d.light design's goal is to make kerosene lanterns extinct as soon as possible. Why do they want to do this? They think they have a lighting solution that provides a safer, brighter and more affordable light to the widely-used kerosene lantern.

You're probably saying to yourself, "But, I don't own a kerosene lantern". You're right. But, according to d.light, about 1.6 billion people around the world depend on kerosene lanterns as their only lighting source.

Where do these 1.6 billion people live? Mostly in rural and urban areas that don't have regular access to electricity.

Here are some strong reasons for eradicating kerosene lanterns pulled from d.light's site:

Improved Health
Reduction of indoor air pollution, which causes acute lower respiratory infections, one of the biggest killers among children under 5 in India.

Access to Education
We will offer higher quality and brighter light for children to read by.

Saved Lives
Kerosene causes thousands of fires and burns annually.

More Savings
The average rural household in India spends 7.4% of their income on fuel and lighting, over three times more than is spent on education.

Higher Income
UNDP studies demonstrate that families with access to improved lighting have up to a 30% increase in income levels due to increased productivity at night.

So, what's their big solution to the kerosene epidemic? It's simple... LED lights (aka light-emitting diodes).

However, they're not any old LED lights. Their LED lights have been tested over and over with real families living in the harshest of off-the-grid locations. The d.light team spent months and months perfecting what batteries to use, back-up power sources and different configurations.

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This roundup is mostly for new readers of this blog. It's just a quick snapshot of every post I've published in the 'My Genome' category up until today.

#24 Genetic Testing on The John and Ken Show (May 5, 2008)
#23 Just Downloaded a File Containing my Raw Genome Data. Now What? (May 4, 2008)
#22 Visualization of My Genetic Similarity to People Around the World (Apr 30, 2008)
#21 How Heart Attack and Other Four Star-Rated Topics Relate to My DNA, Part 2 (Apr 24, 2008)
#20 Fun with Y Chromosomes: Exploring my Paternal Ancestry (Apr 16, 2008)
#19 Look Ma, I’m in Newsweek (Apr 14, 2008)
#18 Fun with mtDNA: Exploring my Maternal Ancestry (Apr 12, 2008)
#17 How Breast Cancer and Other Four Star-Rated Topics Relate to My DNA, Part 1 (Apr 11, 2008)
#16 Sharing My DNA Results (Apr 9, 2008)
#15 The Most Common Cancer (For Men) and Me (Apr 6, 2008)
#14 I Just Received an Exciting Email! (Apr 4, 2008)
#13 Bummer… I’m One of Those Customers (Apr 1, 2008)
#12 Still Waiting For My DNA Results (Mar 16, 2008)
#11 Demo 23andMe with the “Mendel Family” (Feb 23, 2008)
#10 We Joined The DNA Network plus Exciting Spit Challenge News (Feb 12, 2008)
#9 Spit Party Photos (Feb 10, 2008)
#8 Spit Challenge: Fill Tube With 2.5ml of Saliva in Under 146sec (Feb 7, 2008)
#7 FedEx Tracking Says DNA Kit Arrives Today (Feb 6, 2008)
#6 Saliva-Spitting 23andMe Party on Wednesday! (Feb 4, 2008)
#5 $1000 Raised! Just Ordered My 23andMe DNA Kit (Jan 22, 2008)
#4 Decoding My DNA Soon, $820 Raised So Far (Update: $1000 raised!) (Jan 11, 2008)
#3 Calling All 23andMe Saliva Spitting Bloggers! (Dec 16, 2007)
#2 Fundraising Updates for Andrew’s DNA Test (Dec 12, 2007)
#1 Help Me Decode My Genome by Christmas (Dec 6, 2007)

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I enjoy reading about companies that are making strong efforts to understand and meet the needs of people in rural, underdeveloped areas of the world.

For the most part, people in rural, underdeveloped areas of the world are shortsightedly ignored by companies and as a result new products and services aren't designed for them. I think this leads to a lose-lose situation for both companies and the people living in these underdeveloped areas.

Bosch a Germany company well-known for its auto parts and power tools launched in interesting expansion into the rural, underdeveloped areas of south India back in 2006.

In collaboration with some Indian banks, Canara Bank and Andhra Bank, they launched Bosch Vaahan, which is a mobile van that provides power tool demonstrations and training to artisans. The mobile van also travels with bank workers that provide info on small business loans and help the artisans through the application process.

In Summer 2006, while working for a microfinance organization I got to travel extensively through rural southern India visiting tons of artisans, craft makers etc.

As you'd expect, they all worked extremely hard but lacked efficient tools. The whole time I was traveling and meeting these rural entrepreneurs I kept thinking, "If only they had this tool they could increase their productivity 10x."

According to the Bosch site, the southern India initiative has been successful. They launched a second mobile van in northern India in April 2007.

The Hindu Business Line reported this about the second van:

The van will reach Delhi and travel towards northern Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab and Jammu before returning to Delhi. The second phase will cover eastern and western Uttar Pradesh. "We aim to reach 4,000 artisans in north India," says Navin Paul [Business Head, Bosch Power Tools India].

You can read more about the Bosch Vaahan initiative over at the Bosch site. And, Sagar Gubbi has some more insight into this initiative over at his blog.

The John & Ken Show on LA radio station KFI AM-640 covered genetic testing on their Saturday (5/3) broadcast.

Note: I tried to figure out a way to incorporate "100,000 watt blowtorch lighting the LA afternoon skies" into the above paragraph but gave up.

They invited Trish Brown, a VP at DNA Direct, and myself to talk during the segment. I guess someone over at The John and Ken Show found my blog while doing some random Googling.

