Readers may see the video in English in this entry or by clicking here. To see an interview in English to the author of the "story of a frog", the philosopher from Switzeralnd, Olivier Clerc, click here. There are other versions in French, Spanish and Italian in our Spanish Blog. The Video of the "Story of a Frog" tell us about the importance of Citizens Voice in Government Quality. Education usually contributes to foster Citizens Voice and Government Effectiveness. Econometrics research also shows those positive effects. Educate population has an important role to avoid manipulation of public opinion and to foster good quality of life for all.

With the new-year upon us, this is a time for family, fun and food! Having family members that love to cook (and are quite good at it) I’m always anticipating the next iteration of quiche or curry, hopefully not combined. Cooking is something many of us enjoy doing, so it was with great pleasure I stumbled upon an article about the Food52 website and decided to share it with our Solvers.

Food52 is a crowdsourcing website for people who love to cook: it is made up of a community of cooks initially signed up for the chance to contribute to the next cookbook by New York Times food critic and author Amanda Hesser and freelance food writer Merrill Stubbs’s by way of weekly, themed contests. Hesser and Stubbs will choose a list of finalists in each culinary category, but it is the community who will vote on the final selection of recipes to be included in the cookbook. In addition, the community will also choose the title, cover design and photos.

Don Norman, a rare intellect and a major godfather of Design, has launched a provocative broadside against Design that has enormous implications for building an innovative society. Norman tells designers to get over themselves. It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design’s focus on the needs and wants of people. Ethnographic research, Norman says, can generate small, incremental innovations but the blockbuster game-changing stuff, comes from the lab, not the village or the mall. Norman states: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” In short, tech trumps culture. New technology comes first. Inventing new products comes second. Finding new needs for those products comes third.

A successful change isn't just a dream (or nightmare). It requires creative, energetic leaders who can engage a diverse workforce in taking on health-care challenges

Because no one can predict the final outcome of health-care reform, providers of all shapes and sizes are preparing for a wide array of possibilities. Health care has seen this uncertainty before, and we believe that looking to the past for insight helps to illustrate what the future could hold for health-care providers.

While the Clintons' reform efforts in the mid-1990s didn't even make it to the floor of the House or the Senate, providers anticipating reform unleashed a wave of proactive innovations including formations of large regional and multistate health-care systems, investments in financial and clinical information systems, radical changes in supply chains, and leveraging of scale to negotiate rates with commercial insurance companies.

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu today outlined the department’s plans to invest up to $366 million to establish and operate three new Energy Innovation Hubs focused on accelerating research and development in three key energy areas. Each hub, to be funded at up to $122 million over five years, will bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers in an effort to speed research and shorten the path from scientific discovery to technological development and commercial deployment of highly promising energy-related technologies.

Here they are, online 53 tools to help you increase productivity, give you more free time, and Have Fun.

[click to the original article for tools.  they're broken into a number of categories.  -Ed.]

We covered WTF tech moments in detail and now is the time to cover the most important and inspiring technology milestones for Indian in 2009.

Here is our list.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan
Satyam Rehabilitation
Nandan Nilekani & UID Project
Tata Nano Launch
Decoding Human Genome

[ click to the original article for details - Ed. ]

With concerns about sales, unemployment, access to credit, and health care reform paramount on the economic scene, accounting and taxes may not be on your radar screen. Still, these factors have a direct impact on your bottom line—the more of your earnings that you keep after tax, the better.

Looking ahead, taxes will continue to be used for social engineering—to encourage job creation, help the unemployed, provide incentives for going green, assist U.S. companies going global, and ensure that most Americans have health coverage. Taxes will also be used to serve its traditional function as a revenue raiser to pay for the war in Afghanistan. Within this context, here are the top 10 trends in accounting and taxes for 2010.

“FESTIVALS,” to adapt an anthropological adage, “are good to think with.” An especially salient festival like Christmas is abundantly thought-provoking. Take one aspect of behavior at Christmas: gift-giving.

Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating. We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.

As I [THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN] listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.

The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.

What is Technology Transfer? Generally speaking, it’s the process of transmitting research, technology or scientific findings from research labs to commercial users i.e. ‘Technology Commercialization’. Many companies, universities and government organizations have an “Office of Tech Transfer” dedicated to identifying research which has potential commercial interest and strategies on how to exploit it. The process of commercially exploiting research varies widely. Tech transfer models and techniques can involve licensing, joint ventures or partnerships. The classic model was to develop a license to transfer new technology or research to an existing company. But a very few existing companies will take the risk of commercializing ‘premature’ technology findings. This is where startups come in and facilitate tech transfer. Startups have an opportunity to bring technology from the research labs to the commercial end users and companies. They can either work on the technology and build it in-house completely or further research on a technology provided by the researchers. A new model of tech transfer is being evolved and startups have a major role to play! Brian Darmody talks more about this topic in an interview with venturehype. Have a look: http://venturehype.com/startups-creation-and-tech-transfer/

There's no sugarcoating it: Raising money for your startup won't get much easier in 2010, since the capital market for early-stage investments is still reeling from the effects of the recession.

