and underutilized. It is easy to see how people end up in her situation:

Step 1: Capable people are driven to achieve.

Step 2: Other people see they are capable and give them assignments.

Step 3: Capable people gain a reputation as "go to" people. They become "good old [insert name] who is always there when you need him." There is lots right with this, unless or until...

Step 4: Capable people end up doing lots of projects well but are distracted from what would otherwise be their highest point of contribution which I define as the intersection of talent, passion and market (see more on this in the Harvard Business Review article The Disciplined Pursuit of Less). Then, both the company and the employee lose out.

When this happens, some of the responsibility lies with out-of-touch managers who are too busy or distracted to notice the very best use of their people. But some of the responsibility lies with us. Perhaps we need to be more deliberate and discerning in navigating our own careers.

In the conversation above, we spent some time to identify my colleague's Highest Point of Contribution and develop a plan of action for a more focused career strategy.

We followed a simple process similar to one I write about here: If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will. My friend is not alone. Indeed, in coaching and teaching managers and executives around the world it strikes me that failure to be conscientious about this represents the #1 mistake, in frequency, I see capable people make in their careers.

Using a camping metaphor, capable people often add additional poles of the same height to their career tent. We end up with 10, 20 or 30 poles of the same height, somehow hoping the tent will go higher. I don't just mean higher on the career ladder either. I mean higher in terms of our ability to contribute.

The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can "own" in another person’s mind. People can't think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us but people can only think of us as one thing first. At any one time there is only one phrase that can follow our name. Might we be better served by asking, at least occasionally, whether the various projects we have add up to a longer pole?

I saw this illustrated some time ago in one of the more distinctive resumes I have seen. It belonged to a Stanford Law School Professor [there it is: the single phrase that follows his name, the longest pole in his career tent]. His resume was clean and concise. For each entry there was one impressive title/role/school and a succinct description of what he had achieved. Each sentence seemed to say more than ten typical bullet points in many resumes I have seen. When he was at university he had been the student body president, under "teaching" he was teacher of the year and so on.

Being able to do many things is important in many jobs today. Broad understanding also is a must. But developing greater discernment about what is distinctive about us can be a great advantage. Instead of simply doing more things we need to find, at every phase in our careers, our highest point of contribution.

Global R&D spending. Graphic detail

ORIGINAL: The Economist

by Economist.com

Oct 30th 2012

TOYOTA spent more on research and development (R&D) than any other company in the world in 2011, according to "Global Innovation 1,000". This report compiled by Booz & Company, a consultancy, looks at the companies with the 1,000 biggest R&D budgets. Toyota increased its 2010 spending by 16.5%, and the car industry as a whole increased spending by $13.2 billion, largely to meet fuel economy standards and improve electronics. Two health-care companies, Roche and Pfizer, had topped the 2010 table, but dropped to third and fourth places after reducing spending in 2011. Yet the health-care industry still supplied three of the five biggest budgets, and accounted for 21% of the $603 billion spent on R&D by the 1,000 companies. It is not the most lavish-spending industry, though: that title goes to computing and electronics, whose firms spent 28% of the total R&D expenditure and also increased spending more than any other sector (by $13.4 billion). Overall R&D spending in 2011 grew for the second year running.

2011 R &D spending ($bn) , R&D as a % of Sales.

Biodiversidad & Desarrollo.

ORIGINAL: Instituto Humboldt

Neuroscience Revolution: How Parents Can Help Develop Their Child’s Brain

ORIGINAL: Our Kids

Michelle Eisen

12/07/2012 BY MICHELLE EISEN LEAVE A COMMENT

Interested in some new ways to engage your children this summer? You can develop their interests and life skills by doing simple every day activities! Michelle Eisen highlights five ways to help develop your children’s brains that translate to real life experiences throughout their lives.

Glen Bernard Camp – Photograph by Mike Pochwat

The great thing about being a parent is that you have the power and opportunity to help a child grow into the best he can be from the moment he enters this world. 
The great thing about being a child, is that you have the opportunity to learn quickly, and take in a great deal of information. At birth, a child is born with 100 billion neurons, and each neuron sends information to thousands of other neurons through connections called synapses.

