Josh

You can track our progress here: http://www.foresight.org/challenge

Any size donation is welcome. Here’s how to give:

• Use the online form at https://foresight.org/forms/php/donate.php.
• Fax or mail your donation by completing our printable donation form. Fax: +1 650.289.0863
• Donate by telephone by calling +1 650.289.0860 x 254 and we will be happy to take your information.
• Donate by mail — checks postmarked by December 31, 2007 are also eligible for matching funds.
• Donate stock — see http://www.foresight.org/members/stock.php

Thanks in advance for anything you can do to help! —Christine

Are you up for the nanotech challenge?

Thanks to contributions like yours, we’ve been able to advance beneficial nanotechnology through our publications, prizes, and Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. With your support, Foresight can continue as a growing force enabling businesses, scientists, technologists, policy makers, investors, and individuals to be informed about how nanotechnology can contribute to a better future.

Now you can double the impact of your donation and membership dollars.

Thanks to a generous $40,000 Challenge Grant, every contribution you make to Foresight is matched dollar for dollar. This Challenge is for a limited time only, so give today. Donations and memberships sent by December 31, 2007, qualify as 2007 tax deductions [in the U.S., as permitted by law]. For extra tax savings, you can donate appreciated stock.

Nanodot readers can donate here: https://foresight.org/forms/php/donate.php

Thanks in advance if you can help. Your support of nanotech, Foresight, our Roadmap, and Nanodot is greatly appreciated. —Christine

http://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/2007

I encourage you to check out this event. Since it is an Unconference, you have the option of presenting as well as general participation. The overall theme is advanced technologies, with a wide variety being covered at the meeting.

Facebook users can indicate their plans here (though RSVPs here don’t guarantee your place):
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=5194522980

If you do choose to attend, please register early to ensure a seat.

Hope to see you there! —Christine

Currently not working appear to be Technology Review, Science Daily and Eureka Alert. But we are working on it.

So feel free to review your "User Admin" -> "Customize Homepage" options to get the block/box selections of those information sources you most value.

If you are aware of additional sources which have RSS/RDF feeds which may be of interest to nanodot readers (ACS, EETimes, etc.) feel free to post them here and we will try to include them in the list. If you feel there are entries in the block/box list which are of lesser interest to nanodot readers feel free to suggest that they be removed as well (nobody wants to have to read through and review several hundred items to configure their home page…). Just keep in mind that we are trying to strike a balance between infotech, biotech and nanotech.

Ultimately we are trying to build a community which includes each of these facets.

"After a long week of work, nanodot is back up and running! During our major upgrade/maintenence on August 12th, we ran into some hardware issues which forced us to lengthen our downtime unexpectedly. We've since corrected those hardware issues, and have gotten nanodot back up on a more stable, extensable, and solid infastructure running BSD and Slash 2.0.

I want to appoligize to everyone for our downtime, as well as for the inconvenience this has casued. I can assure you that we'll do everything we can to significantly shorten subsequent maintenence and downtime on the site in the future.

Please feel free to email me anytime at nanodot@foresight.org to let me know of any issues, comments or questions that you have regarding Nanodot.org.

Thanks for reading!

Ben Harper
Chief Information Officer
Foresight Institute"

Ben has commendably corrected the Sendmail malconfig Nanodot had been suffering (by replacing Sendmail with Postfix)… so if you signed up for a Nanodot account and never received your password, you can now use the "Mail Password" facility to get the system to resend your password. (If you don't remember your Nanodot nickname, don't fret… we will do a mass-mailing to all Nanodot users, reminding them of their nicknames and passwords, shortly.)

Dave

• Many of the topics on Nanodot are somewhat abstract and therefore hard to represent graphically, particularly when relying (as I have been) on clip-art. (I defy you to find a good image for "Nanoscale Bulk Technology" in an off-the-shelf clip art package. Conversely, it was often hard for people to figure out the topic based on the image I picked, and some browsers [<cough>Netscape] don't display the <ALT> text when the mouse rolls over the icon (and let's not start a debate about Javascript!). The new icons, whatever their other merits, are quite clear about what they represent.
• The new icons are also much easier to create, and enable me to add new topics when requested with a much shorter response time than previously. Creating one of the old graphic icons required me to:
  1. Think of a way to graphically represent the topic, no matter how tenuous the rationale.
  2. Pore over my available clip-art for an image like that. (If no such image found, go to Step 1.)
  3. Colorize the monochrome image (usually)
  4. Make any changes needed to make the image fit the topic.
  5. Save and upload the icon.

  The new textual icons eliminate Steps 1-4 with "Type the topic name". (Yes, I'm lazy. Laziness, along with Hubris and Impatience, is one of the three Cardinal Virtues of a Perl programmer.)

• Having a greatly reduced color scheme, the icons can have a smaller file size and download faster.

However, some users have spoken up in favor of the old graphic icons, saying that they made the home page easier to scan visually and that the site looks less interesting with the text icons. (I worked pretty hard on the old graphic icons, so this gave me a warm fuzzy.)

The obvious compromise — adding text to the graphic icons — has most of the drawbacks of the old graphic icons, including the most important one: they take longer to create, and so they delay the creation of new topics for the site.

But Nanodot exists for the users, so I have run the question up the proverbial flagpole and am standing by to count salutes.

Dave