Monthly Archives: June 2013

(Community Matters) Super to see Austin’s John Arrow, CEO of Mutual Mobile at the top of the list.

(Community Matters) Best Rainey Street run down I’ve come across in Michael Barnes’ Out & About.

(Community Matters) Our government is indeed mining all digital content from all 9 major internet carriers, that’s access to emails, photos, video, google docs, dropbox content . . . I’m a bit overwhelmed and have to think more about it.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy.

WAPO Story

Powerpoint

today’s earlier posting: Can We Even Find Our Way Back

(Community Matters) Israeli Judge: ‘Some Girls Enjoy Being Raped’

GOP Congressmen on rape. Congressional hearings on birth control excluding testimony from women. Repeated, epidemic, sometime public, gang rapes in India. Epidemic sexual assaults in the US military and military leaders punishing victims, arguing for the right to “handle” and overturn prosecutions.

I’m sorta at a loss here; I imagine most are. Whiskey tango foxtrot is going on?

(Community Matters) I’m still receiving emails from parents and parties engaged with Southwest Key. The latest news of concern, which I have no way to verify but hope board members will, is that key employees are being given interests in closely held companies and family members being given jobs as a way to stymie dissent and stifle voices.

I hadn’t thought about board members being similarly conflicted and don’t imagine they’d allow this to happen.

I’m also hearing growing voices of dissent about the costs charged to Austin Prepatory School by SWKey and the singular control exerted by SWKey Founder, Juan Sanchez. 

earlier postings linked here:

More on East Austin College Prep & Southwest Key

(Community Matters) Bummed had to miss last night’s E&Y Entrepreneurs of the Year Awards, always a festive evening. Congratulations to all the finalists, and especially this year’s winners:

Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, Indeed

Glenn Garland & Jim Stimmel, CLEAResult

Dan Graham, BuildASign

Joyce McDonald, Frameworks (Social Entrepreneur of the Year, includes $100k Silverton Foundation prize)

Maryanne Guido, Guido Brothers Construction Co, San Antonio

Veronica Edwards,  InGenesis, San Antonio

(Community Matters) Richard Florida on the urbanization and globalization of startup cities.  Austin #11.

New York tops the list with 144, besting San Francisco’s 135. London is next with 90, followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (Silicon Valley) with 66, and Los Angeles with 64. Toronto and Boston-Cambridge tied for sixth with 34 each, Chicago is eighth with 31, Berlin ninth with 27, and Bangalore 10th with 26. Austin (23), Seattle (22), and São Paulo (21) each have more than 20 start-ups. Another 20 cities are home to 10 or more start-ups: Istanbul with 19; Vancouver and Moscow each with 17; New Delhi (15); Paris, and Atlanta with 14 each; Washington, D.C., Amsterdam, and Miami with 12 each; San Diego, Madrid, Singapore, and Sydney with 11 apiece; and Barcelona, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Dallas-Fort Worth, Mumbai, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, with 10 start-ups each.

(Community Matters) We’ve lost our balance . . . in national security monitoring. It’s not a surprise that the FBI, CIA and NSA overreach. I imagine it’s a rabbit trail and that there’s always further to go in the honorable quest to keep Americans safe and capture the bad guys.

In our War on Terror, Congress and the President overrode the checks & balances. And, it’s time to reign in our proclivity for overreaching. It’s a rabbit hole too easily traversed, and we could find ourselves so far inside we’d never get back – we’re pretty far. Politico: NSA sought all Verizon U.S. call records – foreign & domestic. 

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who both serve on the Intelligence Committee — have long contended that the federal government is using orders from the FISA court to engage in surveillance that would shock and anger many Americans.

“Not only are they intercepting call data into and out of the country, but they are intercepting all call data in the United States, which goes far beyond what the FISA Amendments Act allows,” Timm said.

(Community Matters) Yesterday ACM announced a new name, The Thinkery at the Meredith Learning Lab – named in honor of Lynn Meredith for her extraordinary leadership and support. Kudos to my dear friend + Mike Nellis who’s an awesome ED.

The Thinkery is an evolution of Austin Children’s Museum opening at Mueller in December 2013. It’s Austin’s sparkling new home for “why” and “how.” A place where science and families play side by side. Where people connect with ideas by doing, making and experiencing. It’s a foundry for a new generation of innovators and creative problem solvers. And it’s a heck of a good time.

(Community Matters) Not to just keep posting NYTimes headlines . . . and, I hadn’t realized the sooner-than-expected housing recovery was Wall Street driven as institutions were purchasing 10s of thousands of homes.  That’s laudable and also gives some pause. Overall appears a good thing, even an innovative way to make money and help speed up recovery. I’m sure there’s downside and worries – hopefully less worry than appreciation.

(Community Matters) Groundbreaking innovation in pharmacology with promising early results fighting cancer. 

The drugs, still generally in early testing, work in an entirely new way, by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells much as it attacks bacteria. That could be an alternative to often-debilitating chemotherapy.

The new drugs work by disabling a brake on the immune system called the programmed death 1 receptor, or PD-1.

Much of the previous attempts at cancer immunotherapy have focused on the first problem — trying to train the immune system to recognize the tumor and attack it.

The PD-1 drugs tackle the second problem of immune system suppression. How many cancers this will work for is still unclear.

(Community Matters) This doesn’t bode well for King Abdullah II.