There’s a lot of tech talent to be found right here in Northern Nevada colleges. If you’re interested in getting a firsthand look at some of the innovative ideas coming out of our universities, plan to attend Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology’s (NCET) Governor’s Cup oral presentations April 21 & 22. The event is free and open to the public. Finalists in this statewide business plan competition are vying for big bucks – more than $110K. This is a good way to support Nevada’s best and brightest and check out what might be on horizon on the sustainable/renewable energy & technology fronts.
Governor’s Cup finalists oral presentations:
Monday, April 21 - 10 am - 5 p.m.
Lt. Governor’s Award oral presentations:
Tuesday, April 22 - 9 a.m. - 5 .pm.
All oral presentation are at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks. Winners of the Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup and the Lt. Governor’s Awards will be announced on April 25 at the Awards Luncheon at the Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas. Tables of eight are $750 and individual tickets are $100. Please RSVP by
April 18 to Emily Lowe at Emily@NCET.org or (775) 332-3000 x3228.
Visit www.2008GovCup.com for more details.
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Now entering its fourth year, the Donald W. Reynolds Collegiate Business Plan Competition is attracting more college students than ever before. Presented by Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (NCET), the Governor’s Cup encourages students to develop innovative new business concepts as they compete for cash prizes. A record number of entries were received this year and NCET saw a significant jump in participation for the Lt. Governor’s Award, which is presented to the business plans that best employ clean, renewable or efficient energy technologies and services.
Governor’s Cup finalists will be announced on Wednesday, April 2, and winners will be named on Friday, April 25 at an awards luncheon at 
Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas. Nevada’s winners will compete in the new Tri-State Donald W. Reynolds Cup Competition, slated for May 14 at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas.
For info on ticket sales and event sponsorship opportunities, contact Emily Lowe at Emily@NCET.org or call (775) 337-3328.
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Join the Nevada Biotechnology & Bioscience Consortium Regenerative Medicine Organization and the Nevada Development Authority in honoring Senator Harry Reid and UNLV’s College of Sciences February 18 in Las Vegas.
DATE: Monday, February 18, 2008
TIME: 11:30 a.m. - Check-in & networking ; 12 noon: - Luncheon; 12:30 p.m. – Awards ceremony
LOCATION: Wynn Hotel (Margaux Ballroom) 3131 S. Las Vegas Blvd., Las Vegas
COST: Tickets are $75 and tables are $750; VIP Tickets are $125 and VIP tables are $1,000.
RSVP: No later than February 14. Purchase tickets online at: www.nevbio.org
For more information e-mail Judith Rebholz at jrebholz@cvbt.com or call (702) 839-7222. Click here for additional details:
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Virginia Kuhn of USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy made some cool comments: “From Twelve Horses to health care providers to technology-innovative start ups in San Jose, every CEO said the same thing: we need personnel who are flexible, who know how to be resourceful, who have tech skills but
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I’m a 3rd generation skier raising a 4th generation. Just how many generations before skiing starts to become embedded within our DNA? 
Over the last three weeks, Reno-Tahoe’s seen several winter storms. As I write this, it’s cold outside and all the Tahoe peaks are covered in the good white stuff. This year will be Logan’s (8) third year on the Alpine Meadows ski team. Cody (5) will be starting his first year. Yay! Last year, Logan played hooky from school about 13 days to hit every day of ski team plus the few powder days we had. I expect Logan and Cody will be missing a similar amount of school again this year.
Skiing for us is a lot of time spent together as a family. (See post from 2004.) It means 50+ days of being together. The 50+ days of 1.5 to 2.5 hours in the car together is where Logan gets a massive amount of homework and reading. It means a lot of discipline getting out of bed at 6:30am to be on the road by 7:30am to be in the lodge by 8:30am booting up and ready for 9am ski team start. It means a lot of lodge-time playing foosball, wrestling, eating, goofing off and hanging out with friends and other family. It means a lot of time riding the chairlifts with my kids and good wife talking and singing/making up stupid songs. And, of course, it means skiing! Whether the snow is great or the snow sucks, at least we’re skiing!