During the interview, John & Ken were surprisingly quieter and less angry than I thought they were going to be. They asked me basic questions regarding the DNA test I chose, my test results and raising donations on my blog for the DNA test.

You can listen to the genetic testing segment on the podcast below. The genetic testing segment starts at 33:40min and goes to 59:40min (They talk to me at the 45:30min mark):

 

 John & Ken Show [67:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Read more posts from the 'My Genome' category here.

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I've downloaded plenty of mp3 files to my desktop over the years, but I've never downloaded a file containing my raw, uninterpreted genome data. Until today.

23andMe lets you download a zipped, text file containing 500,000+ lines of your genotype call data. It's all the raw, uninterpreted data they pull from your saliva.

All. on. one. 5mb. zipped. file. And, about 14.2mb unzipped.

Why did I download the raw data file instead of keeping it protected behind the layers of encryption over on the 23andMe servers?

No particular reason. Just curious to see what a file containing 500,000+ lines of my genotype call data looks like.

Here's what it looked like when I opened it in TextEdit (Note: This is just the first 7 of 500,000+ lines):

I'll probably use the Promethease tool the guys over at SNPedia built as soon as they create a Mac version.

Does anyone know anything else I can do with my downloaded text file containing 500,000+ lines of my genotype call data?

I'm up for interesting suggestions.

There wasn't a camera on the market that could do what director James Cameron wanted to do. So, he invented his own camera.

How badass is that?

I'm not going to try and describe how it works in detail. In short, his camera acts like a set of human eyeballs.

Watch the video below for a cool 4min sneak peek of the camera:

(Video link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-241532803911842846)

Sigourney Weaver who acts in Cameron's next movie Avatar mentioned something that blew my mind during her recent appearance on Late Night with Conan O'brien.

She said that the new camera allows Cameron to capture a scene with actors (wearing special skins) and then go into the studio when everyones left for the day and re-shoot different angles of the same scene without needing the actors.

If that wasn't enough for you, BusinessWeek reporter Aili McConnon recently had an extremely interesting email exchange with James Cameron about all kinds of futuristic film/technology stuff.

In the interview, he mentioned something very insightful about the future of mobile technology (aka small screens):

"The density of information one can place on a small screen becomes much higher if it's stacked in three dimensions."

Hmmm... I'm guessing Steve Jobs already has some sort of 3D display mobile device prototype in his labs.

Here is a cool visualization of my genetic similarity to groups of people from around the globe. The longer the bar the greater my genetic similarity to people from that region.

As you can see, I'm most similar to people from Northern Europe in the 23andMe visualization.

Here is how my genetic similarity to different global regions stacks up:

I was just perusing my local paper The Press Democrat and I came across an article covering a startup/venture capital meetup that took place April 29-30 in Santa Rosa, CA at the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country Hotel.

The event went by the highly descriptive title "2008 Venture Vineyard Early Stage Conference and Santa Rosa Innovation Investment Forum".

Wow. That is a mouthful.

It was put together by the City of Santa Rosa, the SR Chamber of Commerce and the Golden Capital Network. Golden Capital has a nice overview of the event here.

I was a bit surprised to find an event like this taking place in Sonoma County Wine Country. I wish I had heard about the event because I would have definitely have tried to get in.

This Press Democrat article excerpt mentions some of the entrepreneurs who showed up at the meetup:
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23andMe's Gene Journal let's you see how your DNA data "relates to ongoing research in health and physical traits".

They provide their own 1-4 star rating beside each Gene Journal topic letting users know how much research backs each specific topic and how much the general scientific community has accepted the research.

For instance, Heart Attack has a rating.

Whereas other topics might have a , or ratings.

23andMe provides a more detailed rating explanation:

Before I look at my Gene Journal topics D-H, I should note that 23andMe makes it very clear that their service is "Intended for research and educational purposes. Not for diagnostic use".

I'm pretty sure most of us who signed-up with 23andMe understood this fully before we shelled out $1000. But, we are curious consumers and enjoy the chance to learn a little more about ourselves no matter how young and immature the personal genomics space is.

Ok, let's look at four star-rated topics D-H in my Gene Journal (Check out Part 1 for topics A-C).

Earwax Type

Is wet earwax sexier than dry earwax (I have wet earwax)? Is earwax sexy at all?

After reading a little bit about the benefits of earwax I'm starting to see it through a more sexy tint. Why? Because stopping dust and shampoo from entering my inner ear is sexy.

Also, earwax might contain natural antibiotics to keep bacterial pirates from pillaging! Awesome. Earwax is getting sexier by the minute.

[Continue reading this post →]

About a month ago, Max Ventilla the CEO over at The Mechanical Zoo sent me an email wondering if I'd be interested in a position at their stealth startup. He gave me a brief description of what they were working on and told me about all the cool people on their team.

What are they working on? Social search technology that will help you use the power of your networks to search (Think networks like Facebook, email etc).

I was salivating. It sounded so awesome. I'm pretty sure that social search is going to be one of the next big things to hit the Internet and The Mechanical Zoo has assembled an impressive team to take a stab at being a first-mover.

They have lot's of ex-Googlers, Yahoos etc on their current 12-man team. Search Engine Land reports that they are looking for hires in the following areas:

The 12-man team is looking for a few good people. So what skills would you need? AJAXy web development; rapid prototyping and development with rails; new paradigms of data availability and access (OpenSocial); distributed systems and large datasets; statistics; algorithms; NLP and machine learning; recommendation systems; usability research; online community building; and data-driven marketing.

Sound interesting? Then drop them a line or check out their jobs page.

I felt that it would be OK to write this post since it looks like The Mechanical Zoo has leaked what they are working on to the Techmeme crowd. You can read plenty more over on Techmeme or CNET.