As children develop, learn, and take part in new experiences, the number of synapses (connections) greatly increase. Connections which are never or rarely used are eliminated. Because of this rapid synaptic growth and destruction during the early years, such emphasis is placed onto early learning in the school system, and teaching pre-literacy skills at home. Whether you love to bake, build, garden, or paint, you have the power to use what you know to increase your child’s cognitive ability. Taking advantage of the teachable moments these activities allow can actually increase your child’s competency in math and literacy later on in life.

Looking for meaningful and productive activities for your kids to do this summer? Here are top five ways you can use what you know to help develop your child’s brain:

Baking Buddies—Baking is a great way to increase your child’s self-efficacy in working with different foods in the kitchen, increasing the likelihood that (s)he will cook healthy meals for him or herself later on in life. Through baking, children can learn measurement using fractions—a subject most students have trouble grasping. All of a sudden, fractions become tangible. With these experiences under their belts, in grade 8, when those students are asked for 1/3 of ¾, they can recall placing three quarter cups of flour in the cake, which would mean that 1/3 of that would be ¼! As your child becomes more experienced with baking, they will learn to double recipes (double fractions), and halve recipes (divide fractions). Not only will these children be able to follow the standard procedure for multiplying fractions, they will conceptually understand the math, and be able to apply these skills in real-world settings. What about Science? Baking allows children to understand scientific concepts such as viscosity, melting and boiling points, changes of state (solid-liquid), and chemical reactions (using yeast to make bread or desserts).Vocabulary opportunities: measuring cup, egg beater, food processor, temperature, mixing bowl, spatula, rubber bowl scraper, blade, greasing the pan, and teaspoon.

Are you someone who likes to build? Involving your child in (safe) building, is another great way to give him/her the math advantage and encourage the development of other cognitive skills such as mental rotation and planning. Through building activities, children will have tangible experiences to refer back to when learning about measurement and conversions (ex: meter to centimeter)—another area students struggle with in school.Vocabulary opportunities: tape measure, level, saw, goggles, blueprint, drywall, wrench, screwdriver, hammer, draft, brackets, sand paper, and drill.

Digging up the dirt—Gardening can involve planning and spatial reasoning when figuring out where each type of flower should be planted. Perhaps you would like the early and late bloomers spread out evenly throughout the garden, allowing for a full summer of colour, or perhaps you have to account for required plant conditions such as amount of sunlight, or soil drainage. Having to keep all of these factors in mind when planning a garden is great mental exercise, especially for the growing brain. Additionally, taking into account the height each plant will grow to when planning your garden will allow your child the ability to later conceptualize standardized and non-standardized units of measurement—a concept introduced as early as Kindergarten with non-standardized units, until grade two, when standardized units such as centimeters are introduced.Vocabulary opportunities: shovel, rake, roots, loam, moss, lilies, orchids, cultivate, annual, perennial, drainage, sprout, larvae, cocoon, trowel, and wheelbarrow.

Parenting with Paint—Whether you love to paint pictures, furniture, or your home, involving your children in the process can teach them about colour (Science), volume (Math), and texture (Art). Have your child think about and suggest how much paint you would need to buy to repaint the entire kitchen, for example. Would one can be enough, or would another one be required? Ask your child to estimate the total cost before you arrive at the cash: “If one can of paint costs $10.00, and we are buying two cans of paint, how much do you think the total will be when we cash out?” If painting a picture together, only offer red, blue, and yellow, and ask how you could create the colour orange to paint a pumpkin, or the colour green to paint grass in a landscape.Vocabulary opportunities: cyan, maroon, mixing, smudge, lighter, darker, blend, even, texture, glaze, trim, baseboards, pigment, hue, palette, prime, matte, and saturation.

