The Technology Innovation Program (TIP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking public comments on six NIST-prepared white papers outlining potential areas for research grants. TIP assists U.S. businesses, universities and other institutions in furthering and accelerating innovation through shared support of high-risk, high-reward research addressing needs and challenges meriting national attention.

The six draft white papers that are the subject of the current call for public comments distill the topics into the following areas of critical national need:

* Water: New Technologies for Managing and Ensuring Future Water Availability;
* Manufacturing: Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Automation;
* Manufacturing and Biomanufacturing: Materials Advances and Critical Processes;
* Energy: Technologies to Enable a Smart Grid;
* Civil Infrastructure: Advanced Sensing Technologies and Advanced Repair Materials for The Infrastructure: Water Systems, Dams, Levees, Bridges, Roads, and Highways; and,
* Healthcare: Advanced Technologies for Proteomics, Data Integration and Analysis, and Biomanufacturing for Personalized Medicine.

All six of the drafts can be downloaded at:
http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/index.cfm

Comments will be accepted through September, 29, 2011, and should be submitted electronically using the automated response feature at the end of each document.

The Federal Register notice can be found at:
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/pdf/2010-27449.pdf

Robert Rains covers public policy-related NIST issues for ASME. He can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dear SBIR Insider,

We have a few quick pre-holiday items for you. This issue is mainly to make you aware of the short time lead to participate in the 2011 Tibbetts Awards.


RETURN OF THE SBIR TIBBETTS AWARDS - (Short Time Window Alert)

After a 3 year hiatus, the SBIR Tibbetts Awards Program have been restarted by the Small Business Administration (SBA).

These prestigious awards, named for Roland Tibbetts, (acknowledged as the father of the SBIR), are presented to small businesses and individuals who represent excellence in achieving the mission and goals of the SBIR and STTR programs.

Any individual who owns and operates, or who bears principal responsibility for operating a business that has received an SBIR Phase I and II or an STTR award may be nominated. Self nominations are encouraged.

There is a short time window for nominations. Nominations must be received by the SBA by December 15, 2010 at 5pm est. Complete information is available at: http://www.sba.gov/aboutsba/sbaprograms/sbir/tibbetts/index.html

"Unofficially", the Tibbetts Awards Ceremony will take place in Washington, DC, with a potential date of mid-February, 2011. This is not confirmed, but is a target.

This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States.

It may be that all the doomsayers are right.

But I don’t think so.

Let me offer my prediction. There’s a chance that the common wisdom is very, very wrong. That the second decade of the 21st century may turn out to be the West’s and in particular the United States’ finest hour.

Construction of the “Bloodhound SSC,” a car expected to be able to travel at 1,000 mph (around 1,600 km/h) or faster, will begin in January.

An attempt on the World Land Speed record will be made in 2012. The aim of the project is to promote science and engineering and to inspire young people.

The vehicle will be powered by a Falcon rocket and an EJ200 jet engine from a Eurofighter Typhoon military plane. The jet produces nine tons of thrust, while the rocket produces an additional 12 tons of thrust.

As a former entrepreneur, who's been on the “dark side” of Venture Capital for the last ten years, here are 10 lessons I got from the investment side of that experience.

These lessons still serve me well on a daily basis.

When it comes to the economy, it seems the news hasn’t changed for quite a while: Business spending is down, jobs are nowhere to be had and the housing market’s slump continues.

“Economic activity in the United States has continued to expand at a modest pace, although some areas, including housing, construction and the labor market, remain weak,” the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday, Oct. 20.

This is a sobering reality check for millions of Americans who continue to hope the economy will soon turn around.

The holiday selling season is about to kick off and, slow economy or not, tech gadgets are going to be high on the wish list for a lot of us. At VentureBeat, we like gifts that work, that are fun, and that are affordable.

Many of these ideas for gifts aren’t brand new. That’s because new stuff breaks and costs a lot. You won’t see web-connected 3D TVs that play apps on our list because that’s too far on the bleeding edge now. They’re just not safe purchases, given how fast the technology is changing and how much better and cheaper they’re going to get with time.

Our top picks were easy. Apple or Apple or Apple. Which Apple device, was the hard question. But the iPad captured everyone’s imagination this year, as the device’s unique design finally set fire to the tablet computer category. Some devices like the Apple iPod Touch and the iPod Shuffle are also great products, but we can’t make our list full of nothing but Apple devices, can we? Throughout the year, these devices got more and more useful as the apps multiplied and the content, such as Beatles songs, arrived in droves.

