Innovators

Although the Grammys' rap field was packed with marginal artists and inferior work, the voters managed to spot the jewels: The winners in each of the three rap categories are among the most innovative and exciting talents in the field. Hard-core rapper Eminem won best rap album for "The Slim Shady LP" and best rap solo performance for "My Name Is," while the Roots won in the duo or group category for their collaboration with Erykah Badu, "You Got Me."

SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Inc. unveiled a daring overhaul of its mobile operating system to kick off its annual developers conference, where it hopes to show critics that it has lost none of its innovative swagger. In addition to unveiling iOS 7, the company made a blizzard of other product and feature announcements that included upgrades to MacBook laptops and a new streaming radio service. As expected, there were no new iPhones or iPads, which are often announced separately. But the presentation seemed in spirit to also be a rebuttal to critics who contended that Apple had lost its innovative edge in the last year.

As a woman business owner, I can only say that these clubs who refuse to accept women are dinosaurs and like the dinosaurs will, in time, disappear from the Earth. My letter does not concern those who are clinging to outmoded traditions but rather the forward-thinking spirited innovators who are passing them by. Rotary International is one of the latter group. I am a new member of the Pacific Palisades Rotary Club and cannot say enough good things about this wonderful group. CHELLIE CAMPBELL Pacific Palisades

HERZLIYA, Israel - High-tech entrepreneur Kobi Stok is chasing the new Israeli dream. The 33-year-old software engineer quit a steady job to launch a Web start-up that teaches guitar playing. In three years, Stok's Jamstar.co signed up 80,000 users, raised $650,000 from investors, and inked a partnership deal with Warner Music to teach songs by Led Zeppelin and others on the site. Next step? Like most Israeli start-up founders, Stok is hoping to sell his brainchild to a large international Internet-based company, preferably at a price in the eight digits.

Regarding the Feb. 16 article about cram schools for Japanese preschoolers: Sure, the Japanese culture can be viewed as being a trifle extreme, especially to our Western mind-set. On the one hand, they have a culture that takes education and manners very seriously--perhaps too much so. On the other hand, we have an American culture where teenagers can't speak even one sentence without using the words "you know" or "like" at least five times. I've seen our future politicians, lawyers and business leaders and frankly, I'm worried.

I was pleased to see your editorial (Nov. 6), "An Investment in Science," noting the National Academy of Sciences plans to build a West Coast headquarters in California. On the same day you published the editorial, I co-chaired a statewide conference on industrial competitiveness at which many leading business executives and educators endorsed a program to extend to our secondary schools the science and technology leadership that we enjoy in our universities. We need in our public schools an exemplary program to groom future innovators and Nobel prize winners.

Dear Sierra Club Colleagues, After 38 years with the Sierra Club, I am opening my dance card to new partners. In December, I shall stand down as Chairman to undertake a new initiative. My hope is to pull together a broad front of environmental groups, labor unions, clean-economy innovators, mainline manufacturers, civil rights organizations, and state and local officials to insist that candidates for public office in 2012 address the role of innovation, clean technology, and manufacturing in rebuilding the American economy and restoring the American middle class.

I've felt a bit quaint the last couple of days, toting a pen, a notepad and my old journalism notions around here at the Googleplex. I'd once thought that a journalist's (and journalism's) work ended when a story cleared the copy desk. But a two-day blizzard of power-point presentations in the heart of the Silicon Valley pounded home a notion that the media and their foot soldiers need to do much, much more to thrive in the midst of an information revolution. We're talking about media letting the audience increasingly into the middle of the conversation.

SAN FRANCISCO - Apple Inc. unveiled a daring overhaul of its mobile operating system to kick off its annual developers conference, where it hopes to show critics that it has lost none of its innovative swagger. In addition to unveiling iOS 7, the company made a blizzard of other product and feature announcements that included upgrades to MacBook laptops and a new streaming radio service. As expected, there were no new iPhones or iPads, which are often announced separately. But the presentation seemed in spirit to also be a rebuttal to critics who contended that Apple had lost its innovative edge in the last year.

Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect who created a visionary prototype for a new kind of ecologically sensitive city in the remote Arizona desert four decades ago, only to watch the suburban sprawl he detested begin to creep near it in recent years, has died. He was 93. Soleri died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., according to an official with the architect's foundation . PHOTOS: Paolo Soleri | 1919-2013 A onetime apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West compound on the edge of Scottsdale, Ariz., Soleri founded his own desert settlement, called Arcosanti, in 1970 at a site roughly 70 miles north of downtown Phoenix.