Collaboration is Key—The goal of promoting early brain development in children can be accomplished by providing children with as many different exposures to the same concept, allowing for an increase in synapses (connections) in the brain. An increase in synapses allows for deeper understanding and effective application to new and real world circumstances. Enrolling your child in a camp or private schoolcan be an effective way of providing him/her with opportunities to extend his/her learning, thus increasing the number of neural synapses.Some camps which are sure to extend your child’s learning experience are:

• The Chef Upstairs- A one-week summer cooking camp located in Toronto, which will teach your children through experience, the skills of cooking and baking, along with healthy eating habits.
• Toronto Waldorf School Camp- The Adventure/Creative camp offered by Waldorf for ages 10-14, is an adventure camp taking place at Camp Kettleby and Albion Hills Conservation Area. Campers will not only have the opportunity for biking, hiking, and orienteering, but they will be able to extend their skills in building through creating and carving wood.
• Camp Otterdale- This camp in Lombardy, Ontario offers campers an opportunity to practice their woodworking and glass etching skills, along with golf, drama, mountain biking, tennis, hiking, and more.
• Centauri Summer Arts Camp- This camp offers children summer programs in painting, drawing, design, photography, stop-motion animation, and comic creation. This is a great opportunity for your child to take what she has learned through painting at home, and use these skills in a new context, furthering her connections and understanding.
• Glen Bernard Summer Camp- This all-girls camp is devoted to teaching environmental sustainability through the use of solar energy, composting toilets, a solar boat, and more. They run an earth education program, allowing campers to interact and learn about sustainable technologies. Throughout the year, they also offer Outdoor Education Centres for co-ed school groups.
• Keep in mind that the more opportunities children have to expand their knowledge through real-life experiences, the less trouble they will have learning new concepts later on in school. When children can use prior knowledge to help them make sense of a new concept, the learning process becomes easier and more enjoyable. Whether it is baking, building, gardening, or choosing a new colour to paint your living room, involving your children in everyday activities will prove to be not only a rewarding learning experience, but one in which you form an even stronger and invaluable bond.

If you are looking for some enriching activities to do with your child, please feel free to contact me for ideas at: FeedingTheNeedToSucceed@gmail.com

* * * * *

Have you tried some of these activities with your kids already to help develop their interests and skills? How else do you engage your children? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.

Related:

• Five Ways Neuroscience Will Change Education
• How Neuroscience Opened My Eyes to Helping My Kids Reach Their Full Potential
• Gardening With Children is a Challenge
• The Art of Healthy Eating
• Five Ways to Encourage Children to Eat Healthy

Michelle Eisen

Michelle Eisen founded the Feeding the Need to Succeed initiative in 2011, providing parents with accessible tools to help their children reach their full potential. Through her education, teaching experience, consultant roles, and research in music, literacy and nutrition, she has become an expert in child development, devoting her time to bringing research to practice. You can contact her at FeedingTheNeedToSucceed@gmail.com or Twitter: @Feed2Succeed

Formulación de los planes de manejo de los manglares del Golfo de Tribugá

ORIGINAL: Instituto Humboldt

Expositor: Jorge Enrique Murillo 

Comunidad: Consejo Comunitario Mayor Los Riscales

Lugar: Golfo de Tribugá - Nuquí, Chocó

Organización de apoyo: Marviva 

Resumen:

La comunidad del Consejo Comunitario Mayor los Riscales está elaborando de manera colectiva los planes de manejo de los manglares del Golfo de Tribugá en Nuquí. Este proceso se basa en el Plan de Etnodesarrollo: visión de vida de las comunidades negras del Golfo de Tribugá 2007 -- 2020. Para la elaboración de estos planes de manejo se han realizado diferentes ejercicios de caracterización y planificación entre los que encontramos el intercambio de experciencias con otras comunidades, la zonificación comunitaria de los maglares, la caracterización socioeconómica de los usurios del manglar, la caracterización de la piangua (Anadara similis y Anadara tuberculosa), la caracterización forestal del manglar, el desarrollo de lineamientos de manejo de los manglare; estos planes de manejo y su proceso de elaboracion se han divulgado en la comunidad a través de publicaciones y materiales informativos.

