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Scattered across a swath of Michigan that’s been devastated by the state’s slowdown in automobile manufacturing, a half-dozen or so companies have begun construction on facilities to build advanced batteries for electric vehicles. In the Southwest, two solar thermal plants, each supported by more than a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees, will soon sprawl across thousands of acres in the desert. From Hawaii to northern Maine, ridgelines have begun bristling with wind turbines, made possible in part by government funding.

Enacted 18 months ago, the American Recovery Act is now delivering $80 billion in loan guarantees, tax credits, and cash grants to projects aimed at developing and deploying energy technologies. Speaking in mid-July at a ground-breaking ceremony for an advanced battery factory in Holland, MI, President Obama promised that the plant would be “a boost to the economy of the entire region.” But beyond spurring new jobs in clean energy, the Obama administration says, the unprecedented injection of federal money into the energy sector is meant to be a first step in creating “a comprehensive strategy that will pave the way toward a clean energy future for our country.” Remaking the nation’s energy infrastructure will, of course, take years. But a year and half after passage of the stimulus legislation, it is worth asking whether the strategy is on track. Do the billions of federal dollars being spent on energy research and commercialization really represent the beginning of a comprehensive plan for a clean-energy future? Or are they simply piecemeal investments that will become irrelevant once federal incentives disappear?

The U.S. Department of Energy, which alone controls $36.7 billion from the stimulus bill, is now spending from $800 million to $1 billion of that money every month on R&D and the commercialization of new energy projects, according to Steve ­Isakowitz, the agency’s chief financial officer. In a recent interview, Isakowitz said it has been a “huge challenge” to spend the money quickly and efficiently. Some programs have been expanded significantly: spending on modernization of the electric grid, for example, soared from less than $200 million to $4 billion. In other cases, the DOE had to fund entirely new programs. The agency spent $350 million, for instance, to start up the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which backs high-risk research projects. Despite the challenges, he expects the stimulus-related spending to reach $14 billion in 2011 before dropping off to $9 billion in 2012.

Though President Obama and other supporters of the legislation justified much of the spending as a way to create “green jobs” and thus stimulate the economy, many economists dismiss that idea. Even those who strongly support government investment in technology point out that any spending on research and new energy sources will take years to produce economic growth. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT and a leading authority on the link between economic productivity and innovation, says that while he strongly favors increased federal support for energy innovation on the grounds that we need new technologies to forestall climate change, it is “a joke and totally misguided” to think it will help solve the nation’s unemployment problem.

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The real value of the stimulus spending has always been in its potential to compensate for years of declining investment in energy R&D and to jump-start commercial use of cleaner energy technologies despite that long decline. The United States spends shockingly little on energy research. In that context, the stimulus bill provided a much-needed boost by allocating $3 billion for energy R&D, including the creation of ARPA-E and a series of research centers around the country. But by far the largest energy expenditures in the stimulus bill support the demonstration and commercialization of new technologies. Loan guarantees, tax credits, and cash grants will supply tens of billions of dollars to advanced battery factories, solar power plants, and biofuel refineries (see “Taking Stock of the Stimulus“)–large speculative projects for which tight credit and depressed financial markets would have made private funding nearly impossible.

These are fragile gains, however. The benefit of increased R&D spending will depend on whether future funding levels remain high or suddenly drop again. Likewise, the fate of the new commercial projects will depend on what happens when federal funding winds down; many of the projects will not, at least in the short term, thrive without various government incentives. For the federal spending to have a lasting impact, the stimulus bill will have to be followed by a practical plan for energy innovation and investment. And as budget hawks in Washington begin to tear apart federal expenditures, any sustainable energy policy will need to justify its government funding in terms of direct, clearly recognizable benefits.

