RENT A ROOM AND HELP AROUND THE HOUSE? NESTERLY OFFERS ALTERNATIVE TO PRICEY DIGS.

STARTUP WILL SUPPORT AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR AN AGING POPULATION.

It typically costs more than $2,400 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Boston. Imagine trying to pay that on a starting teacher’s salary. Yet, at the same time, a growing population of senior citizens in areas around Boston and other cities nationwide is finding it increasingly difficult to stay in and maintain their large homes.

Now nesterly, a startup founded by students at MIT Sloan and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, is trying to solve both problems simultaneously.

Launching later this summer, nesterly will pair two well-known models — home-sharing and gig economy platforms — to tap into a hidden source of affordable housing stock: seniors’ and empty nesters’ spare bedrooms. The company provides a community-driven digital marketplace for homeowners to rent their spare rooms to young people at affordable rates in exchange for help with mutually determined tasks — tasks such as walking the dog or occasionally cooking dinner — which may help the elderly stay in their homes longer.

“Nesterly targets both the affordability crisis and the aging population with a single integrated solution,” said cofounder Virginia Maloney, MBA ’17. Using publicly available housing data, nesterly has estimated that more than 50 million bedrooms sit empty every night in the United States.

Since its founding in October 2016, nesterly has won several awards, including one from MIT’s IDEAS Global Challenge and the Grand Prize for Community Resiliency from NYC BigApps, a New York City-based innovation competition. The startup has also been accepted into Boston’s 2017 MassChallengeaccelerator. In addition to Maloney, nesterly’s founders are Grey McCune, MBA ’17; Dennis Harvey, MCP ’17; Rachel Goor, MCP ’17, and Noelle Marcus, MCP ’17.

Here’s what we’ve learned about nesterly:

Nesterly isn’t Airbnb. And it isn’t TaskRabbit. It’s sort of both.
While there are many services that offer home-sharing opportunities (e.g., Airbnb, HomeAway), and companies that provide assistance with basic tasks (e.g., TaskRabbit), nesterly combines components of both.

The digital interface pairs seniors who have spare bedrooms with young people who will help with household tasks in exchange for reduced rent.

Nesterly focuses on medium- to long-term housing, with the average stay being three months. Unlike Airbnb, the startup incorporates “tasks for housing,” where students can perform tasks for reduced rental rates.

For example, a student and a senior might connect on nesterly and use the site to design a rental agreement whereby the student pays below-market rate for a room and makes up the difference by walking the dog. Nesterly manages rent payments, tracks tasks, manages insurance, and provides conflict mediation. The business profits by charging a transaction fee to both hosts and guests when they sign a lease.

Founders tapped MIT’s network for expertise and support
Nesterly has formed a broad network of advisers, mentors, and partners through MIT — including working with the MIT AgeLab to survey 15,000 people nationwide to confirm that hosts would find the company’s offerings appealing.

The startup was a semi-finalist in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competitionand has received more than $20,000 in funding from the MIT community thanks to the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, MIT Global Ideas Challenge, and others.

Nesterly sees itself as a community builder
In addition to providing affordable housing while helping hosts monetize extra space, nesterly’s founders expect the company’s home-sharing model to increase community stability and foster relationships across generational divides.

“What truly makes nesterly unique is the promise of building a new model for the 21st century family and creating a network of lifelong intergenerational friendships through shared living arrangements,” Maloney said.

The 25 Most Innovative Ag-Tech Startups

By Maggie McGrath and Chloe Sorvino

When our nation was founded 241 years ago, farming was the economy’s primary driver. By 1870, nearly half of the employed population held jobs in agriculture. Today, it’s a $3 trillion industry - but only 2% of Americans hold a farm-oriented job.

This is, in many ways, thanks to technology. Tractors and other automation advances in the 20th century let large farms shift management to only a handful of people. But this, paradoxically, has also slowed things down in the 21st. With only a few people working every farm, there’s not a lot of time - or incentive - to innovate.

