Blogs

Cerebral Palsy also known as CP is often described as "An intelligent mind captured in a disobedient body". This is a non-progressive condition caused due to damage in some parts of brain especially during child delivery. This leads to loss of proper functioning of motor nerves which are responsible for neuro-muscular coordination leading to various problems including speech impairment.

At yesterday's Engenious event, held as part of Shaastra 2008 and sponsored by RIN, we had a very interesting panel discussion led by various members of Tamil Nadu's innovation community.

One of the panel discussants was speaking on the difficulty of encouraging students to take up projects for rural development, especially on the perception that rural technology is boring. He shared an interesting perspective he'd heard from somebody else (and I paraphrase here):

A piece from the President of Liberia on how development through enterprise is more efficient than development through aid.

The article is here.

The last week's have been exceedingly busy and so I haven't had time to post articles I've been saving as interesting - I post them here for your reading:

A great article on how the constraints of delivering medical care in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, has led to a reduced cost and better outcome treatment for patients in the UK as well.

An example of how products/services created for the world's poor can compete and win against those designed for the fortunate 10%.

Two articles (from the BBC) discussing changing patterns in agriculture as a result of global changes in food availability are listed below.

This article discusses the European response, with 1.3 million hectares of previous fallow land coming back into production in Europe. Leaving aside the potential significant environmental consequences, it is interesting to see how quickly the Europeans have reacted to the economic potential of food in the face of reduced global availability.

General Motors (GM) has been pursued for decades by competing automakers but in recent years, the news has turned exceptionally bad. Just today, they reported a 3 month loss of $15.5 billion USD, a staggering amount even considering that many of the charges are one-time charges relating to their ongoing restructuring efforts.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but the average man who is 100 years behind it.

-Robert Musil, novelist (1880-1942)

I received this word in my email inbox this morning as part of my 'Word of the Day' email from wordsmith.org

I thought it was a useful word to know as we go about our work promoting innovations and building an innovation ecosystem:
Misoneism - A hatred, fear or intolerance of innovation or change

I came across an interesting report discussing a new HIV detection technology starting trials in India.