News Update Tuesday February 21 2006

• 02/21/06

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News for Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006

* MIT Appoints Executive Frank Moss as Media Lab Director

* Grants.gov Not Mac Compatible: Some Grantors Retrench

* MIT Student Wins Highest Student Honors for Flying Car

* Stanford Journalism Fellowship Keys on Innovation Processes

* IIT Starts on $50 Million Technology Business Incubator

* Deals: U. Wisconsin Offers Faculty Free Email List Manager

* Grants: Microsoft Funds Virtual Earth, Trusted Computing

* ONLINE RESOURCES
http://www.campus-technology.com/resources/index.asp

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MIT Appoints Executive Frank Moss as Media Lab Director

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed
business executive and entrepreneur Frank Moss as
director of its Media Lab, a pioneering research
center that has become famous for its work on
Internet technologies and culture.

Moss was CEO and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc.,
a firm in the distributed systems management field,
and co-founder of Stellar Computer Inc., a developer
of graphic supercomputers; Bowstreet Inc., a Web services
firm; and Infinity Pharmaceuticals, an early-stage cancer
drug discovery company. Moss, who has an MIT Ph.D. in
aeronautics and astronautics, has been named professor
of the practice, a position reserved for practitioners.

With Moss's appointment, Media Lab co-founder Nicholas
Negroponte will step down as chairman to concentrate on
One Laptop per Child (OLPC), an independent nonprofit
organization he launched in January 2005 to develop a
very-low-cost laptop to help solve the problems of education,
especially in developing nations. Walter Bender, a founding
member of the Media Lab who has served as lab director for
the past five years, will take a two-year leave of absence
from MIT to serve as OLPC's president for software and content
development.

For more information, visit: http://www.media.mit.edu

Grants.gov Not Mac Compatible: Some Grantors Retrench

The federal government's new Grants.gov program,
which aims to replace paper grant applications with
fully electronic systems, is not Macintosh compatible,
reports the Washington Post, even though many grant
seekers in and out of higher education are Mac users.
The revelation has caused one of the largest grant-giving
agencies, the National Institutes of Health, to drop plans
to switch to electronic applications for $600 million in
R01 grants expected to be processed this fall, according
to the Post. All 26 federal grant-giving agencies are
supposed to have their application processes fully online
by 2007.

For more information, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021200942.html
[Registration required].

MIT Student Wins Highest Student Honors for Flying Car

MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Ph.D. candidate Carl
Dietrich won this year's $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student
Prize in recognition of his inventions in the personal
technology arena. Among them are: a 'Personal Air Vehicle;'
a desktop-sized fusion reactor; and a lower-cost rocket engine.

MIT Prof. Manuel Martinez-Sanchez said of Dietrich, 'In my
30 years as a teacher (at MIT), I cannot recall a clearer
exponent of the Edison mindset. Carl is routinely cycling
back and forth between what is known and what is possible.'

Dietrich's most recent invention is a Personal Air Vehicle
called Transition, a flying car that would rely on small
under-used airports as an option for short 100-500 mile trips.
His SUV-sized car plane could be stored in most home garages
and is has folding wings to enable it to operate both on the
ground and in the air. Dietrich also co-founded the MIT Rocket
Team and holds a patent for a low-cost, high-performance rocket
propulsion engine. For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching
spacecraft power and propulsion, research that grew out of an
efficiency improvement he patented for a desktop-sized Penning
Fusion Reactor.

For more information visit: http://web.mit.edu/invent

Stanford Journalism Fellowship Keys on Innovation Processes

Stanford University named eight 2006 Innovation Journalism Fellows
who will be focused on identifying journalism best practices in
covering innovation processes. After a one-week kickoff workshop
on the Stanford campus, the fellows are now interacting in U.S.
newsrooms, including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Red Herring,
Business 2.0, CNET News.com, PC World and the San Francisco Chronicle.

While working in the newsrooms, the fellows will participate in a
virtual community organized by Stanford. They will present the
results of their work at The Third Conference on Innovation Journalism
at Stanford April 5-7. 'Today, innovation processes drive society. But
the news d'esn't cover it very much,' says Dr. David Nordfors, founder
of the Stanford program. 'It's difficult for journalists to cover the
interaction between research, business, politics and culture, fields
that traditionally belong to different news desks. We are building a
community of journalists that are developing skills for reporting across
the beats.'

For more information, visit: http://www.innovationjournalism.org

IIT Starts Building $50 Million Technology Business Incubator

The Illinois Institute of Technology began work last week on its
$50 million Technology Business Center, a component of its University
Technology Park (UTP) plan to create an incubator for technology
entrepreneurs and fledgling tech businesses.

IIT officials say at full build-out, UTP will have 1.5 million square
feet of space to house mid-sized, high-growth, and spin-off technology
companies. UTP is designed to accommodate the space needs of companies
that 'graduate' beyond the incubator stage so that they may expand their
business. Last fall, University Technology Park At IIT opened a Business
Incubator with tenants Sun Phocus Technology LLC, and All Cell Technologies
LLC. Since then, software company start-ups, including Cleversafe, Network
Black Box, and Air 2 Access have also moved into UTP.

'By giving startups access to on-site graduate space, we will be able to
retain these companies, and the jobs they create, in the local economy.
Too often, such companies move out of the area, and out of Illinois, when
they outgrow incubation,' said David Baker, vice president of external
affairs at IIT.

Deals: U. Wisconsin Offers Faculty Free Email List Manager

The University of Wisconsin at Madison is offering faculty and staff free
email list management software that will let set-up and interact with groups
of students, colleagues, and other communities via email lists. The university
is subsidizing the software, Lyris Technologies' ListManager, to make it available
to faculty and staff at no cost. The school already uses the application to reach
more than 900,000 subscribers on 25,000 different lists. Each day, 6,000 email
campaigns are initiated by faculty, staff and students, generating more than
175,000 messages daily. 'Faculty and staff asked for an easy solution that lets
them handle email list development and management,' said J'e Tarter, University
of Wisconsin, Email List Services Manager.

Grants: Microsoft Funds Virtual Earth, Trusted Computing

Microsoft Corp. announced recipients of $1 million in academic funding
for projects using its Virtual Earth technology and for developing
Trustworthy Computing curriculum projects. The 23 grant recipients are from
universities around the world, including in Belgium, India, Russia, South
Korea and the U.S. The eight winners of the Virtual Earth RFP will receive
a total of $300,000, while the 15 winners of the Trustworthy Computing
RFP will receive a total of $750,000. The maximum individual grant amount
for each RFP is $50,000.

The Virtual Earth RFP is designed to encourage research in digital
geography by universities using Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform,
a mapping and local search platform. Grants for the Trustworthy
Computing project will focus on developing technology and policy
in the areas of business integrity, privacy, reliability, security
and secure software engineering. Microsoft also said it will soon
announce the winners of its $1.2 million Digital Inclusion RFP, for
academic projects aimed at health, education and soci'economic
conditions.

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