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MIT Helps Third World With Hands-On Approach
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Jul 13, 2008 10:11 AM
from the helpful-contributions dept.
from the helpful-contributions dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "About 60 people from 20 nations will descend on the MIT campus July 14th for the second annual International Development Design Summit to begin an intensive month-long process of creating technological solutions for the needs of people in the world's developing nations. The goal of the program is to develop simple, inexpensive devices that in some cases can be produced locally and make a real difference for people and communities. The event is the brainchild of MIT Senior Lecturer Amy Smith, a returned Peace Corps volunteer and a past winner of the MacArthur 'genius' grant. Previous products of Smith's design class include a bike-powered corn sheller, a metal press that can make clean-burning fuel out of agricultural waste, and an electricity-free incubator. The workshop promotes a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world's poorest places. 'Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population,' Ms. Smith said. 'The point of the design revolution is to switch that.'"
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Hardware: Popular Mechanics Awards Technological Innovation 45 comments
PreacherTom writes "Every year, Popular Mechanics attempts to find the most innovative tech products and hand out a little notoriety. This year's honorees range from everyday items like a $17 Crescent RapidSlide wrench, which puts a new, faster spin on an already well-designed tool, to a high-end Lexus that can virtually park itself. PM took an extra step by honoring innovators in science, having solicited nominations from a board of editorial advisers that includes Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Dr. Amy Smith, a professor at MIT. Winners include Burt Rutan (of SpaceShipTwo fame) and Angela Belcher (for her work with virus nanofabrication)."
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Engineers without borders plug (Score:5, Informative)
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Thank you for that utterly pointless and irrelevant mini-rant. Now get back in your cave.
WHICH Third World? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there is a wide range of poorer nations, every of which is "Third World". There are more advanced nations, like Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, there are some in the middle of the road, like India, Egypt, Pakistan, and then there are the desperately poor, like most of Africa.
The technology needed by each group is different. A cheap way of digging a well is not what the people living in a city slum need most. OTOH, a cheap computer will not be much help people who live in mud huts somewhere in Africa.
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The technology "needed"? Funny, there's this odd history book that seems to think that humans lived in Africa for a while before Europeans arrived. I'm not sure, but I hear that in this mysterious time before time, they even didn't have cellphones or the Internet!
What is needed is an end to things like this [thirdworldtraveler.com]. Until the first world nations stop raping third world nations and supporting tinpot dictators just for the sake of guaranteeing access to their resources, human misery will continue wholesale.
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Until the first world nations stop raping third world nations and supporting tinpot dictators just for the sake of guaranteeing access to their resources, human misery will continue wholesale.
Yes! We need to get out of the way and let the local tinpot dictators get on with raping their own countries without outside interference. Just ask Robert Mugabe! He'll tell you.
Well, just imagine if we hadn't interfered in Iraq, Afghanistan in the 60s, Vietnam, Korea, etc. -- we wouldn't be overextended right now, and could genuinely help out in Zimbabwe if the UN asked us to. In fact, we would actually have enough credibility in the UN to rally support around the idea of taking action in Zimbabwe.
But instead we went chasing 'weapons of mass destruction' and an 'al-qaida in Iraq' that didn't exist there until we turned the country into a pile of rubble. So the man has a point, a
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Well, just imagine if we hadn't interfered in Iraq, Afghanistan in the 60s, Vietnam, Korea, etc.
(emphasize is mine)
Then instead of rich and (now) democratic South Korea and poor tyrannic North Korea, we would have poor tyrannic Korea across entire peninsula. And even more likely, passivity from the West would probably encourage Soviet Union and its satellites to try to attack even more countries.
Trickle down (Score:4, Insightful)
90% of research dollars may be spent on creating technologies that are targeted at the richest 10% of the population, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit the other 90%. Think of mobile phones, for example - originally aimed at the Western business elite, but they went on to revolutionise the African economy by creating a fast, efficient communication network between villages where it wasn't feasible to roll out wired infrastructure.
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Never gonna get anywhere with reason here on /.
Might as well give up now.
Why the third world? (Score:2)
If reversing that is the goal, why only help the third world when it seems that nearly the entire globe is that way?
Missing links (Score:4, Informative)
For some reason the news office didn't link to D-lab [mit.edu]. But there are actually plenty of groups at MIT doing stuff like this,
including the Public Service Center's IDEAS [mit.edu] competition, several Mech-E student ptojects, Design for Change [mit.edu],
and the spin-off Design that matters [designthatmatters.org].
These groups work on a lot of interesting things. Some of them, like the Kinkajou projector, see somewhat esoteric or "luxurious,"
but others are pretty basic and nifty. There are a lot of bicycle flywheel-moderated pedal powered devices that seem to fill genuine
needs, as does the famous peanut sheller [fullbellyproject.org].
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Wow, great idea! (Score:2)
Let's make really cheap, low-cost, useful, and robust devices to help people. Why didn't I think of that! Bet nobody else has thought of that before either!
