Illustration by Mark Alain


What’s on the horizon?
Discover the homegrown innovations that could change our world

On May 1, 1844, the inventor Samuel Morse told his partner, Alfred Vail, to undertake a flashy demonstration of their new device, the electric telegraph. “A good way of exciting wonder,” Morse wrote, would be for Vail to get news from the Whig Party’s national convention in Baltimore and then transmit the information instantly to Washington, D.C., in advance of the adjourning delegates on the afternoon train. Vail waited at the Annapolis Junction train station—the northernmost end of the still-unfinished telegraph line under construction along the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad right-of-way—and learned from the passengers that Henry Clay had won the presidential nomination that morning. He telegraphed this scoop to Morse, who was waiting in the Capitol. When the delegates disembarked at Union Station an hour and fifteen minutes later, they were surprised to be greeted by crowds of Clay supporters. News of the nomination was already in the papers. “When they heard the newsboys shouting their extras, and saw, in cold print, their supposed exclusive information, their astonishment knew no bounds,” Vail recalled in a letter, “for they had no belief in the ability of that little instrument they saw at Annapolis Junction to beat them in carrying the news to Washington.”

A few weeks later, the first telegraph line was formally opened between Baltimore and Washington, with Morse transmitting his famously portentous telegram: “What hath God wrought.”

What indeed. The story of America is the story of little instruments that turned the world upside down. We are—or were—the planet’s premier innovators, and Baltimoreans now live in a city littered with traces of that frenzy of invention, from the cornerstone of the nation’s first railroad in southwest Baltimore to the Space Telescope Science Institute uptown, where scientists are now pondering the stuff of existence with devices that Sam Morse could not have imagined. Inside the region’s major research institutions, Maryland minds are dreaming and devising and cobbling together all manner of audacious contraptions that may or may not transform the 21st century.

And we happen to be living in a century that is in serious need of transforming. A multiplicity of human woes, from bankrupt automakers to climate change to the subprime meltdown, demand the same remedy: Innovate your way out. There’s a strong case to be made that the current economic crisis represents nothing less than a collective failure of imagination, and it’s high time for American mindpower to offer humanity something more useful than creative credit-swapping devices and the world’s most realistic computer-generated dinosaurs.

We took just a sample of what’s brewing in Baltimore’s brain—the emerging technology, paradigm-shifting notions, and weird ideas that we might all be taking for granted in a few years. We also asked a host of local luminaries to look down the road and offer their thoughts on the breakthroughs they see coming. The future, as we are learning, can be a disturbing place. But never doubt the possibility of waking up one morning to find that someone, somewhere, has changed everything.



Collaborate or perish: Ben Shneiderman wants researchers to practice “Science 2.0.” | photo by Christopher Graham



Everyone's A Scientist
A computer pioneer calls for a revolution in scientific inquiry

In March, University of Maryland computer science professor Ben Shneiderman published a brief article called “Science 2.0” in Science magazine. In it, he argued that the scientific method is overdue for a technology-enabled makeover. The traditional guy-with-beaker stuff? That’s so Science 1.0—a lone researcher testing and re-testing hypotheses in controlled experiments and writing up results in peer-reviewed journals. Science 2.0 will follow Web 2.0 principles of social connectivity, busting out of the lab and opening up the real world to real-time, networked experimentation.

“The last four hundred years have been very successful for the observation and study of the natural world, and that will continue, but it’s time to make room for a new kind of science that has new methods,” Shneiderman says. “The traditional controlled laboratory experiment doesn’t quite work in the modern world of social complexity.” Instead, he calls for “collaboration-centered researchers” who might launch wiki-esque mega-experiments involving thousands of contributors. “We need to make a safe space for this new kind of science that blends technology with the social sciences.”

This was a bit much for a lot of colleagues, who greeted Science 2.0 with some skepticism (“idiotic pseudoscientific sloppy thinking bullshit that exemplifies the worst aspects of the intersection of the hard and soft sciences,” opined one commenter on a Wired blog). But Shneiderman, a pioneering figure in computer science who founded College Park’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, sounds delighted by the response. “Anything sufficiently bold to be threatening is rejected,” he says. “There are those who say, ‘We don’t need any new science, and this stuff is soft.’ My response is that the hard sciences may be hard, but they’re also brittle, and they break down when they’re applied to the complexity of the socially networked world.”

Understanding the rules that govern this collaborative world will be one of the fundamental jobs of Science 2.0, Shneiderman says. Just as Newton and Einstein pondered gravity and light, future researchers will unravel the relationships between the forces in the Web 2.0 universe, which he boils down to four keywords: trust, empathy, responsibility, and privacy—or TERP (get it?).

So, what might a Science 2.0 experiment look like? Shneiderman cites one example from Web-based businesses such as Amazon.com and Netflix, which monitor how tiny changes to their website design affect user purchases.

“They perform these experiments—I’d call them interventions—with the real world,” he says. “They perturb the world and then measure the response.” Similar interventional studies, on a much more massive scale, could be used to probe the intricacies of human collaboration.