“You only get 40 attempts at farming. From your 20’s to your 60’s, you get 40 seasons,” says Duncan Logan, the founder and CEO of RocketSpace, a tech accelerator company. “In tech, you get 40 attempts in a week.”

But even farmland isn’t immune to the information revolution. Today, there are hundreds of agriculture tech startups around the world, and some experts say the situation reminds them of the early days of the internet: There’s a lot of activity in agriculture, but no clear winners yet - it’s hard to say who might become the Facebook or Amazon of the scene. Couple that with climate change pressures, the fact that two billion more people will live on this planet by 2050, and that just 40% of the world’s land is available to grow crops, and you have yourself a market ripe for innovation — and big money.

“The ag tech space right now is in a very unique position. You can’t ignore the fundamentals,” says vice president of Business Development at AgTech Accelerator Corp., Corey Huck. “You have to produce a lot more crop on limited acres, and 70% of fresh water is already being used in agriculture. We have to do more with less at the end of the day and the only way you can do that is with technology.”

From irrigation hardware engineered to beat the drought to biotechnology startups cultivating future cash crops, Forbeshas identified the 25 most innovative pieces of burgeoning technology in this space. Together, they have more than $400 million in financing. Those investments come from the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kholsa Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Monsanto Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as in-house venture capital arms like Campbell Soup’s Acre Ventures. Even President Barack Obama’s former White House chef is getting in the game.

To find the 25 ag-tech startups that carry the most potential, we surveyed the agricultural technology landscape by speaking with experts, venture capitalists and accelerators; then, we examined financials and each company’s agricultural credentials. A special thanks goes to Seana Day at the Mixing Bowl for her comprehensive research on the ag-tech environment.

In alphabetical order, here is the fruit of that labor:

Vineyards in the Malibu region of California. (Photo credit MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

AgCode: This vineyard management company helps winegrowers track harvests, field conditions and grape maturity in order to maximize yields and manage labor. Oenophiles are on board: seven of the country’s top ten wineries use AgCode’s technology. Ag cred: in February, scored an undisclosed investment from Cavallo Ventures, the VC arm of Wilbur-Ellis.

AGERpoint: This startup produces nut and citrus orchard management software that uses satellite data. The data is granular enough to provide tree-specific information, like the size of the canopy or the trunk diameter. The company expects to break-even in 2017 with $3 million in sales. Ag cred: Has raised nearly $9 million at a valuation of about $30 million.

Arvegenix: Former Monsanto executives lead this startup, which is developing a new cash-crop called pennycress that can be added to field rotations between corn and soybeans. The winter cover crop protects the soil from erosion and soaks up nitrogen pollution - and makes money for farmers. Ag cred: Monsanto Ventures led the last funding round.

BluWrap: Using a patented oxygen management technique that extends the shelf life of fresh protein, BluWrap allows fresh protein suppliers to ship by ocean rather than by air, saving on costs. Ag cred: Anterra Capital, the international food and ag growth VC, is an investor in the company, which has raised $18.6 million.

Bovcontrol: This livestock manager is helping cattle farmers keep better track of their herds using cloud technology. Bovcontrol tracks inventory, vaccinations, nutrition needs and more. Ag cred: The company’s software is used by farmers in every continent (except Antarctica).

BrightFarms: The demand for hyper-local produce is booming, and BrightFarms is building and operating greenhouses in urban and suburban areas. The company partners with supermarkets like Giant, ACME, and Pick-n-save and puts the farm at or near the store to maximize produce freshness. Ag cred: The company has raised $57.9M in equity to date.

Clear Labs: This science startup is making a database of the world’s food supply by studying food on a molecular level. The goal is to use the information to help food retailers pick the best suppliers and avoid the next crippling food borne illness outbreak. Ag cred: Per Pitchbook, has $21.2 million in funding; investors include Khosla Ventures and GV.

CropX: An Israeli startup, CropX sells cloud-based software which aims to boost crop yields by focusing on saving water and energy. With in-field sensors, the system automatically delivers the correct amount of water to each plant instead of watering a whole field at a time. Ag cred: Founded in 2013, the company has raised $10 million.

