There’s quite a few reasons to cheer Microsoft’s (s MSFT) next-generation operating system, Windows 7, which launched today — it could drive down the price of computers, help you ditch Vista once and for all, and couldchange the dynamics of the memory business. But here’s another: Windows 7 has some nifty new power management functions that will help cut down on the energy consumption of your PC or laptop. It’s about time.

Back in June, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told attendees of the utility-focused Edison Electric Conference in San Francisco, Calif. that Microsoft had made a “big investment” into more sophisticated power management features for Windows 7. Mundie said Microsoft was working on features like adding smarter power management functions that can put a computer into a low-power state and wake it up again much more quickly than other operating systems.

While I haven’t tried out the new power management features, Microsoft details some of the more energy efficiency upgrades of Windows 7 here. The OS uses fewer background activities than a standard OS, so the processor doesn’t use as much power, it has a more energy-efficient DVD playback, automatic screen dimming, a more accurate battery-life indicator, and it powers off unused ports. The biggest benefit that the consumer will see is that your laptop will be able to run longer without plugging in.

But when it comes to fighting climate change, it’s an even bigger deal. Mundie said he expects Microsoft’s power management functions to start to dramatically decrease the energy consumption of computers starting in 2010, when the next cycle of products will make its way into the market. PCs, peripherals and printers are responsible for 60 percent of the energy consumption of overall information technology (25 percent from network infrastructure and 15 percent from data centers) and the IT industry is responsible for between 2 and 3 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions according to researchers at the Climate Group and Gartner. So bringing down the energy consumption of our own computers will be very significant.

Microsoft’s energy management tool, Hohm, which launched this week, is a clear play to help consumers save energy. Log into the Hohm web site, enter your ZIP code and other details about your residence, and the service predicts your home energy use (or links to your historical energy use via your utility) and suggests ways to curb it.

But Hohm is also Microsoft’s first consumer-facing web service that is hosted entirely on Azure, the company’s cloud computing software control system — and Azure boasts some cutting-edge energy savings features of its own. Even if Hohm isn’t eventually able to convince consumers to cut their energy consumption, the way it’s hosted could represent the future of more energy-efficient computing.

We’ll forgive you if you thought Azure was just an outdated color in a Crayola box. Microsoft announced the cloud computing platform more than six months ago, and while few details are known about it, what is known is that it will be used by companies that want to deploy large web services and host them in a cloud computing model. But Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, explained to us in an interview this week that Azure is expected to be more efficient than standard web hosting and offer better power utilization, partly because the cloud takes advantage of on-demand scalable computing, growing and shrinking the amount of computing that’s applied to a particular task (and thus power used). In addition, the servers will feature efficient hardware designs and make better use of power management software, Mundie said.

In the past, Microsoft would have allocated a couple of data centers to house Hohm, said Mundie. In that model, even if it were the middle of the night, the web service would grind away in case there was a visitor. That meant it would be using more energy than needed. But with Azure’s set-up, the servers are more like a car with different cylinders. “When they go uphill, we’ll turn them on, and when we’re coasting downhill, we’ll turn them off,” said Mundie.

It might seem like an obvious way to build a system. But right now, servers in general aren’t very “energy proportional” — they don’t consume a small amount of energy when used only a little bit, or a lot more energy when used extensively. As Google suggested recently in its mini-book about data centers (GigaOM Pro subscription required), if servers were a little more like humans, which have evolved to use energy only when needed, they would consume significantly less of it. Google, like Microsoft, is thinking about ways to design servers and power management software for servers so that it can mimic this type of dynamic power consumption.

The trend of turning to cloud computing as a more efficient way to utilize computing power will only grow, too. At the Structure 2009 conference, held by our sister site GigaOM, the CEO of content delivery network company Akamai, Peter Sagan, said that cloud computing was a much more efficient and green way to do computing, a sentiment that was echoed by executives from web companies, telecom firms and Internet infrastructure makers.

However the networked computing world is tweaked, at the end of the day, it needs to more closely focus on using as little energy as possible. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, data centers currently consume 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity, and that number is poised to more than double by 2011. In an increasingly broadband-connected world, in which our media, commerce, communications and work life will be increasingly hosted in the cloud, energy conservation in IT will become extremely important. And who knows? Hohm’s legacy of being the first external web service hosted on the energy-efficient Azure platform could stretch beyond its practical intentions to help reduce global energy consumption.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Putting your computer to sleep and subsequently knocking it out of its slumber can take a bit of time, even for the most advanced laptops and PCs — it’s annoying enough that a lot of people just avoid doing it. But Microsoft (s MSFT) is working on solving that problem, which could mean reducing a significant amount of computing energy consumption. This morning, at the Edison Electric Conference in San Francisco, Calif., Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told an audience of utility executives that the software giant has developed more sophisticated power management functions for its upcoming Windows 7 product, calling power management one of Windows 7’s “big investments.” In addition, Mundie said Microsoft “is getting very aggressive” when it comes to designing hardware and building software to increase the functionality of power management across its product lines.

