I usually don’t cover medical technology unless it somehow impacts living and working in a connected world.  But a new book entitled, Fragile Beginnings: Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU by Adam Wolfberg, MD really got my attention.  It features some of the remarkable work being done by my very good friend Jason Carmel, MD.  Fragile Beginnings tells the story of the authors’ daughter, who was born at 26 weeks, her struggles in the neonatal ICU, and her ultimate recovery from a large brain hemorrhage. The book features Dr. Carmel’s work as a scientist, and his studies of brain injury and repair and describes advances in newborn care and the brain plasticity underlying his daughter’s recovery.

Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year.  In fact, one of my granddaughters was born five weeks premature. As doctors and parents make decisions about life-saving care in the first hours of a premature infants life, they must grapple with profound ethical and scientific questions: Who should be saved? How aggressively should doctors try to salvage the life of a premature baby, who may be severely neurologically and physically impaired? What will that child’s quality of life be like after millions of dollars are spent saving her? As a specialist in high-risk obstetrics, Dr. Adam Wolfberg explores those profound questions at the beginning of life from the font lines of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit.

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Gary Carter

In mid-summer 1986, the New York Mets were about 20 games ahead. Jerry Della Femina called and asked me to write a song and produce a music video for the team. It was the kind of idea that Jerry was famous for – create and produce not only a song and music video, but create a half-hour “making of” video so the whole thing could be packaged for home video release. Of course, everything hinged on the Mets continued success.

When the Mets winning streak put them 27 games ahead, everyone in New York knew the 1986 Mets had a chance to take it all the way. I got the green light and, along with Greg Smith and Hal Hackady, wrote “Let’s Go Mets!”

Everything was awesome. The agency liked the song, the video storyboard was approved and even Mets management thought it was a “toe-tapper.” (Not my words.) There was only one thing left to do … play it for the team.

Time was extremely tight and, so we took the train to Pittsburgh to play the song and explain the team’s role in the music video. With boom box in hand, we got to the locker room and, we got schooled fast – baseball players who think they have a shot at getting to the World Series don’t want to think about anything but baseball before an away game.

Gary Carter was the first person to walk up to me and ask me what was going on. We spoke for about five minutes and then he and Keith Hernandez got everyone’s attention.

It’s hard to describe how instantly likable Gary Carter was. He had a unique ability to make everyone he spoke to feel like they were the most important thing in his world — a truly remarkable attribute. Some people thought it was a parlor trick, but years of infrequent, but substantial conversations with Gary proved to me it was not.

In 1987, Gary (along with Mookie Wilson and Roger McDowell) starred in a kids video that I also wrote and produced for Jerry called, “Think Big.” It wasn’t anywhere near as successful as “Let’s Go Mets!” but while we were on location shooting Gary and I really got to know each other. At that time, before Google and Wikipedia, I did not know that Gary was a Football player. I found out during a game of touch football with cast and crew during a lunch break. Gary had the arm of an NFL quarterback – he told us some great stories about his high school sports career and his love of both football and baseball.

His smile was infectious, his laugh was genuine and he was a true gentleman in every respect. And, not for nothing, he let me use his game glove to catch while we were shooting Roger McDowell pitching. I’m not sure I can adequately describe how it felt for a Long Island kid to catch Roger McDowell with Gary Carter’s game glove while Gary “took over” as director.

“Let’s Go Mets!” became the “official theme song” of the World Champion 1986 New York Mets and the video went Platinum. It kicked off a pretty good time in my career as a composer/producer and writer/director – but the true gift of 1986 was meeting and getting to know Gary Carter. Some will remember Gary as an All-Star, power-hitter who set the stage for the Mets to become champions; I’ll remember him as friend who left us too soon. Gary, RIP.

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NY Emmy

New York, NY — Thursday, February 16, 2012. The 55th Annual New York Emmy Awards nominations were held this morning at the studios of CUNY-TV. Shelly Palmer was nominated for two New York Emmy Awards for WNYW Fox 5′s Shelly Palmer Digital Living. Mr. Palmer has six previous Emmy nominations.

