Bill Gates discusses energy and other issues that matter the poorest people of the world

If imitation were the path to excellence, art museums would be filled with paint-by-number works [...]

[Tucker’s] expertise is self-appointed, and his method, the equivalent of “the think system,” is obvious quackery. And the Gates Foundation, which has for some reason backed Tucker and his organization with millions of dollars, must be playing the residents of River City...

The Boston metro area is no Silicon Valley. But it fields its fair share of startups and it raked in the lion’s share of the nearly $780 million in venture capital invested in the New England region in the fourth quarter of 2011.

While the area is more famous for the tech luminaries and startups it lost to other regions — Harvard alums Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates being the most famous examples  – it still can claim a roster of impressive tech startups.

As a Silicon Valley-based partner for Boston-based North Bridge Venture Partners‘  Paul Santinelli has studied the differences between the two technology hotbeds up close and come up with a few conclusions. ”Boston is strong in infrastructure, comms [communications], and enterprise software — the kinds of technologies needed to build businesses,” he said in a recent interview.

Silicon Valley — which led the league in VC money with more than $3 billion invested in Q4 2011, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report, is much more focused on the consumer markets, Santinelli said.

But in the post-minicomputer, post-PC world, why build a business in Boston? “That’s a question we had to answer in a very real way when we got started,” said David McFarlane, Co-Founder and CEO of Akiban Technologies, a Boston-based NewSQL database startup. Some of the company’s backers wanted it to relocate to Silicon Valley, he said, but Akiban resisted.

“There’s a tremendous amount of talent in the Boston area where there are quite a few database and data integration companies. There are a number of founding architects that came from Object Design, from Archivas, Blue Agave, and Oberon and InterSystems,” he said. Object Design was a pioneer in object-oriented databases; Blue Agave, a demand management specialist, was acquired by I2 Technologies (which was then acquired by JDA Software); Archivas was a storage startup acquired by HDS; InterSystems is the company behind the Cache database (an outgrowth of the  MUMPS database) used by many hospitals and healthcare organizations.

Ori Herrnstadt, McFarlane’s co-founder and Akiban CTO agreed. “The caliber of architects you found here in the database world was unmatched. The Vertica, the Netezza, the Object Design guys were all here,” he said.  (Vertica, Netezza and Object Design ended up at  Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Progress Software respectively.)

Other hot database or storage oriented startups in the Boston area include Kinvey, ParElastic, Ginger.io, Sonian, Hadapt, Cloudant and VoltDB, the latest brainchild of serial database entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who backed Informix, INGRES, Streambase and, Vertica.

It doesn’t hurt that MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Bentley, Babson, UMass/Boston and other colleges are shoehorned into a compact area around the city. Those schools provide a steady stream of young talent to power startups. Another key part of Boston’s deep bench comes from its background as the home of the minicomputer — the mid-range machines that bridged the mainframe and PC eras. Those minicomputer companies — Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer, Data General, Wang Labs, ComputerVision — have gone the way of the dodo bird, but left behind an impressive array of technology experience that remains relevant.

Boston’s proximity to east coast financial companies is another plus. Those companies are not only a possible source of investment but a potential customer base, Santinelli said.

Still, as evidenced by the number of local companies snapped up by outside tech giants, the Boston-Cambridge nexus can feel more like a farm team to distant big leaguers. IBM alone has bought 20 local area companies since it purchased Lotus Development Corp. in 1995. IBM’s most recent purchase was Burlington, Mass.-based Emptoris last December.  Oracle (bought Cambridge-based Endeca in October) and others have cherry picked promising startups in the area. There simply aren’t many tech giants based here any more. On the plus side, the well of expertise still runs deep in the area that witnessed the rise (and fall) of the minicomputer era.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Stracke

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Quite a screed attacking Bill Gates on Africa: Philanthropy is the enemy of justice attn: @lizwilsonUK @mattbish

The man who changed the way the rich world lives is equally determined to change the way in which the poor world dies

Chicago-based artist Hebru Brantley is looking to carry on the legacy of the inherent relationship between hip-hop and art, focusing mainly on graffiti. His latest effort to do so is sprawled over two floors and a couple thousand square feet, dubbed “Yesterday’s Losers.” Tucked into Chicago’s South Loop, it features dozens of paintings, graffiti, drawings, installments, sculptures and other pieces.

“I didn’t want to use anything traditional because I don’t feel like my work is traditional,” he says. “Given that I have this space, I didn’t want to use drywall and just hang paintings. I wanted to make it interesting and keep the feel of this space, because it’s very industrial. The opportunity arose to get some of this old hardwood and I felt like it was kind of ideal to put into this space. I use a lot a Nike iconography. Certain older artists would use birds for freedom. As we grew up, we didn’t see many birds. If I did, they were pigeons. The closest I’ve ever seen to flight is what these guys can do.”