Mundie said Microsoft is working on power management software that can keep a computer in a very low power state at all times but enables the machine to be awake enough so that when you approach it, it’s smart enough to quickly power up. It could power down just as quickly, too — Mundie said the computer could change states in “fractions of a second.” The power management tools sound like a much more subtle, user-friendly and energy efficient version of what your computer probably does now. Mundie expects these power management functions to start to dramatically decrease the energy consumption of computers starting in 2010, when the next cycle of products will make its way into the market.

In his speech to the NAS, Obama also announced his new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Obama’s PCAST will be – or at least will start out – significantly smaller than Bush’s, decreasing from 35 members to 20, and will focus on energy and the environment, whereas Bush’s PCAST focused primarily on technology and the economy. So what got cut? Primarily the representatives from industry (Microsoft and Google are still represented). This could be because of the switch in focus (technology to energy and environment), but it seems that it could also signal that Obama *may* be a President more receptive to science than to corporate pressures.

Here’s a great article from SEED Magazine, breaking down Obama’s PCAST in terms of which disciplines its members come from: climate science, energy, basic research, finance, networks and security, and health and medicine.

From Obama’s speech:

“This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views…I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.”

The new cast of PCAST:

Rosina Bierbaum, a widely-recognized expert in climate-change science and ecology, is Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her PhD is in evolutionary biology and ecology. She served as Associate Director for Environment in OSTP in the Clinton Administration, as well as Acting Director of OSTP in 2000-2001. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christine Cassel is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and previously served as Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health & Science University. A member of the US Institute of Medicine, she is a leading expert in geriatric medicine and quality of care.

Christopher Chyba is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. His scientific work focuses on solar system exploration and his security-related research emphasizes nuclear and biological weapons policy, proliferation, and terrorism. He served on the White House staff from 1993 to 1995 at the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (2001) for his work in both planetary science and international security.

S. James Gates Jr. is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university. He has served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, and the Educational Testing Service and held appointments at MIT, Harvard, California Institute of Technology and Howard University.

John Holdren is serving as co-chair of PCAST in addition to his duties as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Prior to this appointment Dr. Holdren was a Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also served concurrently as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and as Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.

Shirley Ann Jackson is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1995-1999). She is the University Vice Chairman of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Jackson was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT and chairs the New York Stock Exchange Regulation Board.

Eric Lander is serving as a co-chair of PCAST. He is the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Professor of Biology at MIT, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and former member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine.

Richard Levin has served as President of Yale University since 1993 and is a distinguished economist with interests in industrial organization, the patent system, and the competitiveness of American manufacturing industries, including industrial research and development, intellectual property, and productivity. He is a leader in US-China cooperation, in research and education, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chad Mirkin is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University, as well as Director of Northwestern’s International Institute of Nanotechnology. He is a leading expert on nanotechnology, including nano-scale manufacturing and applications to medicine. Awarded the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in 2002, he is one of the top-cited researchers in nano-medicine, as well as one of the most widely cited chemists.

Mario Molina is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as Director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases. The only Mexican-born Nobel laureate in science, he served on PCAST for both Clinton terms. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.

Ernest J. Moniz is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, Director of the Energy Initiative, and Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at MIT. His research centers on energy technology and policy, including the future of nuclear power, coal, natural gas, and solar energy in a low-carbon world. He served as Under Secretary of the Department of Energy (1997-2001) and Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1995-1997).

Craig Mundie is Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft Corporation. He has 39 years of experience in the computer industry, beginning as a developer of operating systems. Dr. Mundie co-founded and served as CEO of Alliant Computer Systems.

William Press is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, has wide-ranging expertise in computer science, astrophysics, and international security. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, he previously served as Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1998 to 2004. He is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University and a former member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1982-1998).

Maxine Savitz is retired general manager of Technology Partnerships at Honeywell, Inc and has more than 30 years of experience managing research, development and implementation programs for the public and private sectors, including in the aerospace, transportation, and industrial sectors. From 1979 to 1983 she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Conservation in the US Department of Energy. She currently serves as vice-president of the National Academy of Engineering.

Barbara Schaal is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St Louis. She is a renowned plant geneticist who has used molecular genetics to understand the evolution and ecology of plants, ranging from the US Midwest to the tropics. Dr Schaal serves as Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman ever elected to that role.

Eric Schmidt is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. Before joining Google, Dr. Schmidt served as Chief Technology Officer for Sun Microsystems and later as CEO of Novell Inc.

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also Director of the Harvard University-wide Center for Environment. He was trained as a marine geochemist and has employed a variety of methods to study the carbon cycle and climate over a wide range of Earth’s history. Awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 2000, he has recently been working on technological approaches to mitigating future climate change.

David E. Shaw is the chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group in the field of computational biochemistry. He is the founder of D. E. Shaw & Co., an investment and technology development firm. Dr. Shaw is a former member of PCAST under President Clinton and a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, where he co-chairs the steering committee for the Council’s federally funded High-Performance Computing Initiative. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies.

Harold Varmus is the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and co-chair of PCAST. Dr. Varmus served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and in 1989 was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering studies of the genetic basis of cancer. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine and recipient of the National Medal of Science.

