Blogger auf der ganzen Welt vereinigen sich um ueber Armut zu schreiben und diskutieren.
Ich habe schon ein paar Artikel ueber Armut geschrieben und denke, dass wir die Generation sind die die notwendigen Mittel hat Armut zu besiegen! Eines dieser Mittel ist das Internet und ueberhaupt die heutige Vernetzung aller Menschen ueber die ganze Welt hinweg. Nachdem ich diesen Artikel geschrieben habe kann ihn jeder auf der ganzen Welt mit Internetempfang lesen. Eigentlich sollte ich den Artikel somit auf Englisch schreiben, aber ich bin ja nicht der einzige der heute schreibt:
Ein ganz wichtiger Schritt zum Sieg ueber die Armut ist natuerlich damit die weitere Vernetzung der Welt, dazu arbeite ich und interessiere ich mich fuer folgende Projekte: 1. Mobiltelefone gegen Armut (Iqbal-Quadir)
Ich hatte sogar persoenlich die Ehre mit Igbal zu sprechen und ihn sprechen zu hoeren ueber seine Projekte in der 3. Welt und das Legatum Center am Massachusetts Instiute of Technology (MIT) - www.iqbalquadir.com/ 2. Ich habe 15 OLPC-laptops letztes Jahr zu Weihnachten gekauft
Das GiveOneGetOne Programm war und ist eine tolle Idee und die Laptops sind ein unglaublicher Schritt in die richtige Richtung, alleine wenn man sich nur ansieht was die OLPCs fuer den Rest des Laptopmarktes getan haben. Im Moment arbeite ich mit VW Californien an einem Projekt das die Laptops in Autos zur Verwendung bringen soll: ideas.redwired.org/VWLaptopChallenge
3. Ideenwettbewerbe zur Bekaempfung der Armut aber allgemein fuer die Hilfe der Menschheit sind ein weiterer Schritt um die Menschheit aufzufordern etwas zu tun:
Damit kann ich nur mit den BlogActionDay Worten enden: "I am participating. Are you?" NEWS und Tipps und Videos und weiteres zum heutigen BlogActionDay 2008 ARMUT gibt es auf http://blogactionday.org/
Finally, I found the time to type up my 2nd INvenTERVIEW, where I interview great friends and people, who I have met on my path at MIT and my carreer. I try to show a more personal and different point of view than usually shown in the media.
Many more shall follow! Enjoy.
INvenTERVIEW – David Merrill
(Date: May, 2008)
David Merrill is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab who I collaborated with in this year’s i-teams class at MIT. His technology that needed a clear path to the market is called Siftables:
I asked David to start telling his story from his childhood and how he might have gotten into things like Siftables and such!
“As a kid I always building with building blocks (he was especially referring to Lincoln Logs, something to get for your child maybe in the near future, besides LEGO and all that or maybe some Siftables…)!”
“I liked building!”,
That he really did, inHigh School (1992-1996) he got into programming, at least as far as the computers would allow him to go, at this time. First, he was programming on his school Texas Instruments calculator (TI)! On the calculator he made simple math programs to help his classmates, and even built a simple driving game with multiple levels. He started making a more sophisticated battleship game, which was "quite a large piece of software for a calculator!", but he got too busy with college applications to release it.
In calculus class he built a program for his TI, where adding up squares underneath a curve computed an approximation of the integral of the curve. Showing an early interest in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Merrill was eager to find out how his fellow students would use his creations. The way to distribute programs at the time was through a cable to the other students’ calculators, an early peer-to-peer file sharing technique for mobile devices!
He was off to Stanford, and created his first website in his spare time at his job at the campus library.
“At that time, the question was: What are you supposed to have on your website? …Nobody knew what should have been there! Pictures of my friends, a bulletin board type system, Messages, which everyone could see, we used it to keep in touch.” – very much like today, I thought.
I asked David how Stanford supported his WWW education and he told that even back then they would have seminars in the dorm where the resident computer person would help you make a website.
“I thought I was going to study physics, but I ended up studying cognitive science, because it was more interdisciplinary.”
At this time David got really interested in computer science!, “I realized with a computer I could build even better greater things than with a calculator.” Still, the most exciting part for David was when other people would use his programs and benefit from his work. Now he had a word for this interest, however: computer-human interaction became his focus!
