If you’ve ever heard the lyrics to Brad Paisley’s “Letter to Me”, you know that the country crooner made a song of taking his adult wisdom and imparting it on his 17-year-old self, reminding him not to bother arguing with his dad, to enjoy the adventure of his date with Bridget, and to thank his teacher for spending time with him.

The same concept is done daily by parents telling their kids, “Back when I was your age…”

Now, in honor of Women’s History Month, the Science Club for Girls is embracing the same concept; they’ve asked bright women leaders in science, engineering and technology careers to write “a letter to my young self.” What’s the point? To inspire young would-be scientists, highlight women in STEM, challenge the “geek” stereotype of those in science and enlighten people about the number of science careers available.

What interests us is that several of the Mass High Tech 2009 Women to Watch honorees have written a letter to their young selves.

Anna Mracek Dietrich, chief operating officer of Terrafugia Inc., wrote to herself, “You always regret the things you don’t do more than the things you do” (within boundaries of legality and logic).

Intel lead technologist Mondira Pant advised her 15-year-old self to “enjoy your present, welcome your doubts but don’t be afraid.”

Ronnie Maffa, Director of Social Software Product Development at IBM Corp., told her young self on the edge of possibly taking on a new project: “Be prepared that you may not be chosen. More importantly, be prepared that you will be chosen. Either way, you would have strengthened your position and preparedness for the future.”

The letters are another attempt to get science in front of girls and women. You might wonder just how many of these groups we need. After all, we’ve got the Science Club for Girls, Society of Women Engineers, the Association for Women in Science — and that’s just with a quick Google search. But it comes down to peer pressure. Just as friends, family and neighbors can sway one to a life of drugs, enough women leading interesting lives and careers in science may sway others to embrace science and technology.

So that’s our strategy too. Mass High Tech is peer pressuring girls and encouraging women leaders in science with our annual Women to Watch event on Friday, March 19, and our special report, coming out March 17, dedicated to this year’s crop of inspirational women in tech. By now, we’ve talked to our 11 new women honorees, interviewing them on their early influences, challenges and accomplishments, and they’re shaping up to be another group of go-getters. To hear what the women have to say, join us for breakfast on March 19.

Some of the best places for scientists to work for no money are here in Massachusetts. The Scientist magazine has put out its yearly “Best Places to Work” list for post-docs, and three of the top ten are located in Massachusetts. For the uninitiated, post-docs are the low men and women on the scientific totem pole. They toil for long hours in the bowels of Harvard and MIT buildings with no one to talk to but transgenic mice. They get paid something like $40,000, even though they all have Ph.D.s already. They do it because it helps enhance their resumes or, in this economy, because it’s a good alternative to the frosty job search process.

Post-docs are the lifeblood of early stage research, and although most of that research ultimately fails, there would be far fewer drugs on the market today if the post-doc system did not exist. Treating them well would seem to be a societal good.

The most fulfilled post-docs in Massachusetts work at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, according to The Scientist. The survey ranked the institute the third best place to work, out of the top 40 listed in the survey. Workers there said they benefited from exemplary facilities, infrastructure and funding to support their research. However, they gave the Whitehead low marks for communication and being conducive to family and personal life.

The fourth favorite research institution in the national survey wasn’t at Harvard — it was at Swiss drug maker Novartis’ Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge. There, workers extolled Novartis’ equitable workplace and the benefits. But there too, post-docs complained their personal lives had to suffer.

Coming in at number nine on the list was Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here, the workers surveyed said their jobs allowed for family and personal life and offered great opportunities for career development. Woods-Hole post docs said the drawbacks were the facilities and infrastructure, as well as the benefits.

The bill in question is LD 1706, somewhat redundantly called “An Act to Create the Children’s Wireless Protection Act.” The Maine state legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee is holding the hearings today, on a bill that has already created national news for the Pine Tree State.

HP120701 An Act To Create the Children’s Wireless Protection Act

Sponsoring the bill is Rep. Andrea Boland, D-Sanford. The bill calls for these exact words on every cell phone and all related packaging: “Warning, this device emits electromagnetic radiation, exposure to which may cause brain cancer. Users, especially children and pregnant women, should keep this device away from the head and body.”

Even more astounding is that the bill would require the label to have art, after a fashion. Boland’s bill wants to put on every cell phone a “color graphic of ‘Brain of 5-year-old’” from a 1996 study published by the IEEE of the effect of cell phone microwave emissions on the neck and head.

The onus of the bill would land squarely on the shoulders of the phone manufacturers, as the bill contains this proviso: “The requirements of this subsection may not result in a cost to the retailer or distributor of cellular telephones.” And the summary states that “This bill provides that a manufacturer may not sell at retail in this State…” any cell phone not carrying the warning.