Lately, Shneiderman’s been demonstrating the potential of collaboration-centered research for disaster preparation: In 2007 he and several coauthors proposed 911.gov, a site that would connect citizens into a “community response grid,” using social networking tools to allow community members to share news and assistance during a crisis. He cites a smaller-scale example of Science 2.0 thinking: a website, www.watchjeffersoncounty.net, that functions as a community-powered virtual neighborhood watch for a rural stretch of West Virginia. Says Shneiderman, “It’s a breakthrough idea by any standard I know.”




It’s a Really Small World

As director of the Maryland NanoCenter, Gary Rubloff usually measures scientific progress one billionth of a meter at a time. But he’s confident that, in the next five to ten years, the research he facilitates will mean big news for the rest of us. “I will make a prediction that the biggest impact on the future of energy will come from the nanotechnology field,” he says. In Rubloff’s future, nano-sized particles will boost the amount of energy solar panels can absorb, enable a new generation of batteries to store ten to one hundred times more power, and convert the heat from a running car engine into usable energy. If he and other researchers are successful, “your gas station might look different in five to ten years,” Rubloff says. “You could drive into a gas station and fill your battery with electric energy in the same time it would have taken you to fill your [tank] with gas.”





Map quest: Genetic researcher Akhilesh Pandey is on a mission to find every protein in the human body. | photo by Christopher Graham


Protein Power
The next big medical breakthough: mapping every protein in the human body

Remember the Human Genome Project? That effort to map the sequence of human genes cost $3 billion, maxed out supercomputers, and took teams of scientists spread across the globe more than a decade to accomplish. How quaint, says Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical School’s Institute of Genetic Medicine. Pandey is among a cadre of researchers who have set out to chart the human proteome. Where genome researchers decoded approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes, Pandey and his colleagues want to catalog every last protein in the human body—a figure that may number in the millions. It’s a project, Pandey says, that “will never be done.”

Genes, for all their usefulness, really tell only a fragment of the story, Pandey explains. The rest is to be found in the complex protein molecules that genes encode. What’s so great about proteins? They do the work in every cell in our bodies. Proteins fight disease, help us handle stress and exertion, and allow us to metabolize our food. To get a sense of what life would be like without proteins, says one microbiologist, imagine the cell as an office building. Now take out all the workers. And the concrete.

Proteins are also the target of most modern medications. In theory, if we can boost or disable specific proteins, we can treat just about anything. The problem is that, unlike genes, proteins vary from cell to cell—brain cells, for example, have a different set of proteins than heart cells. They also vary from person to person. Even in a single individual, proteins are in a state of constant flux. The proteins in your brain cells when you have a fever may be different than the ones in the same cells when you’re healthy.

The implications of mapping the proteome are profound. For starters, Pandey and his colleagues are trying to identify “biomarkers”—proteins that appear in your blood or urine when disease is present. He foresees a day when we will have simple home tests that check for pancreatic cancer—a disease that can be treated if it’s caught early, but rarely is. And, Pandey says, “if we get a catalog of proteins, we can design better drugs”—drugs that are designed to go after very specific proteins while leaving others alone.

Because of the scope of the project, researchers have broken it into bite-sized chunks. One lab is cataloging the proteins just in blood cells, for example, while others are working on the liver and the brain. But even with a relatively complete catalog of these proteins, medicine will be a moving target, says Pandey, because of the constant shifting inside every cell. “You can recognize what a marvel of a machine we are,” he says. “Everything is in some state of equilibrium.”



The Power Restructure
By Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

One of the most pressing agendas for the American city in the coming decade is replacing crumbling infrastructure. With this great need comes an even greater opportunity: to redefine the way our systems function. Imagine highways that generate energy via wind turbines, bridges that capture passive solar energy and feed it to the grid, and devices that can sanitize water anywhere. Rather than merely patching up aging systems, designers are developing ways to turn infrastructure into sophisticated machines that can produce and save energy. Ecological engineer John Todd, a researcher at the University of Vermont and a winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is cleaning sewer systems using “living machines,” sophisticated bioremediation systems that mimic the effects of wetlands. San Francisco-based architect Eric Olsen invented a portable tarpaulin that can sanitize dirty water with the power of the sun. (Imagine if we’d had an effective, off-the-grid method for providing drinking water in the days following Katrina or the Indian Ocean tsunami.) A West Coast design collective called Civil Twilight realized that streetlamps suck up nearly 40 percent of the electricity used for our lighting, so they created a lunar-resonant lamp that automatically dims when the moon is bright, effectively reducing energy consumption in cities.

In addition to innovative large-scale solutions, cities could benefit by thinking small and encouraging inventive infrastructure systems on the block scale. We could see a day when neighbors in a rowhouse block share resources, such as tapping into a geothermal well for hot water and harnessing increasingly sophisticated nano-solar technology to light their homes. This is the future of infrastructure.

—Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson is the former editor-in-chief of Urbanite. She writes about architecture and design for Architect, Metropolis, and the New York Times Magazine.