A rapid shift in climate that brought wetter and warmer conditions in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age helped propel innovation and cultural advances in early man, a study has found. Paleontologists have long known that anatomically modern man's technological progress moved in fits and starts in various regions of the planet. A European team suggests that one period of abrupt change, about 40,000-80,000 years ago in what now is South Africa, matches with a climate shift brought about by cyclical changes in the currents of the Atlantic Ocean.

During eight years in office, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa staked much of his legacy on transportation. He lobbied Washington for millions of dollars in federal funding. He oversaw the addition of 150 miles of bike lanes. And, five years ago, he won voter approval of Measure R, the countywide half-cent sales tax expected to raise more than $30 billion over 30 years for a dozen new transportation projects. The challenge for the next mayor, experts say, will be the nuts and bolts: repaving the city's broken streets and sidewalks, completing a surge of bus and rail projects and securing more transportation funding.

Atwood will appear at the Festival of Books in conversation with Michael Silverblatt at 11 a.m. on Saturday. More information: latimes.com/festivalofbooks If you want a sense of how Margaret Atwood operates, you could do a lot worse than to watch her keynote address at the 2011 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York. "This is not the kind of thing I usually do," the author begins, speaking in a quiet deadpan, before stepping from behind a podium and moving to the lip of the stage.

Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect who created a visionary prototype for a new kind of ecologically sensitive city in the remote Arizona desert four decades ago, only to watch the suburban sprawl he detested begin to creep near it in recent years, has died. He was 93. Soleri died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., according to an official with the architect's foundation . PHOTOS: Paolo Soleri | 1919-2013 A onetime apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West compound on the edge of Scottsdale, Ariz., Soleri founded his own desert settlement, called Arcosanti, in 1970 at a site roughly 70 miles north of downtown Phoenix.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown is stepping back onto the world stage. After two years largely spent cloistered in California tending to the fiscal crisis, he starts a weeklong visit to China on Tuesday in a bid to reclaim the state's reputation as a global economic powerhouse and innovator. The visit will lack the glitz of Brown's travels as governor decades ago, with rock star companions and international paparazzi replaced by dozens of state bureaucrats and business officials.

SACRAMENTO - California's first attempt to run a park more than a century ago was a disaster. Over a campfire in the backcountry, John Muir himself urged President Theodore Roosevelt to rescue thousands of acres in the Yosemite Valley from the state's neglect - and it remains a national park to this day. The state found redemption after that rocky start, and went on to preserve 1.5 million acres of coastline, forests, mountains and historic sites,...

The gig: Perhaps more than any other person, Marissa Mayer influences how the world experiences the Web. As Google Inc.'s champion of innovation and design, she has had her hand in nearly every product the Internet search giant has rolled out. Basically, nothing gets out the door without her approval, including such popular services as Gmail and Google Earth. Her latest job at the company: vice president of consumer products. One of her responsibilities is to run Google's geographic and local services effort, the red-hot market focused on delivering information and advertising to people based on where they are. Mayer also recently got a promotion to Google's operating committee, the elite group that sets the company's strategic direction.

Franklin D. Israel, a highly respected modern architect known for placing his individual stamp on the innovative Southern California design tradition made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler and Frank Gehry, died Monday. He was 50.

We think of Wilshire Boulevard as synonymous with Los Angeles - as our Main Street. But Wilshire has always stood apart from the city it slices through. It is denser and more urbane, its architecture more vertical. No, rather than act as a perfect symbol of Los Angeles, Wilshire has operated as a proving ground for new ideas about architecture, commerce, transportation and urbanism in Southern California. For nearly a century Wilshire has been L.A.'s boulevard of prototypes, a string of hypotheses 16 miles long.

DENVER - As the manhunt expanded Wednesday for the killer of Tom Clements, Colorado's top corrections official, shock and sadness spread across the nation for the loss of what many called a true innovator in how prisons should work. "What Tom brought was a completely different perspective," said a shaken Doug Wilson, Colorado's state public defender, who had frequently worked with Clements. "He wasn't a cop. He was a man who cared not only for those he worked with, but he treated inmates with respect and dignity.