You are there: Video of Curiosity's landing on the Red Planet

Shot by the rover on its highly choreographed descent to the surface of the Red Planet, and synced with ground audio that in reality lagged the actual events by several minutes, the video embedded here may raise goose bumps.

Give it a watch.

In contrast to the many stories about the landing that focused on the astrobiology mission and sheer technical success of putting such a large vehicle on the surface of another planet, shortly after the landing GOOD went a different direction. What does the public get for its $1.5b? You might be surprised.

The - ahem - money graph:

Those who say NASA is an economic leech have no idea how tiny a share NASA has, so here’s a quick visual. Turn a tax dollar into one hundred pennies. Pick up one penny. Now, take a pair of shears and cut off a sliver of that penny, something slightly less than half. That sliver is NASA. And the Curiosity rover? Per capita, it cost each American seven dollars. The war in Iraq, by comparison, will cost each of us around $12,000. The $850 billion Wall Street bailout cost more than NASA's entire 54-year existence. 

Over those 54 years though, NASA has paid dividends. Any long distance communication--voice, television, data, GPS--has NASA to thank. They developed the first satellites, accomplishing that would’ve been far too risky and expensive for any private company to pioneer. The list of aviation safety and medical technologies NASA developed or helped develop is too long for this screen. Cordless appliances, LEDs, water filters, memory foam mattresses? All NASA. One out of every thousand US patents belongs to NASA. Economic studies have found that NASA generates between 3 and 7 dollars return for every 1 dollar invested.

After an extensive two-week check out, the plutonium powered six-wheeled spider has raised its mast and begun to move, leaving tracks behind.

Wayne

"Affective computing" will reshape healthcare

Along with Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, Rosalind Picard of MIT's Center for Affective Comptuing rounds out the IdeaFestival 2012 speaker lineup.

Affective computing aims to bridge the gap between technology and its emotion-laden creators, by, for example, creating methods to read facial expressions over the Web, which could improve medical diagnostics or lead to more effective educational instruction. In the broadest sense, the goal is to develop technology to reliably sense, communicate and respond to emotion. As such it not only builds on improvements in sensor and other technologies, but recognizes that as biological beings, emotion and cognition are inseparable. That understanding alone has begun to profoundly reshape fields as diverse as philosophy and robotics.

Rosalind Picard will talk at the festival about how emotion data will reshape healthcare.

All-access and Day passes to the IdeaFestival are available. I hope to see you there!

Wayne

Anxious decisions bad for innovation, lasting creativity

Reading a blog post on anxiety and decision making may seem like an unlikely place to find a lesson on innovation, but that's exactly what I encountered reading "Fretting Over Decisions," an older article posted at Psychology Today. Money section:

When you believe that any decision must be the RIGHT one, then even small decisions can paralyze you.

Reasoning can take the form of all-or-nothing thinking—often called 'dichotomous thinking' when you're anxious. It's about fight or flight, right or wrong, and good or bad. Nuance goes out the door. That's why you end up making poor decisions when you sweat about it.

You can practice confident decision-making by remembering a simple dictum over and over: You cannot have certainty and you don't need it. By accepting that no certainty exists and that you don't need it, you'll instead harness intuition and, by extension, confidence (emphasis supplied).

Here's the innovation lesson I learned: The link between axiety and the need for certainty can be broken if I'm willing to make little bets.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by soundman1024

Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat: "Maybe they thought I was dead"

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others. Winston Churchill

Cartoonist Ali Ferzat founded Syria's first satirical weekly, Ad Domari, and in August 2011, was attacked by Bashar al-Assad's militia, who broke his hands. The incident prompted international condemnation of the Assad regime. Ferzat was subsequently awarded the European parliament Sakharov prize for freedom of thought.

Watch as this courageous man talks about his career and the events of August, 2011.

He will speak at IdeaFestival 2012 in an event moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader, Joel Pett. Make plans to be there!

Wayne

Joel Pett

Joel Pett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoons have appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Times of London, the Boston Globe and the Katmandu Times.  Magazine credits include Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and MAD.

Pett received the 1999 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the 1995, 2007, 2010 and 2011 Global Media Awards for cartoons on population and sustainability issues, and an Emmy for television commentary.  He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1989, 1998, and 2011, is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, a past Pulitzer juror, and has conducted three overseas seminars on editorial cartooning as a guest speaker of the U.S. State Department.

Pett has also shared his blend of deceptively simple and provocative humor on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and as a guest lecturer at dozens of venues, including Washington’s  Newseum, Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library, Indiana University, Whitman College, Ohio State University, Brandeis University, and many more.