Most of the direct spending in the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February 2009 was targeted at infrastructure projects that could begin immediately and provide a quick injection of jobs into a reeling economy. But the legislation also provided more than $50 billion in grants to deploy energy and information technologies, and that money will take longer to spend. While the ultimate economic value of the investment is yet to be determined (see “Cash for Infrastructure“), the map above shows that the money is at last beginning to flow. The bar shows how much money was authorized, how much of it has been awarded to specific projects, and how much has been paid out. While just $381 million of the $7.2 billion authorized to bring broadband to rural areas had been spent as of June 30, for example, nearly $2.5 billion has been awarded, and the rest should be spoken for by September. The Department of Energy, which controls $32.7 billion for clean energy, has also picked up the pace, awarding hundreds of grants to projects around the country.

As an investment partner with Google Ventures, I am often asked how I decide which startups to back.

An encounter in a tiny San Diego office in mid-2004 helps illustrate my answer. There I met Paul, Brett, Jack, and Scott, the scrappiest and most creative founders I had ever seen. They constructed their own office furniture to save money. To increase awareness of their product, they would sneak into trade-show parties sponsored by well-funded competitors and bribe bartenders to distribute hip-looking decals. Without much money in the bank and under heavy competition from a dominant market leader, they proved themselves able not only to survive but to thrive. They had created a service that was well designed and had immense potential. They knew exactly how to adapt their product to handle 10 times as many users when success came, but they built it without spending on expensive equipment to serve users they had not yet acquired.

Six months later I led the acquisition of their startup, Urchin Software, which became the inspiration and foundation for one of our most successful products, Google Analytics. But for all its founders’ good points, acquiring the company was not the obvious choice. Skeptics inside Google pointed out that Urchin was not the market leader or even the best-known among the 30 analytics providers we considered. I had to pound my fist on the table in many meetings, declaring that this was the right horse to back.

When people ask why I was so certain, my response harks back to that meeting in San Diego. Urchin’s founders, who are all still with Google, may not have had the best-performing startup, but they were the best founding team around. Great founders need the technical aptitude, motivation, and personal skills to make a product take off. They proved they had all that when, 72 hours after it launched, Google Analytics was overwhelmed by demand. Paul and his team rapidly recruited and motivated new talent to rearchitect the service’s back end. Analytics opened shortly afterward with the capacity to handle an order of magnitude more traffic. Great founders understand how to deal with unprecedented issues and come out ahead.

They also use feedback from users and the market to dramatically increase their product’s growth. For example, we decided to offer Analytics free of charge when we realized that this would allow Google to engage online advertisers it hadn’t been able to reach before.

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So how do I invest at Google Ventures? When I fund a company, I’m looking for people with the kind of potential that Urchin’s founders displayed: extraordinary entrepreneurs who can build game-changing products.

Wesley Chan is a partner at Google Ventures, the company’s venture capital investment arm. He is one of the 2010 TR35.

Liver Scaffold: The network of blood vessels in a decellularized liver (left) looks the same as that in a normal one (right).   Credit: B.E. Uygun and O.B. Usta

Growing New Livers
Scaffold from ­damaged organs may provide the basis for new ones.

Source: “Organ reengineering through development of a transplantable recellularized liver graft using decellularized liver matrix”
Basak Uygun et al.
Nature Medicine 16: 814-820

Results: Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, grew new livers by removing the cells from an existing rat liver and seeding the scaffold left behind with healthy liver cells. The new organs were able to function for a short time when transplanted into rats.

Why it matters: Not enough donor livers are available for everyone who needs one, and the organ’s complex three-dimensional structure has made generating replacements very difficult. The research could one day provide a way to use unhealthy organs to grow healthy ones.

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Methods: Scientists used a detergent to remove cells from the existing liver, leaving a scaffold of proteins and other molecules. The basic architecture of the liver’s complex network of blood vessels remained intact. To the empty scaffold, the researchers added a mixture of liver cells and endothelial cells, the cells that line blood vessels. The cells grew into an almost complete organ that functioned for 10 days in a dish and for up to eight hours in live animals.

Next steps: The researchers plan to transplant the organs into rats for longer periods to see if they might function well enough to replace a damaged liver. This will require adding more endothelial cells, because the current reconstructed livers don’t have enough blood vessels to work properly for long. The team is also experimenting with using stem cells rather than liver cells to populate the scaffold, which could potentially enable patients to use their own cells.