FREDERICTON - A bill to establish an arms-length agency charged with creating jobs and attracting investment to the province will be tabled in spring 2011, says the minister of economic development.

"Invest NB will be a crown corporation that will have a very serious mandate to increase the economy and create good jobs in the province of New Brunswick," Paul Robichaud told reporters following the first session of the legislature in Fredericton on Wednesday.

The new agency is part of the Tories' plan to restructure and refocus Business New Brunswick and other government programs and services geared toward the private sector.

Robichaud said he will introduce a bill to create Invest NB in the spring session of the legislature, noting it should be fully operational by 2012.

On December 3, 1959, Richard L. Penney, a pioneering penguin researcher, snatched five male Adélie penguins from their rookery on Wilkes Land, in eastern Antarctica. He affixed numbered bands to their flippers, placed the Adélies in cloth bags, and had them flown halfway across Antarctica to McMurdo Sound, on the Ross Sea. There, they were released.

Ten months later, three of the five returned to the Wilkes Land colonies from which they had been taken. The penguins had swum 2,400 miles along the Antarctic coast, passing many Adélie rookeries along the way. Their average speed was eight miles per day. What was most remarkable was that the birds managed this feat after being flown overland and turned loose in a place they had never been before. They had made a beeline for their natal colonies and, following a route they had never traveled, wound up in the same rookery where they had been abducted nearly a year earlier.

It’s never been an easy ride, but in the wake of financial meltdown, high-risk, innovative start-ups are finding it tougher than ever to bridge the funding gap and get products out of the lab and onto the market, or at least advance them to the stage where large companies will pay to take them on.

Banks aren’t lending, venture capital funds have dried up, and now as austerity measures kick-in, public venture funding is getting exhausted too.

All of which presents a huge barrier to the EU’s new Innovation Union strategy for reshaping our busted economies. As Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science said when she launched the strategy in October, Europe has an “Innovation Emergency.” At the heart of that emergency are the ongoing difficulties Europe’s entrepreneurs face as they try to get good ideas to market.

On the face of it, research spending and investment is still prioritised by a French government that has moved so fast from stimulus to austerity in its public spending that the Minister of Finance, Christine Lagarde, coined the term “la rilance”, a word that mixes rigour and “relance”, or stimulus in French, to describe the current policy.

As the axe falls elsewhere, stirring strikes and public protests, for the fourth year in a row the French budget for research and higher education has been increased in the 2011 budget adopted recently by the French Parliament. At €25.2 billion, it is increasing by 1.9 per cent, slightly less than in 2009, when there was a 2.7 per cent rise. Still, along with Justice, R&D is the only public budget that has not been cut.

Within this, the higher education budget is increasing 1.3 per cent to reach €14.9 billion. Public support for research, which stood at 2.07 per cent of GDP in 2007 and 2.21 per cent in 2009, will reach 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2011.

Although it wasn’t a picture of Armani-suited city slickers fighting to keep soil off their fancy leather loafers, a group of venture capitalists recently visited the Central Valley to learn about agriculture technology.

“It was typical California business casual, which meant jeans and tennis shoes,” said Phil Christensen, founder and president of Fresno farm asset manager Agriglobe. “A very relaxed atmosphere.”

What the group took away from the visit, ideally, is a keener grasp of investment opportunities in the state’s $36 billion farming industry. Surprisingly for such a powerhouse economic sector, there has been little such funding to date, Christensen said.

It isn't always easy to define the line between investing for real innovation and growth, and rushing into what seems like a gold mine only to have it collapse around one's ears. It's part of the lure, risk and pain of venture investing, yet, after all the venture capital industry has been through, one would think the distinction would be a bit clearer now.

If you ask some prominent venture capitalists who have experienced the highs and lows, however, trouble is once again brewing. Not necessarily on the scale it was 10 years ago, but some are noticing flashing warning signs.

Fred Wilson, who saw his share of successes and failures with Flatiron Partners during the boom and went on to co-found New York firm Union Square Ventures in 2003, is concerned. In his well-read blog, he wrote recently that "competition for 'hot' deals is making people crazy and I am seeing many more unnatural acts from investors.

Suitcases followed high heels down K Street as Thanksgiving approached Washington.

Megabuses rumbled through Chinatown, and Metro riders packed the Blue Line in the direction of home, by way of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Work could wait, and it would. On Thanksgiving, residents and experts say, the priority is a dinner table surrounded by family. Despite the intense commercialization of most other American holidays, Thanksgiving remains something else: a time for family, friends and thanks.