Ahmed Zewail is Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Caltech and Director of the Physical Biology Center. Dr. Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for his pioneering work that allowed observation of exceedingly rapid molecular transformations. He is an Egyptian-American, widely respected not only for his science but also for his efforts in the Middle East as a voice of reason. Dr. Zewail is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and postage stamps have been issued to honor his contributions to science and humanity.

For the past year, whenever my group has had government visitors to Microsoft labs in Redmond to see advanced technologies, we’ve considered whether or not to show them a demo of a particular “secret project” being developed, now called Microsoft Vine.

If the group was with local or state government, or related to homeland security, or emergency responders and the like, the answer was easier, because that’s the sweet spot it’s designed for.

But I was always tempted to show it even to my federal government friends – and anyone else – just because it’s so impressive!

No more dilemma: Vine is being unveiled this week to the world, being rolled out live in a controlled Seattle beta initially. It is a very cool, highly visual, local/social networking service that adds to your Twitter-like updates access to 20,000 local media sources, along with incorporated local-government and emergency-management notification feeds from government sources like police, fire, and federal agencies like NOAA.

One of our most impressive executives, Tammy Savage, had the original idea after Hurricane Katrina and has led this important public-saftey initiative ever since.  Implementation has required an alignment of expertise in social software, new media, cloud computing and cloud services, and advanced mobile functionality. This morning the early reviews have been impressive:

Seattle Times: Microsoft Debuts Vine: Twitter + Facebook on Steroids

TechCrunch: Microsoft Vine to connect family, friends when crisis hits (good screenshots).

Mashable: Microsoft Vine is Twitter for Emergencies

Econsultancy: Could Vine be Microsoft’s first real social media hit?

Vine was initially designed and prototyped within the Windows Live team, and about a year ago was transferred into the Start Up Business Accelerator group (which sits like my group under Craig Mundie) for robust incubation - the precursor for scaling and transitioning into an existing business division for full global support. That should be happening with Vine over the next months.

A tough technical challenge – though no surprise to anyone who’s worked in the semantic-analysis space – has been getting the localization to work reliably. Vine’s access to hyper-local information from mobile devices has to mesh with local news and alerts from the thousands of feeds and notification services.  We’re continuing lab work on improving the recognition and extrapolation of precise place names in unstructured text, a classic problem in geospatial analysis and software.  A review in SearchEngineLand (“Microsoft Goes Social & Local with Vine“) points out just how important the localization is, and the promise of having precision hyperlocal targeting in Vine’s social soctware:

An application that can connect with other social services, allow both sending and receiving of data to and from those services, pull in local news from media outlets and other feeds (like local blogs, say), and add local context to all of that data in the form of mapping … now that could become a very compelling tool.”

And yes, we’ve been working on the business model – a common criticism of Twitter and the like. As ZDnet reports (“Microsoft to begin public test of Twitter-like notification service“), Microsoft says ““The baseline offering of Microsoft Vine will available at no charge. Over time, you can expect to see premium services added on to the baseline offering, for a fee.”

Sign up for the beta yourself.  One thing I notice: there’s no technological substitute for some old-fashioned realities of public safety.  Vine offers a handy wallet-sized card, to print out and clip – yes kids, it’s an actual physical artifact!  And I spy with my little eye a reassuring caveat in the fine print on every page of the Vine demo, down there with the legal notice: “In case of an emergency dial 911.”

Email this post to a friend

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/26/swine-flu-spreads-panic-over-the-web 4/26)

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, have been named to President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). According to a statement released by the White House, PCAST is an advisory group of the the country’s foremost scientists and engineers who will help the President and Vice President form policy related to science, technology, and innovation. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/27/googles-schmidt-and-microsofts-mundie-appointed-as-obama-tech-advisors 4/27)

Google plans to roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it, according to CEO Eric Schmidt. Users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them. Google will sell advertising against premium content. (Iwantmedia 4/27, http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/2679 4/25)

Facebook is expected to open up core parts of its site to third-party developers so that they can build new services. The move means developers can build services that access the photos, videos, notes and comments users upload to Facebook, with users’ permission. (Iwantmedia 4/27, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078628311057281.html 4/27)

Computers will freeze and drop offline with increasing regularity as the Web’s outdated infrastructure struggles to cope with the surging popularity of bandwidth-hungry video sites, analysts warn. YouTube reportedly uses as much bandwidth as the entire Internet took up in 2000. (Iwantmedia 4/27, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5224306/Internet-users-could-suffer-brownouts-due-to-YouTube-and-iPlayer.html 4/27)

AOL is adding a twist to old-fashioned political journalism with the launch of its new political news and blog site, PoliticsDaily.com. The site, which will primarily focus on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, will only provide original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/26/aol-launches-online-news-magazine-politicsdaily 4/26)

MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes will replace outgoing CEO Owen Van Natta as the new head of Project Playlist, the controversial music-sharing site. Van Natta is being named CEO of MySpace. Sykes, who helped launch MTV 25 years ago, left the company last year. (Iwantmedia 4/27, http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090424/project-playlist-names-former-mtv-exec-sykes-as-ceo-replacing-van-natta 4/24)

“Obama Promises Major Investment in Science” – AP News story (April 27, 2009)

“The bottom line is that if you’re a fan of new technologies being developed on US soil, you should be pretty damned excited.” – Alex Koppelman, writing in Salon.com

President Obama announced today an effort to increase the nation’s investment in research and development spending for the sciences and new technologies.  As Alex Koppelman points out:

One particularly striking point to note about this: That level of funding [an increase to 'more than three percent of GDP'] would almost meet the amount of money spent on defense. To some extent, that may simply represent a shift in where on the budget certain funds are accounted for, as defense spending has always been a key driver of American scientific research, but it’s still a sharp difference from the normal state of affairs.