On call: Dr. Stephen Liggett found that beta blockers often failed to work on African American patients. | courtesy of University of Maryland School of Medicine


Better Medicine
Advances in pharmacogenomics promise a personalized pillbox

“Take two and call me in the morning.”

It’s an old cliché that still aptly describes the one-drug-fits-all approach of modern medicine. Despite decades of advancement in pharmacology, millions of people with little in common apart from a medical diagnosis are prescribed exactly the same drug. And while the dosage and length of treatment may differ from person to person, until the patient improves—or worsens—a doctor may not know for certain whether what cures Peter might harm Paul.

But thanks to advances in genetic testing and the mapping of the human genome, researchers in the field of pharmacogenomics, more commonly called “personalized medicine,” are crafting treatments that better fit each patient.

“The notion that we are different from each other, and that that is based on our genetic makeup, has been with us for long time,” says Dr. Stephen Liggett, director of cardiopulmonary genomics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Usually people talk about things like height, eye color, and skin color. I think everyone understands the outward appearance of being different. What was not clear to us until the 1990s was that critical genes that control heart and lung function [for example] were quite different from one individual to another.”

In April 2008 Liggett co-wrote a study on differences in the effectiveness of beta blockers, drugs often used to treat certain forms of heart disease, in African American and Caucasian patients. To their surprise, Liggett and his team found that, for many African Americans in their study, beta blockers had no effect at all, and this was likely due to a genetic variation found predominantly, though not exclusively, in African Americans. The variation in the gene known as GRK5 produces a molecule that acts like a natural beta blocker, thus nullifying the effects of the drugs.

The results of this and other studies could be far-reaching. Pre-screening for genetic variations such as GRK5 could steer doctors away from prescribing expensive medications to patients for whom they would be less effective. Pharmacogenomics could also affect drug development. “The pipeline [of new drugs] is not very good right now,” Liggett explains. “I’m talking about really new drugs, not just minor modifications to older drugs. There are not a lot of them. We think that genomics will ultimately work their way in perhaps because of that dry pipeline.” For a long time, if a drug wasn’t shown to have an acceptable response with at least 50 percent of the population, it was shelved. Developing drugs for smaller segments of the population could mean fewer sales for individual drugs, but more drugs overall.

When used appropriately, Liggett says, pharmacogenomics could fundamentally change the way doctors assess a patient’s risk of contracting certain illnesses, the effects of the illness on particular individuals, and their response to therapy. As DNA profiles and tests for particular genetic variations become more standard, doctors can make more informed treatment decisions.



Foot fetish: UMBC engineers helped build a more enlightened pump. (Image credit: Pique Performance Inc.)


If the Shoe Fits

When it comes to women’s shoes, it’s either fashion or comfort. Baltimore-based Pique Performance Inc. aims to overcome that dilemma with an insole-like device that redistributes pressure to the middle of the foot and the heel, relieving the stress on the ball of the foot that comes from wearing typical high heels. Tested on heels measuring 3 and 4 inches, as well as stilettos, it’s not yet available on the market, as it needs to be incorporated into a shoe’s design—it’s what inventor Angela Singleton calls an “under-the-hood” technology. “Instead of putting comfort features on the exterior of the shoe, like a wider heel or a rubber outsole, can we put them inside the shoe so you don’t see it?” Singleton, who previously worked at Loehmann’s in fashion and merchandise planning and at Proctor & Gamble in product development, is creating the device with the help of mechanical engineers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Shoes with Pique technology could arrive in stores as early as this fall.





A closer look: The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to watch distant stars being born. (Image credit: NASA)


Forward Into the Past!

Hubble, schmubble. With a primary mirror almost six times larger than Hubble’s, the James Webb Space Telescope should have capabilities light years beyond our current orbital observatory. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt are leading the effort to create this $4.5-billion instrument, due to launch in 2013. Its eighteen hexagonal mirror segments will unfold in space like a flower, and it will be parked about 3 million miles away, at a “Lagrange point” in interplanetary space where gravity will fix it in the shadow of the planet. Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore should able to use the telescope’s instruments to detect the infrared light from stars and galaxies that formed soon after the Big Bang—literally, the end (and the beginning) of the universe.




Disappearing act: UM’s super-tiny cloaking device scatters plasmons around an object, making it invisible. (Image credit: University of Maryland)


(Not) Seeing Things

Your jetpack may still be MIA, but there’s progress on the race to develop invisibility technology. In 2007, professor Christopher Davis, research scientist Igor Smolyaninov, and graduate student Yu-Ju Hung at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering created a functional invisibility cloak with “metamaterials” that bend rather than reflect light. The UM cloak uses a thin gold film coated with transparent plastic to bend plasmons (electron waves) around whatever is behind it. There are few kinks to work out before we can all try one at the office. For starters, the cloak is nearly twenty times smaller than a strand of human hair, and it’s two-dimensional, so it can’t be wrapped around an object. Another con: An invisible man would also be blind, because no light reaches the cloaked object. But stay tuned; a team of Berkeley researchers claim to have created a nano-scaled 3-D cloak, and scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have proposed a theoretical “anti-cloak” that would allow an invisible person to see out periodically.




Emergence!
By Klaus Philipsen

On Sunday, February 11, 2007, my perspective on the world changed. The science writer Steven Johnson was on National Public Radio, speaking about about slime molds, ants, and fireflies, about the way many low-complexity agents could coalesce into a higher order. He was talking about emergence.

Like many other concepts, emergence has been around forever; the innovation is human understanding of it. It has become a fashionable topic lately because of Johnson’s 2001 book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities. The idea of self-organization challenges the traditional Western view of the world as top-down, hierarchical, deistic, and teleological. Instead, it presents a bottom-up egalitarian system with many possible endings, a non-deterministic view without a spiritus rector, without a dictator, benign or otherwise, directing from above. All it needs is a large number of low-level agents—subatomic particles, cells, small critters, humans even—that get stimulated, provide feedback to each other, and en masse transform into more complex patterns.

Emergence may not explain the Big Bang, but it can explain almost everything thereafter, from how water turns into ice or how superconductivity is possible to how fireflies synchronize their flashing lights. It’s also the basis for game theory.

The societal applications of the idea make me hopeful about the progress of mankind. A large enough number of participants is almost bound to get it right, provided positive feedback is possible and the feedback loops are not too small. This explains why a whole bunch of fairly uninformed folks making up an electorate eventually will get it right in elections. Emergence has incredible implications not only for technology but for management and organization. It can be applied to medicine, to traffic, or to regional planning, without the need for perfected closed systems in which all eventualities are pre-calculated and programmed. There is hope for open-ended systems that find their way “on their own,” getting progressively better by self-calibration and feedback. Google and Wikipedia have become classic examples of systems that follow the algorithms of emergence. Understanding emergence can help us to emulate nature, which always seems to work with redundancy and self-adjustment, thus allowing failure, death, and error without collapse. Nature grows smarter from mistakes.

Although scientists rightly frown upon quick societal analogies, the definition of emergence as a multitude of low-level agents coalescing into meaningful patterns invites comparison to market economics and democracy. Obama’s election was enabled by an army of low-level agents organizing into a nationwide complex. (He might become the first “open-source president.”) Sadly, human nature can also work counter to the benefits of potentially emergent systems. A relatively small group of greedy credit-swap investment acrobats ignored early feedback signals and ran the whole world into the current financial meltdown. It remains to be seen if the principles of emergence will get the upper hand.

—Architect Klaus Philipsen AIA is a principal partner in ArchPlan in Baltimore.





Bay banker: Eco-investor John Campagna | photo by Christopher Graham


Paying for Nature’s Services
Can the free market save the bay?

John Campagna believes that the key to saving the Chesapeake Bay isn’t a water scrubbing gizmo or new breed of super oyster. It’s the free market.

Campagna is a green investment expert with Benchmark Asset Managers in Baltimore and an advocate of “ecosystem service markets.” You may not know the term, but you’ve probably heard about at least one of these markets—for carbon credits. Here’s how it works: You feel guilty about burning all that jet fuel to visit Tortuga, so you buy a few bucks’ worth of carbon credits online, which pays to plant enough trees to “offset” your share of greenhouse emissions. Buying into the carbon market is now voluntary, but if Campagna is right, such markets will soon be part of doing business, opening the door for a suite of market-based conservation strategies. “We’ll still need state and federal money, and charitable contributions,” he says. “But this will be instrumental in bringing private capital to restoring the bay.”

The bay’s biggest problem is that it’s overdosing on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The obvious yet weirdly elusive solution? Stop dumping so much. Campagna’s model would accomplish that by setting a ceiling on the amount of nutrients that can be poured into bay-feeding rivers, and then steadily ratcheting that cap down. Polluters would be forced to either clean up or offset their pollution by buying water quality credits—credits that would, for example, pay farmers to restore streamside forests and wetlands to slow nutrient runoff. Set a cap, and a market is born.

Who could set such a cap? The Environmental Protection Agency, for one: The EPA has a tool designed for such situations called the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) rule. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation recently threatened to sue the agency for failing to take a heavier hand in bay restoration. Capping nutrient runoff would be an obvious first step. In the meantime, the foundation is working with the free-market conservation group Forest Trends and the University of Maryland to create a market for water quality credits. The Washington, D.C.-based Pinchot Institute for Conservation is building an online marketplace called “The Bay Bank,” where polluters looking to buy such credits can hook up with landowners with credits to sell.

Campagna believes that he can use these emerging markets to slow forest- and wetland-devouring suburban sprawl and its attendant lawn chemicals, leaky septic tanks, and stormwater runoff. He has teamed up with the Annapolis-based Biophilia Foundation to create the nonprofit Chesapeake EcoFinance Development Corporation, which is raising $10 million in low-interest loans to buy large tracts of land. It plans to sell ecosystem credits from the land to polluters or investors, then sell the land to the state for open space or to ecologically minded farmers at below market value. The sale of the land and credits would fund the next project, plus a modest profit to cover costs and pay interest on the loans.

For this scheme to work, of course, there must be people who want to buy credits—and with a few exceptions, that is not yet the case. Nels Johnson with the Pennsylvania office of the Nature Conservancy says there has been a lot of talk about ecosystem service markets in the past decade, but not much action. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what constitutes a service, who benefits from it, and how much it is worth—that is, slapping on the price tags. Biophilia is working on a regional system, and the Nature Conservancy has teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund and researchers at Stanford University to create a national system, but it’s a complicated proposition. Campagna pegs his hopes on the carbon market, which recently got a boost from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that forces power plants in ten states, including Maryland, to reduce emissions or buy offsets. A national carbon cap may be only a matter of time, and investing houses are beginning to buy carbon credits, which now sell for around $1.50 for a metric ton of carbon dioxide. In Europe, where there are strict caps, credits fetch around $20 a metric ton.

Around the bay, markets are emerging for forest protection, development rights, and wetland mitigation. The Nature Conservancy’s Johnson says “the jury is still out” on water quality markets, but the Chesapeake watershed should make good habitat for them: There are 17 million people living in the watershed, all of them potential market players, and plenty of pent-up frustration. “We’ve been spending a lot of time and money trying to restore the bay, and we really haven’t gotten very far,” says Johnson. “Governments and businesses are probably ready for some new ideas.”



A Whiter Shade of Pale

Albedo, the amount of solar radiation that bounces off a surface, is something that the Earth is losing a lot of in a hurry as the ice caps shrink. Enter a new acrylic-based roofing system that will turn the top of your rowhouse from a black asphalt heat sink into something more like an iceberg. “Cool roofs” use white goop to boost reflectivity, bringing the temperature of your roof down as much as 70 degrees on a hot summer day. The treatment costs between $900 and $2,000 for a rowhouse and comes with a ten-year warranty, says Kristin Richards of the nonprofit Civic Works, which installs cool roofs in Baltimore. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say that if one hundred major urban areas swapped out dark roofs for more reflective ones, it would offset 44 metric giga-tons of greenhouse gases—more than all the countries on Earth emit in a year.



Tomorrow’s turkey burger? That’s tissue-engineered turkey muscle. | photo by Doug McFarland

Future Flesh

The global hankering for cheeseburgers isn’t just hard on the cows: It’s murder on the environment. Livestock generate more greenhouse gases than the transportation sector, and meat consumption rates are skyrocketing. Rather than try to convince the planet to lay off the stuff, Jason Matheny, a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, founded a nonprofit called New Harvest in 2004 to help fund researchers studying how to make synthetic meat in vitro using animal cells. Cruelty-free “cultured meat” could be created in “bio-reactors” that grow muscle in a nutrient soup, and the tissue could be engineered to include heart-healthy omega-3 fats. “You could have a hamburger that prevented heart attacks instead of causing them,” Matheny says. We are probably decades away from a good synthetic pork chop, but test-tube ground meat could be on the dinner table in five to ten years.



Green-ish Power

Imagine a critter that can both clean up polluted water and power your car. Researchers on the Susquehanna River have been using algae to gobble up nitrogen and phosphorus that wreak havoc on the Chesapeake Bay. To date, the dead algae, also known as “biomass,” has been hauled off to the landfill, but technologies are in the works that will turn the biomass into ethanol and butanol, which can be mixed with gasoline. Patrick Kangas, an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s natural resource management program, says neither technology has taken off on a large scale, but he believes algae can kill two birds with one stone. “We call it ecological engineering,” he says. “We’re using an ecosystem to solve multiple problems.”




A New Old Age Home

Pioneering geriatrician William Thomas, a professor at UMBC’s Erickson School of Aging, Management, and Policy, is on a mission to change the culture of eldercare. He’s the creator of the Green House project, a radical re-imagining of the institutional long-term care facility. Each Green House serves as a home-like environment for six to ten frail older residents and is staffed not by aides but by “Shahbazim” (Farsi for “royal falcons”), specially trained certified nursing assistants who assist with cooking and housekeeping. Residents set their own routines and live in private bedrooms arranged around a common kitchen/living/dining area dubbed “the hearth.”

In 2005, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded a grant to fund the construction of fifty Green House facilities across the country; Maryland’s first is slated to be built at the Stadium Place senior housing campus on the former Memorial Stadium site in Waverly. The nonprofit Govans Ecumenical Development Corporation, or GEDCO, is currently planning four Green House residences; construction is due to begin in the winter of 2010.



The Great Media Bloodbath
By Russ Smith

I’ve read newspapers, several a day, since the age of 5, which would be in 1960. So it came as a sudden shock about six months ago when I realized that’s no longer the case: in fact, as opposed to just a year ago, I don’t even go through the New York Times and Wall Street Journal online with the same eagerness. Usually, I log onto realclearpolitics.com and pick and choose stories that the site has culled from new and old media alike.

It’s inevitable that 2009 will be a bloodbath for the media industry, especially weekly and monthly magazines. Every day, as people die, newspapers lose lifelong readers, and they’re not being replaced by those who are younger than 25. Second-tier papers such as the Baltimore Sun have been stripped to the bone, with nothing much left to pare. (And, with capital at a premium in the worst economic climate in decades, who’s going to take the Sun off the Tribune Co.’s hands?) I think 2009 will be the year when behemoths such as the New York Times are either sold or drastically reduced in staff. Financial institutions fell one after the other in the third and fourth quarters of ’08, so the unimaginable—the Sulzberger family resigning themselves to a sale of the onetime “Paper of Record”—is not far-fetched.

As for the once-fat monthlies—Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, Esquire—their day of reckoning will come as well. As I write, advertising agencies are making their buys—or not—for the second quarter of ’09. The drop in advertising linage in those magazines is bound to be precipitous. Newsweeklies such as Time and Newsweek are already anachronisms and may go online-only, switch to a monthly schedule, or just fold altogether. Weekly newspapers, formerly known as “alternative”—fat with ads in the prosperous 1990s—aren’t much better off. That these papers haven’t made a successful transition to the Web will come back to haunt them.

The fate of online media is up in the air as well, although their costs are lower and audiences are growing. Say, for example, the Times drastically reduces its budget and closes foreign and even some domestic bureaus: Where will the Huffington Post get material to ruminate on? The combination of an already awful climate for the media in general and a weakened economy will undoubtedly result in a forever-changed way to .find and consume news. What will the communications industry be like in five years? God only knows, but to anyone older than 25, my guess is that it won’t be pretty.

—Russ Smith co-founded the Baltimore City Paper in 1977, the Washington City Paper in 1981, and New York Press in 1988. He is now the managing director of the website splicetoday.com.




Stroke of genius: The BATRAC device can help stroke survivors regain lost abilities. | Image credit: Encore Path


Brain Rebuilder

Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability in the U.S., but a new device may help survivors regain cognitive and motor functions. Developed by women researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and local company Encore Path, Tailwind BATRAC (Bilateral Arm Trainer with Rhythmic Auditory Cueing) consists of two handles set on tracks. In response to audio cues, patients rhythmically push or pull on the device’s handles. Studies have shown that it can not only improve grip and shoulder movement, but it may recruit new neural pathways,  further confirming the belief that the brain has neuroplasticity—it can reorganize itself based on experiences. Professor Jill Whitall, one of the inventors, says more studies are being conducted to figure out exactly how, and why, BATRAC works. “We’ve been doing this for eight or nine years,” she says, “and there are plenty of questions we haven’t been able to answer yet.” The device should be available to the public for home use in February.



The straight poop: No-flush “mineralizing toilet” systems use bacteria to digest waste. | Image credit: Bio-Sun


Beyond Compost

It’s almost as good as crapping in the woods: Pennsylvania-based Bio-Sun Systems Inc. has developed a solar-powered, no-flush “mineralizing toilet” that uses wild forest fungi and bacteria to digest human waste. An average home set-up will cost you $12,500—and there’s some assembly required—but the organisms that do the work “cost nothing,” says company founder Al White. High-capacity versions can handle five hundred or more daily “uses” with no water, no chemicals, and no clean-out required for fifteen years, and they are catching on with public agencies. The city of Baltimore, partnered with a volunteer group, is installing one at the new nature center in the Cylburn Arboretum this winter.




The Breakthrough at the Bottom
By Sherrilyn Ifill

Like millions of others, I wept with joy on election night. I awoke Wednesday feeling as though I were in a dream. I felt joy and peace and a sense of rightness in the world. I felt vindicated for so many of the choices I’ve made in my life—to become a civil rights lawyer, to fight for racial justice, to commit myself to fighting for full voting rights and political participation, to believe that people, systems, countries can change. It was a new day.

Then I hit downtown Baltimore. Jobless men and women milling around Lexington Market. A homeless man on Paca Street talking to himself, holding his pants up with one hand and wildly gesturing with the other. Young girls—too young—clutching the hands of their toddlers, talking into cell phones, walking determinedly down Martin Luther King boulevard. A man and a woman cussing and hollering outside McDonald’s. Men with vacant eyes and grizzled jaws—surely not as old as they look—milling about outside the VA hospital. A line forming at a bus stop, with eight or nine would-be riders peering hopefully down Baltimore Street, looking for a sign that the 40 was coming, or up at a sky that was threatening rain. Nobody looked celebratory. Hadn’t they heard? It’s a new day! 

President Obama’s victory is perhaps the most significant social and political breakthrough of the past forty-five years. But it’s also true that millions haven’t broken through. The work of achieving real gains in economic, social, and racial justice for the millions of Americans who live at the bottom and at the margins in our cities remains before us. For those people, “trickle-down breakthroughs” are likely to be as successful as “trickle-down economics” has been.

That is to say, not very.

Having achieved this enormous breakthrough at the top, I hope that more of us will turn our attention to achieving a breakthrough at the bottom.  This means fighting, with renewed vigor, for the adoption and implementation of new economic, criminal justice, health, and education policies that will really transform the lives of those who have, for the most part, been left out of the celebration this year.


—Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century (Beacon, 2007).




WEB EXCLUSIVE BIG IDEAS

The World’s Next Innovators
By Peter Chomowicz

In the 1950s, General Motors (GM) created a series of concept cars that sought to break the mold. The original Firebird concepts used alloy composites, integrated electronics, and a gas turbine engine (that’s why it’s called a Firebird). They even went so far as to imagine a highway network of embedded sensors that would have allowed the car to drive itself. GM was actually messing around with turbine engines in the 1930s, more than a decade before we saw them in airplanes. It’s ironic to note how ahead of its time this American automaker once was.

The story of GM and the Firebird is also the story of our current financial crisis. One of the main causes of Wall Street’s woes is corporate America’s fixation on short-term results and outrageous executive pay; corporate profits walked out the door with the CEO and were not plowed back into research and innovation. Sadly, it seems America’s past success may keep it from realizing our future potential. Where will we see true groundbreaking innovation? In developing economies.

Developing economies don’t have the entrenched legacies or complacencies of the developed world that restrain innovation. Take India’s Tata Motors and its new Nano, a comfortable, fuel-efficient, low-emissions car that costs about $2,000. By comparison, GM spends nearly this amount per vehicle on health care for active and retired workers. General Motors’ social safety net is admirable—but not if its pensions disappear overnight.

A look at Tata’s website underscores what many believe are the inescapable ingredients of 21st century innovation: “Tata Motors is committed in letter and spirit to Corporate Social Responsibility,” the site declares. “It is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, and is engaged in community and social initiatives on labor and environment standards in compliance with the principles of the Global Compact.” Sustainability and social responsibility are together a wave breaking on everyone’s shores. Those that embrace these challenges will thrive. Those that don’t will go the way of the Firebird.

—Peter Chomowicz is the chair of the environmental design department at Maryland Institute College of Art.





Innovation by Productive Regression
By Sebastian Martorana

Over the last century, the movement away from using stone in art-making—concurrent with the distancing from classical or objective themes in contemporary art—has slowly caused a schism between American sculptors and carvers. Few artists carve stone anymore and few carvers consider themselves to be artists. Today, it might be considered innovative to train for years to learn the traditional skills required to re-conflate these two concepts.

If so, then everything I do as a young stone sculptor is innovative. Because of my modern perspective and subject matter, what I do will always be something that has never been done before, something that people will have never experienced in this medium. What some people call stone’s “historical baggage” can be seen as a help rather than a hindrance.

I am hoping to make stone carving relevant again through my art and my work on the city’s historical buildings; to this end, I recently started my own carving company, Atlantic Custom Carving. The home street address, being permanent, is a logical place to start. Carving it contributes to the home’s identity and says something about its owner. However, this does not even occur to people as an option. Usually homeowners opt for stickers or, unfortunately, metal numbers that are drilled into the stone. This opens up the home to staining and water that can freeze, expand, and crack irreplaceable stones. And when I say these stones are irreplaceable, I am not exaggerating. The Maryland quarry that yielded that marble no longer produces building blocks. It only makes dust, gravel, and cobble. Every time one of these homes is let go to ruin, it is truly gone.

Is a being a stone carver innovative? It depends on context. A hundred years ago, no—but today, perhaps. I believe it is innovative to bring something new to the table-of-current-consciousness, even if it is also bringing something back.

—Sebastian Martorana is a Baltimore-based stone carver. His work can be seen online at www.sebastianworks.com and www.atlanticcustomcarving.com.





Urban Food Production
By Janna Howley

When I suggested at the Ignite Baltimore event on October 16 that we rip up the City Hall plaza and turn it into an urban garden, I was only half kidding. They did it in San Francisco. But as I thought about it later, I realized that turning a lawn into a garden was only a partial solution. If City Hall is supposed to represent the people of the city of Baltimore, but the very people who need the garden don’t fully participate in or embrace the garden, then it’s just for show.

In order for a city such as Baltimore to help feed itself through local agriculture, we need more farmers. And right now, no one is making farming very viable for those interested. The institutional memory of farming, passed from generation to generation, is disappearing. Rural land in the Chesapeake region is being swallowed up at an alarming rate, and available land is prohibitively expensive for those who want to farm. Ideally, urban land presents an incredible opportunity for both potential farmers and the city residents who could buy directly from farmers.

We need an urban agriculture program, where young people learn farming skills and the city provides vacant lots to community organizations, cooperatives of farmers, and start-up enterprises, and then lets them experiment with growing food and raising livestock that can be sold directly in the community. This is what Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago are doing. We can’t expect people who work numerous jobs and struggle with long-term poverty to eat their five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables when there are no fruits and vegetables to be found. But if we bring residents into the economy through the entrepreneurial opportunity of growing food and explore the collective memories of residents who remember how to cook and preserve food, then we’ll be addressing some of the underlying problems in our city.

—Janna Howley works for an organization that manages D.C. and Maryland farmers’ markets, is a steering committee member on the Buy Fresh Buy Local Chesapeake Region campaign, and eats as much local kale as she can get her hands on.




Innovation Art: The Actual, the Virtual, and the Future
By Nicole Fall

The act of looking at art is an interactive experience between the art (by extension the artist) and the viewer. Recently, art has become significantly more interactive. One reason for this is the incorporation of technology as subject or medium, or both.

The Internet has played a significant role in bringing art into more people’s lives, including those of artists themselves. Artists use the Web in a variety of ways: showing each other images of their work, doing interdisciplinary research and collaboration, taking art courses, locating materials, participating in online exhibitions, advertising and selling their work, communicating about work that has been commissioned, compiling and using listservs to reach a global clientele, and more. The Internet is also used as a medium in itself, where blogs and websites are artists’ projects. And collectors view work to make purchasing decisions.

Real-time, hands-on experience making art and being able to view art is the ideal combination. The act of manipulating materials, thus rendering ideas “real,” can have a significant impact on how one imagines possibilities for the future and one’s place in it. Experiences in the arts enhance the creative-thinking skills needed to succeed in the global economy, solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, or simply succeed at living a well-rounded life. To that end, President Obama has proposed an Artist Corps of young artists to teach in low-income schools and their communities. The future rests in the actual and the virtual realities coming together to create a dynamic whole.

—Nicole Fall, an artist-activist-educator, is an associate professor at Baltimore City Community College.





The Power of Sound: Future Rewards of Music
By Lorraine Whittlesey

“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”
—Albert Einstein, when asked about his “Eureka!” moment as per his theory of relativity

Music is a universal human experience. As infants, and, to an extent, while in utero, we learn how to listen. We are bombarded with sonic stimuli that become the words we learn to speak and the music we listen to.

In the past few decades we've been able to measure more accurately the wide-ranging benefits of listening to music and learning how to play an instrument. Various musical styles can shape a mood, contribute to healing processes, and influence neural pathways in the developing brain. It’s only within the past few decades that science has begun to understand these phenomena and their future applications.

Researchers at companies such as Sony and the Roland Corporation continue to develop products for the classroom that combine technology and music performance. Other areas of research where music has positive quantifiable results include sports, sleep disorders, relaxation techniques, and business productivity. As research advances, the list continues to grow.

In 1998, Dr. Frank R. Wilson, a now-retired clinical professor of neurology at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, presented to the American Music Conference a publication titled "Music and Your Child," which stated that "Musical activities provide children with important experiences that can help them develop physical coordination, timing, memory, visual, aural, and language skills. When they work to increase their command of music and exercise musical skills in the company of others, they gain important experience with self-paced learning, mental concentration, and a heightened personal and social awareness."

So, here we are, nearly a decade into the 21st century and with endless bodies of evidence that point to the comprehensive benefits of music education. This begs a question: Why isn’t musical instruction a priority in all classrooms? We have the knowledge and skills to allow future generations to utilize and expand their intellectual capacities in ways never understood previously. We owe, to our world’s children, the gift of music.

—Lorraine L. Whittlesey describes herself as a genre-surfing composer. Her catalogue includes music performed by such disparate ensembles as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and hip-hop artists Naughty By Nature.





Free Everything
By Ed Schrader

Should everything be free? Having been at both ends of the spectrum—a cheapskate and needing to get paid—I can empathize with both sides of the argument. Yet it seems that recently there has been a heightened sense of bratty entitlement among people from live music attendees to provocateurs of local galleries and DIY theatrical events. People don’t even flinch at the thought of dropping $40 to stand in the rain at Merriweather Post Pavilion to watch a filthy-rich band like R.E.M.—who, by the way, I love—on a dimly lit Jumbotron. But ask them for $5 to stand a few feet from the stage at a warehouse space to hear four bands spill their guts, or to see thirty paintings that have been labored over by artists for months at a time living on Ramen noodles, and they act as though they are being swindled. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked the door at shows and seen kids with pants that cost more than my entire wardrobe complain about tossing a few bucks to a touring band that lives out of their van.

Perhaps the advent of free mp3s and other easy-access online media has re-conceptualized our understanding of what it means to value the exchange of entertainment for money, especially as it concerns those not lucky enough to have the ability to make mega-bucks on whirlwind international stadium tours. We make our bread from our jobs, a cut of the door, and whatever merch or art we can manage to sell. Music has developed a relationship with its listener that continually falls out of proportion with the labor put into the package that is being retrieved for free, online, and in line. People have come to expect much and pay little, and this mentality sits in the atmosphere like weighty black soot, disenchanting the enchanters that we need now more than ever. So buck up soldiers, and show some love!

—Ed Schrader is a Batimore-based comedian and musician. He hosts a talk show called the Ed Schrader Show.





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