Summer wind: Welcome to Friday, dear readers, and not just any Friday but the fifth and final Friday of May – with the first weekend of (unofficial) Summer 2024, including plenty of warm sunshine for Long Island, on tap.
It’s May 31 out there, and we’re wrapping up Spring – and this abbreviated but busy workweek – with another jam-packed innovation review. Sun’s out, fun’s out!
No sweat: All kidding aside, excessive heat is a killer — and mitigating the risk is critical.
Hot stuff: Considering the seasonal shift, it’s no surprise that we’re leading off with National Heat Awareness Day, an annual climate-change-palooza offering tips to beat the heat – which, all joking aside, can be deadly.
Cool stuff: Likely working inside comfy air-conditioned spaces, we find graphic artists and user-interface experts – stars of the show on Web Designer Day, a celebration of the creative minds that make the Internet such a visually stunning (and user-friendly) space.
And speaking of creativity and user-friendliness, welcome to National Macaroon Day, drawing a sweet line between French macarons (meringue-based confections) and American macaroons (soft coconut-coated cookies) every May 31.
Copy that (actually, don’t): Drawing a line between the intellectual property of original creators and would-be copycats was the first federal copyright act, signed into law by President George Washington on this date in 1790.
Power train: The original designs for Siemans’ electrodynamic locomotive.
Full steam ahead (actually, not): Marking one of the most important technical innovations of the 19th Century, German giant Siemens demonstrated the world’s first electric railway – traveling just 4 miles per hour around a 980-foot circular track, sans steam – at the Berlin Industrial Exposition on May 31, 1879.
Cereal entrepreneur: Redefining breakfast forever, Superintendent John Harvey Kellogg of Michigan’s Battle Creek Medical Surgical Sanitarium – where vegetarian diets, exercise and alcohol and tobacco abstinence were all heavily promoted – applied to patent his “flaked cereal” on this date in 1884.
Checkered past: Altering Big Apple traffic patterns forever, the first gasoline-powered New York City taxicabs rolled through Big Apple streets 117 years ago today. (The often-imitated checkered-yellow designs would come later, for those keeping score.)
Sinking feeling: And less than a year before its infamous disaster, the RMS Titanic put to sea for the first time on May 31, 1911.
Built in Ireland, registered in England and owned by an international consortium that included famed American financier J.P. Morgan, Titanic was the largest and most luxurious passenger liner of her day – and rumored to be unsinkable.
Wild ride: American mechanical engineer Ronald Valentine Toomer (1930-2011) – who contributed to the first U.S. satellites and co-designed the heat shields on NASA’s Apollo spacecraft, but is remembered best as the father of steel roller coasters – would be 94 years old today.
Joe cool: Namath was larger than life, and a rare Jets hero.
Also born on May 31 were American poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman Jr. (1819-1892), the Long Island native who helped define modern poetry; German microbiologist Julius Richard Petri (1852-1921), who could really dish it out; American astrophysicist Charles Greeley Abbott (1872-1973), a solar-radiation expert who later led the Smithsonian Institution; American singer and songwriter Peter Yarrow (born 1938), who rose to folksy fame with friends Paul and Mary; and English model and businesswoman Debbie Moore (born 1946), who founded Pineapple Dance Studios and an uber-successful clothing line.
Jet engine: And take a bow, Joseph William Namath! The retired American Football League and National Football League quarterback – a 1985 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee who won a collegiate national championship with the Alabama Crimson Tide before guaranteeing the New York Jets would win Super Bowl III, and delivering on that promise – turns 81 today.
Give Broadway Joe your best at editor@innovateli.com, where we guarantee your news tips will make headlines and we promise your calendar events will bowl them over.
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BUT FIRST, THIS
That championship season: From the Innovate Long Island Sports Desk comes the Adelphi Panthers men’s lacrosse team, which captured the 2024 NCAA Division II championship over Memorial Day weekend.
The squad’s 12-10 win over defending D2 champion Lenoir-Rhyne University of North Carolina marked the Panthers’ eighth national lacrosse championship and the first for veteran coach Gordon Purdie, an Australia native and 1988 Adelphi graduate who’s helmed the men’s lacrosse program for 17 seasons. It was also the program’s first national title since 2001 – before many of its current players were even born.
Adelphi’s women’s lacrosse team also made its 11th championship appearance this weekend, finishing as national runners-up after falling 13-8 to the University of Tampa in the title tilt – but still making history, as Adelphi became the only NCAA Division II school to send its men’s and women’s lacrosse teams to national title games in the same season. “On behalf of the Adelphi University Board of Trustees and everyone at Adelphi, I am honored to congratulate our student-athletes and coaches on an extraordinary year,” Adelphi University President Christine Riordan said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more proud of their competitive spirit as they represented our university on the national stage.”
