My Space, not MySpace

“I just want Bruce Lee to hold me as long as he can.”

I’m dying.

Meet the most successful tech entrepreneur you’ve never heard of. 

In 1962, Dame Stephanie Shirley decided she was sick of hitting the glass ceiling for women in the tech industry. So she founded an all-female software startup called Freelance Programmers, and she hired women who had left the workplace after getting married or having children. To get business, she often signed her name “Steve” instead of “Stephanie” in letters. “In those days, I couldn’t open a bank account without my husband’s permission,” Dame Stephanie says. “My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay.”

Freelance Programmers was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making Dame Stephanie and 70 of her employees millionaires. 

Mr. Rogers made a point of mentioning out loud when he was feeding his fish after he got a letter from a family whose blind daughter asked him to do so, because she couldn’t tell if the fish were being fed.

This machine can make salty water drinkable — using only the sun’s rays. The MIT team developed a solar-powered water desalination system that uses the sun’s energy to turn brackish liquid into contaminant-free water safe for drinking and for crops.

The American engineers who traveled to rural India two years ago believed they were going to help poor villagers get rid of microbes in their drinking water. But soon after their arrival, they began hearing about a different problem: salt.

“People kept talking about the salt in the water,” recalled Natasha Wright, a doctoral candidate who was part of the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that made the journey in 2013. “The groundwater beneath the villages was brackish.”

Those complaints inspired new technology that could some day supply water to thirsty villages and drought-stricken farms in other parts of the world. The MIT team developed a solar-powered water desalination system that uses the sun’s energy to turn brackish liquid into contaminant-free water safe for drinking and for crops.

The finished prototype is small enough to fit in a tractor-trailer and includes photovoltaic cells to supply the electricity. The system, when fully operational, can supply the basic water needs of a village of between 2,000 and 5,000 people, MIT officials said. Although the prototype was more expensive, Wright said the team is hopes to lower the costs of a village-sized unit to about $11,000.

Such a lower-power system is useful mainly for treating brackish water and not seawater, which contains far more salt. But the prototype now being tested could handle water that contains salt concentrations of up to 4,000 parts per million, meaning it would work in about 90 percent of India’s wells, Wright said. Seawater’s salt concentration averages about 35,000 parts per million.

“There are places where this kind of system won’t work, but the advantage is, it uses half the energy of other systems,” said Wright. And, thanks to solar cells, “you can be fully off the grid.”

When an assisted living home in California shut down, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go. The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid — except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.

“There was about 16 residents left behind, and we had a conversation in the kitchen, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” Rowland says. “If we left, they wouldn’t have nobody,” Alvarez says.

Their roles quickly transformed for the elderly residents, who needed round-the-clock care. “I would only go home for one hour, take a shower, get dressed, then be there for 24-hour days,” says Alvarez. 

Rowland remembers passing out medications during those long days. He says he didn’t want to leave the residents — some coping with dementia — to fend for themselves. “I just couldn’t see myself going home — next thing you know, they’re in the kitchen trying to cook their own food and burn the place down,” Rowland says. “Even though they wasn’t our family, they were kind of like our family for this short period of time.“ [x]

Alvarez and Rowland spent several days caring for the elderly residents of Valley Springs Manor until the fire department and sheriff took over. The incident led to legislation in California known as the Residential Care for the Elderly Reform Act of 2014.

Photography’s artistic and magical nature lies in timing. Along with other elements such as lighting, shadow and angle, luck also plays an important role. Below, we have compiled 15 images that were taken at the perfect time. 

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