I’ve written before (“How to Find Research“) about the need for increased R&D spending, and about the role of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy in its main role: advising the President and others within the Executive Office of the President on the impacts of science and technology on domestic and international affairs.

OSTP does the hard work – but it is guided in part by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST.  This group can be a quiet backwater – as it has been on and off for years – or it has the potential to be a dynamic leading voice in advising the Administration on S&T policies, particularly in investments in scientific research and tech innovation.

It looks like we’re on the dynamic upswing, given that President Obama also used today’s high-profile announcement to name his appointments to an all-new PCAST. 

The media is mostly focusing on the money story, or on highlighting the inclusion of big names from Microsoft and Google (TechFlash: ”Microsoft’s Mundie, Google’s Schmidt Named Obama Advisers,”) – that’s our own Craig Mundie. 

But the entire list is impressive, truly.  I’ve included it below, and I think it is worth including some biographical detail on each of the appointees, drawn from the official announcement (pdf) issued by the White House.  

Rosina Bierbaum, a widely-recognized expert in climate-change science and ecology, is Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Her PhD is in evolutionary biology and ecology. She served as Associate Director for Environment in OSTP in the Clinton Administration, as well as Acting Director of OSTP in 2000-2001. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christine Cassel is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and previously served as Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health & Science University. A member of the US Institute of Medicine, she is a leading expert in geriatric medicine and quality of care.

Christopher Chyba is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. His scientific work focuses on solar system exploration and his security-related research emphasizes nuclear and biological weapons policy, proliferation, and terrorism. He served on the White House staff from 1993 to 1995 at the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship (2001) for his work in both planetary science and international security.

S. James Gates Jr. is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major research university. He has served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, and the Educational Testing Service and held appointments at MIT, Harvard, California Institute of Technology and Howard University.

John Holdren is serving as co-chair of PCAST in addition to his duties as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Prior to this appointment Dr. Holdren was a Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also served concurrently as Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and as Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. 

Shirley Ann Jackson is the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (1995-1999). She is the University Vice Chairman of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Jackson was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT and chairs the New York Stock Exchange Regulation Board. 

Eric Lander is serving as a co-chair of PCAST. He is the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Professor of Biology at MIT, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine.

Richard Levin has served as President of Yale University since 1993 and is a distinguished economist with interests in industrial organization, the patent system, and the competitiveness of American manufacturing industries, including industrial research and development, intellectual property, and productivity. He is a leader in US-China cooperation, in research and education, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chad Mirkin is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University, as well as Director of Northwestern’s International Institute of Nanotechnology. He is a leading expert on nanotechnology, including nano-scale manufacturing and applications to medicine. Awarded the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology in 2002, he is one of the top-cited researchers in nano-medicine, as well as one of the most widely cited chemists.

Mario Molina is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as Director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases. The only Mexican-born Nobel laureate in science, he served on PCAST for both Clinton terms. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. 

Ernest J. Moniz is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, Director of the Energy Initiative, and Director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at MIT. His research centers on energy technology and policy, including the future of nuclear power, coal, natural gas, and solar energy in a low-carbon world. He served as Under Secretary of the Department of Energy (1997-2001) and Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1995-1997). 

Craig Mundie is Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft Corporation. He has 39 years of experience in the computer industry, beginning as a developer of operating systems. Dr. Mundie co-founded and served as CEO of Alliant Computer Systems.

William Press is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, has wide-ranging expertise in computer science, astrophysics, and international security. A member of the US National Academy of Sciences, he previously served as Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1998 to 2004. He is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University and a former member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1982-1998).

Maxine Savitz is retired general manager of Technology Partnerships at Honeywell, Inc and has more than 30 years of experience managing research, development and implementation programs for the public and private sectors, including in the aerospace, transportation, and industrial sectors. From 1979 to 1983 she served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Conservation in the US Department of Energy. She currently serves as vice-president of the National Academy of Engineering. 

Barbara Schaal is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St Louis. She is a renowned plant geneticist who has used molecular genetics to understand the evolution and ecology of plants, ranging from the US Midwest to the tropics. Dr Schaal serves as Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman ever elected to that role.

Eric Schmidt is Chairman and CEO of Google Inc. and a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc. Before joining Google, Dr. Schmidt served as Chief Technology Officer for Sun Microsystems and later as CEO of Novell Inc.

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also Director of the Harvard University-wide Center for Environment. He was trained as a marine geochemist and has employed a variety of methods to study the carbon cycle and climate over a wide range of Earth’s history. Awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 2000, he has recently been working on technological approaches to mitigating future climate change. 

