In Israel, Commerce amid Conflict, Stacy Perman, Aug 15 2012, TIME

Old news. From 2012 Aug. There could be setbacks and newer obstacles but still. Seems there already are good amount of materials on this type of development on Web? 

Indeed, NGT was formed with a triple bottom line in mind. While its main goal is to translate ideas into profitable companies, it was also established as a vehicle to integrate Israel’s sizable Arab minority into the nation’s economy while promoting co-existence between Jews and Arabs. This idea that business can move the ball when politics can’t is one that has quietly been gaining currency. Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer, who sold an 80% stake in his company Iscar to Warren Buffett for $4 billion in 2006, has long championed the idea. More important, he has demonstrated that creating jobs and economic prosperity can do much to defuse conflicts. For the past 28 years, his five industrial parks in Israel — home to 73 companies that generate sales of $700 million and employ more than 2,000 people — and one in Turkey have helped entrepreneurs in low-income, high-unemployment regions develop businesses for export. In Nazareth in early July, Wertheimer broke ground on the seventh industrial park that he is financing, which is expected to house up to 25 export-oriented enterprises and create 500 to 1,000 new jobs in the short term.

[…]

It’s just one more hurdle in NGT’s eight-year fight to move from conflict to commerce. Perhaps Helmi Kittani explained it best when he said, “From my perspective, the most important aspect of NGT’s success has been the process itself — namely that we proved that it was possible for Arab and joint Jewish-Arab ventures to initiate, attract investment from both Arab and Jewish investors, become stable and grow. For our investors, the goal was not necessarily to turn a profit but to create the social fabric that would stimulate entrepreneurship. From that perspective, NGT has already provided an enormous return on investment.” Perhaps so, although robust profitability has a way of unifying people too.

Nonverbal behavior has been seen as a powerful tool by scientists and analysts in unearthing subconscious thoughts and emotions through signals given off by humans. Modern technology now offers more pathways in determining emotions rather than relying predominantly on human analysis. In the West Bank town of Hebron, students at the Palestine Polytechnic University say they have designed a software program that can measure a person’s emotions. Happiness Measurement, as the program has been named, uses still images and videos to analyse and determine the degree of a person’s happiness. Anas Omar and Anas Shawar developed the program, and have used it on faces of their political leaders. They found out from an experiment that current president Mahmoud Abbas was happy and late president Yasser Arafat to be unhappy, according to Happiness Measurement. “The Happiness Measurement software is our final graduation project. We use still photos and videos to measure the degree of happiness in a picture. We heard that this kind of software is being used in Berlin. The project is currently being developed to measure the age or sex of a person through videos or still pictures.” Project supervisor Abdel Fatah Najar said emotions are universal and the program aims to recognize them. The students say their software can give an idea of a person’s general mood, whereas simply looking at a photo gives a basic impression of whether a person is happy or sad. Shawar said the program took three months to design and install, but now the students are seeking funding to travel and participate in international conferences in a bid to further enhance their software. Happiness Measurement can be downloaded directly from the internet onto mobile phones and computers. Omar and Shawar say they are keen to expand the use of the technology across Palestine.

1. Greatest news! 2. MENA pushing for IT is absolutely way to go! 3. Gotta find DL source! :)

envirolutionary:

As I read this story I remember discussing the possiblity of this in my biology class in college. It excites me that this is happening so close. The University of Texas has opened a new center at the J.J. Pickle research center that could provide new solutions in how to harvest the power of algae for fuel.

Just off a dirt road in northwest Austin stand hundreds of 12-foot-tall tubes filled with green liquid. Nearly 15,000 gallons of algae grow inside the tubes, which are housed in a massive structure called a shade house. Lab workers have to climb ladders to peek inside and tend to the tiny organisms.

For decades, scientists have been trying to find ways to mass-produce algae as a viable source of fuel for vehicles. High costs and environmental factors have created insurmountable roadblocks.

Now, researchers hope, a new facility at the University of Texas will help them move closer to that goal.

“You need three things to grow algae: carbon dioxide, dirty water and sunshine,” said Michael Webber, an assistant professor in UT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Texas has abundant supplies of all three.”

The university opened the large facility that houses the algae tubes three weeks ago at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus with the objective of mass-producing algae for use as biofuel and other byproducts. AlgEternal Technologies, L.L.C., a company based in Austin whose CEO is state Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, partnered with the university’s UTEX Culture Collection of Algae — one of the largest algae collections in the world — to develop the technology to grow the plants for the project. Another Texas company, OpenAlgae, L.L.C., works with the university’s Center for Electromechanics to cost-effectively extract oil from the algae.

Algae can be used to make products other than biofuel, including animal feed, food supplements and pharmaceuticals, said Jerry Brand, the Jack S. Josey professor in energy studies and the director of the UTEX Culture Collection of Algae.

Michael Jochum, AlgEternal’s chief scientist, said one potential key to successfully growing large quantities of algae for commercial use is the project’s Vertical Growth Module — those giant tubes. The facility grows algae in a closed system that uses the sun as its main source of energy and reduces production costs and the chances of predators or diseases attacking the algae. Growing the cultures vertically also means scientists can produce a lot of algae in a relatively small area.

“Algae has typically been grown horizontally in open ponds, where limiting factors like poor sunlight and contamination from outside organisms have prevented large-scale algae production,” Jochum said.

The UTEX Culture Collection of Algae works with AlgEternal to decide which kinds of cultures should be grown and under what conditions, Brand said.

“They have the potential to play a role in reducing greenhouse gases and decreasing our dependence on crude oil,” Brand said. “Algae can grow much faster than plants. They don’t require as much water, and they can grow in places that plants can’t, like deserts.”

That is especially important for Texas because of the severe drought gripping most of the state.

Beyond the central problem of figuring out how to economically grow large amounts of algae, Brand said, is the complexity of working with vast amounts of it.

“No one has ever grown microorganisms on a huge scale before,” he said. “As you scale up, more unexpected problems arise.”