Life+Times: Explain the meaning behind the name “Yesterday’s Losers.”
Hebru Brantley: Old folks tend to frown upon the younger generation. But in their time, it was the same thing. It’s generational and keeps repeating itself. I’m a product of the MTV, rap generation. A child of history, and my history is getting richer by the day. We have a Black president now, there’s a power struggle, a shift, but we don’t have a great war, we don’t have what our parents had. Our history is different. I feel like a lot of my generation is looked upon as being shiftless, lazy, and losers. When I grew up the nerds were always shunned. Those kids who were geeky, those kids who were different, who didn’t necessarily subscribe to the track that everybody else rode on. Those different kids – yesterday’s loser’s – are today’s CEOs. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Kanye West, those guys who are geniuses. The ones who were shunned upon and written off are the ones who shaped culture.

L+T: Was it hard to get people to pay attention?
HB: At first, [yes]. But my audience has definitely grown, and I’m appreciative of that, because, people say New York or L.A. is hard, but Chicago, I think, is the hardest market. It’s not a place with strong support or a strong background. There’s not a lot of support. Places like L.A. or New York are more fashioned to be spots for the underdogs. They’re boutique-based. Because everybody wants to be on the cutting edge, it’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t know about this? Well let me put you on.’ Chicago is like, ‘Oh, you don’t about this? Haha, well I can’t tell you about it.’ So for me to be as well-received as I have been, it’s a blessing. It’s been great.

L+T: How has hip-hop influenced you in your work?
HB: It has a great deal of influence. It’s what I listen to when I’m creating, brushing my teeth. It is who I am. The [Souls of Mischief] statement, “93 Til…” kind quantifies everything as far as my relationship with art, my relationship with music and where it all derives from. That was a big time in my life, when you get to be a teenager and things start shaping.

L+T: Was graffiti how you got into art, then?
HB: Absolutely. I think for most people in my generation, kids that are into art, it starts one of three way: cartoons, graffiti or comics. Something catches your eye at an early age that sparks that within you. For a lot my peer group, that’s what did it for them.

L+T: As an artist, what is your ultimate goal?
HB: To be considered a master. To go down in history and to be a huge part of history as it relates to contemporary art. The guys that I grew up looking towards, how I marveled at what they did, I want that same thing.

[electric can openers]

there's a danger to extrapolate conclusions from education experiments - as it was in welfare reform: "Our measurements are imprecise at best and meaningless and misleading at worst. Most educators, advocates, researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers are well aware of the problem of measuring complex outcomes. That awareness disappears when we talk about policy experiments. We act as if testing these programs will lead to some empirical, objective truth about what works best."

Rogers added: "Policy experiments are supposed to tell us empirically how good a program or approach is. They don't do this very well. Randomized experiments are expensive, difficult, and rare. Most policy ‘experiments' aren't really experiments. They are a trial run of a program with data collection. Even then, the data is often collected haphazardly or to highlight program success and minimize failures. Politics and research also operate in different time frames - solid evaluations often take years. In short, well-funded policy evaluations take too long to actually affect policy, and ad hoc evaluations don't produce reliable findings."

In the final analysis, ALEC will take Gates money. It will likely come up with another report touting the success of charter schools and voucher programs, and more reasons to bust teachers unions. It will design sample legislation for its members to introduce in state houses across the country. The privatization of public education will move forward. This is not a project that Bill or Melinda Gates should be proud of.

admitting that I just ♡ Fareed. but there are good points in here. basically -
"We've been talking about America's education decline for three decades now, so much so that we are numbed by the discussion. But the consequences of that crisis are only just becoming fully apparent."

Bill Gates is only 56 years old, but he stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft a decade ago. He’d still be the richest man in America if he and his wife Melinda hadn’t been so busy giving money away. And instead of just donating, they did the research to determine how they would get the most bang for the buck. As it turns out, those bucks get a lot of bang when you use them to buy simple vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has gone through 25 billion dollars to not only get vaccines to children who need them, but to change the way that vaccines are developed, manufactured, and distributed globally.

The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.

“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.

Read about how they did it at Forbes. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

While some may have bristled at Steve Jobs calling Bill Gates an unimaginative copycat in the Jobs biography released last week, Gates says he was not one of those people. In fact, Gates says he totally gets why Jobs would, from time to time, say some pretty mean things about him. He basically suggests it was professional jealousy.