David E. Shaw is the chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, where he leads an interdisciplinary research group in the field of computational biochemistry. He is the founder of D. E. Shaw & Co., an investment and technology development fund company. Dr. Shaw is a former member of PCAST under President Clinton and a member of the executive committee of the Council on Competitiveness, where he co-chairs the steering committee for the Council’s federally funded High-Performance Computing Initiative. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies.

Harold Varmus is the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and co-chair of PCAST. Dr. Varmus served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and in 1989 was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering studies of the genetic basis of cancer. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine and recipient of the National Medal of Science.

Ahmed Zewail is Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Caltech and Director of the Physical Biology Center. Dr. Zewail was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for his pioneering work that allowed observation of exceedingly rapid molecular transformations. He is an Egyptian-American, widely respected not only for his science but also for his efforts in the Middle East as a voice of reason. Dr. Zewail is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and postage stamps have been issued to honor his contributions to science and humanity.

 
PCAST’s charter says it will “work with the private sector to ensure that federal investments in science and technology contribute to economic prosperity, environmental quality, and national security.” I’m looking forward to our team being part of that effort.

Email this post to a friend

BY Noah Robischon @ Fast Company

Windows Azure and “Red Dog” Cloud Computing Project One over-arching theme that will underly many of the projects on display today is the upcoming Windows Azure cloud-computing push. This is Microsoft’s attempt to move its operating off the desktop and into the cloud. Although it was officially unveiled several months ago, Microsoft is only now getting specific about the kinds of tools it will deliver in Azure.

SecondLight Surface Computing UI Based on the description I’m reading, it sounds like Microsoft is ready to move its touch-screen UI off of the tabletop and into the “mid-air above the display” where it will recognize Minority Report-style gestural navigation.

Color-Structured Image Search color pattern image search has been around since at least 2005. Microsoft seems to have made some advances here, allowing for more consistency, speed and a semantic structure that could be applied to other search types.

Social Desktop, Social E-Mail, and Location-Based Social Networking Never one to let another software company own a lucrative market (ahem, Facebook), Microsoft has several projects on tap that will utilize your social networks in novel ways. Among them: e-mail integrated social networking tools and GeoLife 2.0, which sounds a lot like Google Latitude.

Opinion Search Several companies are moving into search engine algorithms that incorporate opinion or emotion data into the results. Microsoft’s Opinion Search will also filter results based on positive or negative polarity–again, not entirely new, but fascinating nevertheless.

Image-Centric and User-Interactions Advertising Platform Perhaps the first project on this list that could lead to real revenue, these two projects aim to replace today’s keyword-driven ad model with ones based on the content of recently searched images and a more integrated presentation of the resulting ads.

Tool Kit for Visualizing Large-Scale Data Silverlight and Ajax controls to help navigate large volumes of structured data from multiple source may not sound sexy. But if done well, it’s groundbreaking.

Augmented Reality 2009 buzzword alert! I’m not sure why everyone is tossing this old concept around so much lately, but Microsoft has at least two projects here that blend reality with computer interfaces. One is centered on 3D portable and virtual sticky notes.

Do these projects represent true innovation, or just more me-too computing? I aim to find out. Drop a note into the comments here if you’d like me to focus on anything in particular from the list above, or that you’ve heard about elsewhere.

For once, Intel shares space on a Microsoft bus, and not the other way around. (For the more typical arrangement, see Wikipedia’s straightforward history of the Wintel platform, still “the dominant desktop and laptop computer architecture”).

I’ve been following some of the output from this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, and noticed this very cute paragraph from the always interesting blog by Intel’s VP for Corporate Social Responsibility, Will Swope:

Earlier today I had just 12 minutes to get from a hotel on the “far end” of Davos back to the conference center. The session I was exiting had been organized by the World Economic Forum, so they organized vans to assure that the participants could get back to the main conference center. I was on the phone when I walked outside (feeble excuse for what I’m about to write), saw the van, and climbed in. At that time, Craig Mundie turned to me and said, “Will, this is the Microsoft shuttle.” He was quite gracious, would not let me leave, made room, and they gave me a ride to the center. Embarrassing…geez, you think?

Will, that’s not embarrassing!  But it does show that Craig Mundie’s a mensch.  Don’t know how to be a mensch? Guy Kawasaki can help you out.

Email this post to a friend

Sabi, a Seattle-based startup company, and Microsoft have announced the launch of ItzaBitza. It’s an interactive drawing and reading game for children age 4 and older. Sabi was created through the collaboration of the Microsoft IP Ventures program and Sabi co-founder and CEO Margaret Johnson.

Sabi’s ItzaBitza is the first in a series of new games from the company that aims to inspire creativity, exercise minds and deliver fun experiences.

“Our vision is to create a new gaming category that stimulates creative thinking,” Johnson said.

ItzaBitza’s approach to interactive learning is based on design and technology, conceived at Microsoft Research — along with the support of Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer — and licensed to Sabi through Microsoft’s IP Ventures program.

“Game-based education is a very exciting concept, and one that we have been interested in for many years,” Mundie said. “The launch of Sabi’s game is a great example of our collaborative efforts to bootstrap young companies by providing them with guidance and access to innovative intellectual property.”