Here and gone: McInnis’ tenure as Stony Brook University president was relatively short.
Maurie, we hardly knew ya: Stony Brook University is in the market for a new leader – once again – with relatively short-lived President Maurie McInnis this week announcing her appointment as Yale University’s 24th president.
McInnis, who assumed the Stony Brook presidency in March 2020 and was officially inaugurated as the university’s sixth president in November 2021, is a Yale graduate (Master of Arts 1990, Master of Philosophy 1993, PhD 1996) and member of the Ivy Leaguer’s Board of Trustees. She’s set to assume her new office July 1, with the State University of New York planning a national search for McInnis’ permanent SBU successor.
The outgoing president – who followed Acting SBU President Michael Bernstein, who’d filled in for a year after 10-year President Samuel Stanley, who’d succeeded 15-year President Shirley Strum Kenny – was heavily criticized for her recent handling of pro-Palestinian student protests, but has otherwise earned praise from colleagues throughout the State University system. “We congratulate Maurie on this prestigious appointment, merely the latest in her series of extraordinary professional accomplishments,” noted SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. “Maurie’s election (to the Yale presidency) is a testament to both her exceptional ability and the esteem with which Stony Brook is viewed by its peers.”
TOP OF THE SITE
(Out)source code: More mid-market companies are outsourcing cybersecurity, marketing and other key corporate functions, according to the latest Marcum-Hofstra CEO Survey.
Act now: That’s right … get THREE educational and entertaining Innovate Long Island Newsletters delivered directly to your inbox EVERY WEEK – including our handy, subscriber-only Monday Calendar Newsletter – for the low, low price of ZERO. Operators are standing by!
ICYMI
Melville-based Canon USA is a textbook example of patents done right, according to Executive Vice President Seymour Liebman, who cites numerous benefits – for the company, its partners and the entire world – from various intellectual property strategies.
BEST OF THE WEST (AND SOMETIMES NORTH/SOUTH)
Innovate LI’s inbox overrunneth with inspirational innovations from all North American corners. This week’s brightest out-of-towners:
From Florida: Miami-based smart-glasses spearhead Innovative Eyewear adds ChatGPT voice access to its new Eddie Bauer Smart Eyewear collection.
From Massachusetts: Boston-based immersive surgical training titan FundamentalVR breaks new ground with artificial intelligence-enabled teaching platform.
From New York: Upstate Hamburg-based e-commerce startup Fun Stuff Galore rolls out full line of remote-controlled vehicles and other topnotch toys.
ON THE MOVE
Salmah Nashurdeen
+ Salmah Nashurdeen has been hired as an architectural designer at Mark Design Studios in Hicksville. She was a project designer at ENV in Manhattan.
+ Caroline Frisoni has been named an associate in the Corporate and Mergers & Acquisitions Practice Group at Uniondale-based Forchelli Deegan Terrana. She was a law clerk at the firm.
+ The Plainview-based Suffolk County Sheriff’s Foundation has appointed two new members to its Board of Trustees:
- Michael Brown, founder and president of Huntington Station-based Empire Automotive Group
- Thomas Mascolo, principal at East Northport-based Mascolo Dental
+ David Pernick has been hired as an associate in the Commercial Real Estate Group at Uniondale-based Harris Beach. He held the same position at Garden City-based Jaspan Schlesinger Narendran.
+ Garden City-based Family & Children’s Association has appointed two new members to its Board of Trustees:
- Kara Cannon, chief executive officer at Enzo Biochem in Farmingdale
- John Dionisio, vice chairman of Global Infrastructure Solutions in Manhattan
+ The Hauppauge-based LGBT Network has appointed three new members to its Board of Directors:
- Nicole Brand, divisional human resources director/Long Island region for Georgia-based Floor & Décor
- Lori Panarello, owner and stylist at ID Salon in Greenport
- Adam Garriga, chief operating officer at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan
Like this newsletter? Innovate Long Island newsletter, website and podcast sponsorships are a prime opportunity to reach the inventors, investors, entrepreneurs and executives you need to know (just ask Stony Brook University). Marlene McDonnell can tell you more.
BELOW THE FOLD (Election Interference Edition)
Currency exchange: The ancient silver denarius depicts how Rome overcame voter suppression.
Trump card: Texas Republicans have been warned by mail – vote MAGA or be reported.
‘Lawfare’ lie: Even Fox News admits the hush-money trial is not President Biden’s doing.
Rock the vote: How Ancient Rome defeated voter intimidation.
Vote of confidence: Please continue supporting the amazing institutions that support Innovate Long Island, including the Stony Brook University Office of Economic Development, where commercialization experts (and friends in high places) turn cutting-edge science into front-line industry. Check them out.