Other products in this section:

A Charger for the Smart Grid

Low-Cost Solar

Touch Screen Touch-up

Designing Genes

Disposable EEG

Boss on Wheels

Body Tracker

Into the Clouds

Watch the Hand

Other products in this section:

A Charger for the Smart Grid

Low-Cost Solar

Touch Screen Touch-up

Designing Genes

Boss on Wheels

Body Tracker

Into the Clouds

Watch the Hand

Desktop Cancer Check

Other products in this section:

A Charger for the Smart Grid

Low-Cost Solar

Touch Screen Touch-up

Disposable EEG

Boss on Wheels

Body Tracker

Into the Clouds

Watch the Hand

Desktop Cancer Check

More than a dozen people who have had their genomes sequenced stand on stage in an R&D center near Boston. Billed as the last time all such people might fit in one room before the technology moves into the mainstream, the event doesn’t quite include the whole group: actress Glenn Close and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, didn’t make it. But those who did include James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA; Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.; entrepreneur Esther Dyson; and a smattering of leaders from gene-sequencing companies.

Leaning against a wall at one end of the stage is James Lupski, a pediatrician, clinical geneticist, and scientist at Baylor College of Medicine. Unlike many of the others, Lupski wasn’t interested in sequencing as a way to trace his ancestry or determine his future likelihood of developing some ailment. Instead, he had hoped to solve a medical mystery that affects him in the most personal way: the cause of a genetic disorder, called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, that struck him and several of his siblings as teenagers, severely weakening the muscles in their legs and feet. After a quarter-century searching for the gene responsible, the 53-year-old scientist finally found it by scouring his own genome, combing through the billions of DNA building blocks represented by the letters A, T, C, and G. It marks the very first time that whole-genome sequencing–determining the exact order of all the letters in an individual’s DNA–has identified the mutation to blame for a specific case of a genetic disease.

Since the human genome was first sequenced a decade ago, scientists have discovered thousands of genetic variations linked to different diseases. Until very recently, however, sequencing an individual genome cost millions of dollars, making it an impractical way to search for the cause of a particular person’s genetic disorder. Now the cost

Starting kindergarten can be stressful for both parents and students. But would you believe it’s also stressful for teachers? A new crop of students means a new group of parents for kindergarten teachers to communicate with and there are always things they wished you knew right off the bat. Here’s five things your child’s kindergarten teacher wished you knew on the first day of school.

1. Kindergarten is not what it used to be. Many parents remember kindergarten as a time of finger-painting, playing with blocks and eating graham crackers. While these activities still have a place in the kindergarten classroom, a lot has changed over the years. With increasing numbers of children attending preschool and schools across the nation instituting PreK and full-day kindergarten programs, students are not only entering kindergarten more prepared to learn, but also have more time in which to do so.




2. Kindergarten is a much more academically rigorous environment than many parents remember. Your kindergartener will be learning much more than how to share and use classroom materials. Be prepared to see your child’s reading skills blossom and her mathematical mind challenged. In addition to learning the alphabet and the sounds of the letters, your child will learn to recognize core (sight) words, read books with repetitive themes and even write down her own thoughts. She’ll also learn basic math skills, including numeral and number recognition and sorting, which serve as building blocks for later, more complex math skills.
3. Delaying kindergarten entry by a year isn’t always a good idea. In most states, as long as your child turns 5 somewhere between June 1st and December 1st, he is age-eligible for kindergarten. Sometimes parents of children–frequently boys–whose birthdays are at the latter end of the deadline think about starting their child a year later to give him an opportunity to mature and increase his readiness skills. This practice, sometimes known as “academic redshirting,” is not always the best move.
   

   A kindergarten teacher is likely to ask you one question if you tell her your child is going to delay kindergarten by a year: What will he be doing in that year to help him be more prepared for school? Simply giving your child another year isn’t enough–it’s important to have a plan as to how you are going to get him more ready.