For instance, Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,” and “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

Here’s how Gates responded in his Sunday interview on ABC’s This Week:

“Over the course of the 30 years we worked together, you know, he said a lot of very nice things about me and he said a lot of tough things. He faced, several times at Apple, the fact that their products were so premium priced that they literally might not stay in the marketplace. So the fact that we were succeeding with high-volume products, you know, including a range of prices, because of the way we worked with multiple companies, it’s tough. And so the fact that at various times, he felt beleaguered, he felt like he was the good guy and we were the bad guys, you know, very understandable.”

Gates seems to be referring to the Apple that Jobs returned to in 1997, when the company was 90 days from bankruptcy. Jobs eventually ended up making a deal with Microsoft to invest $150 million into the company directly as well as develop Microsoft software for the Mac, which was a  huge boon to the Mac platform. And that’s also probably was Gates was referring to earlier in the interview when he sort of took credit for creating the Mac: “Steve and I worked together creating the Mac, we had more people on it, did the key software for it,” he told Christiane Amanpour.

“We” is obviously Microsoft. And as previously mentioned, they did develop Office, Internet Explorer and other development tools for the Mac. But Jobs and possibly a few others at Apple might take exception at the “worked on creating the Mac” bit.

Even so, Gates reiterates his respect for Jobs despite the blunt quotes about him that Jobs gave to his biographer:

“I respect Steve. We got to work together, we spurred each other on even as competitors. None of that bothers me at all.”

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When it comes to reading the world's "tea leaves", few are as capable as Ray Dalio, head of the world's biggest (macro) hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. So when none other than Ray tells PBS' Charlie Rose that "there are no more tools in the tool kit" of fiscal and monetary policy to help America kick the can down the road, perhaps it would behoove the respective authorities to sit down and listen. Or not... and just to buy S&P futures in hopes that record career risk is big enough to force every other asset manager in the market to do the dumb thing and follow the crowd of lemmings right over the edge. Luckily, there are those who have the luxury of having both the capital and the time to not be drawn into the latest sucker's rally. More importantly, Dalio shares some unique perspectives on what it means to run the world's largest hedge fund, his perspective on social anxiety, and Occupy Wall Street and thus the demonization of wealth and success (in a way that does not imply crony capitalism: see Omaha), his views on taxation, on China, on the markets, on Europe and its insolvent banks, and most imporantly on the economy and why the much pained 2% growth (if that) will not be nowhere near enough to alleviate social tensions, such as those that have appeared over the past two months. Dalio's conclusion, in responding to whether he is optimsitic or pessimistic, to the current environment of broad delevaraging of the private sector, coupled with record releveraging of the public, is that he is "concerned." And that's why, unlike the recently unemployed David Biancos of the world, who never exhibit an ounce of skepticism, Dalio is among the wealthiest men in the world (and hence a prime target of the #OWS movement). Well, that and also being smarter than most.

Full video interview after the jump

And complete transcript:

CHARLIE ROSE: Ray Dalio is here. He is the founder of Bridgewater Associates. He created the investment firm in 1975 out of a two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Today the company managed roughly $125 billion in global investments. Its clients include foreign governments, sovereign banks, central banks and institutional pension funds.

Over the last two years, Bridgewater ranked as the largest and best- performing hedge fund in the world. In 2010, his returns were greater than the profits of Google, Amazon and eBay combined.

I`m very pleased to have Ray Dalio at this table for the first time to talk about a perspective on the global economic scene and a whole range of issues having to do with where we see ourselves and also a look at his own philosophy and what has informed his own opinions and the way he looks at the world. Having said that -- welcome.

RAY DALIO: Thank you.

CHARLIE ROSE: It`s great to have you here.

RAY DALIO: It`s great to be here.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is Bridgewater Associates?

RAY DALIO: It`s a global macro firm. We assess what the world economy is like and what -- how asset classes will change and we are managing money for pension funds and endowments like you described; the Pennsylvania teachers, those types of pension funds. We`re trying to keep them safe.

CHARLIE ROSE: When you look at the world today, the global economic picture, I read today Goldman Sachs had a disappointing performance. JP Morgan did not do as well as some had hoped it might be. What`s happening with financial firms?

RAY DALIO: I think it`s important to understand that we`re going through a deleveraging. So we have to understand the big picture is -- there`s a deleveraging. Three big themes: first there`s a deleveraging; secondly we have a problem with monetary and fiscal policies are running out of ammunition; and thirdly we have an issue in terms of people most importantly who are at each other`s throats politically and globally in terms of having a problem resolving those.

Imagine you earned $100,000 a year and you didn`t have any debt. You can go to a bank and borrow $10,000 a year. You can spend, therefore, $110 a year. When you spend $110,000 a year, somebody else earns $110,000 and they can go to a bank and there`s a self-reinforcing process in which your debt rises in relationship to your income.