Shelly Palmer Digital Living received both Emmy nominations in the category Business/Consumer: Program/Special.

The 55th Annual New York Emmy Awards will be presented at a Black Tie Gala on Sunday, April 1, 2012 at The Marriott Marquis in Times Square. For additional information, visit www.nyemmys.org.

Click below to watch the nominated episodes.

Shelly Palmer Digital Living Episode #3 – June 10, 2011

Watch the newest episode of Shelly Palmer Digital Living . Join Shelly Palmer as he shows off awesome gift ideas for Dads and grads. Original airdate: June 10, 2011 Share/Bookmark

Shelly Palmer Digital Living Episode #2 – May 13, 2011

Watch the newest episode of Shelly Palmer Digital Living online. Join Shelly Palmer as he shows off some of the coolest new ways that technology affects the way we do life. Original airdate: May 13, 2011 Share/Bookmark

Those of you who follow my blog know that I am an optimist. The Shelly Palmer School of Connected Living has one primary thesis: “Technology is good.”

This is why I am very excited about this new book Abundance – The Future is Better Than You Think, written by my friend Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, X PRIZE Foundation Chairman/CEO, and Steven Kotler, Science Journalist.

Abundance is a powerful antidote to today’s dark pessimism. Peter and Steven present a convincing case that the world has been getting better at an accelerating rate over the last few decades. There are abundant stories and hard facts in the book to support the case that our future is better than we think.

Anyone who enjoys technology will love the extensive tour of the latest in exponential technologies, DIY innovation, Techno-philanthropy, and more. Have you considered that the free apps we take for granted today on our smart phones (GPS mapping, video conferencing, digital and video cameras, full sets of library and encyclopedia, etc.) would have cost more than $1 million dollars, affordable only to the richest, 20 years ago? And those poorest citizens of the world, who used to be called the bottom billion, are now the “Rising Billion” because of accessibility to technology? Masai warriors in Kenya now have cell phones that give them better access to mobile communication and information than USA presidents 15 years ago.

So there you have it. If you want some good news (great news actually), read Abundance. If you want to help change the world’s conversation from its current pessimism about scarcity to Abundance, share the book with your friends.

You can visit Peter and Steven’s website www.AbundanceTheBook.com, where you can pre-order Abundance by February 13 and get thank-you gifts (free access to Singularity University’s video library packed with graduate training on exponential technologies, AI, Robotics, Synthetic Biology, Neuroscience, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, etc., The Transcendent Man documentary, and more.) But, before you do, check out this excerpt from Chapter 1.

OUR GRANDEST CHALLENGE

The Lesson of Aluminum

Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in Italy in the year 23. He was a naval and army commander in the early Roman Empire, later an author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, best known for his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia describing, well, everything there was to describe. His opus includes a book on cosmology, another on farming, a third on magic. It took him four volumes to cover world geography, nine for flora and fauna, and another nine for medicine. In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius.

The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.”

This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.

Aluminum’s rarity comes down to chemistry. Technically, behind oxygen and silicon, it’s the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3 percent of the weight of the world. Today it’s cheap, ubiquitous, and used with a throwaway mind-set, but—as Napoléon’s banquet demonstrates—this wasn’t always the case. Because of aluminum’s high affinity for oxygen, it never appears in nature as a pure metal. Instead it’s found tightly bound as oxides and silicates in a claylike material called bauxite.

While bauxite is 52 percent aluminum, separating out the pure metal ore was a complex and difficult task. But between 1825 and 1845, Hans Christian Oersted and Frederick Wohler discovered that heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and then distilling away the mercury left a residue of pure aluminum. In 1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville created the first commercial process for extraction, driving down the price by 90 percent. Yet the metal was still costly and in short supply.

It was the creation of a new breakthrough technology known as electrolysis, discovered independently and almost simultaneously in 1886 by American chemist Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul Héroult, that changed everything. The Hall-Héroult process, as it is now known, uses electricity to liberate aluminum from bauxite. Suddenly everyone on the planet had access to ridiculous amounts of cheap, light, pliable metal.

Save the beheading, there’s nothing too unusual in this story. History’s littered with tales of once rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual. Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

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