Skiing also introduces my kids to mentors like Shane McConkey…who my kids idolize as an “educational role model”. Shane can read. He can also ski, too!
Here’s a video of Cody from last January (2007). He was 4 at the time…about a month before his 5th birthday. Juxtaposed to that is a video of Paul Dugan — the Washoe County School District’s Superintendent (who kicks ass BTW) — giving Logan a reading award when he was in kindergarten 2 years a go.
The point: ski for literacy <grin>.
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So Myrna has a new look to her Blog. Cool! Loving that Reno’s #1 blogger dug-in and upgraded. Reno and its Discontents got a makeover over the weekend and it’s lookin’ great! Blog redesign can kill a person (or pay the bills for some, wink)…or at least drive you ”absolutely bonkers” which is what I think drove Myrna to write a post on economics.
Her post “On Capitalism” got me thinking about how much I enjoy social and political economic theory and why. Myrna asks the question:
“Come on, is there anyone out there who can tell me with a straight face that Milton Friedman or Karl Marx or John Keynes didn?t have certain agendas in mind while formulating their theories?”
Rather than give a straight answer (yes, I have a BS in Economics AND a BS in Finance, emphasis on “BS” hahaha), here’s a little story about where my passion came from:
When I showed up to UNR in 1988, I intended to be a Finance Major w/ Political Science and Marketing Minors. I wanted to go to law school then. Yeah…anyway…probably should have stuck with that plan, BUT:
My adviser was Mike Reed — a social economics professor then. Mike later went on to become Dean of the College of Business and is now basically the CFO for the Nevada System of Higher Education. He works for Jim Rogers & Crew now. What kind of sillyness he must witness in the name of education one can only imagine…but I’m jealous!
Because of Mike Reed I dumped my minors and ended up taking all of his classes, and incidentally, pretty much every one of his “arch enemy” Tom Cargill’s as well (who is a hidden UNR treasure). They weren’t actually enemy’s. I just like to think so. Cargill had a different approach. He’s a banking economist who I think predicted/nailed the whole EU unification/outcome in 1991 with an intense decade crystal ball accuracy… Smart dude, anyway…
There’s simply no better person to have a drink with in all of Nevada and have a conversation about economics and the social/political conundrum than Dr. Mike Reed. A hippie. A beatnik. A redneck. A artisan. A philosopher. An economist. A real human being. He’s the kind of social chameleon that makes him great at everything. Not only can he slide comfortably in to every social-economics conversation and actually ADD to it, he can — and will – challenge every belief you hold until you have no choice but to find empathy and a understanding of all perspectives. I’ve seen the most virulent of socialists tamed in to respect for Smith/Hayek. Conversely, he beat the Ayn Rand right out of me, while simultaneously introducing me to Ludwig von Mises v. Keynes, and then doubled-back with Schumpeter (hence my Entrepreneur bent). Then, just when I was all puffed up, he slipped in Marx, Kant, Hegel and Rousseau. (Ayn still tops in the book favs tho’.)
Yes Myrna, every economist has an agenda – visible, hidden, obfuscated or even more often subconscious. But we all do!
We all have agendas. We all have different worldviews. The greatest thing about Mike’s approach towards teaching economics was to encourage his students to discover these “worldviews” and navigate in-and-around them in understanding what made their approach tick, click or sick. BTW, agenda sounds evil - all these people were well intentioned passionate people deeply vested in trying to understand the world about them to the benefit of everyone…folks like Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin, Che, Hitler, Castro, Chavez, Peron hacked certain economic theories for their impassioned Maslow-political marketing/branding strategy a.k.a. “an agenda”.
Because of Mike’s passion for his students, I was fortunate to be able to see Milton Friedman — not once…but twice before he passed away.
Anyway, Myrna’s post reminded me of how much value I got from my education as a result of Mike Reed’s meddling with my mind…and how lucky I am to have meet and see speak one of the great economists of our time. Speaking of (future) great economists…Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and Curator of TED and writer/creator of the Long Tail is still quite young/alive/kicking and just may be a recent example of great economic mind of our time…go see him speak before he dies in a WordPress makeover!