In undergraduate computer science he asked himself the question: How can the computer better represent information to us, and how can we interact with it in the most natural manner? As time went on, the question shifted to become: How does our body interact with a computer? And how can this interaction be improved? “What interfaces could I build if my toolset included the physical world, rather than just code?” At this point David’s focus moved from code to the additional use of embedded processors and sensors.
He pursued this interest from 2001 to 2002 at CCRMA, Stanford’s computer music center, in a class about physical music controllers. In the context of making new instruments, he learned by doing how to use basic electronics and sensors.
He was building physical objects that had computational behavior…objects that allowed a person to trigger and shape digital sounds. To put it in a nutshell he was designing systems that enabled a person to control sonic outputs through different physical inputs, and that is where he met his most difficult challenge and question:
“What is most intuitive? Now that we can connect any input gesture to any sound output, what should this mapping be?” He considered acoustic instruments and how they have become mature over hundreds of years, and wondered if a good instrument takes a long time to develop.
At this point in time, another event shaped David’s life dramatically :
“I wanted to pursue a Ph.D., but it was already November (Fall 2001) of the year that I was graduating. About half of the programs had deadlines in December and January, and I was not going to have enough time to make the December deadlines. I didn’t want to apply to only half of the interesting schools because of this deadline crunch, so, I said to myself: Why don’t I apply ONLY to my #1 choice (which at the time had a January deadline). And if I get in, I’ll go. Otherwise, I will just wait a year and apply everywhere else.”
But he got in, and by in, I mean, into the MIT Media Lab, to study physically embodied interactive systems. He worked with Ted Selker, Joe Paradiso, and Pattie Maes over his six years at the lab, and produced an impressive collection of new user interface devices, interactive installations and publications.
And it was the project Siftables that would become the focus of his Ph.D.: “Ever since my time at Stanford’s computer center, I have been a bit input device geek! I probably have 25 different game pads and joysticks that I have bought from eBay over the years…..!”
He was intrigued by how devices could be made for our hands: “Hands are most creative part of our body!”
Today we still interact with graphical content using a mouse and a keyboard. David thinks differently about how we might interact with digital content: “Today, my computer has 101 buttons and allows me one fingertip to touch the digital space. Imagine yourself sitting in front of a big pile of blocks and someone tells you that you can only use one fingertip to build structures with them… How can you do anything useful/creative?”
“We should be able to reach out with our hands, to grasp and move digital content around!”
Siftables can do just that. Having collaborated with David, I believe in it myself, but he needs move quickly, because Microsoft and Apple are trying to own this market!
But David is a multi-talented inventor and is already looking beyond Siftables, thinking about nano-bots in our body, as described by Ray Kurzweil, a well-known futurist and inventor. He is interested in neural implants and Kurzweil’s idea that we might be able to live forever, as described in a recent Wired magazine article. David knows that in the future he will be engineering solutions to such "what if we could do X…" questions, “My work is very applied”.
He has enjoyed recent press and feedback about his Sound of Touch project and other art installations, as well as blogosphere and news articles about Siftables.
Besides all of his technology work, Merrill has travelled the world: Ireland, England, France, Germany, Morocco, Canada, Peru, Hawaii, Spain, Portugal, and Iceland to date. All of this time abroad probably has something to do with the fact that his girlfriend is a “voracious traveler”!
Being originally from California, he enjoys the West coast very much. His friend Ben Olding, a statistics Ph.D. at Harvard who is also from California, articulates the appeal of the place in a way that resonates with David: California is full of dreamers. Everyone has a scheme about what they are going to do next, some high-tech, some not. Their plan might be the next social web service, or it might be mail-order homeopathic medicine. Whatever it is, they are open to new out-there possibilities and trying to make them happen.
"There is something fresh and naïve and wonderful about California, and although I love MIT and the Boston area I am looking forward to my future out West” says David Merill, PhD Candidate at the MIT Media Lab.
Daniel Pressl’s INvenTERVIEW Question List:
1.Complete the sentence: “I am…
excited to give people amazing new ways to interact with the digital world.
I am optimistic, a roll up the sleeves- and make things happen- kind of guy, who enjoys motivating people around me.”
2.Complete the sentence: “I like…
languages and understanding or decoding other cultures and places and processes. I like language barriers because they are challenging.”
3.Complete the sentence: “My heart was beating the last time,…
when I rode my bike to MIT. I need more exercise.”
