This week in PopTech: Stories of health, language and living
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Friday, December 09, 2011 UTC
There's always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week's highlights follows.
- PopTech 2009 speaker Luis von Ahn invented ReCaptcha, a program that uses squiggly characters that humans easily decipher but blocks spambots – and helped digitize millions of old texts. The CMU professor has also made games like Duolingo, that let you learn a language for free, while simultaneously translating the Web. To learn French or Spanish sign up for the private beta, which just recently opened to the public.
- Congratulations to UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan (PopTech 2009) who was named one of the top mobile health innovators of 2011 by the mHealth Alliance and Rockefeller Foundation. Ozcan has discovered how to convert cellphones into microscopes by relying on shadow imaging instead of expensive optics.
- If you're in New York, check out this very special production of PopTech 2011 Social Innovation Fellow Bryan Doerries' Theater of War with Tuesday's Children this Sunday, December 10th.
- What happens when ambitious and talented data scientists are connected with social organizations rife with data but lacking resources to do anything with it? PopTech 2011 Social Innovation Fellow Jake Porway’s Data Without Borders helps bring these two groups together, using data in the service of humanity to design transformative visualizations and decision-making tools. This week FastCo Exist examined a few examples of Data Without Borders at work.
- Jonathan Harris (PopTech 2007) has announced the launch of Cowbird, a community of storytellers, focused on deeper, longer-lasting, more personal storytelling than you're likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Listen to Harris discuss Cowbird in this interview on PRI.
- The Mesh has released their 2011 holiday gift guide. To learn more about The Mesh and the future of sharing, watch Lisa Gansky's PopTech 2010 talk.
- PopTech Board Chair Cheryl Heller tells GOOD, "Do your homework," as part of their series with social enterprise leaders. For more, check out this interview with Heller that we published earlier this week on SVA's new Design for Social Innovation MFA.
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Image: Dualingo
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