the engagement with intimacy
is like a sailing boat in the sea
facing tsunami
or river in spate,
it can turn every thing upside down.
But then it helps uncover those sides
of ourselves which we can not face otherwise,
decide! today, many are terrified of intimacy, why
sept 12

Story of a missing pearl

One day a little girl, naughty and a bit unpredictable was playing with dried leaves under a tree. The birds were taking bath in a pool of water nearby. She asked the birds, why were they feeling so hot, it was not so warm after all? One of the younger bird replied, do we take bath only when we feel warm outside, what if I was feeling warm inside? The little girl had not thought about that, but being not given to easily accept defeat in argumentation, she asked, “that is ok, little bird, but then tell me, why do you flutter your wings so hard after taking bath, why not let the water evaporate slowly and slowly so that you can keep cool longer?” The bird was not going to let the girl get away with that. She said, “you know, when I flutter my wings, some drops look like pearls when sun rays pass through them, some fall on dried leaves with which you were playing and some soak other birds tempting them to also take bath”. And as if as an after thought, she added, that the leaves which received drops of water, became manure faster, did not fly with the breeze too far, being heavy and enriched the roots of the trees under which we are talking. But some drop disappear, in the thin air. She asked the bird, “do u know where?”
The little bird was speechless, she did not know, but do you?

Kennedy space centre: launch

Majora

“U have to look outside, to look inside”
Eleanor Roosevelt: if substitute to petrol was to be found, it will be, because it was done in past, 1948

South Bronx poorest district
World’s largest food distribution centre

Less trees, parks that most places in the country

Lungs are linked to brain: proximity to fossil fuel emission source and poor intelligence
We do things not bec these are easy, but because these are difficult

We should not use the term waste water, we cant waste people any more, it is a process which is not productive

Peter gleick: pacific instt

Solving water problems solves education, health and food problems,
Post apartheid program: working for water, removing alien vegetation from watershed, restored ecosystems, gave work, restored flows, hugely successful program;

We cant forget that technology has unintended consequences: poor water quality; clean ground water, millions of bore water to reach cleaner ground water because surface water was bad, that lead to arsenic problem;

Water weirdos: some solutions violate physics laws and some violate social and or institutional laws

We need to rethink choices we had rejected in past

Mark Tonkin:

Dutyion membrane; absorbs water, plants can be grown from sea water without desalination, put salt water inside these pipes and only vapor of pure water comes out;
70 per cent of all fresh water goes to irrigate crops

What are the limits of the technology:
Sea water was 35k ppm salt
Water being used was 25kppm
Settlement tank:
No power, only gravity==========================trenching between trees—making plant work for water;

Demand for salt: heat is stored in molten salt:

Water testing:

Mark sobsey
Film: inoculate the sample, culture the bacteria: grow the bact in bottle, let it grow, colour change, no quantification, but presence is told;

Absorbent pads for water testing:
Chromegenic agents for testing fecal bacteria;

No water testing facility in ketrina in usa and also in Haiti

Ashok gadgil:
Shallow handpumps: arsenic pollution
140 million people are exposed to arsenic pollution

Arsenic binds to iron electrodes;

Andrew tinka:

Sensors for water quality: rivers, install sensors at a place in river and then monitor the water quality

Innovation is to have floating water sensor

Gps laoded sensor records watr quality along with gps value

Traffic map for water

2 parts per thousand of salt, this is ok for rice

Young salmon tok wrong turn, went toward
Delta
Why was salmon gong down the wrong direction?
Sensor with fish behaviour may be floated and then one coul see why the fish take wrong direction
Emergency response systems floating sensors

One drop: liliana peresa

Nicaragua, ivania: did not have access to safe water
Technical, education and micro credit: tripod approach
Family garden
Drip, roof top water harvest

Floating sensor: Andrew tinka

Seeds from different catchments may enter the water stream and then grow in the cana bed and damage it, floating sensor will tell us where
Vectors movement along water

Nitrate flow form farms to canal
High cost sensor that moves,
New type of business model for monitoring the effluents

Ideal conditions for fish breeding
Wetland health
Low cost nitrate sensor
Navy
Regulatory agencies
Non point becomes the point pollution
72 hours
Turbine at the bottom
Dispenser of chemicals, dyes, to measure the dynamic nature of river, or its properties, various reactions could be measured through release of the small substances

Aquifer by aquifer value of water quality yin deep bores

Air column at different heights and width

Ashok

Mark sobsey

Postage stamp
Mail in absorbent pad
Camera based diagnostic
Idex labs in milk
640 20 camera

Food processing industry may use this strip for quality assurance

Beverages companies

Todd khozein

Plant need based release of water

Six lakh ideas

 

Anil K. Gupta Posted: Feb 25, 2009 at 0353 hrs IST

 

Related Stories:

Micro, small and medium scale enterprises (MSME) are hit hard by the global recession. Large numbers of workers have been laid off. A sector providing so much employment cannot be left to fend for itself; it needs a major transformation, led by entrepreneurs and policy-makers. There are four different levels for transformative policy : stimulating demand; upgrading technology and skills; promoting innovations for developing new products and services; and forging new partnerships between entrepreneurs and R&D institutions, grassroots innovation networks and technology students.

