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1 days ago
Stay calm, stick with your vision and business fundamentals, and you’ll survive and perhaps even thrive in rough economic times, counsel these entrepreneurial aces. In a conversation with the Kauffman Foundation’s Bo Fishback, panelists reflect on their experiences bringing novel tech products to market and new companies to fruition, in good times and bad. Daphne Zohar attributes much of her company’s success to its unusual approach: PureTech Ventures is an institutional entrepreneur that “starts companies from scratch, backwards, looking for an unmet need.” Her team investigates thousands of technologies brewing in academic labs, then, says Zohar, “we brainstorm and come up with ideas ourselves, forming a company in a proactive way.” Zohar’s group seeks out the very best researchers from the start -- the first step in building what she calls an “entrepreneurial trinity: people, money, technology.” Zohar has been starting companies since she was a teenager, and ...8 days ago
Recalling a lecture he gave at MIT in 2005, Alan Davidson returns to the questions of the impact of public policy on the way technology is evolving in the Internet space. Instead of viewing it as a lawyer for a public policy interest group—his previous role—he now approaches it from his new perspective as a public policy advisor to Google's engineering design group, counseling them on how to build products and run a business. He encourages his fellow engineers "to think broadly […] about their role in the world […], to be more than bench-tied engineers and more involved in the deep social debates of the time." These questions remain: What are the big issues facing the Internet and, specifically, Google; and what are the lessons that have been learned? The old Conventional Wisdom said censorship could not be stopped, only contained. But Davidson believes that in the last 10-15 years there has been a backlash from governments, large institutions, and influential ...10 days ago
The “chief inspired protagonist” of one of the nation’s oldest and most successful green manufacturers apologizes for delivering a talk “more depressing than expected.” While discussing the challenges facing businesses attempting to transition to a more just and sustainable economy, Jeffrey Hollender enumerates the many reasons he’s feeling bleak these days. While some pundits claim the recession is over, Hollender sees continued deep problems, with almost one in five Americans under- or unemployed. The stock market has recovered only because of the “belief that the total financial system won’t collapse in the short term,” he says. Corporations have learned to improve quarterly earnings by quickly “getting rid of a disposable asset -- their people,” and Hollender’s worried this behavior “will lead to a downward spiral.” But his greater concern involves the underlying structure of our economic system, which makes it especially difficult for people to acknowledge and then ...13 days ago
The hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in November rocked the world of climate change science, energized global warming skeptics, and threatened to derail policy negotiations at Copenhagen. These panelists, who differ on the scientific implications of the released emails, generally agree that the episode will have long-term consequences for the larger scientific community. “What we have here,” says Kerry Emanuel, are “thousands of emails collectively showing scientists hard at work, trying to figure out the meaning of evidence that confronts them. Among a few messages, there are a few lines showing the human failings of a few scientists…” Emanuel believes that “scientifically, it means nothing,” because the controversy doesn’t challenge the overwhelming evidence supporting anthropogenic warming. He is far more concerned with the well-funded “public relations campaign” to drown out or distort the message of climate science, which ...15 days ago
In this complex narrative documenting paradigm shifts in developmental thinking, Carol Gilligan defines the very capacity of our human nature—to have a voice and to communicate—as the grounds of both love and democratic citizenship. Dissecting the roots of healthy ethical resistance, Gilligan weaves together developmental psychology, neurobiology, ethics, and politics in ethical and moral decisions. Gilligan provides an overview of the evolution of her research and thinking about gender as they relate to ethics. She recounts in her early research that she was initially blind to gender issues. These issues became strikingly clear to her after completing one study with men about their moral dilemmas to serve in the Vietnam War or resist the draft, versus a group of women faced with the moral choice to continue or to terminate a pregnancy. Though this experience she realized that all previous studies of moral and psychological development had been based on men only. This ...