Farmer’s Edge: A hardware and software product that uses satellite imagery and precision technology to help growers identify, map and manage farmland variability. Ag cred: To date, the startup has raised $94.3 million in funding.

Farmer’s Business Network: This big data company connects over 3,400 small farms with open data about yields, supply prices and other information that lets them compete with large operations. Ag Cred: Raised over $83 million in funding from the likes of GV and Double Bottom Line Partners.

FarmLead: An online marketplace for grain, FarmLead lets grain growers expand beyond their local market and sell to the best bidders. Buyers and sellers can register for free, and deals are negotiated anonymously. Ag cred: Monsanto Growth Ventures led their Series A.

FoodLogiQ: The average food recall costs companies $10 million. FoodLogiQ aims to reduce those costs by using data to track a supply chain (i.e, food) from the farm to the fork, ensuring the correct foods are recalled. Ag cred: Works with more than 3,500 food companies, including Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle.

(Credit: Full Harvest)

Full Harvest: 20 billion pounds of "ugly" produce go to waste in the U.S. each year. Full Harvest is trying to reduce that waste by building a B2B marketplace where growers can connect with food companies to offload surplus or imperfect produce. Ag cred: Won the Innovation Award at United Fresh, one of the biggest produce conferences in the U.S.

(Credit: Granular Stock Photo)

Granular: Big retailers stay nimble with the help of data-driven software to help them track everything. Granular’s software does this for farmers, allowing them to prioritize their workforce, monitor profitability, forecast revenues and more. Ag Cred: Raised over $24 million in capital from likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Tao Capital Partners and Khosla Ventures.

Mavrx: This startup’s software allows farmers to visualize their entire fields in an instant, highlighting areas where resources need to be directed and benchmarking crop performance. Ag Cred: Have raised over $22 million from the likes of Bloomberg Beta, Crosslink Ventures and more.

mOasis: mOasis is making a non-toxic gel-like soil additive that helps seeds get farther on less water. It works by holding extra water near a plant’s roots and releasing it was the soil dries out. Ag cred: a field test from UC Davis found the product provided 30% yield increase for broccoli - using 25% less water.

Produce Pay: Founded at Cornell University in 2014, this supply chain startup aims to fix cash-flow problems by paying for the product the day after it is shipped, rather than the typical 30 - 45 day waiting period. Ag cred: Its total funding is $13.4 million from the likes of CoVenture and Menlo Ventures, along with $70 million in debt financing.

RipeIO: Former financiers are bringing blockchain technology to the food supply chain. Its algorithms crunch data to calculate sustainability scores, as well as scores for spoilage and safety levels. Ag cred: Joined the first cohort of the Terra Accelerator, backed by Rabobank, RocketSpace and Nestle USA.

S4: Argentina-based precision ag company with a fintech side that pays producers or companies along the supply chain when systemic risks like drought or flood occurs. The startup expects $2 million in revenue by the end of the year. Ag cred: Raised $3.5 million ahead of its series A.

Sample6: Sample6 claims to be “the world’s fastest food pathogen detection system" by detecting a bug within 6 hours. Its products can detect pathogens and listeria in plants. Ag cred: Has raised more than $30 million from the likes of Campbell Soup’s VC Acre Venture Partners and Sam Kass, the former policy advisor and personal chef to President Barack Obama.

Spensa Technologies: Its software lets farmers record, upload and track observations about their fields; its Z-Trap hardware allows farmers to track pests in the fields by trapping and identifying bug species. Ag Cred: Developed hardware with a National Science Foundaiton grant; has raised over $5 million in outside funding to date.

Strider: A Brazil-based ranch management startup that sells a pest monitoring application which allows farmers to monitor and decide how to treat infestations. Ag cred: Has raised $5 million from the likes of Qualcomm Ventures.

SWIIM: The patented process behind SWIIM, or Sustainable Water and Innovative Irrigation Management, monitors water budgets and computes data. This allows a large-scale water user, like a farm or a utility company, to better manage usage. Ag cred: Partners include Western Growers Association while CA's Metropolitan Water District is a client.