4.Complete the sentence: “Once, I would like to drink coffee with…
Mohammed Yunis, who started the Grameen Bank.”
5.Complete the sentence: “Things that are never missing in my fridge are…
Yogurt and soy milk.”
6.Complete the sentence: “My favorite book is…
The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker.”
7.Complete the sentence: “The credo/moto of my life is…
We can built a solution to that.”
8.Complete the sentence: “My last words should be…
On Monday things cleared up when I spoke with Adam Holt from the OLPC Foundation, situated right across the street in Kendall Square. Yesterday I sent the check for the 15+15 Laptops to the foundation:
I was ensured that I will receive the laptops in 10 business days. Just in time, when I will be going to Austria.
Stephen Steiner at Los Alamos National Laboratory holding a silica aerogel in his hand
Birthday: 26th of March, 1982
Hometown: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
“Talk about some extreme chemistry! As if aerogel weren’t exciting enough, here we are in our fourth year of making the world’s lowest density solid in zero-gravity. So what’s the big deal? Why have we endured the gut-wrenching environment of NASA’s KC-135A over and over? Why do we go to such extremes to make this stuff in zero-gravity?
Because aerogel has the potential to revolutionize everything from your winter jacket to surfboards to computers, and aerogels made in zero-gravity are materials like nothing else.”
These are the first two paragraphs on the website http://zerogaerogel.com/ created by Stephen Steiner, who I had the pleasure to spend a dinner with and talk about his past, present and future as an inventor.
These three words—automated nanomaterials production—are constantly on Steve’s mind (from this point on I shall refer to Mr. Steiner as Steve, as we have been great friends for the past four years and have also been inventing and venturing together in our time at MIT). Already in high school, Steve had taken an interest in science and at the time was particularly interested in ways of generating hydrogen. His junior year he was looking at photoelectrolysis of sun light as a way to electrolyze water while simultaneously extracting energy in the form of electrical current. Going through the literature, he found that titanium dioxide semiconductors are great materials to do just that and so the 17 year-old teenager decided to make his own!
Set yourself a goal, try something, do it wrong, and keep trying until you get it right—that was certainly one lesson Steve had to learn right of the bat! Quickly he discovered that the material of choice had an extremely high melting point, which makes it complicated to render into usable forms. After many trials of blowtorches, explosive thermite reactions, even acids, he still had not found the right way to get what he wanted.
That meant, back to the drawing board, or in this case the Internet—albeit the early Internet (1999)! There he found another way of approaching his problem; he read about materials called aerogels made through a wet-chemistry technique called sol-gel processing, and so he thought, “Why not make titanium dioxide aerogels to make a semiconductor for photoelectrolysis?”
And at that point, a new question arose: “Can I make an aerogel?” Soon after, he started in on trying different techniques and, with the help of his former high school chemistry teacher, ordered the chemicals he needed to start to make silica aerogels—or so he thought. But the recipes he got from the Internet wouldn’t work and again Steve said to himself, I have to make my own!
The process was made up of two steps—first, making a gel in a beaker and second, extracting the liquid to turn it into the so-called aerogel. Making the necessary gels didn’t seem to work at first until by accident he found that a method which worked very well—instead of adding catalyst all at once, he broke the process into two steps. In fact, this way, he was able to control the gel time quite precisely, which seemed to be an advantage over current procedures at the time.
Now, to extract the liquid from the gel, he would need to perform a supercritical drying procedure (which is as dangerous and expensive as it sounds!) But this didn’t hold Steve back and rather was exactly why he wanted to do it! So he purchased high-pressure pipe components with the help of his dad, Teflon-taped and epoxied everything together, bought liquid carbon dioxide from a welding house nearby, and found that his system could hold the needed pressure but eventually the epoxy seals would fail and fly across the room. With time he improved the setup and got it welded to replace all the Teflon tape and glue.
But that was not enough for Steve, so he started to call scientists at Lawrence Livermore and asked them tons of questions, always extracting the bits of information that he needed to use his machine. After 20 trials trying to operate the so-called manuclave (or “manual autoclave”), everything finally started to work!
Although he didn’t make titanium dioxide semiconductors, he ended up building an autoclave and inventing a new manufacturing procedure for creating silica aerogel and instead
• Exhibited his work at the International Science and Engineering Fair, where he won 2nd place in Chemistry
• Received a patent for his autoclave design and the rapid gelation technique
• Won an Intel Achievement Award for doing research without the resources of a lab or mentor (in fact, one of the Intel Judges said: “We looked at using aerogels for integrated circuits a few years ago, but we couldn’t get the gel time fast enough!”)