The game is built on a drawing recognition experience, called Living Ink, which identifies the drawing of certain objects and brings them to life so that the child’s art becomes an integral part of the game. Children then interact with the drawings, embark on different quests and create their own stories using the characters in the game.

“We wanted to take all we had learned while incubating our game designs at Microsoft and create a game we felt was a fresh approach to children’s computer games,” Johnson said. “We see ItzaBitza as the seed of an effort in which the games children want to play provide crucial creativity and reading skills they need to succeed.”

ItzaBitza begins with play sets that include easy and basic words, and then gets increasingly difficult as the child successfully completes the challenges. It supports young readers with audio word help, so they don’t get frustrated if they get stuck on a word. 

Photo courtesy: Sabi

Source: My Techbox Online

Worried about today’s stock market activity? Retreat with me into the security of the bright future that awaits.

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie (pater familias of the Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments), is on a college tour across the nation.  The trip is something of a reprise of jaunts Bill Gates famously made over the years, when he would string together visits to campuses partly to evangelize, partly to recruit, and mostly to get new ideas from bright young (and contrarian) minds.  The Seattle paper today labels these tours as filling the role of Microsoft’s “chief inspiration officer” (“Mundie gives campuses peek at tech’s future”).

What’s he telling this generation of future technologists, at Princeton, NYU, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego? Here’s a telling quote from Craig in a much longer interview just posted with Knowledge@Wharton:

Many of the failings — not just of our software but of all large software — is that the security problems, the lack of reliability, the difficulty in maintenance, the difficulty in testing, all of these things are symptomatic of software still being too much of an art form and too little of an engineering discipline. I believe that over the next 10 to 20 years, you’re going to see a dramatic shift in the way people write software…

Software will be built through the composition at every scale of a lot of distributed, asynchronous services. The question is: How can you specify, compose and operate those services?”

What will such software enable – since “a lot” = billions of distributed, asynchronous services?  The future may look a lot like what Kevin Kelly laid out in a mind-tripping TED talk at the dawn of 2008 (“Predicting the Next 5000 Days of the Web“).  But Kevin’s conclusions were predicted in a pathbreaking 1997 article for Microsoft Research by Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, “The Revolution Yet to Happen.”  And their writing appropriately cited Vannevar Bush’s archetypal 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think” for its vision of the globally networked uber-library, Memex.

And for a peek into how we’re beginning that “changed way of software,” I’ve written before that we’re using Robotics as an exemplar, a testbed, and it is proving to be a remarkable environment in which to test the power of marrying “Decentralized Software Services” (DSS) with a “Concurrency and Coordination Runtime” (CCR) framework.  It’s really powerful, check out this detailed technical report – lots of cool pictures, too

Email this post to a friend

Craig Mundie of Microsoft.

Here at UC Berkeley, the View from the Top Lecture Series featured Craig Mundie, the Chief Research and Strategy Officer of Microsoft. This lecture was of the type that makes living in Berkeley a real pleasure for me. With just the tiniest bit of effort I can hear a really intelligent, informed, enthusiastic person talk in some depth about very interesting, important and worthwhile subjects. This talk was video-recorded and will soon be on-line here at Berkeley Engineering web site.

What interested me most about this lecture wasn’t the information, which was important and future looking but the man himself. He had a marvelous ability to take long complicated questions from the audience and answer them in clear and content filled complete ways. He was a superb example of the Hamlet sanity test and he not only answered the questions but answered them clearly and carried them even deeper than the questioner asked for. Not off topic, as a non-sane person would do, but right on topic as a sane person should do and furthermore developing the idea to its knowable limits as only a super-sane person is capable of doing. I have been watching for this ability and have found it in several other people who have been blogged about here: Craig Venter, Michael Marks and Cesar Millan.

Highlights of this morning’s keynote by Craig Mundie, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

Computers will be more pervasive and work in the context of what an individual is doing – think GPS and restaurant search ala iPhone. More broadly, and in a healthcare context, think real-time diabetes monitoring, coupled to intelligent alerts. Last week’s Project HealthDesign had a good example of a diabetes monitoring system that is well worth watching.

Spatial Computing: Computing outside the normal PC construct and compute within the Cloud. As cost of sensors continue to fall they will increasingly be a part of the fabric of future computing. This will lead to computing becoming model based, vs. the discreet applications we have today. More humanistic computing will be the result including the moving to 3D display and highly adaptive systems.

Mundie gave a brief example during this part of his talk of a controlling a robot representation in a 3D visual environment with objects, which were obeying first principle physical laws falling over as the robot bumped into them. Thought to myself, doesn’t look much different than a gaming environment. Then it struck me, damn, this looks familiar! Willing to place a very heavy bet that what he was actually demonstrating is a gaming computing environment from what was a small and very innovative French software company, Virtools. Virtools was acquired by my former employer Dassault Systemes a few years back and no, this is not something new that has yet to reach the market, which to me Mundie inferred, but a technology that has been in the market for several years now – it just doesn’t have that much visibility outside game development community.