(Credit: Terviva)

Terviva: An Oakland-based company that is cultivating the pongamia tree, which is native to Australia and India, on American soil. The trees produce an oilseed with 10x more yield than soybeans and have the potential to create a biofuel alternative. Ag cred: Company is valued at $32 million after raising about $15 million.

(Credit: Trace Genomics)

Trace Genomics: It’s 23andMe for soil health: using machine learning and genomics testing, Trace Genomics can ID microbes and other biological data in soil, helping farmers maximize yields. Ag Cred: It’s raised $4 million to develop their tech and has worked with big ag concerns like the Western Growers Association and Driscoll.

How Design Thinking Turned One Hospital into a Bright and Comforting Place

Long dreary corridors, impersonal waiting rooms, the smell of disinfectant — hospitals tend to be anonymous and depressing places. Even if you’re just there as a visitor, you’re bound to wonder, “How can my friend recover in such an awful place? Will I get out of here without catching an infection?”
But the transformation of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital suggests that it doesn’t have to be this way. Over the past 10 years, the hospital’s managers have transformed their institution from the usual, grim, human-repair shop into a bright and comforting place. By incorporating design thinking and design principles into their planning process, the hospital’s executives, supported by external designers, have turned the hospital into a showplace that has won a number of safety, quality, and design awards — including a nomination for the prestigious Dutch Design Award. Even more important to the not-for-profit organization: patient intake rose 47%.
They started with patient-first thinking. The first step in any design-thinking process is to understand the end-user’s experience. In this case, a team of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital’s CEO, CFO, managers, staff, and doctors wanted to understand how their patients felt when they entered the hospital and what could be done to improve their experience. The hospital board directors realized that most of their patients felt afraid of going blind. Thus their primary goal should be to reduce patients’ fears.
To do that, the team next looked inside and outside the health care for ideas about how to improve the hospital’s service. For example, they learned about scheduling from the just-in-time practices of the upscale Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn and KLM, the Netherlands’ flagship airline. They also gained important insights about operational excellence from two eye hospital organizations founded by Rotterdam Eye Hospital: the World Association of Eye Hospitals and the European Association of Eye Hospitals.
At this point, teams of caregivers at the hospital began designing experiments based on the most promising concepts the Rotterdam Eye Hospital innovation hunters had brought back with them. Such experiments were crucial to the program’s success: proponents of the methodology insist that because it’s impossible to know in advance what impact an idea will actually have, making small-scale experiments is a crucial part of refining the concepts and winning the support of senior managers.

These small experiments were somewhat informal. They were not run like a clinical trial with a formal reckoning at their conclusion. Instead, the transition to formal adoption tended to be more gradual. If an idea worked, sooner or later other groups would ask if they could try it too, and the best ideas spread organically.
One reason the hospital could be so flexible was that most of the ideas eventually adopted were fairly inexpensive. From the start, planners kept a tight rein on costs, in part because the hospital worked with no outside consultants or high-priced designers. When designers were needed, the planners usually found up-and-coming external designers who saw a commission from the hospital as a way to gain experience and exposure.
A good example of a small but powerful change to improve the institution’s information and communication structure involved the children’s hospital. The hospital sends beautiful T-shirts with a specific animal print to children in advance of their stay. The consulting ophthalmologists wear a button with the same animal during the appointment, which gives them a way to immediately connect with the children and to create a feeling of community.
An example of a more complex change to the hospital’s operations is the newly created culture and training program called “Eye Care Air.” Inspired by the safety and training programs of airlines, Eye Care Air trains all caregivers in fear reduction, teamwork, and safety. The program addresses such topics such as: How openly should I talk to patients, doctors, and other colleagues? How do I speak frankly to a patient without triggering panic?
Clever architectural and interior ideas also contributed to reducing patients’ fears. For instance, the children’s department got a face-lift to make it less frightening and more fun, with such imaginative new features as stepping stones at service counters that allow kids to communicate eye to eye with the hospital staff.
Not every idea worked. One concept, to pick patients up directly from their homes in a taxi, didn’t reduce their fears at all. When a pilot didn’t catch on, the hospital planners would analyze the experiment and try to understand why. In the case of the taxi service, patients’ fears weren’t reduced because the taxi ended up in the same traffic jams as patients would have encountered if they had used their own cars.