• Won a free trip to Space Camp from NASA
• Won $2,500 for the United States Air Force
Today, he is a PhD candidate at MIT and his rapid gelation technique has been used for the study of aerogel production aboard zero-gravity flights performed by NASA. The length of each zero-gravity period during the flight is relatively short (only 23 seconds), but his technique allows the gel to form that fast.
Set yourself a goal, work hard, go back to the books if it doesn’t work, and then work even harder and you will win big!
We are off to North Carolina to present the piddler to the Hickory Museum of Art for the opening of their High-Speed Photography exhibition (details will follow).
In the 3nd video you can follow the amazing chair challenge:
Sit down on a chair. Climb underneath the chair, come back out on the opposite side and sit back down. Without! ever touching the floor! Five people have been able to do this so far! Can you do it!?
Die European Career Fair (ECF) ist die größte Karrieremesse mit Fokus auf den europäischen Arbeitsmarkt in Nordamerika und in ihrer Art einzigartig. Die Messe zieht jedes Jahr tausende BesucherInnen („Candidates“) an und ermöglicht den Ausstellern („Employers“) den direkten Kontakt mit hervorragenden AbsolventInnen von amerikanischen Top-Universitäten und Institutionen. Die ECF wird jährlich (seit 1997) am Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) vom MIT European Club veranstaltet. Seit 2007 gibt es neben den klassischen "Companies" auch eine eigene "Science & Technology Section", in der speziell Non-Profit Unternehmen, wie zum Beispiel auch brainpower austria, auftreten. Die Messe ist eine großartige Gelegenheit für europäische Unternehmen, junge Talente und erfahrene ForscherInnen anzusprechen und direkt vor Ort Bewerbungsgespräche zu führen.
brainpower austria - der erste österreichische Beitrag
Bei der ECF 2008 präsentierte brainpower austria am eigenen Messestand eine Auswahl an österreichischen Jobanbietern und aktuellen F&E-Jobs in einer eigenen Messebroschüre, die insgesamt von 22 österreichischen F&E-Institutionen als Plattform genutzt wurde. Darunter finden sich renommierte Namen wie IMP, IMBA, Siemens, Infineon, Böhler-Uddeholm, Austrian Research Centers und große Universitäten. Die MessebesucherInnen konnten auch direkt vor Ort unsere F&E-Online Jobbörse benutzen und sich über alle kostenlosen Serviceleistungen von brainpower austria informieren.
Mit diesem internationalen Auftritt konnten wir einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten, um österreichische F&E Institutionen im internationalen Wettbewerb um die besten Köpfe zu unterstützen. Interessierte Unternehmen sind bereits jetzt aufgerufen, sich bei brainpower austria für die ECF 2009 zu melden!
Informieren Sie sich im Detail zur European Career Fair 2008:
Looking back at my last report about the European Career Fair (ECF) and further developments of my project MIT-Austria (previous article), I am now pleased to offer you some insight from the point of view of one of the presenters at the ECF 2008 at MIT:
“As Austria’s first representative I participated in the 2008 MIT
European Career Fair, representing „brainpower austria“, a non-profit
program presented in the ECF’s Science & Technology Section.
brainpower austria is a program of Austria’s Federal Ministry of
Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit), managed by the Austrian
Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Structural Programs Division.
I found the ECF as very well organized and was quite impressed by the
large number of registered candidates from all over the world. The whole
fair day kept me busy and I had the chance to speak to many motivated
people about their concerns and ideas about a research career. It was
mainly Europeans who stepped up to the brainpower austria booth but also
Americans and people from other countries as well asked about our
services and opportunities in R&D in Austria. There was also a number of
Austrians who attended the fair and warmly welcomed the idea of Austria
finally participating in an event like this.
One of our major services is our online job listings that are used by many Austrian employers to
post their R&D vacancies. At the fair booth people could browse the
listing and take a brochure including a selection of 22 Austrian
employers, with current open positions.
