Get your budding scientist ready - the first global online science competition is on! Google Science Fair is open to full-time students ages 13 to 18. My oldest isn't old enough yet, but I am so excited for all the innovative kids out there that get to do this.

The Pentagon is vowing to do battle against an enemy that one top U.S. Marines official says “makes us stupid.” So just who is this formidable enemy? None other than Microsoft PowerPoint.

A story in the April 26 edition of the New York Times points to a slide, widely circulated on the Internet, meant to portray the complexity of U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. Complex, it was. But it also showed what can happen when use of such a business tool spirals out of control.

Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software is something the business world has both loved and loathed ever since a Mac-based program named “Presenter” was re-christened as PowerPoint in 1987. Darkened board rooms have never been the same.

Many a conference and meeting attendee has sat through his or her share of badly executed PowerPoint presentations. Blocks of indecipherable grey text. Colors and fonts more appropriate for a bag of Easter candy. Goofy animation and silly sound effects. And the overall theme that ties it all together: Lack of a clear message.

If your company makes a lot of these presentations — especially to your customers and clients — it’s worth taking a long, hard look at what you’re putting out there. This isn’t to say you need to hire a design firm to handle your slides (though having someone on your staff with better-than-average knowledge certainly helps). But you need to ask yourself if you’re using PowerPoint to enhance presentations, or if you’re using it as a crutch.

If you’re ready to raise your PowerPoint game, there is a wealth of resources online. A simple Google search for “effective PowerPoint presentations” yields nearly 3 million hits. Online tutorial sites such as Lynda.com also offer informative sessions on PowerPoint-related topics.

But don’t expect those eye-glazing presentations to go away anytime soon. Though perhaps the military will examine a different approach to eliminating the blight.

“If we really want to accomplish something we shouldn’t be teaching our allies how to use PowerPoint,” Duke University military expert Peter Feaver told ZDNet. “We should give it to the Iraqis. We’d never have to worry about them again.”

Modern art usually pushes the bounds of what is in the next step of society. Warhol, O’Keefe, and Picasso all pushed the boundaries of art in their time. A good place to find our culture’s next generation of art is in New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

A conceptual artist, Tino Sehgal is currently “showing” his work entitled “This Progress”. I discovered the work this weekend while listening to Studio 360 on NPR. There are no canvases in Sehgals work. There are no paint strokes or molded clay. As visitors to the museum enter the exhibit, which is simply the entire space of the museum, they are met by a child. The child, no more than 12 years old, asks the visitor if they would like to participate in the art. When someone responds, “yes,” the child then asks, “What is progress?”

You’ll have to listen to the recording on Studio 360 to hear some of the interesting answered provided by guests. The exhibition continues as the child brings the visitor to a teenager and repeats, as best he or she can, the answer provided by visitor. The visitor continues this same journey with the teenager, then a young adult. Finally they are brought to a senior citizen – with the same question in the air “What is progress?”

Personally, I consider myself a fan of tangible art – if only because I haven’t thought of another kind of art. But the idea of providing this artistic experience to museum visitors is fascinating and, at least, conceptually, quite provocative. There is no wrong answer from what I can tell. The experience is in no way recorded, digitally or through written transcript. But I have no doubt that the thorough challenge of addressing, “What is progress?” through the interpretation of four strangers of varying generations will alter the how the conversation unfolds.

So what is progress to you? What does it mean? How does it effect you?

Today in history … seems to have been significant regarding the leaps and bounds technology has come.

December 8, 1931 - coaxial cable was patented (can’t get enough of the Discovery channel)

December 8, 1993 – US Secretary of Defense opens the global positioning system to civilian use (go Garmin!)

And on this date in 1765, Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin was born.

We could probably pick any date and think of a half of a dozen things that were invented or people born that day who have significantly changed technology and society as a result. Every aspect of timing is critical for any piece of technology to succeed.

With the pieces and parts in place the cotton gin came at a significant time in history. Or would Whitney not been compelled to work on such a design if the land to grow more cotton on did not exist or if slave trade had been abolished earlier? According the Eli Whitney Museum website, "…Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor."

Every advancement we make, society challenges us as a people to remember the potential ethical impact of technology.