Other ideas, such as the EyePad, an iPad app that made it possible for an individual patient to track his or her progress through a procedure, took more time to sell to the staff than to the patients. In that case, planners had to persuade employees that the idea behind an electronic checklist was to reduce patient anxiety and improve service quality, not “blame and shame.”
Making the Rotterdam Eye Hospital a more pleasant environment has had a number of positive effects. Patients heal faster now and have a more positive experience overall. The hospital staff can now conduct 95% of all procedures without an overnight stay and the hospital itself scores 8.6 (out of 10) on its customer satisfaction surveys. Employees are also happier. One staff members says, “Because the Rotterdam Eye Hospital is so small, lines are short and I can deeply focus on my profession. There is room for new ideas.”
Design thinking has also earned the hospital a reputation as an innovator. Even people outside health care are talking about the hospital now, largely because of its creative approach. (The hospital’s art collection is even included in the city’s annual museum night.)
Over time, as many of these experiments succeeded, internal skepticism about the value of design declined. Employees can see that better design had a positive effect not only on the patients but also on themselves.

Umpqua Bank: Innovation and Change in an Old-Fashioned Industry

The thrill of breakthrough creativity doesn’t just belong to upstart companies with the most radical technologies. It can be summoned in all sorts of industries and all walks of life, if leaders can reimagine what’s possible in their fields. In fact, the opportunity to reach for the extraordinary may be most pronounced in fields that have been far too ordinary for far too long.
One inspiring and instructive case in point is what Ray Davis and his colleagues at Umpqua Bank have achieved over the last two decades, in a field that is about as traditional as it gets. Davis took over as CEO in 1994, when Umpqua was a tiny community bank with five branches in Roseburg, Oregon. It had $140 million in assets, was privately held (worth $20 million), and had a plain-vanilla strategy no different from thousands of other community banks. Today, Umpqua, headquartered in Portland, has 300 locations in five states, $25 billion in assets, and a stock-market value of more than $4 billion. As American Banker, the bible of the industry, noted, “Few banks in the country have undergone as thorough a transformation” as Umpqua under Ray Davis, which is why the magazine bestowed upon him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Most importantly, Umpqua has created a one-of-a-kind relationship with customers that distinguishes it from other community banks. Davis and his colleagues invented a retail experience that appeals to all five human senses: sight, sound, even taste. Umpqua locations host book clubs and yoga classes, serve Umpqua Blend coffee and specially made chocolates, invite merchants to open pop-up stores, become hubs for local businesses and civic groups. Today, Umpqua is a passion brand that stands for something colorful and hopeful in an industry that feels bland and broken.
Ray Davis will soon be stepping down as CEO of Umpqua Bank, so I asked him to reflect on his two-plus decades as a banking revolutionary. What could other CEOs learn from what he and his colleagues have built? What might leaders misunderstand about what it takes to do something this distinctive? What’s hard about sustaining innovation as a company gets bigger and its environment keeps changing? His reflections amount to a game plan for game-changers — lessons for achieving extraordinary things, even in ordinary fields.
There’s a difference between being creative and being reckless. Umpqua stands out in radical ways from the banking establishment. But that has not required big, audacious, risky financial moves. “The level of risk was small as far as I was concerned,” Davis told me. “First of all, if you don’t differentiate yourself you’re in a death spiral, so doing nothing is its own risk. But when it comes to financial performance, we have been consistent and steady, through the best of times and the toughest of times. Being distinctive does not mean you bet the company on any one decision.”
Big change sticks when it’s the result of lots of little changes.  There was no “aha moment” behind Umpqua’s dramatic transformation, no single bolt of insight that put the bank on a new course. “Banking had always been such a chore,” Davis told me. “In the mid-nineties, we asked, ‘Why can’t banking become something people enjoy?’ So we tried a few things. They felt good, so we tried a few other things, and it kept going.  I’m not sure there’s anything particularly brilliant about what we’ve done. But over time, there’s something brilliant about what this has become.”
The more you change, the more you have to keep changing. Over two decades, Umpqua has built the most distinctive physical retail experience in U.S. banking. Of course, customers now look to their phones, computers, and online apps to for much of their banking needs. So Davis, even after he steps down as CEO of Umpqua, will remain CEO of Pivotus, an Umpqua company based in Palo Alto that is translating the physical Umpqua experience into the virtual realm. “We are building a one-of-a-kind digital banking platform that does not exist anywhere today,” he told me. “We want to take this incredible customer experience and put it on a digital platform.”
There’s a difference between being admired and being copied. Ray Davis and his colleagues are genuine celebrities in community-banking circles, and in the financial-services field more generally. Umpqua is “so highly regarded by its peers,” American Banker wrote, “that bankers from all over the world regularly travel to Portland to study its approach.” Davis has spent time with executives from China, Russia, Australia, and across the United States. Yet as much as these visitors marvel at what Umpqua has built, few plan to build something similar. “I recently had a CEO visit and tell me, ‘This has been a terrific two days, I can’t believe what you’ve done.’ So I asked, ‘How will you apply this to your bank?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we won’t do any of this, it’s way too hard.’”  That’s a sobering reality check about the challenges of making change, and a powerful invitation for leaders prepared to rethink what’s possible in their fields. Remember, what your competitors won’t do will surprise you.
As you reflect about what you’ve achieved at your company and with your career, and as you think about what it will take in the years ahead to do something extraordinary in your field, no matter what field you work in, you may want to borrow a page from Ray Davis’s revolutionary playbook. And remember…There’s nothing standing in the way of breakthrough innovation other than your capacity to imagine it.