After Rio+20, developing countries must take the lead

ORIGINAL: SciDev

David Dickson

29 June 2012

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Leadership from developing countries will be key to global sustainable development

Last week's summit has confirmed that sustainable development will only be achieved through the political leadership of developing countries.

Two and a half years ago, the Copenhagen climate change conference (COP15) ended in rancorous and highly public disagreement between developed and developing nations on what was needed to prevent further global warming .

The outcome proved an intense embarrassment to the host nation, Denmark.

From the beginning of negotiations over the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (dubbed Rio+20 ), which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last week, it was widely reported that the Brazilian government was desperate to avoid the same fate.

SCIENCE AT RIO+20

This article is part of our coverage of Rio+20 — the UN Conference on Sustainable Development — which took place on 20-22 June 2012. For other articles, go to Science at Rio+20

Although Brazil's determination was only one contributory factor, the result was the agreement, by all 188 participating nations, on an outcome document that was filled with aspirations and exhortations about the need for the world to move to a more sustainable path of economic and social development, but lacking any firm commitment to the more painful steps needed to achieve this goal.

Inevitably, this outcome has satisfied virtually no-one engaged in the process (apart from the host country).

But the increased focus that it provided on the political realities on which the Copenhagen meeting foundered — and which Rio+20 ducked — has itself been a significant step forward.

Taking the lead

What became clearer than ever at Rio was that the key to global sustainable development does not lie in the logical arguments coming from proponents in the developed world, including its scientific communities, however passionately they are delivered.

Rather, it now lies in the combination of political muscle and imaginative thinking in the developing world, particularly the so-called "emerging economies" of countries such as Brazil, China and India.

In Rio, these countries insisted, quite legitimately, that a global commitment to making the transition to "green economies" is only valid if it includes atransfer of significant financial and technical resources from the North to the South.

Their argument was that such a transfer would compensate for the fact that this transition is necessary because of the consumption patterns of the North.

Furthermore, the emerging economies — and China in particular — are coming to realise that sustainable development is in their own interest.

Their own internal environmental problems, from air pollution to an increase in flooding related to climate change , need to be addressed urgently as the unacceptable by-products of economic growth.

At the same time, a combination of technical ingenuity and low labour costs makes them well placed to become the leading producers of sustainable technologies for the rest of the world­ — as China has already shown in exporting solar energy technologies to Africa, for example.

Galvanising the grassroots

The organisers of Rio+20 were keen to emphasise that even as the formal proceedings turned out to be disappointing, this had been partially compensated for by the enormous networking opportunities the meeting provided for sustainable development stakeholders .

In particular, by the end of the meeting, more than 700 pledges — valued at over US$500 billion — had been registered for concrete actions through, for example, individual institutional commitments or partnership agreements.

Each of these was required to commit to quantifiable outcomes within a fixed timeframe. Together they show that a massive global commitment to sustainable development already exists, even without promises of resource transfers from political leaders.

Indeed, this outcome appears to confirm what many have been arguing: that truly sustainable economies can only be built from the grassroots, and with the full inclusion of community groups and other interested stakeholders.

Reigning in corporate power

But even if grassroots or voluntary initiatives are a necessary condition for sustainable development, they are not sufficient.

In particular, it ignores the extent to which the key directions and components of economic growth — such as a continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources supported by generous subsidies — are inevitably set at the top, rather than the bottom, of the political pyramid.

Furthermore, without an all-embracing political framework to ensure coherence between individual actions, each stakeholder remains — equally inevitably — motivated primarily by their own self-interest (or that of their stakeholders or shareholders), rather than a commitment to a common good. 

For example, many of the 700 individual pledges registered at Rio involved individual commitments from corporations keen to be seen to be "going green".