The technology industry trade group TechAmerica today released a statement about the bill, saying that it “substitutes political judgment for the collective scientific judgment of experts around the world.” The National Cancer Institute, on the other hand, is hedging its bets. That organization has said that while “research has not consistently demonstrated a link between cellular telephone use and cancer, scientists still caution that further surveillance is needed before conclusions can be drawn” on its website.

What do you think? Are we at risk of brain cancer from our cell phones and do we need to be warned about it? Or is Maine making a call to Big Brother government?

Is it a return of a pre-burst tech bubble stalwart or the final true sign of a new tech apocalypse? The possible harbinger of doom in this case is the newly launched Tech Hub Foosball League.

According to their own PR, the league is a “multi-team collaboration, bringing together Boston’s best techies, strategists and innovators for the opportunity to prove their foosball mastery…” The league will begin to hold weekly tournaments this month, which founders say will feature prizes such as consulting workshops with “the biggest names in innovation.”

Responsible for this blast from the tech past is Chase Garbarino of Boston startup Pinyadda and BostInnovation, and Bonnie Shaw of Somerville’s EchoDitto. Each team will host the foosball games in their offices and will provide refreshments for the real value in this proposition — the pre- and post-game networking.

According to the league’s Facebook page, Game 1 in the tournament is already planned for March 11 at Pinyadda in Boston. While most of the rest of the games in the six-game season have yet to be sited, the finale will be held at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge on April 22, according to the Facebook page.

The league can be found here Right now, there are nine members on that Facebook page, and only time will tell if the league’s founders have picked the right game to draw techies and innovators together. Do you hear that? Is that a Rock Band league tuning up?

Four of the six candidates for Governor – former Harvard Pilgrim Health Care CEO Charlie Baker, state treasurer Tim Cahill, businessman Christy Mihos and physician Jill Stein – all made pitches for the support of the technology community in the fall elections. Gov. Deval Patrick was invited and declined to participate. Grace Ross, who is challenging Patrick for the Democratic nomination, did not respond to an invitation to participate.

Here is a brief summary of the comments of the corner office hopefuls as well as links to campaign websites:

• Charlie Baker, Republican: Baker, who served as secretary of Health & Human Services and Administration & Finance in the Weld-Cellucci administrations, described his campaign platform as mirroring the council’s public policy agenda, which is strongly focused on education and economic competitiveness. This should not come as a surprise since Baker first served as the council’s communications director in the early 1980s and later was an active member while leading Harvard Pilgrim.

Baker called for the state to adopt a stable and predictable tax and cost structure. He noted that in the past four years, the state had changed its corporate tax structure seven times, leading to uncertainty and mistrust from the employer community. He called for a return to five percent for the state’s sales tax, which was increased to 6.25 percent last year. Baker, a former member of the state’s Board of Education, applauded the council’s work on education reform but said that the really hard work of implementing the reforms lies ahead. The state’s ability to deliver innovations to the district level will ultimately determine how successful education reform in Massachusetts will be. Baker praised the Commonwealth’s ability to reinvent its economy over the years, and, as governor, would support the next reinvention by bringing cost transparency to health care, innovations to the state budget and operations and creating a more competitive business climate for employers and consumers.

• Christy Mihos, Republican: The loquacious Mihos, the former owner of the Christy’s Markets convenience store chain, declared that because the state had ignored the needs of Main Street, “the jobs are not coming” to Massachusetts. He called the state’s health care plan a “budget buster” and urged a transition from the universal program toward Health Savings Accounts and allowing small businesses to buy bulk health insurance. He also pledged to cut state payroll dramatically and bring the state’s sales tax to three percent, which would greatly benefit small businesses on the Rhode Island border. While he opposes casinos, he thinks Massachusetts would benefit from legalizing sports betting.

Mihos, who ran for governor as an Independent in 2006, described himself as an outsider who is running against “big business, big labor, big government and big media.” Mihos also touted his efforts fighting the Big Dig while serving as a member of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

• Tim Cahill, independent: Cahill, who is serving his second term as state treasurer and receiver general, said that Massachusetts has emerged from the “lost jobs decade” and that his first priority is to create a “level playing field” for Massachusetts to compete with other states for jobs and economic opportunity. He also said that Massachusetts had become famous for “borrowing money and buying lottery tickets,” which are not positive distinctions. Cahill hopes that Massachusetts would become famous for having a competitive business climate, by restraining borrowing, trimming the state budget and reducing taxes. The former Norfolk County treasurer favors rolling back the sales tax to five percent.