I personally think Clay Shirky is a potential great mind to be appreciated and agendacided…Robb Smith has a great post here on Clay Shirky. Clay’s Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags is a must read for ANY BLOGGER that is participating/creating/benefiting from the Web 2.0 economy. In fact, “Part I: Classification and its Discontents” sounds awfully familiar… hahahahah!
A note from the Adam Smith wiki worth digressing on:
On June 25, 2006, when Warren Buffet announced that he would donate his wealth to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he was presented with a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations by Bill Gates.[12]
So, the two people that are most often maligned for being Capitalists donated 33 Billion buckaroos (now a 65B portfolio) to solve a lot of world ilk. Can anyone with a straight face tell me that whatever they’re 33 Billion dollars goes to, it doesn’t have an agenda too? That’s 64.9999999999999999Billion more than I have to help people out!
Anyway, When Mike Reed introduced Warren Buffet to UNR students celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the COBA, I couldn’t help but think that Mike Reed and Warren Buffet were two intellectual giants/peas-in-a-pod on stage. While Warren Buffet talked about how important people are to business and organizations and the empathy/ethics required to steward any organization, I realized I was fortunate to have experienced that philosophy first hand from Mike starting in 1988.
Thanks Myrna for finally triggering a post outta me!
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When I look back at all the books of fiction that I’ve read, there’s a few that absolutely stand out as being totally congruent with me personally and my developing worldview. Of course, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is right at the top of the list.
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash stand out dog-eared and above the boxes and shelves countless Bruce Sterling, Phillip K. Dick’s, Isaac Asimov, Verner Vinge, Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson novels.
But I still remember reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a junior in high school in 1987 and thinking, “This is cool. This is a world I could live in! This world will exist one day.”
This is the book that really started it all for me. Why I do what I do. Sure, a snowball effect. But a tremendous connection was made in my personality that I didn’t know existed.
This is the book that led to a ‘couple hundred other books being read…and I believe this book led to the Web as we know it. Minimally, we owe the Matrix movies to William!
“They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.” - Neuromancer
Neuromancer went on to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award. I didn’t know then how much recognition it would receive. I just knew that my love for technology how it impacts human social behavior OK someday in the not to distant future. That this guy Bruce Sterling was not a writer of fiction…he was a seer…a social economist…a person with a gift to follow trajectory within the human spirit and paint a vivid photo of where we’re all headed.
So it was with some dismay that I caught this quote from William Gibson (thanks Bruno Giussani, you have the best del.iciou.us feed on the planet right now IMHO):
“The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.
We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.
Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.
You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.”
Should we be troubled by this? Is there a new class of science fiction writers ready to take this task up? What’s next? Should we be scared that when our best science fiction writer gives up we’re in trouble? Is this DOOMSDAY? hahahaHA!
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Have you ever had that “idea” and wondered how to get’r dun? Here’s you’re chance…
I’m stoked that there’s so many cool workshops and events going on with entrepreneurship and technology now. I can tell you that even 4 years a go Nevada was dry as a bone for assisting entrepreneurs with this stuff. I know. I was there. And I struggled a lot and made a lot of mistakes fumbling around. There’s so many resources now that I can’t think of a better place to be to startup a business.
The latest is that UNR is having this Invention to Venture workshop. The workshop is an introduces the process and practices of technology entrepreneurship.
Additionally, EDAWN, NCED and NCET are sponsors and as such I expect more open dialog on hitting EDAWN’s Target 2010 growth industries.
This event is a co-production of the Institute for Innovation and Informatics at the University of Nevada, Reno and the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance.
Date: April 20th, 2007
Time: 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM
Location: AT&T Auditorium in the Athletic Department’s Legacy Hall
University of Nevada, Reno Campus
Cost: $15 Students, $35 Faculty and Staff, and $70 Business Community
Gold Sponsor: Nevada Commission on Economic Development
Silver Sponsor: Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada (EDAWN)
Sponsor: Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology
For more information or to register online, please visit http://www.invention2venture.org/events/UNR/index.html
Contact: Melodie Harney, Institute for Innovation and Informatics, University of Nevada, Reno, 775.784.1214 or mharney at unr dot edu
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