Smart mirror continuously redirects sunlight into dark corners

The benefits of sunlight is widely known, and we have seen a number of devices — such as a fake window and smart LED light — help those who spend a lot of time indoors get their daily dose of vitamin D. Now, Lucy is a smart adaptive mirror that uses robotics to follow the sun throughout the day, in order to redirect sunlight to any chosen area.
Lucy is a portable, white globe, which uses an algorithm based on smartly positioned photosensors to continuously redirect sunlight into the home. Users first place Lucy in a spot with a view of the sun. Then, they point its ‘nose’ towards the ceiling of the room they want to illuminate. The mirror inside the device then redirects the sunlight to the ceiling, which cause the light to spread out and illuminate the room. As the sun moves throughout the day, the mirror repositions itself in order to provide a continuous stream of light into the desired spot.
Created by Italian startup Solenica, Lucy is entirely solar powered, it has no wires and never needs to be charged, so it can lead to energy savings for users who are able to switch off some of their electric lighting. It can be even be placed outside on a patio or balcony, since it is rain and snow proof. Lucy is currently available to preorder for USD 199. How else could smart technology be used to maximize people’s exposure to sunlight?

Disrupting traditional education where kids drop out

Shearwater International aims to keep international students from dropping out of college, by building an online platform that connects them with young alumni who have been trained as mentors. CEO Jackson Boyar says that while international students spend $27 billion on tuition, room, and board each year, roughly 40 percent of them haven’t graduated after six years. Shearwater wants to supply a support system that will change that statistic — and eventually ensure that those students give back to their alma mater as donors. Shearwater is already working with two dozen colleges and boarding schools, Boyar says — and 19 of them are paying customers.

Disrupting the farmer to market ecommerce - Provender

 Provender is out to connect restaurants with farmers, fishermen, and foragers by creating a kind of digital farmer’s market. With fewer intermediaries, prices are lower for restaurants buying fresh mushrooms or scallops from a local producer, and they can pay a single Provender invoice rather than dozens of separate ones. The company began serving Eastern Canada first, and has more recently expanded to New England, Florida, and Colorado. CEO Caithrin Rintoul says that the startup’s average order size is nearly $1,500, and that its operations in New England hit $100,000 in bookings a little more than two months after launching here. Rintoul says the startup aspires to create “the operating system of agriculture.” Barry Maiden, formerly the chef at Hungry Mother in Cambridge, has signed on to be the startup’s “ambassador” for the New England region.