But there is still money out there and there are better (and worse) ways to pursue it. Here's how to make the best of the leading trends for 2010:

1.Remember: Angels didn't stop investing--they're just writing smaller checks. There will always be high-net-worth individuals and former entrepreneurs who like to invest in startups, and next year should be no different. But as long as the stock market remains rocky and liquidating stock to make investments remains painful, angels will be investing less. As an entrepreneur, you should plan to get a smaller portion of your money from angel investors, or approach more investors per round.

Layar is probably the best known startup in the area of augmented reality. Their augmented reality browser has been getting lots of attention on blogs and conferences about mobile. But it’s not only press attention, they are building a strong collection of Layars, connecting a great amount of information with the reality through your phone’s camera. A while ago Layar released SARA, the augmented reality application of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, that showed 3D models of buildings yet to be build. And now the technology of Layar serves an even greater purpose, if you are a sports fan.

The digital department of Dutch football club PSV Eindhoven has used the technology by Layar to develop a great proof of concept for an application that let’s you check if a player is on or offside while watching the match in the stadium. In the clip below you can see a demonstration video.

Thank you, Claes Hammar, for the kind welcome and introduction. Thank you to His Excellency Ambassador Hafstrom and Mrs. Hafstrom for making this magnificent facility available for this event. And thank you to Ericsson and our friend Barbara Baffer for sponsoring this event.

I also would like to acknowledge the presence of Ambassador Henrik Liligren, who represented Sweden here in Washington with much distinction, and of Ambassador Thomas Siebert, who represented the United States in Stockholm with similar distinction. My assigned topic is international innovation and broadband. This is very nearly redundant because in the world of inter

Former Bloomington Mayor John Fernandez says a new economic development foundation is needed to create "sustained growth" for businesses and communities that continue to struggle throughout Indiana and the nation. Fernandez, just three months into his job as assistant U.S. secretary of commerce for economic development, is calling for a new strategy, based on innovation, entrepreneurs and regional collaboration.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Office of Development Partners (ODP), Division of Private and Voluntary Cooperation (PVC) is seeking applications from indigenous, local NGOs or US-based private and voluntary organizations under its Development Grants Program (DGP). This is a “small grants program for development activities that respond to overall USAID priorities and support selected USAID Missions’ strategic objectives and sector priorities.” USAID has allocated over US $40 million for this program.

The purpose of the program is to create new partnership opportunities with local NGOs, which have had limited or no prior funding from and experience of working directly with USAID. For more information about eligibility, visit this link. The specific sectors to be funded under this program are microenterprise, water sector activities including water supply, sanitation and hygiene, dairy development for increasing food security and climate change adaptation. Organizations requesting funding under the program are encouraged to adopt innovative and effective approaches, outlined in their proposed project proposals. Sharing of project costs with other organizations especially through a public-private partnership is encouraged. For geographic focus of the funding, DGP guidelines say:

(I-Newswire) December 21, 2009 - Some people suggest that Venture Capital is just in a normal cyclical downturn. Not a single venture backed company went public in second quarter of 2008. This has not happen since 1978. This was followed up by no venture backed companies going public in second and third quarters of 2009. This is clearly not just a cyclical downturn.

Venture Capital is built on technology start-up companies whose main assets are inventions. The value of these inventions is determined not just by their technical merit, but the strength of title to the invention. If legal title to the invention is weak, then a great technical invention provides a very limited opportunity for the start-up company or its investors. This clearly reduces the value of the company and the chances of return for it investors. Since 2000 the U.S. has significantly weakened inventors’ title to their inventions.

New York is not capitalizing on the potential benefits of technology-based partnerships between institutions of higher education and emerging industries.

That was the conclusion reached in a report released last week by The Task Force on Diversifying the New York State Economy Through Industry-Higher Education Partnerships.

The task force was created by Gov. David A. Paterson in May to study how New York could create economic growth through cooperative efforts. According to the task force, the state "possesses many of the raw materials" to be a leader in fostering such relationships. However, it "lags far behind" other states in doing so.

Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker was half right when he told a conference last month that the ATM was the pinnacle of financial innovation, and that nothing useful has been developed since. He was probably thinking about CDOs, but there are plenty of other products that compare unfavourably to ATMs.

The wonderful thing about hole-in-the-wall machines, as they are called in the UK, is not just, as Volcker pointed out, that they meet a real need. They are also simple devices that use open standards.

The tragedy is that innovation in the retail and corporate banking world seems to have stopped in 1968 with the development of the ATM. Nothing else in the world of payments – especially in the US – is simple or designed with the customer in mind. US banks are incapable of making electronic payments (at least not to publishing companies in the UK) and still insist on issuing cheques. In all countries, payments take days to settle and require a bewildering array of references.

Sharing the view of the majority of U.S. News readers (judging by the "Are the Holidays Too Secular?" vote when I checked it recently), about half of Americans (52 percent) say they are bothered at least to some degree by the commercialization of Christmas. This, according to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, includes 26 percent who say that they are bothered by it a lot.

But most Americans, whatever their preferences for holiday celebrations and public displays thereof, are not highly concerned about the matter. When given the option of hearing "Merry Christmas" or a less religious greeting—like "Happy Holidays"—in stores and businesses, Americans do choose Merry Christmas by a 60 percent-to-23 percent margin. But when specifically given "doesn't matter" as an option, a 45 percent-plurality express no preference for how they are greeted during the holiday season—42 percent want Merry Christmas and 12 percent prefer the less religious greeting.