   A child who is hanging out at home may be better off in the structure of the classroom. However, if your child will be going to preschool or playgroups to interact with other children, practicing gross and fine motor skills daily and playing games to improve letter recognition and the ability to follow directions, delayed entry may be the way to go. Parents take note: If your child receives Early Intervention Services, they will end when he becomes kindergarten eligible. In order to continue receiving educational services for a disability, he will have to be enrolled in school.

4. Academic skills are only part of kindergarten readiness. Sure, it’s great that your child knows the entire alphabet, recognizes all the numbers up to 20 and can even read a little bit, but these skills are of secondary importance in the eyes of many kindergarten teachers. There are a number of other readiness skills that will give your child a leg up in the classroom. Ask yourself the following questions to get a better sense of your child’s readiness:
   • Does my child have the oral communication skills to make her needs/wants clearly understood?
   • Can my child separate from me for hours at a time without distress?
   • Is my child able to follow one- and two-step directions and adhere to rules?
   • Can my child sit still and pay attention for at least 10 minutes?
   • Does my child get along well with other children? (i.e. Is he able to cooperate? Does he hit, kick or bite?)
   • Is my child able to complete personal need tasks independently or is she willing to try? (Can she button or snap her pants? Zip her coat? Use the toilet without help? Wash her hands?)
   • Does my child know how to use crayons? A pencil? Scissors?
   • Can my child state his full name, address and phone number?
5. Volunteering in the classroom isn’t the only way you can help out. Many parents think the only way to help in their child’s classroom is to actually be in the classroom helping out. Kindergarten teachers know that many parents work and aren’t able to be there during the day. Luckily it’s not the only way you can offer assistance. There are a number of behind-the-scenes things that you can do, too.

   Kindergarteners do a significant amount of hands-on learning and projects, meaning teachers often have a lot of prep work and non-budgeted expenses. Offering to provide the materials for a project or sending in staples like reclosable plastic bags, paper cups, napkins or tissues can save a teacher huge out-of-pocket expenses. Or, if you’re crafty, your child’s teacher would probably love to have you cut out or assemble project pieces at home. Using your lunch hour once a week to photocopy for the teacher can give her the chance to make much-needed phone calls to other parents or to create lesson plans.




6. Learning is a full-time endeavor and you are your child’s primary teacher. Learning doesn’t begin at 9:00 and end at 3:00. Your child is going to learn a lot and be exposed to new ideas in school, but at the end of the day it’s up to you to keep that learning going. In fact, teachers rely on parents reinforcing newly learned skills as a way to promote ongoing scholastic success. Ask him to share what he’s learning with you and find ways to extend that learning. It can be as simple as finding books at the local library to explore a topic deeper, playing a game of “Sorry” to help him keep up on his counting skills or reading with him daily.

Grade school is an action-packed time, full of learning and development. In the elementary school years, your grade school age child will learn to read, and transition to reading to learn. He will mature emotionally and physically as he grows more independent and reaches toward adolescence. From kindergarten to 5th grade, here is a grade-by-grade overview of what you can expect your child to learn in grade school.

It’s not just your kids who need your help with homework; teachers need your help too.  While you may have prepared at home by setting up a homework space, coming up with a homework plan and a plan to make sure it gets into the teacher’s hands, there are a few other, more subtle things that your child’s teacher needs you to do for homework to be successful.

What You Need to Know About Homework

• Read the homework policy. Teachers know that parents feel like they are drowning in all the paperwork that comes home from school and, if they can help it, won’t add unnecessary notices to the pile. However, the homework policy is a memo that parents really ought to read to avoid questions and confusions further down the line. Homework policies outline the important details such as whether or not an assignment will be accepted late, what percentage of your child’s grade is based on homework, what resources are considered acceptable for research or even whether assignments need to be written in pen or pencil.

• Ask your child daily about homework. Many students forget to write down homework assignments or wait until the last minute to complete a long-term project. Asking every day about your child’s homework (and framing the question so you get more than “Yeah, I have homework”) not only shows your child you’re invested in his academic success, but also gives you a chance to run him back to school for books he may need, provide help with a tough assignment or help him plan out a schedule for approaching for a long-term project.

