My personal interests and/or activities include:
MIT actively promotes new venture creation in several ways. The most visible is the MIT $10K Entrepreneurial Competition organized by the MIT Entrepreneurs Club and the Sloan New Venture Association. The $10K awards $10,000 to the student team with the most promising new venture plan. The MIT Enterprise Forum, spun out of the MIT Alumni/ae Association, hosts monthly presentations and sundry new enterprise activities. The MIT Technology Licencing Office pursues the intellectual property rights of MIT-developed new technology, and actively licences it to both existing firms and new startups. The MIT Entrepreneurship Center is transforming into the MIT Venture Initiative, bringing the Nuts and Bolts of New Enterprise savvy to Science and Engineering students and faculty. Numerous MIT classes in both the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT School of Engineering have new business and product development-oriented content. The Edgerton Center is a great place to prototype inventive science and engineering projects.
Many services and product realms, both high and low tech, are wide open and waiting to be properly developed. There's always a need for better software apps, and now-a-days, the infobahn through cyberspace is hot stuff, especially web surfing. Vannevar Bush was right, and his vision for the Memex, as elaborated in an incredibly visionary 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly, As We May Think. Ted Nelson was right, and his vision for Xanadu has been partially approached by the great progress on the World Wide Web and client web-viewer apps like Mosaic. Net commerce is happening (including the Silicon Valley based CommerceNet), but is currently in its infancy. By the way, while doing anything, please consider the design totality of your product. Don't add to the aesthetic and functional-disaster category of man-made artifacts. And please consider the legal implications of all you're doing, from protecting your intellectual property rights through being aware of contract law, liability considerations, etc., etc.
Science Fiction authors often envision what can and ought to be; stripped of story and plot, SF becomes speculative engineering. Richard Feynman was right, There Is Plenty Of Room At The Bottom, as people studying and developing nanotechnology can tell you. Since aging is a genetic disease that is, by current biomedical engineering standards, quite intractable, follow the progress of cryonics, the art of maintaining biological structure in a non-functional but minimally deteriorating state. Sooner rather than later Tsoilkovsky will be right, and humanity will escape from the cradle of Earth and really explore and develop space.
System dynamics, a method of modeling and conceptualizing particular aspects of man-made and natural systems is a useful tool, for example in understanding software product life-cycles. software product life-cycles. It's also a wonderful way for children to grasp complex feedback-rich systems at an early age. Also, rather than having your kids suffer the horrors of contemporary public schooling, consider home schooling.
Since I dislike the rapacious behaviour of republicrats, demogogues, and criminals, I'm libertarian.
Be sure to follow the latest statist outrage foisted on us by the Clinton administration in its proposals to automatically wiretap electronic communications. Consider cryptography and the cypherpunks.
Joost Bonsen < jpbonsen@athena.mit.edu> jpbonsen-home