Free/Open Appropriate Technology (Score:5, Informative)
is turning into quite a movement.
http://appropedia.org/ [appropedia.org] is like wikipedia but, predictably, for appropriate technology.
http://hexayurt.com/ [hexayurt.com] is a nice little emergency shelter (that's my project.)
http://globalswadeshi.net/ [globalswadeshi.net] takes Gandhi's ideas (like the spinning wheel) and generalizes them into a global picture based on appropriate technology innovations
http://akvo.org/ [akvo.org] does water technology
http://openfarmtech.org/ [openfarmtech.org] does a wide range of systems for a very high standard of living
and there's a lot more out there.
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video [globalswadeshi.net] has a series of video interviews with people working on appropriate technology in this general vein.
About 30 million people a year could be saved (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, when you run the numbers, it seems like about half of all global death is from poverty.
This talk (I presented it about two weeks ago) gives some details, sketches out possible solutions, and puts the whole thing in context.
http://www.globalswadeshi.net/video/video/show?id=2097821%3AVideo%3A1943 [globalswadeshi.net]
Enjoy.
Zug-Zug (Score:4, Interesting)
Aw hell! Some bastard sent troops into my Town Square and is tearing the place to shit! Yep, you can expect the local warlord/gang/bunch_of_thugs to do that in the real world as well. You've developed a resource; someone will try to take it from you.
Simply tossing a technological measure at a community won't magically fix things. At a minimum, it'll free up someone to perform another task that wasn't an option before. It's worth doing, but needs to be part of a larger program that helps with developing comprehensive infrastructure.
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Nicely said. And don't overlook that classic example of what happens when you mix Third World mentality with up-to-date technology. We call them IED's.
Help the third world? Two simple ideas: (Score:2)
1. cheap, reliable electricity generation
2. cheap, reliable air conditioning
Those two things alone would make an unbelievable difference in the lives of pretty much everyone in the Third World.
Clean micro-power would obivate the need for (1) expensive to own/operate gas/diesel generators and (2) large infrastructure investments.
Cheap, reliable air conditioning would benefit both industry (food storage and transportation) and normal life (things really are nicer in AC).
These two would change life radically i
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Sustainability (Score:5, Insightful)
I talked to a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada [ewb.ca] who had this crazy story about rural villages in Mali (in western Africa). In almost every single town he visited (poor farming villages, actually) there was a deep, covered well and pump providing clean, healthy drinking water. And nobody used them. Instead, women from the villages would walk a few kilometres to collect water from a stagnant, parasite-infected pool of water.
Which seems ridiculous to us, maybe, except that collecting water by the pool was an important social event for these women (that standing in line at the well didn't duplicate at all), and that people thought the metal of the pump was unnatural - especially compared to a water source 'in nature', and that no one had really convinced the families in these villages that water from the pump would make their babies more likely to survive.
But it really goes to show that the best-intended engineering or technical solutions (in this case, a foreign NGO's decision a decade or two ago that every Malian village needed a water pump) won't succeed without a better understanding of the people they are meant to help. And that in the end, developing countries will never "make it" because of solutions 'handed down' by first-world organizations; in the end people there need to be empowered to improve their lives and their countries. First-world organizations can help with that, but we can't pretend to understand their communities' needs better than they do.
Out of Poverty, Paul Polak (Score:3, Informative)
ObPlug: Paul Polak's "Out of Poverty" program. http://www.paulpolak.com/ [paulpolak.com] He has a deeper-than-surface understanding of 3rd world micro-economics. He introduced simple but effective technologies in many places which have completely transformed the lives of whole villages. Drip irrigation, cheap water storage, treadle-pumps, etc. He also has a book at amazon. Haven't read it yet, but it's on my wish list.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1576754499/ref=ord_cart_shr?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance [amazon.com]
On a related note:
(IMO) our universities must become more than diploma mills for the children of the wealthy, they should (primarily) be incubators for real, functional change. MIT and a few other universities take this seriously and (most importantly) fund it. (See recent articles on break-through solar technology.) I hope they will open-source the fruits of their research.
We somehow need to shift focus from getting-rich-quick to saving a world that needs it. We can't afford to let the 21st century really can't be like the 20th.
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So, instead of trying to help the 3rd world countries with tech, we might just try not to harm them with our business practices and subsidies.
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I once saw an interesting example of this. There's a village in the Brazilian northeast where people make cattle bells. The bells themselves are made of steel cut from old oil drums, but what's interesting is the way they braze them.
They cut small pieces of brass from junk and weigh them in a primitive scale, they have a standard pebble that's the right weight of brass for each size of bell. They pile the bells on each other, about ten for a pac
Interestingly, this is often wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why thinking like this is needed. Expensive but efficient technology needs to be commoditised for Third World production to bootstrap their economies.
Parent
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A lot of these nations are poor because the Western nations have invaded, raped, pillaged and destroyed their cultures in pursuit of minerals and precious stones.
England enslaved India not because of their love for the curry, but because they wanted to dominate the spice trade.
Leopold invaded Congo for the rubber (w
Re:90% Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
What you say is a big amount of bollocks.
I suggest you go visit IN PERSON any such country that you berate 'raped, pillaged, destroyed' by teh eviiiil western nations and see for yourself the real causes of their current state.