• Talk to the teacher if your child is spending too much time on or struggling with assignments. Believe it or not, your child’s teacher doesn’t want her to spend hours toiling over her homework. The assignment should, for the most part, be practicing a skill she’s already learned, preparing for the next day’s class or a test or working on a project that goes hand-in-hand with something being learned in class. Homework really shouldn’t be that hard and if your child’s teacher is sticking to the National Education Association’s recommended 10-minute rule, shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes for each grade level she’s finished. (i.e. first grade=10 minutes, second grade=20 minutes, etc.)  If your child is struggling she may need some extra help or a specialized homework plan that reduces her amount of homework

• Supervise, brainstorm and encourage, but not create, your child’s project. How many times have you seen a science fair project that you know is too sophisticated for a third grader to have done by himself? Your child’s teacher has probably seen plenty of projects just like them. The point of a project is to teach students to plan, organize and present information all by themselves, not to have the best or most attractive finished product. It’s okay to help come up with ideas and to buy supplies, but resist the urge to step in and simply be there for your child.

• Look over completed homework. This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Check over your child’s homework when he’s done with it. The purpose is not only to make sure he’s actually done it, but also to make sure it’s been done well. Some children rush through assignments and make careless mistakes, while others may misunderstand the directions and do the assignment completely wrong. These are things a quick homework check can help to catch.

With the help of a stronger-than-expected Saturday, The Expendables held on to first place for the second weekend in a row, beating out five newcomers that were trying to dethrone the aging action stars. Earning another $16.5 million, the Sly Stallone project fell 53 percent from its opening weekend, pushing its total gross to close to $65 million. The film that got the closest to the top was Twentieth Century Fox’s Twilight spoof Vampires Suck, which grossed $12.2 million over the three-day frame. (It has grossed $18.5 million since its Wednesday opening.) The rest of the new releases struggled, most failing to crack $10 million for their opening weekend.

In its second weekend, Eat, Pray, Love held in pretty well in theaters. The Julia Roberts-starrer dropped 48 percent for an additional $12 million. The globe-trotting piece has now grossed $47 million after ten days in release. Lottery Ticket landed in the fourth spot for the weekend and seemed to generate good will with audiences. The Bow Wow-starrer earned $11.1 million plus an A- from exit pollster CinemaScore, which portends a strong hold for the movie going forward. The Other Guys rounded out the top five for the weekend with an additional $10.1 million in its coffers. The Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell action-comedy has now earned $88 million since its opening three weeks ago.

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When I requested the review copy of Tweetomatic Profiteer software, I didn’t really expect a response. This type of software – the kind that automatically tweets out affiliate links inside of multiple Twitter accounts – has a fairly bad reputation. I thought if I did hear from the developers then it must actually work. Who would agree to a public review if it didn’t? So when I received a reply from founder Imran Sadiq, I was excited. He provided a review copy, and I figured that the software must be really good to agree to a review on About.com.

That being said, it isn’t. This program frustrated and confused me. I setup a campaign to send to my test Twitter account. I have around 2000 followers on this account, and thought this would give a good sample for the review. The setup seemed to go okay at first, despite there being bizarre windows opening and closing to perform every function.

But do you know the biggest problem? There is no “Send” button! At least I couldn’t find it. I created two campaigns, and tried to schedule them, but nothing happened – there is no clear way to execute the campaign. After almost two hours, I gave up. This piece of software has just one purpose, and I was unable to make it do anything (and yes, I did read the 53 pg manual).

The idea of this software is to automatically tweet affiliate links from ClickBank. The philosophy is good, in that the handbook encourages users to tweet themed affiliate links, along with other non-affiliate ones, and thus build relationships with the followers. But the software needs some work.

Have you used it? Am I missing something? If you are using it, and it is working – I want to hear from you.

To build a following, I have tried TweetAdder (Visit TweetAdder.com)- and it works very well. To schedule tweets in advance I recommend Hootsuite. Its a free tool. Check out the Top Twitter Tools for Business.

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