And that goes on for a long time and that goes on for 50 or 75 years through history. We`ve had 50, 75-year cycles and then you reach a point where you can`t anymore get more debt and the process starts to change. And you can`t leverage up. Traditionally the private sector leverages up, we leveraged up then we got to a point in 2007 where we had a bubble and that same sort of bubble that happened in Japan, same sort of bubble that happened in the Great Depression, meaning we reached our debt limits. Europe`s reached its debt limits.

So then we begin the process in reverse as you can`t spend as much you -- somebody else`s income falls. And that process works in reverse. So we`re in a deleveraging. So I think that this is important globally. That`s what Europe`s in.

So when we deal with Goldman Sachs or when we deal with banks and when we deal with Europe I think you can break the world into two parts, there`s the debtor-developed world which has reached its debt limits and is going through a deleveraging. Then there`s the creditor-emerging world, the countries like China which are competitive and are beginning to have those big surpluses and they`re lending us money. So we have this big imbalance in the world.

You can break the world into two parts. Debtor-developed countries and emerging-creditor countries and they have a big imbalance which is a debt problem. That`s the nature of the beast of what`s going on.

CHARLIE ROSE: And how long would the deleveraging take place? Ten years?

RAY DALIO: These take place over ten years. The key is to spread it out as much as you can. Make sure that it`s not disorderly.

CHARLIE ROSE: let me talk about the dysfunction issue. We can`t solve our problems domestically in the United States, our economic problems, unless there`s some sense of respect for other people`s views and some sense of it being able to come together and find solutions that are in the interest of the country, not necessarily always in the interest of the ideology or the party.

RAY DALIO: Yes. And I think that`s the problem so pervasively when we`re talking about culture. It is -- when people disagree and you can take thoughtful people disagree, you have then the potential of learning a lot. If people who were disagreeing can say why do we disagree and work through that conversation in an intelligent way to try to find out what`s true, you can learn, you can make progress, it can be a fabulous thing.

When you instead have people who were talking behind each other`s backs and all criticizing and all looking for blame, this is a problem. I think the real question is how we approach those -- can we approach that in a thoughtful way in which we work that through?

Let`s say for example the government budget balance.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

RAY DALIO: The government budget balance if you raise taxes -- if everybody just sucked it in a little bit, you raise taxes by three percent, you cut spending by three percent -- I`m using three percent as an example to say not much. Everybody should be able to pay three percent more or you should be able to cut your expenditures by three percent.

CHARLIE ROSE: If the government did that --

RAY DALIO: If the government did that, they would eliminate half the budget deficit -- it`s estimated about $8.5 trillion over the next ten years is what we`re going to have as a deficit, they will eliminate half of that. Now --

CHARLIE ROSE: Over how long a period?

RAY DALIO: The next ten years.

CHARLIE ROSE: The next ten years, all right.

RAY DALIO: Now, I`m asking you if we could have every American -- can everybody pay three percent more? Can everybody just spend three percent less? You can make a heck of a contribution to that.

Instead we have a division that`s going on in which we -- the basic division is Republicans will say that we shouldn`t raise taxes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Or even reduce deductions.

RAY DALIO: Yes -- in that way of raising taxes. So we -- and Democrats say that we must raise taxes because we can`t cut the spending. So the delineation that as we came into that was the debt limit issue, that remains the debt limit issue.

And there`s vested interests involved; 70 percent of the taxes are paid by the top 10 percent of income earners, income taxes. And so -- so what we have is a division here in which there`s not a coming together, I believe, and that means that in a deleveraging at a difficult time we`re not dealing with it in the best possible way. But it`s human nature.

CHARLIE ROSE: We are doing as they say, kicking the can down the road and not dealing with it. Suppose the super committee does not reach an agreement in terms of its requirement and therefore the mechanism -- the trigger mechanism kicks in? What does your team think about that and what impact will that be?

RAY DALIO: Charlie, I`m meant to be a realistic person and sometimes when there`s concerns it`s difficult to talk about difficult situation. So I want to try and answer your question as honestly as I possibly can but I want to say that I`m very concerned not just of that. I do not believe that we will find a political solution. I think that that would not be -- I`m pessimistic about that.

CHARLIE ROSE: So you have the same opinion that Standard & Poor`s had when they reduced --

RAY DALIO: Essentially.

CHARLIE ROSE: -- America`s credit rating.

RAY DALIO: Essentially. So I think -- and by the way I think it`s very important to understand that the government debt is the terrible challenging issue that we should talk about maybe but also more important is the private sector debt. So that resolving the public sector debt does not resolve the problem.

That individuals face the same problem meaning that they`re overly indebted and because they`re overly ind[…]