Happy Monday everybody and welcome new readers, including Mike, Laurie, Matthew, Jeffrey, Kevin, Jules, Elaine and Stefanie.
Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and the first to send one in 1971, died from a heart attack on Saturday. He was 74. Tomlinson also pioneered use of the @ symbol to separate a user from its host. As he liked to say, “It’s the only preposition on the keyboard.”
It’s over: Stony Brook University political science professor Helmut Norpoth has developed a statistical model that can predict the winner of this year’s presidential election with what he says is 96.1 percent accuracy.
Updated following Super Tuesday results, Norpoth’s model suggests Donald Trump will win the White House in November, with 99 percent certainty if it’s against Bernie Sanders and 87 percent certainty if opposing Hillary Clinton.
Norpoth’s model would have correctly predicted all but one White House race going back to 1912. The outlier? Kennedy’s 1960 squeaker, in which he won the popular vote by 112,000, or 0.17 percent of the total cast.
Norpoth explains it all here.
Power outage: The Long Island Press rolled out the 13th running of its local power list last week, topped for the fourth consecutive year by Northwell Health honcho Michael Dowling. Other Top 10 innovation notables: hedge funder Jim Simons, Cablevision chief Jim Dolan, Canon EVP Seymour Liebman, SBU prez Sam Stanley and Hofstra boss Stuart Rabinowitz.
Cold Spring Harbor Lab director Bruce Stillman was at 13 and BNL’s Doon Gibbs owned the 23 spot.
Also shoulda been higher: Gary Melius, at 42nd. (Heck, Kominicki was No. 41 one year.)
On the case: SBU computer science prof Long Lu has developed a tool that can block ads, data scrapes and other intrusions from off-the-shelf apps. Called CASE, for Comprehensive Application Security Enforcement, the software gets a public bow at a June conference in Singapore.
You should go: Nomorobo founder Aaron Foss and IV Hero inventor Bobby Lenahan co-star at the March 15 meeting of the Suffolk inventors club, 7 p.m., H. Lee Dennison Building in Hauppauge, use east door, bring a photo ID. Reach out to lisaann.broughton@suffolkcountyny.gov for more info.
Thank you, Chuck Schumer: Long Island will receive more than $4 million in federal funds to help combat terrorism and other emergencies.
Helping pilot studies fly: Northwell Health has joined the board of an NYC-based initiative to help rush health-focused digital devices into clinical testing and then off to market.
Ion the future: Brookhaven National Lab has started testing parts of a breakthrough particle accelerator that will be able to deliver tightly controlled ion bursts to kill cancerous tumors with far less damage to adjacent healthy tissue than traditional radiation therapy. BNL design, Virginia-based medical device maker Best Medical International is funding.
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Spooky: Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden will speak at this year’s Disrupt NY conference, first ever in Brooklyn, May 9-11, to opine on what TechCrunch called “whether we should place our trust in unbreakable cryptography or the warm bosom of law enforcement.” The conference will also feature TC’s $50,000 Startup Battlefield pitch event.
Really spooky: Hayden sides with Apple in its dustup with the FBI over unlocking a terrorist’s iPhone.
Not really related: President Obama will attend this year’s South By Southwest confab in Austin, where wife Michelle is keynoting. Obama, the first sitting president to drop in on SXSW, said he would be asking “everyone for ideas and technologies to update our government and our democracy.” March 11-15.
Wee can do this: Cells collected from the urine of preterm infants may lead to breakthroughs in regenerative kidney repair for patients with kidney disease and injury, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Progress, of sorts: Women-owned small businesses set a record last year for the amount of money won through federal contracts. The aggregate $17.8 billion was a shade more than 5 percent of the government’s total contracting effort, a goal Congress set more than (cough) two decades ago (cough).
Stuff we’re going to: Tech Together Happy Hour, April 5, 5:30 p.m. onward, Jewel in Melville, brought to you by Innovate, LISTnet, Ellevate Women and Women in Technology. Free hors d’oeuvres. Let us know you’re coming.
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Compiled by John Kominicki. Thanks for reading.