Last year TechCrunch partnered with Founders Fund on an innovative awards program called the TechFellow Awards to recognize top high-tech entrepreneurs. The 2009 TechFellow Awards recognized 22 inaugural innovators across four categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation.

Founders Fund is expanding the awards program this year and added New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as co-host. Together, Founders Fund and NEA will grant each TechFellow $100,000 to invest in a start-up of their choice, more than doubling last year’s award size. Additionally, a new fund structure will allow each TechFellow to share in the interest of all 2010 TechFellow companies. Last year’s TechFellows helped fund and found fFlick, Bidfire, Quora, Flipboard, HipChat and others. Check out last year’s winners.

It is probably the most famous face, and certainly the most famous beard, in the history of the world. There are more portraits of it in existence than of any other face. Indeed, they outnumber the entire population of flesh-and-blood human beings who have ever lived on the planet. You probably have several jingling in your pocket right now, and maybe another couple folded in your wallet. Millions of years from now – who knows? – they may still be trapped under car seats and sofa cushions, long after our species has gone extinct.

We’ve seen its features so many times – on pennies, five-dollar bills and ads for Presidents’ Day sales – that they’ve become almost invisible. It’s hard to believe that there was a moment when it came into being, a moment when Abraham Lincoln’s face as we know it was invented. Yet there was such a moment, and one might say that it occurred on a Sunday in Chicago, 150 years ago today. That’s when a photographer named Samuel G. Alschuler opened the shutter of his camera for several seconds and captured the first image of the president-elect with his newly grown beard.

In 1936, with the Great Depression persisting, the governor of Connecticut issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation so inspiring that people in the state learned it by heart as if it were scripture. It was common then to memorize stirring speeches and other texts, but not public decrees. The proclamation’s message and 2010’s turmoil make this a very good year to re-read the document.

The governor was Wilbur Cross, and he wrote the proclamation himself. He was an esteemed Shakespeare scholar and had just retired from Yale after an impressive career as an English professor and luminary. At the age of 68 in 1930, by a tiny margin, he won an encore career in politics. His appeal as governor shows what we are missing today.

In his inaugural address, he spoke soberly about the drastic state of the state, calling for it to open its armories to the homeless. As a Democrat hemmed in by a Republican-dominated Legislature, Cross proved an adept leader. His most powerful tool was his rhetoric.

Bank of Ireland’s intimate relationship with Enterprise Ireland affords them the opportunity to nurture start-ups throughout their lifecycle

THE IMPORTANCE of innovation to economic growth is undisputed. Increasingly, governments around the world are seeking ways to maximise innovative capacity and performance within their economies. And it is generally accepted that innovation will play a critical role in Ireland’s economic recovery.

The figures speak for themselves in this regard. Enterprises involved in innovative activity are far more productive and profitable than those that aren’t. Companies active in innovation have an average gross value add (GVA) per person of more than €164,000 per annum, compared to €89,000 for non-innovative firms. Furthermore, innovative enterprises are twice as likely to be engaged in export (66 per cent) as non-innovative enterprises (33 per cent).

Members of FeelGood World have one mission: end world hunger through grilled cheese sandwiches.

According to the program's website, FeelGood World transforms students into entrepreneurs and "changemakers". Through two synergistic initiatives--the FeelGood Changemaker Academy and the FeelGood Changemaker Deli--students learn how to be a social entrepreneur and gain hands-on experience on how to run a business. All proceeds from sandwich sales go to organizations that help eradicate chronic global hunger and empower self-reliance.

As The Manchester Journal reported, there are 23 FeelGood chapters at college campuses nationwide, including major institutions such as Oregon State University, the University of California Berkeley and the University of Utah. One of the most successful chapters is the University of Vermont. UVM's chapter sells their grilled cheese sandwiches--which you can get with an assortment of toppings--every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at a kiosk on campus. Typically, the group sells 80 to 100 sandwiches a day, each for $4.

I lost my Blackberry last weekend and everyone keeps asking me whether I’m going to swap and get an iPhone. In fact I’ve been carrying an iPhone as well as a Blackberry for eighteen months now and whilst I’d love to go back down to carrying one device if I could it isn’t a practical possibility for me. Everyone gets why I want to keep my iPhone – superior web surfing and superior apps (Daily Burn, Fitfu/Gymfu, Facebook, Spotify, Kindle, Amazon are my favourites), but everyone is surprised that I also feel the need to keep a Blackberry – so I thought I’d explain.