Disrupting the existing industry with new model - Greeting card industry

LovePop wants to disrupt Hallmark. Founder Wombi Rose says that buying greeting cards “has become a chore,” and that his Harvard-spawned startup is “bringing the magic back to an industry that has lost its way.” The cards are dazzling — intricate pop-ups that are made in Vietnam at LovePop’s own production facility. They sell for $8 to $13, and a LovePop table in the lobby was doing brisk business at the conclusion of Tuesday’s proceedings. The company has seven retail kiosks in Massachusetts, Nevada, and California, and Rose says that the company’s current revenue run rate is $1 million. Not bad for a company born in early 2014.

New car seat reminds you not to leave your kid in the car

The Evenflo Advanced Embrace with SensorSafe infant car seat is aimed at preventing hot-car deaths. 

To ensure that parents remember their little one in the backseat, the Evenflo car seat has a sensor on the seat harness that triggers a series of tones if the child is still buckled in when the ignition is switched off. The seat works with with cars built on or after 2008.

The most effective solution to the problem, Mr. Null says, is increased awareness of how frequently these things really do happen. 

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six keys to achieving excellence in anything

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:
Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and
perseverance.
1.
Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most
great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult
work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the
2.
Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Busin... http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/08/six-keys-to-being-excellent-at.html
1 of 2 11/21/2010 1:08 PM
work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the
most energy and the fewest distractions.
Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then
take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the
highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers
practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
3.
Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the
more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however,
can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
4.
Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to
rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right
hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
5.
Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister
has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is
to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do
them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Loneliness of older foreign immigrants

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United by their loneliness, America’s elderly Indian immigrants......PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub, sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.

Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.

“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying teenagers swigging energy drinks.

In this country of twittering youth, Devendra and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 per cent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey.

Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say the ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. Seventy per cent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children.

The lives of transplanted elders are largely untracked, unknown outside their ethnic or religious communities. “They never win spelling bees,” said Judith Treas, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of California, Irvine. “They do not join criminal gangs. And nobody worries about Americans losing jobs to Korean grandmothers.”

Many who have followed their grown children here have fulfilling lives, but life in this country does not always go according to plan for seniors navigating the new, at times jagged, emotional terrain, which often means living under a child’s roof.

Devendra Singh grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their privacy,” said Devendra, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.

So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Devendra drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.

“In India there is a favourable bias toward the elders,” Devendra said, sitting amid Hindu religious posters and a photograph of his late wife. “Here people think about what is convenient and inconvenient for them.”

Sociologists call Devendra Singh and his cohort the “.5 generation,” distinct from the “1.5 generation” — younger transplants who became bicultural through school and work. Immigrant elders leave a familiar home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home in communities like Fremont that demographers call ‘ethnoburbs’.

A generation ago, Fremont was 76 per cent Caucasian. Today, nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 per cent are Latino and it is home to one of the country’s largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a setting for the best-selling book The Kite Runner).

Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque; a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple.

Reliant on their children, late-life immigrants are a vulnerable population. “They come anticipating a great deal of family togetherness,” Prof. Treas said. “But American society isn’t organized in a way that responds to their cultural expectations.”

Hardev Singh, 76, and his wife, Pal Keur, 67, part of Fremont’s large Sikh community, live above the office of the Fremont Frontier Motel, its lone nod to a Western motif a dilapidated wagon wheel sign.

They rented the fluorescent-lighted apartment after living for three years with their daughter, Kamaljit Purewal, her husband, his mother and two grandchildren. As the children grew, Hardev and Pal were relegated to the garage, transformed into a room. As Hardev said, “in winter it was too much cold.”( Their daughter, Purewal, said that she “tried to give them a better life,” but felt unappreciated because her parents favoured her older brother in India. “If you’re a happy family, a small house is a big house,” she said. )

Fraught family dynamics when elderly parents move in with children often leave older members without a voice in decision-making, whether about buying a house or using the shower.