Drawing a comparison to the success the Red Sox have enjoyed under a new management philosophy, Cahill claimed he could help Massachusetts compete like never before by changing the Beacon Hill tax and spend mindset. Extending the Red Sox metaphor on the eve of spring training, Cahill said that the state should concentrate on the “pitching and defense” basics and “leave the offense” to the job-creating business community.

• Jill Stein, Green-Rainbow: Stein, a physician and environmental health advocate, called for a more cost-effective way to allocate health care dollars because of the impact on the state economy. She said that the state needs to focus on prevention — particularly for chronic diseases – which would free up some of the $79 billion currently spent on health care in Massachusetts for other priorities. She praised the state health care system for increasing access, but thinks costs still need to be addressed.

Stein also sees a “bonanza of jobs” in the state’s energy technology sector, particularly through conservation and renewable solutions. She also believes consumers could cut energy costs with the development of more municipal power companies. As governor, Stein would also work to restore public higher education funding and return the sales tax to five percent.

Yet, ski reports have been just ducky compared with reports from people trying to get the money to launch new companies in the past 18 months. So, somehow it must make sense that you would bring the world of finance to the ski slopes.

FreshTracks Capital plans to pair investors and entrepreneurs in a ski-lift pitch, with the entrepreneurs getting the few minutes in the chair ride to the summit to get through their talking points. The event is slated for March 3 at Bolton Valley in Vermont. (At least they are reporting “packed powder.”) Yes, there have been similar approaches in the past, events along the lines of speed dating.

Think of the possibilities, though. Do you really want to be the risk-averse entrepreneur chugging up the bunny slope on the magic carpet ride? Even worse would be the entrepreneur who punctuates his pitch with a run down a double black diamond. Maybe he could use a lesson in risk management. Or, if the investor doesn’t seem receptive to a pitch, the entrepreneur can bid them adieu with the old stage line, “Break a leg.”

By Rodney H. Brown

What do you do if as a university you are responsible for more annual revenue generation than most of the countries in the world? Make sure you can keep producing the innovators that are behind that innovation economy, MIT president Susan Hockfield told members of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce at a breakfast forum Wednesday morning.

The economic data Hockfield cited comes from a Sloan School of Management study that says that MIT alumni have been responsible for starting 25,800 existing companies that employ more than 30 million people and pull in more than $2 trillion combined in annual revenue. That only counts companies still running as individual entities and only alumni still alive, and it still adds up to the equivalent of the 12th largest economy on the planet.

With that kind of a legacy, it is no surprise that one of Hockfield’s missions is to continue putting innovators into the pipeline, and it is working with the city of Boston to expand an existing program to help mentor students in science and engineering to all public schools in the city. That program began at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science in Roxbury, formerly known as Boston Technical High School, and has led to three O’Bryant students currently in the MIT undergraduate program, Hockfield said.

Hockfield noted that such programs have wide support within the business sector as well, because the technology-based businesses that are the drivers of Massachusetts’ economic engine need that talent pipeline as much as MIT does.

“Frankly, the success of MIT is not about MIT alone, it is about the region,” Hockfield said.

While the difficult economy has been weighing on everyone’s mind, Hockfield challenged those in the room to embrace the points of value that it provides.

“This region is poised to take advantage of this opportunity that is disguised as a crisis,” Hockfield said.

Can MIT do more to prime the talent pump? How can business and industry help? Let us know what you think.

While Microsoft Corp. is apparently giving away peeks at its new Windows Phone 7 operating system and phones based on that platform by not weighing down the banners covering up its giant promo material (see the Engadget breaking story from earlier today with cool upskirt pics), local companies are making announcements as well at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

Let’s start with Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington. Nuance (Nasdaq: NUAN) announced an enhanced version of its handwriting technology for touch screens called Nuance T9 Write. The technology can also be used for pen-based devices and features multi-touch gesture and on-top writing capabilities — a feature that lets you write one word or letter right on top of the previous one, reducing the screen real estate needed. Nuance T9 Write also mixes handwriting input with Nuance XT9 predictive text technology to “enhance the recognition of naturally shaped letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation in more than 40 languages — predicting words as you write them.”

Coming out of Marlborough is Bitstream Inc. and the latest version of its mobile web browser, Bolt. The 1.7 release of Bolt adds new features such as direct Twitter integration, Spanish and Russian language support, an enhanced download manager, increased streaming video features and the ability to run widgets, according to Bitstream (Nasdaq: BITS) officials. The widgets will be available through a Bolt Widget Gallery and are written to comply with W3C widgets standards.

On the hardware side of things, Skyworks Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS) of Woburn is announcing a handful of new chips to be used in mobile devices. Among those are several highly integrated multimode power amplifier modules for 3G smart phones and data cards using high speed packet access (HSPA).

