Institute For The Future

Taking a page out of Greece’s playbook, the peeved treasurer of America’s largest state fired off letters this week to the chiefs of Goldman Sachs and other banks questioning their marketing of credit default swaps on California’s debt. The instruments, he complained, “wrongly brand our bonds as a greater risk than those issued by such nations as Kazakhstan.”

A group of higher education institutions led by the University of California, Santa Cruz is negotiating to build a $1 billion campus with nearly 3 million square feet at NASA Research Park at Moffett Field alongside a Google Inc. satellite campus announced earlier this year.

NASA and General Motors announced on Tuesday that they planned to send a robot to the International Space Station, with the eventual goal of having it help the astronauts there.

When companies and even countries build centers of innovation, they make two mistakes. The first is defining innovation narrowly— as technology. Technical advantages are costly to achieve and often short lived because everyone else is looking in the same place. The second mistake is trying to impose a solution on a community or organization. Telling people what to do or exhorting them to be good seldom works, especially in the field of sustainable design. Creating vast, top-down global replacements for our malfunctioning industrial systems won’t work. Instead, we must “grow” their replacements from a multitude of small and widely distributed experiments.

This nation’s coasts and oceans contribute much to the United States economy. For the past ten years, the National Ocean Economics Program (NOEP) has compiled time-series data that track economic activities, demographics, natural resource production, non-market values, and federal expenditures in the U.S. coastal zone both on land and in the water.

In the middle of San Francisco’s financial district sits Touch Revolution, a start-up that just hit the scene this year. As the name suggests, Touch Revolution specializes in making touch-screen technology for a wide range of computing devices.

Mobile phone software that allows scientists to send, retrieve and map data from remote areas could benefit scientists in developing countries, but some barriers must be overcome first, a study finds. The EpiCollect software runs on 'smartphones' — mobile phones with additional features such as web connectivity and PC functionality — and allows researchers or members of the public to collect, record, access and map data, photos and videos by connecting to a central online database.

Jon Phillips is a developer living in San Francisco and Beijing while growing Fabricatorz.com and "new" media projects. His notable involvements include Open Source and Free Culture movements, Inkscape, Open Clip Art Library, building community for Creative Commons, and now Status.Net.

huge repositoty of open design materials

paper describing issues around proprietary nature of most manufacturing systems and introduces an open source manufacturing stack called MTConnect

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.