Pravinchandra Patel, the 84-year-old founder of the ‘100 Years Living Club’, intervened when he heard that the son in one family was taking his parents’ monthly Supplemental Security Income check, for $658, then doling out $20 for spending money.

“I ask the son, ‘How much money do you figure you owe your parents for your education?’ “ he said.

Fremont, 40 miles south of San Francisco, is now the Bay Area’s fourth-largest city, with voters from 152 countries. Physical distances can be compounded by psychic ones: 13 per cent of the city’s immigrant seniors live in households isolated by language. Theirs is a late-life journey without a map.

For the men in the ‘100 Years Living Club’, the road leads to the Hub, where they have been meeting for 14 years, since the Target store was a Montgomery Ward. Patel, who was an herbal doctor in India, started the group after he noticed his friends were in “house prisons,” as he put it, without even the confidence to use a bus. The men keep their spirits alive by sharing homemade chaat snacks. They are the lucky ones.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/united-by-their-loneliness-americas-elderly-indian-immigrants/510590/

Loneliness creeps up on Delhi's elders’

NEW DELHI: On the face of it they're busy and happening at 60: exercise regime, social work, satsang, paying bills, housework and the works. Yet, in a disturbing way, loneliness is increasingly creeping up on the old in Delhi, making them feel isolated. A study on the elderly conducted by NGO Agewell Foundation shows that about 80% of the surveyed Delhi residents in their 60s reported feeling isolated despite an active life. While only 11% of old who live in joint families experience loneliness, in nuclear families, more than 70% feel isolated.

Reduced interaction with family emerges as the greatest factor leading to feeling isolated. Differentiating between emotional and social isolation, the study — conducted in January this year among 10,000 citizens above age 60 in 20 states across all economic strata — found that 44% in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata felt both social and emotional isolation. Social isolation stems from a dwindling friends circle, immobility and a feeling of being ignored socially, while emotional isolation results from strained interpersonal relations within family.

Himanshu Rath, founder Agewell explains that at home, younger members are "always bone-tired and too busy" to spend time with the old. "It's not that there's no concern. Even where nuclear families do all that needs to be done for the old, life is too hectic and tough for them to give time," he says.

Additionally, adds Rath, their stagnant incomes and growing costs of living especially in the last two years have led to much self-denial, also resulting in feeling alone, says Rath. "Last two years' slowdown has hit the old hardest. Interest rates have slipped. Monthly yields are reduced. The pressure's tremendous," he says.
Rath gives an example of the stress an average middle-class 65-year-old faces. "With longer life-spans, and given that today, a 65-year-old's wife will be to 6 to 12 years his junior, the retired man believes he has to secure finances for the wife for at least 20 to 30 years." With skyrocketing costs especially for medical, conveyance and food, the feeling of helplessness is strong.

There may be better medical facilities today, but they're expensive. Neighbourhood GPs are a thing of the past, points out Rath, a simple blood test will cost Rs 200 at least. "They cut down on the simple things. A third biscuit can mean Rs 1.50 more. I'm talking upper middle-classes who've had a certain lifestyle," he says. Saving for a rainy day, the old are cutting down on socializing also to avoid expenditure. Understandably, loneliness among elderly in Delhi increases with age.

Further, in cities many oldies, says 81-year-old Carol H. Barbosa, have had to financially pitch in to help children who have suffered setbacks and job losses due to recession. "They encash FDs, send money. The financial pressure has grown. It takes a toll, it's like a physical and mental breakdown," says Barbosa, who lives by herself in a South Delhi apartment complex that houses several retired people.

The report, conducted via interviews in urban and rural randomly selected districts found that at nationally, 87% of those in their 70s reported loneliness. Interestingly, rural old reported lesser levels of loneliness at 78% than urban ones (90%). At 97%, the loneliest were individual elderly who lived by themselves.