Stay tuned for more information throughout the day and let us know what new things you want to see announced in Barcelona.

Update, 11:44 a.m.: Red Bend Software Inc. is ironically announcing its vRapid Mobile Software Management Client, which allows carriers to centrally manage software and apps on smartphones that use open operating systems, with the first OS supported being Google Inc.’s Android. The irony comes from the fact that Waltham’s Red Bend sued Google in October of 2009 over a feature of Google’s Chrome browser. Allegedly, a function of Chrome that allows it to receive compressed software updates infringes one of the Waltham company’s patents on a method allowing wireless carriers to efficiently push out updates to mobile phone firmware — the basis of the vRapid suite of products. The new vRapid client is designed to work with any mobile OS under the Software Component Management Object (SCOMO) model. For now it only works with Android, but will soon support others under the SCOMO model, including Brew Mobile Platform, LiMo and Symbian.

Gamers: “Pick-up groups suxxors!1! Only raid with friends! And no, my looking-for-group flag isn’t on, I r the soloer!1!”

VCs: “Oh noes!1! Server is too crowded, the PVP is too hard! We are getting ganked!1!”

In English, that translates to gamers saying that you should get to know your VC partners real well before doing business with them, but as a rule, you probably don’t need that VC money anyway. And the VCs said that there is already too much money chasing after game companies, making the deals tougher to do and inflating the values.

The New England Games SIG of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge and the New England Venture Capital Association teamed up to hold the event “A Meeting of the Minds: Game Companies and the VCs that Fund Them.” The venue was the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

On the gamer side — literally, as the panel was split with gamers on one side of the podium and VCs on the other — was Jim Crowley, CEO of Turbine Inc.; Nabeel Hyatt, founder and CEO of Conduit Labs; and Rob Seaver, founder and CEO of Vivox Inc. Representing the VCs were Austin Westerling of Charles River Ventures, Alex Finkelstein of Spark Capital and Dayna Grayson of North Bridge Venture Partners.

Wade Roush of the tech blog Xconomy moderated the panel and got things rolling by delineating — at length — some of the recent activities in the game space that proved to the gamers and VC investors of gaming companies assembled that the sector was hot.

While the two points spelled out in gamer speak above were strong themes of the evening, the ultimate take away was that the future of gaming is in mobile and web-based social games, such as Bejeweled or Farmville. Because of that, however, the VCs made it clear that they aren’t interested in game development companies, with the notable exception of storied firms like Turbine Inc. For VCs, the light goes on when they talk about game platform companies like Scvngr Inc., or game services companies like in-game chat provider Vivox.

Finkelstein said it best when he said Spark wasn’t interested in traditional console or PC game developers because “that is a (business) model based on hits.” If, after many tens of millions of dollars in development, your company’s game isn’t the next World of Warcraft or Bioshock, that’s not a win.

The unanswered question of the night then was: With no VC interest in game developers, and with the future of games being in markets where the development costs are so low there is no need for VC money, what did they really have to talk about?

Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a “personal data mining” system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person’s decisions and improving quality of life.

The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I’m not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations “with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit” based on “a user’s determined interests and correlations of other users’ interest.”

Those aren’t the only potential applications of the Microsoft patent, but at its core, isn’t that what Amazon.com has done, and patented, dating back at least a decade?

At any rate, maybe there’s more nuance here than I’m perceiving. The newly issued Microsoft patent essentially takes data mining concepts used by businesses and adapts them for personal use.

“Personal data mining mechanisms and methods are employed to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered,” according to the patent abstract. “Users supply personal data that can be analyzed in conjunction with data associated with a plurality of other users to provide useful information that can improve business operations and/or quality of life. Personal data can be mined alone or in conjunction with third party data to identify correlations amongst the data and associated users. Applications or services can interact with such data and present it to users in a myriad of manners, for instance as notifications of opportunities.”

Of course, it’s not all about improving lives: Further down, the patent explains that “such data can be afforded to businesses involved in market analysis, or the like, in a manner that balances privacy issues of users with demand for high quality information from businesses.”

The patent may be more notable for the names of the inventors, which make clear that these concepts were the subject of some pretty high-level discussions at the company a few years ago. In addition to chairman Gates and chief software architect Ozzie, they include Microsoft Live Labs founder Gary Flake; Microsoft advertising R&D chief Alex Gounares; Lili Cheng, now general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs; Microsoft veteran Amit Mital; and Live Platform Services exec David Treadwell.

Todd Bishop, co-founder and managing editor of TechFlash.com, a sister blog to Mass High Tech. Bishop has covered Microsoft and the Seattle tech industry for more than five years.