Ironically, however, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundlandt, head of the Brundlandt Commission, which first coined the phrase "sustainable development" in the 1980s, accused corporate lobbyists of being partly responsible for the disappointing outcome of the formal negotiations. [1]

Paving the future

The scientific meetings held in the run-up to Rio+20 — including both the Planet Under Pressure meeting in London in April, and the International Council for Science and UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development , held two weeks ago in Rio itself — both underlined the urgency of taking action on many fronts.

Rio+20 opened the door for action on some of these, such as protecting the marine environment or mountain ecosystems . It also endorsed closer interaction between scientific communities and policymakers — another essential element of any future strategy.

But the meeting also highlighted the political challenge of changing the course of a global economy still wedded largely to fossil fuels and non-sustainable patterns of consumption.

It also showed that the developed world lacks the commitment to make the necessary changes and accept the painful consequences, pursuing the familiar maxim that "turkeys don't vote for Christmas".

It is now up to the developing world and its emerging economies to show that they can do better — for example, by taking on a key role in defining the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals — and providing the political muscle to make this happen.

Concerns about embarrassment over possible failure should not stop them from taking the necessary political risks.

David Dickson 

Editor, SciDev.Net

This article is part of our coverage on Science at Rio+20 . Read more in our blog .

REFERENCES

[1] Rio summit ends with warning on corporate power (BBC News, 2012)

As Growth Ebbs, Brazil Powers Up Its Bulldozers

ORIGINAL: NYTimes

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: June 21, 2012

Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Contractors are competing to lure workers from other government investment priorities to work on an irrigation project in northeast Brazil’s hinterland.

IPOJUCA, Brazil — More than 40,000 laborers swarm the port complex here in northeast Brazil, building a refinery for the state oil company. Five thousand others toil at a shipyard, another government-led project. Real estate prices are soaring and unemployment is falling in this region along the Atlantic coast, once known for its festering poverty.

Joblessness is falling in Ipojuca, once known for its poverty. The New York Times 

In a show of the extraordinary sway that Brazil’s government wields in nearly every important area of the economy, President Dilma Rousseff is accelerating an array of stimulus projects throughout the country aimed at blunting a slowdown that has reduced Brazil’s economic growth to a snail’s pace.

Ms. Rousseff’s assertiveness in enhancing the government’s role in molding economic policy is not wholly unlike China’s state-led investment, an increasingly popular model in the developing world. Brazil’s stimulus spending has helped preserve jobs, keeping unemployment at a historic low of 5.8 percent, down from 13 percent a decade ago. Months into a sharp slowdown, Ms. Rousseff’s approval ratings stand at more than 60 percent.

But in an echo of the debate about heavy government borrowing in the United States and Europe after the global downturn, Ms. Rouseff’s moves are starting to meet resistance in Brazil. Some experts fear that Brazil is becoming too dependent on government intervention to smooth the ups and downs of an economy that remains tied to commodity cycles; others fear that the creation of state-supported champions in the business world give the government even greater power to dictate policy shifts, potentially eroding Brazil’s exposure to market forces.

A refinery near Recife. One economist has criticized “projects of pharaonic proportions.” Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Economists here still have unhappy memories of the aftermath of the “Brazilian miracle” of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a state-directed boom fostered fast growth for a time, but ended in rapid inflation, low productivity and a radical restructuring of the economy.

“The government is pressing ahead with projects of pharaonic proportions, when areas like basic sanitation need urgent attention,” said Sergio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo business school, who has written widely on Brazil’s state capitalism. The investment push is already showing signs of strain. So many infrastructure projects have been approved at once, including stadiums for the World Cup soccer tournament in 2014 and hydroelectric plants in the Amazon, that the government is having a hard time spending all the money allocated. For instance, just a fifth of the $7 billion budgeted for highway projects in 2012 has been spent.

In Ipojuca, contractors on state projects are luring workers from other government investment priorities, like the construction of a network of concrete canals in the Sertão, the semiarid hinterland in northeast Brazil. Delays and cost overruns, partly because of labor shortages, have plagued big stretches of that project, which is part of a $4 billion effort to divert the flow of the São Francisco River to villages in need of irrigation.