On the first, stimulating demand: distributed manufacturing, pooling the underutilised capacity of those entrepreneurs with lower costs, can help in becoming competitive. Create portals so that a large number of industries can share capacities. Students from engineering and management colleges can participate in a countrywide campaign to identify redundancy, inappropriate shopfloor design, sourcing procedures, waste re-utilisation processes, obsolete technologies, etc. Treating clusters as ecosystems: one unit?s waste becomes another?s input, in industrial symbiosis. Energy saving inevitably leads to higher competitiveness.

 

Upgrading technologies and skills requires many new initiatives, creating capacities and institutional arrangements to help innovation. For instance, in the recent Shodh Yatra in Champaran, I met Birendara Kumar Sinha who has extracted about 12 kg of carbon from one engine of about 12-15 HP in eight to ten months. Carbon credits for attaching pollution control devices to all diesel engines can aid the economy and the environment.

India has more than six lakh technology students. Each does a final-year project. The fate of these projects is unknown. Neither are MSME problems posed to them nor are good projects used by industry. Similar is the fate of thousands of grassroots innovations developed in the informal sector and pooled by an initiative with which I am involved, the Honey Bee Network at the National Innovation Foundation. What we need is a ?Techpedia?, a portal of students? technology projects accessible to industry. Already volunteers from SVNIT, Surat, have collected more than 4500 projects and contacted around 200 colleges.

To stimulate innovation, one has to take several bold measures. To extend the MSME ministry?s current initiatives, one should aim at creating a web presence for at least ten million MSMEs in the next 12-15 months to create demand for Indian MSMEs worldwide. Since many entrepreneurs, particularly in small towns and villages, have minimal Internet access, every rural or small-town petrol pump can become a business centre for agri-business and other enterprises. Financial and business analysts can offer their support at these poly-business centres. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India wants to extend its role in this area.

Millions of industrial workers returning to rural areas can be converted from a crisis to an opportunity by using their skills and industrial attitudes (in some cases, by re-skilling them) to transform the agri- and rural business sector. Similarly, massive rural sanitation and health education campaigns can be launched on the shoulders of re-trained and re-tooled workers. Large numbers of new production-cum-training ITIs can be opened in rural areas, where many of the workers can be trainers.

Many children withdrawn from urban schools may find it difficult to adjust to rural schools. The capacity of Navodaya Vidyalayas may be expanded; industrial workers and supervisors can offer vocational education in the schools all over. Thus, the period of crisis can be used for creating the groundwork for the next round of distributed economic growth.

Creating new partnerships with both informal and formal sections of the R&D sector is very important for boosting the innovation potential of MSMEs. Some of the urgent steps required are:

 

(a) a technology audit of MSMEs by formal R&D institutions, (b) creating a national innovation fund for MSMEs, dedicated to replacing age-old materials and production processes, (c) awards for innovations by and for MSMEs, particularly by engaging the youth as attempted by the Karnataka Council of Science and Technology and the Indian Institute of Science and (d) dedicated R&D centres for various industrial clusters.

This is a painful time for both MSMEs and workers being laid off. A non-partisan approach is required; let major political parties agree on a revitalisation plan.

Millions of workers and small entrepreneurs will soon evaluate their vision — by their votes.

The writer is at IIM, Ahmedabad, and is executive vice-chair of the National Innovation Foundation

 why downturn in economy may be a good time for innovation

found this post by amar very interestinga nd relevant for present time

with compliments to amar

The Upside of the Worst of Times

Amar Bhidé is the Glaubinger professor of business at Columbia Business School and author of “The Venturesome Economy.”

About 20 years ago, I studied 100 founders of Inc. magazine’s 1989 list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Virtually all of them had started between 1981-83 in the midst of an awful recession.

But that didn’t prevent those founders from starting a new venture — in fact, in many ways it may have helped. Several had lost their jobs, so they weren’t risking steady employment — and they were able to hire employees who didn’t have great job prospects on the cheap. Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid.