For most of us, our neurons remain malleable throughout our lives, giving us the opportunity for lifelong learning (though it does get harder with age). But for those afflicted with the rare genetic disease Angelman syndrome, the synapses are almost completely incapable of being remodeled. By the time children with Angelman syndrome are toddlers, their synapses have largely lost their plasticity, hardening like concrete into rigid structures that can no longer easily relay new information.

The result is quite tragic – children whose bodies grow and age normally but whose brains are locked forever in the state of a two year old. But there is also reason to hope, as tremendous progress has been made in the understanding of Angelman syndrome, say many of the researchers, clinicians, and parents in attendance at a recent conference on the disorder. The 2010 Angelman Treatment and Research Institute Scientific Symposium, held at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill on June 15 and 16, showcased the current research on the genetic disease, with efforts tapping into the latest technological tools from mouse models, brain imaging, stem cells, proteomics and gene therapy.

“Over the span of the conferences I have attended, I really feel like I can see the gap getting smaller between the cellular molecular finding and its clinical applications,” said Heather Adams, a neuropsychologist from Massachusetts who specializes in kids with cognitive impairment. She also has a daughter with Angelman syndrome.

Angelman syndrome is a rare intellectual disorder that affects about one out of every 15,000 people. It is often placed on the autism spectrum because of the shared language difficulties and inappropriate social behavior. The language impairment in people with Angelman syndrome is much more severe than in those with autism – in fact, most of them never speak a single word. And whereas individuals with autism might shun social interaction, those with Angelman are quite social.

“One of the very endearing things about these individuals is they have a very happy demeanor,” said one of the conference’s organizers, Ben Philpot, an Associate Professor in Cell and Molecular Physiology at the University of North Carolina. “They are often said to have inappropriate laughter, but I think that they just find more things in life funny than we do.”

Their child-like view of the world – and the detrimental ramifications of a brain that is unable to change — all stem from a defect in a single gene called UBE3A. If the gene is mutated or deleted, the result is Angelman syndrome. But if it is duplicated, it may result in one of the more classic forms of autism. And altering its function can also lead to tumors of the cervix, though in the cancer field the gene goes by the name E6AP. So studying this one gene and its effects on the plasticity of our brains could have far-reaching implications.

“The work related to synaptic plasticity in genetic syndromes is forming thrilling insights as far as how we reason and learn things,” said conference attendee William Snider, director of the UNC Neuroscience Center.

At the two-day conference, scientists from across the country presented their latest findings on the role of this infamous gene in disease. One of the invited speakers, Harvard’s Michael Greenberg, explained the findings he had recently published in the journal Cell on targets of UBE3A. The molecule’s main job is to mark other proteins to be broken down or destroyed, so if UBE3A is absent then certain proteins accumulate to inappropriately high levels, causing subtle but lasting damage to our brain cells.

“If we know what the targets are we may be able to produce therapies that can break them down when UBE3A is no longer able to do its job,” said Philpot.
Philpot’s own work has indicated that pharmacotherapeutics or behavioral modifications may be able to restore the brain’s plasticity. He is currently using funding from the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS) to search for new molecules to treat Angelman syndrome, an area that is understandably of intense interest for many in the field.

“As a scientist I say the progress that has been made so far is remarkable, but as a parent, I say it is not fast enough,” said Alina Szmant, a marine biologist from Wilmington who has a 31-year-old daughter, Selena, with Angelman Syndrome.

Mark Nespeca, a clinician at Children’s Hospital in San Diego who also attended the conference, says that the pace of research depends a lot on your perspective. Because he does not conduct research himself, conferences like this one help him keep up with the many advances that have occurred since he was in medical school.

“With the advances in technology today, people are talking about sequencing your entire genome for just a thousand dollars,” said Nespeca. “There may come a day when kids will be coming to us at two months of age newly diagnosed, and we can say is there something we can do to make a difference so you can walk, can talk, not have seizures. But for a parent dealing with this illness day in and day out, it must be hard to wait and hope for that day to come.”

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

Monday, May 17

BizMix: A Professional Approach to After-hours Business Connections

5:00 – 7:00pm

The Matthew House, 317 West Chatham Street, Cary, NC 27511

Looking for a business after-hours that’s worth your time? Benefit from a structured setting, connect with leaders and meet our reporting staff.

$15 Triangle Business Journal subscribers; $25 others. Read more here.

Tuesday, May 18

Widening the Pipeline: Excellence in STEM Education (Luncheon)

12:00 – 1:30pm

CED’s Entrepreneurship Center, 100 Capitola Drive, Durham, 27713

How Do We Build the Pipeline of Next Generation STEM Employees? Join the Contemporary Science Center for lunch as we explore and discuss with award-winning Science, Technology, Engineering & Math educators from Charlotte and Raleigh.

Registration $20. Register here.

TARDC May Lunceon

12:00 – 1:15 pm

RTP Headquarters, 12 Davis Drive

Speaker: Dr. Maria Escolar, Director of the Program for the Study of Neurodevelopmental Function in Rare Disorders at UNC Chapel Hill. Lunch will be provided.

Free for TARDC members; $35 others; $25 CED members. RSVP to rousseau@rtp.org

Wednesday, May 19

President’s National Export Initiative Luncheon

11:30am – 1:00pm

Hotel Indigo, 151 Tatum Drive, Durham, NC 27703

TOPIC: President’s National Export Initiative; Speaker: Ro Khanna , Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration, Office of Domestic Operations.

Free. More info here.

CED’s BioTech Forum

5:30 – 8:00 pm

North Carolina Biotechnology Center, RTP, NC

During this presentation and interactive panel discussion we will answer several key questions to provide insight into what will likely drive the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries’ partnering efforts moving forward.

Find out more here.

Speed Networking in the Triangle

5:45 – 8:45pm

Wyndham at RTP, 4620 South Miami Boulevard, Durham, NC

Based on the format of speed dating, attendees will have five minutes to network with each new person you meet. Once the five minutes is up, you will move to the next person and continue networking.

Only 50 attendees allowed! Purchase a ticket here.

Thursday, May 20

If It Isn’t Broke, It Will Be! Reinvent your Business Model

11:30 – 1pm

CED Headquarters, 100 Capitola Drive suite 106 Durham , NC 27713

Participants will focus on evaluating, creating and re-inventing current business models.  This seminar teaches state-of-the art methods that produce transformative ideas and solutions.

$20, including lunch. Sign up here.

Quality In BioPharma Conference (through Fri, May 21)

8:00am (5/20) – 5:00pm (5/21)

NC State University, Centennial Campus, 2410 Campus Shore Drive #218, Raleigh, NC 27695

The focus of the two-day event will be Environmental Monitoring in Biomanufacturing, and will have noteworthy talks, discussions, and networking events for professionals involved in the Quality, Manufacturing, Environmental Microbiology, and Process Engineering areas of the industry.

Register here.

Friday, May 21

BTWW: Cyclists’ Breakfast at RTP HQ

7:00am – 9:00am

Cyclists can mingle and enjoy free breakfast
courtesy of the Research Triangle Foundation.

Saturday, May 22

ProductCamp RTP: Share In The Innovation!

8:00am – 6:00pm

Cambria Suites @RDU Airport, 300 Airgate Drive, Morrisville, NC‎

In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing.

Register online here.

Ongoing (All Week)**

Bike to Work Week

All around the Triangle!

Sponsored by GoTriangle.

Find out more here.

——————————-

To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

But it is a Big Deal. It is the ‘official’ conference of the World Wide Web. Yup, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was there. I saw him, though I did not talk to him. I mean, what excuse could I come up with to approach him? Ask him to autograph my web browser?

This year, WWW2010 (which everyone pronounced as ‘dub-dub-dub-twenty-ten’ reminding me of a cardiac arrhythmia), was really four conferences fused into one, or rather three other conferences piggybacking onto the main program: Web Science Conference 2010, 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility and the one I was most interested in (and could afford to attend) the FutureWeb conference.

Of course, whenever I go to a conference I do two things: one is what everyone does – try to learn as much as possible and meet interesting people; the other thing is a professional deformation of sorts – I observe the details of the organization and try to figure out how to use what I see for the next ScienceOnline.

This is the second conference I attended at the Raleigh Convention Center and this time I felt better about the space – it did not seem so overwhelmingly enormous this time. Perhaps there were more people this time. Or perhaps it’s because the place was filled with vendor booths, including by Google, Facebook, Lulu.com and RedHat. Or perhaps the organizers used the space better. Or perhaps the people were less formal in their dress, behavior and mindset which made the whole experience more pleasurable.

Number 1 requirement for a conference is coffee. And there was plentiful, at all times, both on the ground floor and upstairs, as well as pastries, cake and fruit. Grade: A

Number 2 requirement for a conference is good, free wifi with tons of bandwidth. And WWW2010 got it. It was just as stable and just as fast as at ScienceOnline2010, which says something Grade: A+

Number 3 are people. Apart from the ‘home team’ I mentioned above, it was great to finally meet some of the interesting locals that I only knew from online before, including the entire HASTAC crew led by Cathy Davidson, Annie Antón (watch this video where I first heard of her some time ago), Paolo Mangiafico, Greg Corrin and Negar Mottahedeh. And then the non-locals, e.g., Doc Searls and Kathy Gill.

It was also great to see again, after quite a while, old friends – danah boyd, Dan Conover, Janet Edens, Hilary Spenser and Kate of Save Our Sounds who I first met at the AAAS meeting in San Diego back in February. I really wanted to catch up with Dan and Janet so we went out to dinner and drinks on Thursday afternoon and spent hours talking. Grade: A+

Number 4 requirement for a successful conference is an engaged audience. And there sure was – check out the #fw2010 (futureweb) and #www2010 tweets – there were lots! And people on several panels were really good at monitoring the twitter backchannel and even tweeting themselves during their sessions (Negar Mottahedeh was the champion of this!).

Unfortunately some of the panels were more corporate in tone, with PowerPoint presentations and barely any interaction with the audience besides a couple of Q&As at the very end. In the Public Health session all but the last panelist have even left the room before we could ask them any questions, for example. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Certainly Keynotes are, by design, one-to-many, and most panels I attended were quite nicely many-to-many in a very unconference-y style (especially the one on Social Media where the dialogue between the panelists and the audience started right at the begining), so it’s a bummer that some of the more corporate as well as more academic types did not grok it or were not specifically trained for a modern conference format. Grade: B

Number 5 in my book is diversity. While the attendees as a whole seemed quite balanced and diverse, the talks and panels were quite white-male-dominated or white-male-exclusive, with just a couple of great exceptions, most notably danah boyd. The opposing goals of having the people with the greatest name recognition (which are marketing gold for a meeting) or having a diverse group in which everyone feels comfortable and “an insider” are hard to reconcile. It is not surprising that WWW2010, being so Big Deal, erred somewhat toward the former, while smaller, more obscure conferences (like #scio10) can push more for the latter. But don’t get me wrong – I’ve been to many conferences with a much higher testosterone concentration (and lower melanin) than this one, it just wasn’t quite as perfect as theoretically possible. Grade: B-

Number 5 is the program itself. And that was good. Of course, I had to choose what to attend at each time-slot, but there is excellent coverage and videos of everything here, so you can take your own picks. Part of the deal with FutureWeb conference was that we could also attend three of the main WWW2010 Keynote lectures, by Vint Cerf (Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist), danah boyd (Microsoft and Harvard University’s Berkman Center) and Carl Malamud (president and founder of public.resource.org ) so I did not waste that opportunity and attended all three. Cerf was impressive on search, cloud computing, and universal access. Malamud was funny, yet wise, with his advice on how to deal with bureacracies with outdated ways of thinking and still get things done.

For me, danah boyd’s talk was the very best hour of the entire conference – I had to stop live-tweeting as I wanted to listen and focus. Danah packs her talks with information and insight and I did not want to miss anything. And I was not dissappointed. Both in her keynote address and the interview immediatelly afterwards, danah stressed several points but I want to highlight two:

First, many people are now harvesting information from social networks and running it through mathematical models. Then they get smug about it and assume more than data warrant. Just because you collected a huge number of tweets, for example, does not mean that your sample is representative – which racial, socioeconomic and age groups tend to keep their accounts private, or tend not to use hashtags, keywords or Twitter conventions the way others do? You missed them. And even if you didn’t, are the results of the analysis meaningful. Data, like Soylent Green, are People. Without looking at who they are, what they say and why they say it, the most impressive computing models are suspect.

Second, there is a difference between Public and Publicized. If you put something online with a hope it will go viral and be seen by as many strangers as possible, you have done broadcasting – what you did was Publicizing. But if you put something online with an unspoken understanding that it is targeted at a relatively limited number of people, usually personal friends (on Facebook) or regular readership (on blogs and Twitter), that is only Public, not Publicized. Taking that kind of stuff posted online by someone and spreading it to a much wider audience of strangers (or using that data for ’scientific research’) is a violation of privacy. It is at best unthinking and tone-deaf, at worst unethical.

And this is the category error that Facebook just made with their new privacy rules. There is a lot of writing online about Facebook settings these days, and the mood of WWW2010 was decidedly anti-Facebook. Some people ‘unliked’ all their ‘likes’ there during sessions discussing privacy. Someone even deleted his facebook account right on the spot, after danah’s keynote.

Everyone knows that everything you post online is ‘fair game’, it is googleable, findable and potentially spreadable. This is the reason why some people need to be anonymous or pseudonymous online. But putting stuff online is not automatically a licence for everyone and anyone to take it and spread it around. Before you do this to someone, stop and think. Perhaps ask if that is OK. Much of the stuff posted online is posted online to make it easy for friends and grandma to see, not for all the world to see. Not every facebook status update or every tweet is a news broadcast. Turn on your brain before you start treating Public (but meant to be limited) communication between friends into a Publicized flashing banner on every corner of the Internet. Remember that people who post stuff online are Soylent Green – they are People.

A great recent example of something Public becoming Publicized against the original intentions of the author was #boobquake. The original idea was an inside joke, meant to be read by perhaps a thousand regular blog readers, some Twitter followers and Facebook friends, not much more. But then someone came in and took it and ran with it. Suddenly this went viral. What could she do? How to deal with this sudden change in expectations? One solution would have been to delete everything and lock everything down – it was not yours to take in the first place, so now you won’t be able to see it and spread it any more. The other solution, the one Jen McCreight chose, was to play along and to switch from Public to Publicized and milk that moment of fame for all its worth and for a good cause. But for this to work, she needed to rethink and rewrite the original to make it fit for Publicized consumption, so she wrote an update with clarification and then a number of updates about the phenomenon. It was out of her hands, but she could still steer it to some extent and make sure it gets used for the intended purpose. Good for her – but she is an experienced blogger, and an activist with an agenda. What if it was some kid, or n00b, or grandma, completely unprepared for it all? Was it her fault she put stuff online? No, you were a schmuck to take her stuff and run with it. Perhaps unethical.

See the full text of danah’s talk for more details, and a recent interview with her on the topic.

Later that day I attended (and vigorously participated from my seat in the front row) the Future of Social Networks and the Internet panel with Chris DiBona, Henry Copeland, Zeynep Tufekci, Dave Recordon and Wayne Sutton, moderated by Fred Stutzman. Henry reminded us that it took 150 years after Gutenberg printed a bible until the founding of the first daily newspaper and that the current situation on the Web is far too early (the oldest blogs are 13 years old) to be considered developed and mature. We need to be patient and watch, not proclaim the experiment a success or a failure so early in its history. Several mentions of the Dunbar Number, in some cases used correctly, in others not, reminded me I need to get back to my project of studying the application of the concept to the Web and writing a piece about it, as much of the discussion focused on the way the Web is affecting our relationships in the real world, for better or for worse.

The Future of the Media panel was the most contentious. Out of six people on it, there was a clear split down the middle: three people who ‘get it’ and three who don’t – on one side were Michael Clemente (lumbering dinosaur), Sam Matheny (a more limber dinosaur), Penny Muse Abernathy (a bird-like dinosaur), still walking yet fully unaware they are already extinct, and on the other side were highly evolved birds: Paul Jones, Dan Conover and Doc Searls. One has to give it to Michael Clemente – knowing that the camera’s rolling and everyone’s livetweeting, he stuck to his Fox News talking points, even asserting, with a straight face, that there is a wall between news and editorial content on Fox News (though that was devastatingly demonstrated to be wrong by Jon Stewart – the opinionators make the news which the news-heads report the next day).

I came in a little late (as our waiters at lunch were incredibly slow with food and checks) into the The Future of Privacy and the Internet session, with a star-studded collection of panelists, including Annie Antón of NCSU who I wanted to meet for quite a while. Much was said about legal and policy aspects of privacy. Antón noted that privacy settings on many social networking sites, including Facebook, are complex and counter-intuitive and that many people (aside from techies) do not know what these are and how to set them. She also said that this is not a generational issue – some people know and some don’t regardless of age. But I think that this will change with time – both the people’s skills at controlling their privacy and the societal understanding of what privacy means and where to draw the line. In 20 years, when the employers are all people with decades experience online, they will find Facebook profiles (or equivalent) completely devoid of humanizing elements (including drinking party pictures) suspect – is this person really that boring or is that an intentionally clean profile of someone with Presidential (or at least Harvard) aspirations? People will, over the years, become increasinly better at managing their online personas, making sure that searches bring up to the top both their accomplishments and their human sides in perfect measures.

The The Future of Public Health session was the biggest disappointment for me. It was not even a panel – four people got up, gave their PowerPoint presentations and left the room before any questions could be asked. And their presentations fell short of my expectations – I know how much stuff is going on out there, but each speaker focused only on what he/she is currently working on, their own projects, not the state of the field as a whole.

Finally, the conference ended with a Bang – an exciting panel on The Future of Learning:

“Session organizer was Cathy Davidson co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (http://www.hastac.org/). Panelists included Laurent Dubois, a Duke University historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean; Mark Anthony Neal, accomplished author, one of the foremost scholars of Black popular culture in America and blogger at the New Black Man website; Negar Mottahedeh, she received national notice for staging the first-ever Twitter Film Festival as well as for serving as a communications node in the Iranian election protests.; Tony O’Driscoll, co-author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.”"

These people are all on the cutting edge of the educational revolution involving understanding the way technology (Web) is changing the world, the way students operate, and the way education should be done. Their students use the Web in the classroom, publicly grade each other (leading to a much greater motivation and effort and greater quality of work), use Twitter to communicate, and are savvy at using the Web to find information. One person in the audience said that ‘if I open my laptop, my focus on you, the teacher, drops down from 100% to 0%’, I got up and said ‘if I open my laptop and you have a problem with me not listening – you are doing it wrong: you are standing in front and talking. Instead, you should be here with me, next to me, working with me on my laptop.’ I also added that there is an existing model for a more engaging model of a teacher-student relationship and that is graduate school where the teacher/mentor does not lecture, but assigns a project and mentors the student through it.

Program – grade: A

I want to end this summary with a huge Kudos to the Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, an Elon/Pew Internet Project which has been ongoing for quite a few years now, guided by center director Janna Quitney Anderson. The Elon students from the project manned a booth, attended (anywhere between two and six of them per room) every session and manned the cameras (both the big professional camera and a bunch of little Flip cameras) in each session. They set up the website, covered every single session and talk with a nice blog post and associated articles and videos, livetweeted, used Facebook for organizing and archiving stuff, collected photographs on Flickr and videos on YouTube. They were not just very good, but also very fast – before a session is over the clips from its beginning were already up on YouTube! And at least one of them writes an insightful blog – Kassondra Cloos. Grade: A+

The video coverage was so awesome (and it was the weakest aspect of ScienceOnline2010 organization), that I am seriously considering hiring the Elon student crew to do the same job at ScienceOnline2011. I’ll be in touch with them soon.

I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

You can read a review in Raleigh News & Observer, as well as an article by Scott in the same paper and another one at the Science In The Triangle blog.

Scott Huler has a book reading and signing event on Wednesday, May 12th at the Regulator in Durham, then another one on May 26th at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. I’ll try to make it to one or both of these – and you should, too.

From the blurb:

“Wires, pipes, roads, and water support the lives we lead, but the average person doesn’t know where they go or even how they work. Our systems of infrastructure are not only shrouded in mystery, many are woefully out of date. In On the Grid, Scott Huler takes the time to understand the systems that sustain our way of life, starting from his own quarter of an acre in North Carolina and traveling as far as Ancient Rome.

Each chapter follows one element of infrastructure to its source — or to its outlet. Huler visits power plants, watches new asphalt pavement being laid, and traces a drop of water backward from his faucet to the Gulf of Mexico and then a drop of his wastewater out to the Atlantic. Huler reaches out to guides along the way, bot the workers who operate these systems and the people who plan them.

Mesmerizing and often hilarious, On the Grid brings infrastructure to life and details the ins and outs of our civilization wigh fascinating, back-to-basics information about the systems we all depend on.”

Monday, May 3

Why Scientists are Rhetoricians, Too: They don’t have any choice

11:00 AM – 12:45 PM

Thomas Hall, Room 3503 (Stevens Room) NCSU

Lecture by Dr. Carolyn Miller, SAS Institute and distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State University

Free

Global Health Lecture “Risk and Cost Analysis in Pest Management: Application to Genetically Modified Mosquitoes”

4:00 – 5:00 PM

LSRC A109 (Nicholas School of the Environment) Duke University

Speaker: John Mumford Professor John Mumford of Imperial College London, and the director of the Centre for Environmental Policy

Free. More information.

Tuesday, May 4

Meet the New Media: Celebration of Women Event

10:00 — 11:30 AM

The Pavillions at the Angus Barn, Raleigh

Wanted: Women in the News Meet national journalists who cover business and women’s issues.  Space is limited – Register today!

UNC/NCSU Research and Design Symposium

3:00-8:00 PM

NC Biotechnology Center, RTP

The UNC/NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering Research and Design Symposium is the annual showcase event for senior design and graduate students. The event attracts an industrial and academic audience and features oral and poster presentations and a networking social.

More information and registration.

Wednesday, May 5

JobNob Raleigh Happy Hour

4:30-7:30 PM

Solas Raleigh, 419 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh

Come “Jobnob” with cool new start ups and talented job seekers at this informal networking happy hour where you can find startup jobs.

Free but registration required.

Thursday, May 6

Mike Duke Seminar: Species Delimitation in Spiders

2:00 – 3:30 PM

Clark Labs, NCSU

Lecture by: Dr. Jason Bond, East Carolina University

More information.

Friday, May 7

40 Under 40 Leadership Awards

11:30 AM – 2:00 PM

North Ridge Country Club, Raleigh

More information.

To view a complete calendar of RTP community events, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

XQuery Meetup for WWW2010 Future Web

7-11 PM

Solas, Raleigh

More information

Duke University Immunology Seminar Series

4-5PM

Duke University, Edwin L Jones Building Room 143

Wednesday, April 28

The Future of the Web Conference (April 28-30)

More information

Chapel Hill Bloggers Meetup

6:30-9:30 PM

Milltown Bar and Restaurant, 307 E Main St, Carrboro NC

More Information

Thursday, April 29

Carolina Innovations Seminar: What are the attributes of a good scientific founder?

5:30-6:30 PM

014 Sitterson Hall, UNC Chapel Hill

More information

Friday, April 30

Emerging Tar Heel Leaders: Final Friday

Durham - Katherine Skinner, NC State Director for the Nature Conservancy

Raleigh - Amy Fulk, Chief of Staff to NC Senate Pro Tempore Marc Basnight

For a detailed listing of regional events and programs, please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar.

Making your Green Business Stand Out

6:00-9:00 PM

Durham Tech Small Business Center

No RSVP required, free.

American Scientist Pizza Lunch

12:00-1:30 PM

Sigma Xi, RTP

RSVP required: cclabby@amsci.org

Triangle Area Research Directors Council (TARDC)

12:00-1:30 PM

RTP Headquarters, 12 Davis Drive, RTP

RSVP required: rousseau@rtp.org and $35 fee

Thursday, April 22

Triangle Global Health Consortium: Leveraging the essential role and resource of US global health policy

7:30-9:00 AM

NC Biotechnology Center Congressional Conference Room, RTP

RSVP required: nicole.fouche@triangleglobalhealth.org

National Humanities Center Lecture: Do you have a will?

5:00-6:30 PM

National Humanities Center, 7 TW Alexander Drive, RTP

RSVP Required

Intrahealth International’s “Global Voices”

6:00-8:00 PM

FedEx Global Education Center, 301 Pittsboro Street, Chapel Hill

RSVP to vherrington@intrahealth.org

Friday, April 23

Creative Capital Information Session

5:30-7:30 PM

Durham Arts Council, 120 Morris Street, Durham

No RSVP required, free.

Please visit the Science in the Triangle calendar of events to view a full listing of this week’s events in the RTP and Research Triangle region.

While it would be impossible to separate the global from the state-level issues discussed at the forum, some of the local business people offered examples for specific challenges to innovation that they faced.

Alexander Macris is the president of Themis Group which is based in Durham, N.C. and is a strong example of the power of a science park like RTP to attract additional tech-based businesses to the region. Macris said that the Triangle region is one of the largest concentrations of gaming companies in the U.S. Most of the innovation potential in gaming is at the gaming engine and software level, he said, and the average median income of someone in the gaming industry is about $75,000. He expects to see about 300 to 400 new gaming-related jobs in the area over the next three to five years, he said, because the industry is growing in the double digits. But at the same time, the cost of game development is going up – whereas a decade ago it may have cost $1 million to develop a game, it costs $20 to $30 million to do so today, Macris said. Foreign countries give more tax credits to their gaming companies, he said, which makes them more competitive in the global field and is hurting U.S.-based gaming companies. “Targeted tax credits are a huge attractant to small and start-up businesses in the gaming industry,” Macris said. “And cool downtowns, the creative class really likes a vibrant downtown too.”

While deeper tax credits may help some start-ups get a toe-hold in emerging markets, retaining the best talent is necessary to sustain them over time. And while uber cool downtowns like the American Tobacco District in Durham are one component of enticements to retain the best brains, it’s a smaller part of the issue. Jennie Hunter-Cevera of RTI said that 50 percent of foreign students who earn a doctorate in the U.S. end up exporting their knowledge by returning to their home countries. “We have a brain drain going on, and we need to make it easier and more attractive for the brightest to stay,” she said. (What do you think will help retain top-graduating foreign students in the U.S.? Leave a comment.)

Tim Toben, who chairs the NC Energy Policy Council, said that certain existing state policies were attempting to tap emerging markets by requiring utility companies to use renewable energy for 12.5 percent of their energy mix by 2021. While critics say the target is too low, Toben said that N.C. has a record of being one of the most progressive southeastern states when it comes to energy and the environment. “The utilities know we are moving into a carbon-constrained future,” Toben said, citing a Duke Energy plan to drop their reliance on coal from 42 percent today t 32 percent in 2030, or even as low as 17 percent. “For entrepreneurs, what resources will replace this ? Wind? Nuclear? Biomass? There’s a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs in a carbon-limited future and we want N.C. to be the leader in the Southeast in the new green economy.” (Which begs the question: What specifically is the state energy office doing to help start-ups like MegaWatt Solar or BioRxn?  I have not looked into this at all, so if you have any insight then please leave a comment down below.)

But even if the policies, foreign visas and the vision of local leaders and educators all align into the perfect climate for innovative business, what sort of characteristics do innovative businesses and visionary business leaders typically have? Clay Thorpe, a partner of Hatteras Venture Partners, shared a list of just such traits he amassed from talking to high-level personnel in Genentech. “I’ve been asked why N.C. has not had a homegrown success, a globally-innovative business develop here,” Thorp said. “And I’ve thought about this a lot. We’re the number three biotech hub in the country, and we’re good at attracting existing businesses to the area.” Thorp said he had an opportunity to meet with leaders from Genentech, widely considered one of the main founding companies of the biotech industry, and he asked them what they thought contributed to their success.

“You have to have a driver, like Bob Swanson at Genentech, who set the cultural tone.” Thorp said. “I hesitate to say it, but it’s almost 5 to 10 percent the quality of the technology and 90 to 95 percent the driver.” In addition to having a visionary and energizing leader, Genentech spent an inordinate amount of time hiring good people, he said. They would court people they wanted to attract, sometimes for years, and chose very carefully. The leaders also fostered an ethic of loyalty and hardwork, which resulted in dedicated employees “going the extra mile” when it was needed. The company was also built upon a foundation of “patient, long-standing capital,” Thorp said, which gave them the stability and time to do proper research. In addition, Genentech required its scientists to publish scientific papers on their research and they held them to such high academic standards that often Genentech papers were cited over papers by ivey-league academic researchers.

While there were no clear answers presented at the Global Innovation Forum on Friday, a lot of conservation was generated. We want to hear from you — what are your thoughts on state or federal policies, or cultural shifts, that will help carve a climate favorable to business innovation with global trade potential? Let us know in the comments section below.