Ms. Rousseff vigorously defends her response to the slowdown (Brazil eked out 0.2 percent growth in the first quarter). In a speech this month, she drew a stark comparison to the austerity policies in Europe, where more than half of the young people in some countries are without jobs. “We don’t have a vision which justifies an adjustment leaving 54 percent of a country’s young people without work,” she said. “We never thought that way; our policy is clearly in defense of employment.”

Ms. Rousseff’s position reflects Brazil’s fiscal running room, since improvements in tax collection and the earlier surge in the economy helped bolster state finances. But her thinking is also rooted in Brazil’s strong tradition of government leadership of the economy.

The officials at the helm of Brazil’s state-controlled companies argue that the nation still needs such sprawling projects to consolidate the gains in reducing inequality. “It’s a catalyst of job creation,” Maria das Graças Foster, the chief executive of the national oil company, Petrobras, said in an interview, referring to policies requiring Petrobras to buy Brazilian-made ships even though state-supported shipyards are mired in delays.

Brazil has a web of state-controlled energy companies, including Petrobras, and banks like Banco do Brasil, Latin America’s largest lender by assets.

More subtly, but with perhaps even greater lasting impact, the authorities also wield economic influence through the National Bank for Social and Economic Development, an institution in Rio de Janeiro that has mushroomed, lending four times as much as the World Bank does around the globe.

Like the World Bank, the national development bank finances big infrastructure projects aimed at alleviating poverty and boosting development. Founded in 1952, the bank remained under state control throughout Brazil’s privatization wave in the 1990s, even financing many of the government auctions of state companies.

Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government, from 2003 to 2010, the bank aggressively expanded, acquiring minority stakes in a number of private companies. Some are huge, like JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker. Others are start-ups, like Bug Agentes Biológicos, which mass-produces wasps to combat the larvae threatening soybean crops.

Altogether, the development bank, along with the pension funds of big state companies, now hold stakes in nearly 200 Brazilian companies, up from 95 a decade ago. In some cases, these holdings allow the government to oust powerful corporate leaders. They showed that capacity in 2011, forcing Roger Agnelli, chief executive of the mining giant Vale, to resign after he upset officials by firing 1,300 employees and slashing investments in Brazil.

Ms. Rousseff’s government is showing its teeth to Brazil’s financial elite again this year. She has seized on the economic slowdown as an opportunity to persuade Brazil’s private banks to lower interest rates, which until recently were among the highest in the world, by pushing Banco do Brasil and Caixa Econômica Federal, another large state bank, to cut their own rates.

Initially, the response from Brazil’s powerful banking establishment was tepid. “You can take a horse to the riverbank, but you can’t force it to drink water,” Rubens Sardenberg, chief economist of the powerful Febraban association of banks in São Paulo, said in May.

The reaction from Ms. Rousseff’s office was blunt. “The horse can die of thirst,” said an official in her government, reflecting the president’s irritation. The banking group promptly withdrew the economist’s comments, and private banks started following the giant state banks in lowering rates.

Perhaps aware of such reactions, Brazil’s business establishment rarely voices explicit criticism of state intervention in the economy. But while Brazil remains far more receptive to private investment than neighboring Argentina, concern is nevertheless building as growth stalls.

While bowing to her wishes, some business interests are starting to chafe under Ms. Rousseff’s interventionist policies. “We urgently need to shift our course,” the influential business magazine Exame said in an editorial this month, complaining about what it called Ms. Rousseff’s “strong hand.”

Concerns have emerged over growing consumer debt, with nine million Brazilians taking out loans in 2011 for the first time. At the same time, the valuations of some of Brazil’s largest companies have declined, and the currency, the real, has tumbled against the dollar.

Ipojuca is in Pernambuco State, where both the advantages and drawbacks are on display of the heavy reliance on the government for investment decisions. On the positive side is Brazil’s resilience at a time of global economic turbulence.

“Of course, we’re concerned about contagion reaching our shores, but there is no sense of crisis at the moment,” said Frederico da Costa Amancio, chief executive of the Port of Suape, home to the Petrobras refinery that is under construction alongside factories that produce everything from wind-power turbines to potato chips.