Demos:

• Photosynth: A new technology developed at MS that takes numerous 2D photos and creates a composite to create a 3D composite model of the real world.
• Robotic Receptionist: Plan to beta test at MS campus in next couple of months. Using an 8-core high performance computer, uses roughly 40% of computing power continuously – what a CPU hog! Most dual-core processors on one’s PC use only a few percent in any given computing task. Gave a quick demo, very bizarre is the best way to describe it. Still on the crude side, but not unlike something you would read in a Gibson SciFi novel.

Concurrency and Complexity: Applications that are loosely coupled, asynchronous, concurrent, composable, decentralized and resilient. This is what the Internet is bringing to the future of application development but the tools today to create such are really not there yet. Creates new challenges for computer programmers. Certainly creates challenges for MS who is so tied to the PC construct.

Making things simple for the end user is an incredibly difficult task for programmers. Developing applications that understand the context by which the user interacting with the computer is something that MS is still trying to figure out. Mundie readily admits that today, programs still make the user conform to the computer rather than the computer conform to the user. This is the next big issue to tackle in the comuter industry.

Next month is the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech08 Conference held on the MIT campus (September 23-25). EmTech08 is a conference and workshops to discuss emerging technologies “that are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world.” EmTech also presents the TR35, or the top 35 technology innovators under the age of 35. I am extremely excited about this years EmTech conference and selection of breakout workshops that include: Developing Technical Leadership: Lessons From The Top, Social Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship: Fostering Innovation with a Large Organization, Web 2.0/Web 3.0 Mashup, Is There a Clean-Tech Bubble?, Open-Source Hardware, and many more. Some of this year’s featured speakers include Desh Deshpande, Chairman of Sycamore Networks, A123, and Tejas Networks; Parker Harris, EVP of Technology at Salesforce.com; Rich Miner, Group Manager – Mobile Platforms at Google; and keynote speaker Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

I am seeking sponsorship to attend the conference so I can share my insights with my readers. As I wrote about the Enterprise 2.0 Winner, I plan on writing much more about the EmTech08 conference. I looked in to getting a Press Pass, but do not qualify. I also contacted the EmTech08 organizers in attempts to get the registration fee waived, but the best they could offer me is the student rate of $395. If you are interested in reading my entrepreneurial insights about the EmTech08 conference then please help me find a sponsor to cover the $395 student registration fee for me to attend the EmTech08 conference. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you and I hope I will be seeing you at EmTech08.

You can contact my school e-mail at eshooman1@babson.edu

Channel 10 podcast

I’m a big fan of the cool site Channel 10 and its podcasts and blogs (“a place for enthusiasts with a passion for technology. Through a world-wide network of contributors, Channel 10 covers the latest news in music, mobility, photography, videography, gaming, and new PC hardware and software”).

So I was chuffed when the ubiquitous Jon Udell interviewed me a week ago for Channel 10 (“Lewis Shepherd discusses the Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments“).

Jon asked some really thoughtful, insightful questions – we wound up getting much deeper than planned into topics like Government 2.0 relationships between citizens and public data, and successful routes to innovation in government bureaucracies. 

Channel 10 has posted the whole darn 46-minute conversation we had; my, I do prattle on. But they also have the full text at the link, so you can just skim for particular items of interest.  Pretty wide-ranging topics touched on, including a couple from my government years (Intellipedia, touch-tables) and some more recent Microsoft technologies (Surface, PhotoSynth, PopFly, WorldWideTelescope, Live Translator and others).

Just a few snippets:

JU: Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government is a mysterious new organization that hasn’t been heard from much. Readers of magazines like Government Computer News may have seen some notices about it, and may have noted that former CIA Assistant Director Jim Simon is the founder…  But not much else is known. So, what’s this all about?

LS: Well, I’d say a better word than mysterious would be quiet. And that’s because we’re new and small. The Institute was set up by Bill Gates and Craig Mundie in 2004. They decided that Microsoft should play a more strategic role in the eyes of government….

   …

LS: We have visibility into the entirety of strategic and future-oriented work that Microsoft is doing. Not just strictly MSR, but also incubation, Live Labs, Office Labs, forward-thinking people in various product groups.

   …

LS: What I see is a changing mindset about Microsoft, and the role it can play in government. It’s not just about are we on a Windows platform. It’s about what can I use, on my computer or mobile device, that’ll enable me to do things I couldn’t do before. If those are Microsoft things with a Windows label, that’s great. If they’re not, if they’re cool, funky, web-centric things like Popfly, that’s great too.

   …

JU: Tell me if this fits into your charter. A big aspect of what I think of as Government 2.0 is the emerging availability of various sources of government data. There’s a growing consensus that data will be made available, and that’s happening, but in a way that reminds me of how things were, and mostly still are, on the scientific web. Yeah, there’s the data, go grab the gzipped tarball and have fun with it. As opposed to offering a service layer interposed between both applications and human being. I see an interesting possible role for Microsoft, and I see it as extension of something that’s happening in the relationship between MSR and the scientific community…  One of the things I’m seeing Microsoft consistently doing in its partnerships with scientists is to provide both infrastructure and consulting expertise, to help people wrap their arms around large datasets and make them useful in ways they wouldn’t otherwise be.

I’m wondering if there isn’t scope for something analogous in the government space, as these datasets begin to be made available, but not necessarily in ways that enable citizens to ask and answer meaningful questions, or relate the raw information to policy.

