Category Archives: Transhuman News

RICHARDSON, Texas (PRWEB) October 10, 2014

WHAT: Prodea Systems CEO and Co-Founder Anousheh Ansari will participate in a roundtable panel at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East, which focuses on innovation and disruption at the intersection of media, entertainment and technology. Ansari will partake in the Planning for 2050: Mars, Lunar Colonies & 20,000 Leagues under the Sea session, which will explore the future of space travel, private investment in space enterprises, and the colonization of the ocean, the moon and Mars.

WHO: The panel will be moderated by Tom Keene, editor-at-large of Bloomberg News and co-host of "Bloomberg Surveillance" and Bloomberg TV & Radio. Ansari will be joined by the following panelists:

Anousheh Ansari launched Prodea Systems alongside her husband, Hamid Ansari and brother-in-law Amir Ansari in 2006. That same year, Anousheh blasted off into space for an eight-day expedition aboard the International Space Station and captured headlines around the world as the first female private space explorer. She also earned a place in history as the first astronaut of Iranian descent, the first Muslim woman, and the fourth private explorer to visit space. As a successful serial entrepreneur and active proponent of world-changing technologies and social entrepreneurship, she along with her family provided the title sponsorship for the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million cash award for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Prior to Prodea, the Ansari family founded Telecom Technologies (TTI) and developed one of the telecommunications industrys first softswitch platforms that helped enable the global adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP). TTI was acquired by Sonus Networks in 2000 for approximately $1.2 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in the telecommunications market at that time. The acquisition helped fund Prodea and the Ansari-X Prize.

WHEN: Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East will take place on October 16, 2014. The Planning for 2050: Mars, Lunar Colonies & 20,000 Leagues under the Sea session will take place at 4:00 4:45 p.m.

WHERE: Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East will be held at Location05 (509 West 34th St.) in New York.

Media or analysts interested in one-on-one meetings with Anousheh Ansari, CEO and co-founder of Prodea Systems at Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit: East should contact Marta Weissenborn at MartaWeissenborn(at)mcgrathpower(dot)com.

About Prodea Systems Prodea is the first company that delivered on the promise of the connected home while finally making a seamless connected life possible for everyone. The Prodea Residential Operating System (ROS) is a unified platform of the Internet of Things that enables diverse Service Providers worldwide to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver autonomous, agnostic and easy to use connectivity and services between people, data and devices. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, Prodea maintains additional offices in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, London, Johannesburg, and Dubai, UAE. For more information about Prodea Systems, please visit: http://www.prodea.com/.

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Anousheh Ansari to Speak at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing: East Summit

David M. Perry says the truth about Christopher Columbus is often misunderstood.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at the blog How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- In October 2013, my daughter came home from school excited about Christopher Columbus. He had come to visit her class! During his visit, he told the children that he had figured out the world was round and then bravely led his crew to discover America. Then they all made telescopes.

As a father and history professor, I was caught off-guard. Columbus actually didn't figure out the world was round. He didn't really discover America, either. And telescopes weren't around until about a century after Columbus died. But what do you tell a 5-year-old who has bought into a myth? And how do you do it without constructing an anti-myth, pegging the explorer as one of the most evil people to walk the Earth? What should we tell our children about Columbus?

I asked that question of William Phillips, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and co-author of "The Worlds of Christopher Columbus," and of LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. In both cases, professors started from the same principle: Tell the kids the truth.

David M. Perry

The story goes that Columbus had to persevere against the odds to get support for his venture, because everyone but him believed the Earth was flat. This just isn't true. The ancient Greeks proved that the Earth was round about 2,000 years ago, and one even used the shadow of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse to estimate its circumference. The problem for Columbus is that he was bad at math and worse at geography, and everyone with an education knew it.

"He failed to get funding for a long time," Phillips wrote, "because his calculations of the earth were on the small side, he thought that dry land covered more of the sphere than it does, and he believed Japan was some 1500 miles off the coast of China." In other words, most people knew roughly the distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia but believed it was filled with a vast ocean in which Columbus would surely die.

Columbus was stubborn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he refused to give up his plan, and because he was so stubborn, he kept fighting for funding until he finally broke through to the Queen of Spain. His stubbornness also, as both professors noted, kept him from ever admitting that he hadn't reached Asia. For Columbus, the idea of a whole new continent and unknown peoples just didn't fit his worldview.

Read more here:
What Columbus never did