But in villages like Agrovila Seis in the interior, state investment has been a mixed blessing. After a windfall in 2007, when the earth-moving machines arrived and foremen started hiring workers to dig canals intended to divert the São Francisco River, the optimism dissipated after contractors began suspending work last year, raising fears of white elephants on the Sertão.

Ms. Rousseff personally visited the work sites in February. Later, she vowed to increase the number of workers on the project by the end of the year to 6,500 from 4,500. Still, Agrovila Seis is limping along for now, reflecting the disarray of one of Brazil’s largest infrastructure projects. Empty housing for workers gives part of the village the feel of a ghost town.

“I try not to feel despondent about my debts,” said Eliane da Silva, a restaurant owner in the village who took out loans to buy equipment; her clientele, made up largely of work crews, has plunged. “I try to imagine where all the money went for this project.”

Brasil: La Presidente Rousseff llama al mundo a crecer en equilibrio y no destruir el ambiente

ORIGINAL: MasVerdeDigital

La presidenta brasileña, Dilma Rousseff, encabezó esta semana la celebración del Día Mundial del Ambiente en su país y, como anfitriona de la próxima Conferencia de la ONU sobre Desarrollo Sostenible Río+20, instó al mundo a “crecer, incluir y proteger”.

En esa frase la jefa de Estado resumió los objetivos que deben primar en la Conferencia Río+20, que desde su punto de vista debe apuntar a promover políticas de crecimiento económico volcadas a la promoción social de los más pobres, pero asociadas a prácticas de desarrollo que ayuden a preservar el ambiente.

Rousseff hizo un detallado repaso de los avances registrados en Brasil en materia de protección de la biodiversidad y puso especial énfasis en la reducción de las tasas de deforestación amazónica que se han registrado en el país desde 1988.

En coincidencia con el Día Mundial del Medio Ambiente, del que Brasil es anfitrión este año, se conoció un informe oficial según el cual la Amazonía brasileña perdió 6.418 kilómetros cuadrados de selvas entre agosto de 2010 y julio de 2011, lo que supone la menor área para ese período desde que se comenzó a medir ese indicador, en 1988.

Según Rousseff, quien anunció la creación de dos nuevos parques nacionales, la ampliación de otros tres, y diversas medidas de apoyo a los pueblos indígenas, Brasil “es uno de los países que más avanza en la protección de su biodiversidad y la construcción de un modelo de desarrollo sustentable”.

En un contexto más global, la presidenta alertó de que la crisis financiera puede ser usada como“excusa” para profundizar modelos de desarrollo basados en mayores agresiones al medio ambiente e instó al mundo a “no permitir” que “triunfen esos argumentos”.

La jefa de Estado brasileña afirmó que, en este momento, “con parte de la humanidad en crisis”, es “fundamental discutir nuevos marcos de desarrollo que articulen medio ambiente, crecimiento económico e inclusión social”.

Citó informes de la ONU que alertan sobre la posibilidad de que en un futuro cercano se agudicen la escasez de agua y alimentos a nivel global y sostuvo que “no se puede permitir que la crisis generada por los excesos de ganancias del gran capital sea excusa para perder aún más el control sobre los recursos naturales”.

Por su parte el director ejecutivo del PNUMA coincidió con Rousseff y afirmó que “el cambio climático es real, es un peligro para las sociedades” y además “amenaza” la seguridad alimentaria y los ecosistemas “como nunca antes en la historia”.

Según Steiner, “las respuestas elaboradas en el pasado no han resultado en soluciones a futuro”, por lo que la conferencia Río+20 debe ser considerada por el mundo como el inicio de un debate que conduzca a compromisos “serios” y “definitivos”.

En su opinión, “un resultado de Río+20 que no aborde la pobreza y no lleve a modelos económicos de no agresión al medio ambiente no será satisfactorio para nadie”.

Fuente: EFE, Agencias