LS: You’ve hit on something that’s really important, and yes, it’s an interest of ours. It’s very hard to do, but if you do it, the value is tremendous… When you think about large volumes of data being transmitted in both directions — from citizens to governments, and from governments to citizens — it really opens up the world. We haven’t figured out all the ways, but it’s fascinating to think about the diverse set of enterprise challenges that governments face, and about the technologies we have in the nooks and crannies of Microsoft that might be able to help.

JU: It sounds like you’re having fun snooping around finding them.

LS: I’m having a blast!

With any luck, an Obama or McCain administration will put some momentum into areas like Government 2.0 and extending a social-networking paradigm out to polity relationships.  They’re each making the right noises right now.

These excerpts don’t do John’s great questions and the exchange which followed justice – get the full interview and podcast here).

Email this post to a friend

Non lo conoscevo. L’ho visto. Ci ho capito poco ma in quel poco ho riso un sacco. L’ho scoperto dopo aver letto un interessante articolo dal Disinformatico.

Si tratta dell’autoparodia di Bill Gates dedicata al suo abbandono della Microsoft. Una parodia che vede come protagonisti non solo lui ma anche Brian Williams, Steve Ballmer, Matthew McConaugheyr, Robbie Bach, Jay-Z, Bono, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Kevin Turner, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Ray Ozzie e Craig Mundie (in grassetto quelli che son riuscito a riconoscere).

Guardatevelo anche voi, anche se non doveste capire una parola di inglese: è bello lo stesso!

Video

Ps: mi vergogno un po’ ma nella parte in palestra sembra un po’ me…

Fact: At last, the public announcement this afternoon of one of the most-rumored secrets in tech: Microsoft is acquiring Powerset, taking us one major step forward in semantic technologies. 

Analysis: There’ll be plenty of analysts looking at this, and I expect the acquisition will get a lot of buzz just as Powerset did originally when launched.  After all, Microsoft is buying a company which was called a “Google-Killer” by everyone from the New York Times to various esoteric search-technology blogs.  [Update: it's already started on TechCrunch.]

If you haven’t used Powerset’s first announced product, semantic searching of Wikipedia, check it out on their site and you’ll begin to see why there’s been so much interest in their technical approach. I’ve know founder Barney Pell for a while now, and we’ve mused about the possibilities of adding Powerset’s strengths to Microsoft’s global scale.  The more I played with PowerLabs, before its full launch, the more I was convinced of its power.

When I was working at DIA, one of our dreams was a semantically enabled intelligence enterprise. IC analysts and advanced users within any other enterprise vertical are going to find some very interesting capabilities finally possible when Powerset technology is wedded to the FAST search software already being deployed at web scale.

But that’s only the beginning. 

I knew of Microsoft’s long history in semantic research, dating back to the MindNet days and before. Microsoft Research has been ramping up our investment in semantic approaches for a while now, because we see enormous benefit in embedding semantic capability within the billions of web services and software services we’re planning, in the “software plus services” plan. 

Keep in mind:

1. We’ve already been delving deeply into graph and subgraph relationships among information and documents at web scale (see “Web Projections: Learning from Contextual Subgraph Projections of the Web,” 2007).
2. We’ve added to that some ambitious partnerships with the brightest minds in academic and commercial semantic research, with our program “Beyond Search: Semantic Computing and Internet Economics,” launched late last year “to improve the ways in which the information seeker finds, shares, discovers information.” (Check out the impressive list of projects at the link.)
3. Semantic understanding will only enhance the big vision – and Craig Mundie describes that this way: “We tend to believe that there will continue to accrue a large amount of computational capability in the literally billions of intelligent gadgets and devices.”  Software on those billions of devices will coordinate and interact with a web-scale “services layer” of cloud-supplied intelligence.  One avenue of that activity is imagined in last year’s Microsoft Research-sponsored paper on “Semantic Reality: Connecting the Real and Virtual World.”  That paper describes SR as integrating “a large body of work in sensor networks, embedded systems, ambient intelligence, networking, distributed systems, distributed information systems, artificial intelligence, software engineering, social networking and collaboration, and Semantic Web.”

Simple but surprisingly powerful examples are already appearing, as in the Microsoft Research “Blogosphere Early Warning System” or BLEWS, which was unveiled in prototype at the 2008 TechFest and may go live during this presidential election. Here’s a screenshot of BLEWS; intelligence analysts can think of it as an advanced OSINT tool, consuming web-scale social media and blog content. 

BLEWS semantically identifies political blogposts, ascribing a left-leaning or right-leaning interpretation.  it then extracts and mines all links to news articles, applies an “emotional charge” classifier and a de-duplication algorithm to related articles, and finally produces a visualization of the volume and semantic relationship of the articles in near-real-time.  Nifty!

A personal disclosure: my happiness at the Powerset acquisition isn’t just because of the technology it brings to Microsoft. In fact, when I was preparing to leave government service last year, I was approached by the startup about their position of VP of Engineering.  I had some fascinating discussions and love the company, the technology, and Barney Pell – but I felt I was a better fit as a generalist at Microsoft. 

Well, what do you know – happy endings!  E pluribus unum

 Email this post to a friend