I think the ECF is a unique opportunity to get in contact with a lot of highly qualified academics
and establish ties with (Austrian) employers. I’m happy we made this
step, and I have to say it was a good start! We plan to extend this
co-operation and also encourage Austrian employers to be part of the ECF
themselves. Regarding the Austrians, I was happy to see some familiar
faces and to meet new ones, like DI Daniel Pressl. It’s great to see young
talented researchers who want to change things and get things started,
like Daniel and his MIT-Austria program.”
Two weeks ago I spent an entire weekend (02. Feb. - 03. Feb.) visiting the European Career Fair (ECF) at MIT. In early December, last year, I contacted many Austrian companies to possibly find a spot at the fair. Unfortunately, I was not fast enough to be able to get in touch before the deadline for the companies to apply at the ECF, which was the 14th of December, 2007. However, I promoted the future concept of an MIT-Austria cooperation and introduced the idea of the ECF:
An optimal opportunity for any company to present itself in a professional environment such as the MIT campus. In 2007 more than 4000 students submitted their resumes to be selected by one of the many (more than 100) companies that presented themselves in 2007 at the European Career Fair.
Furthermore, companies will receive the opportunity to speak to the MISTI staff on how to present their company throughout the year at MIT. For example, the program MIT-Germany has already been established and many companies, such as Lufthansa are holding workshops at MIT all year long to recruit the best students for their company needs and future.
General Electrics booth at the ECF 2008. After I showed them my CV and had a conversation about their company and company’s projects and goals. They are still smiling!
Meanwhile, the MIT-Austria idea has found frutation in the region Carinthia, in Austria, where currently an office is being established. This office will be one of the primary positions in Austria to be in contact with MISTI, an organization at MIT, which “offers tailored, hands-on internships abroad for MIT students, study abroad opportunities, short-term workshops and language courses abroad, and funding for collaborative research between MIT faculty and international colleagues”.
The first steps of the MIT-Austria office will be the creation of an MIT-Austria forum inside the already existing MIT-Germany program. Future milestones of the forum will be to establish a idea of the country Austria and its companies in the eyes students at MIT, so they will have an idea of the many possibilities that are available in Austria.
At the same time, the MIT-Austria office will start contacting companies (profit and non-profit), as well as research facilities (universities,…) to become a partner of the MIT-Austria forum and offer spaces for MIT students to come to Austria for their research.
Other concepts of such a program are the exchange of use of research facilities and therefore the publication of papers. Furthermore, it can be possible for students and researchers in Austria to go to MIT for some time, as visiting students.
I, myself, already had two visiting students in my lab and, I believe, both sides shared a great experience (link to Austrian newspaper article on a website that I have created on the social networking site www.Redwired.org, where I constantly post new stories about my works between MIT and Austria).
Booth of the Netherlands Institute of Metals Research at the ECF 2008. I also listened to their talk, which was a very interesting excerpt of life of a successful and growing research facility in Europe.
Back to the ECF, it was a pleasure to find an Austrian booth at this years ECF, the first Austrian booth ever! The booth was lead by the team brainpower-austria. Brainpower-austria was presenting a folder and information of 22 companies with open R & D positions, as well as a talk, which was mainly visited by Austrians, but it is a start and a great one! I sat in the talk and met Stefan Eichenberger, who is the is program manager of brainpower-austria:
I told him what a great pleasure it was for me to see an Austrian booth at the ECF, after having fought for one, back in 2007. I immediately, while walking back to his booth, introduced him to the idea of MIT-Austria and MISTI and he was very interested. At the ECF, I also met Philipp Marxgut, who is the Director and Attache for Science & Technology at the Embassy of Austria, in Washington, DC.
I managed to organize a short meeting between Stefan Eichenberger, Philip Marxgut, Sigrid Berka (Coordinator of MIT-Germany) and myself. Certainly, the outcome was very motivating and I will meet Stefan and the entire team of brainpower-austria at the end of March, when I am back in Austria, to speak about further plans of MIT-Austria and a possible collaboration with brainpower-austria.
A few more images of this year’s ECF at MIT:
Siemens booth at the ECF 2008. I was amazed to find out that one of the coordinators of the booth (and leader of the Materials Department) knew one of my former Professors from the Montanuniversitaet in Leoben, Austria.
The very busy Lufthansa booth at the ECF 2008. Lufthansa is huge at MIT, every month I at least get one email from Lufthansa, asking if I am a scientist interested in aviation, speak german and want to work for them.
Impressions of this year’s ECF 2008 at MIT. The booth show took place in the Athletics Center.
