MIT Announces Top 35 Innovators Under 35

nursegirl writes "MIT's Technology Review has posted their top 35 innovators under the age of 35 for 2006. The 2006 Young Innovator is Joshua Schachter, of del.icio.us fame. The 2006 Young Humanitarian is Christina Galitsky from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Galitsky has done various projects related to energy efficiency, from introducing energy efficient practices to wineries, to helping bring stoves that use less wood to Sudanese refugees, to working on cheap ways to filter arsenic from wells in Bangladesh. Technology Review has also published a related article, titled 10 Ways To Think about Innovation."

Comments

Interesting Indeed

[Iron (III) Chloride]

I was particularly interested in the E. coli pictoral representation as well as the cheap way to sequence bacterial genomes. I think awards like these are obviously good to encourage interesting new developments among what seems to be mainly grad students ... they don't have to wait until they adopt a "career" to do something useful and important.

news flash:

[macadamia_harold]

Technology Review has also published a related article, titled 10 Ways To Think about Innovation.

Yeah, well here's a news flash: Corporate America views innovation only as that which can be converted into profit.

Re:news flash:

[QuantumFTL]

Yeah, well here's a news flash: Corporate America views innovation only as that which can be converted into profit.

I'm not sure that level of cynicism is exactly warrented... I mean strictly speaking, that's essentially correct, however I would add that corporations have also (at least, historically) viewed things that had potential to be monetarized as innovative and important.

Indeed many (if not all) innovations which are undertaken to serve the profit motive are extremely beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. Often times corporations will conduct basic research for the prestige/marketing, to attract highly skilled workers, or banking on long-term returns.

I would humbly suggest that economic impact (though sometimes difficult to measure) is often a very good way to estimate the importance of an innovation. After all, if it's not impacting the economy, directly or indirectly, how is it impacting people's lives?

Disguising data as white noise

[prakslash]

May be I am missing something but isn't this just a fancy way of doing a One Time Pad.

The only difference being that (a) the key is a digitized random laser signal instead of, say, a random number generator (b) the message is encoded bit-by-bit and sent over a wire in real time instead of being sent to a file.

To extract the plain message, you need an identical "white-noise" at the receiving end to cancel the original disguising "white-noise" signal. Therefore, this method will suffer from the same disadvantage as an OTP, that is, if - as a security policy - you need to set a different disguising white-noise signal everyday before sending a message, how do you share it with the receiver so that he/she may decode the message.