That should constitute for you a real eye-opening experience.
Parent
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Re:90% Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Of course, it still doesn't mean that nation being poor means doing something wrong. It may also mean that someone got something right first, at the expense of the others.
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Which is why Japan is so poor, right?
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"The simple fact is, you can only make use of what your environment offers, and in third world countries, that is not much"
Change "environment" to "culture" and you'll be far more accurate.
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From Jarod Diamond's point of view the west did not become wealthy because of us doing things "right". It became wealthy purely through geographical luck.
Aarguments have been raised in opposition to his book, but I still think that it is a worthwhile read.
Re:90% Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
a) The wealthiest 10% (referring to the population of the first world) live the way they do because the wealthiest 0.0001% of the world find it profitable to maintain them in a state of fat, mindless consumption.
b) Where do you think your TV, DVD player, cellphone, shoes, socks, PC are manufactured? I guarantee you that the hard labor required to manufacture these goods is not carried out by the fat, lazy people of the first world. They are too busy doing mindless administrative jobs in the office and then asking for time off due to a stubbed toe.
c) Your "survival of the fittest" attitude is a pathetic attempt at rationalizing your own profligate, wasteful and totally unsustainable lifestyle. You're like a child trying to tell yourself that stealing cookies is actually OK. Go travel, realize that the people in the third world actually are people, who work hard for their families and have the same hopes, dreams and ambitions that you have. The only difference between them and you is that their opportunity is undermined by the first world in the name of "profit" and they don't use abhorrent, broken logic to justify their own existence.
Parent
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Oh, and
d) The "movers and shakers" of the world would die without the third world nations, but the third world would thrive without the "movers and shakers". If you believe otherwise, you're either deluded and ignorant, or 12 years old. Every rich nation in the world today is only rich riding on the back of cheap labor to produce gigantic amounts of consumer goods to fuel their consumption-dependent economies. Taking away the third world would be taking away factories, plants and workshops. How long do you
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So.. every rich nation is rich because they produce a tremendous amount of wealth. How insightful of you. Do you want a ribbon?
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I think somebody's been in the Kool-Aid again...
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No, we don't need your stupid help MIT. We need you [US] to stay home, and stop playing to be the world police.
Be careful what you wish for. Something even worse may step into the void.
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What if the USA stops helping to create wars and manipulating the markets around the world, and helping to create unstable and volatile political situations, that are the conditions that eventually lead all this so called 'third world countries' to be in the terrible situation they are now ... ?
No, we don't need your stupid help MIT. We need you to stay home, and stop playing to be the world police.
I think you're confusing two different things -- US foreign policy, and MIT have nothing to do with each other. The world does need MIT. And you don't speak for the people MIT is trying to help.
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The MIT people may not be the people who design the abusive foreign policy of the US that has resulted in the current state of world affairs, but they need to realize that anything that they come up with will be undermined while the US foreign policy has, as a stated goal, the maintenance of US hegemony over all other nations. While this goal still exists, any attempt by poorer nations to develop themselves will be viewed as a shifting balance of power away from the US rather than the reality, which is a ne
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Unprecedented? It's been happening since the Roman Empire.
In any case, the time when the US was able to dictate policy to the world has passed. China has 1.3 billion, India almost a billion, and 4 billion of the world population lives between Japan and the Arab peninsula. If the US doesn't start cooperating, it's going to fade into irrelevancy.
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Simple linear interpolation proves circumcision reduces HIV:
1. Uncut males may acquire HIV.
2. Remove that nasty wedding tackle at birth: no possibility of future HIV acquistion.
3. Remove X% - reduces HIV risk by some amount.
More studies are needed, but a good start would be the surgical reduction of male penises by various amounts (say 10%, 40%, and 80%.) We could then correlate these reductions with rates of future HIV infection.
Naturally, we should do these studies in Africa because those people have
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Circumcision can reduce the HIV/AIDS by a significant percentage. However, access to circumcision and doctors is the problem in third world countries. If MIT could develop a circumcision device that the third world lay person could operate in a safe manner, this would be a big help in reducing HIV/AIDs and the suffering.
Also, there are some of us in the first world that could also use such a device. Circumcision without the embarrassment of a doctor's visit and in the privacy of one's own home. I'd look to get my hands on one to cirucmcise myself at home, and perhaps the first world's use could subsidise the manufacturing costs for the third world.
Have you tried employing the use of a cigar cutter for this? If you heat up the blades, then it can cauterize in the same motion.
Not that I've personally tried this.
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Step 1) STOP HAVING BABIES!
By force? If its not done by force, then evolution will eventually override any incentives provided. Even now I know some women who's body releases endorphins (feel-good hormones) when they are pregnant. Thus, they get pregnant to be high, and produce more daughters with the same hormone.
Actually, you are a troll (Score:4, Interesting)
A neighbour is a senior project manager for a development charity, and his view is that a lot of Africa's problems stem from too few people. Below a certain density you do not have the GNP to develop transport, or the manpower to clear swamps and get rid of malaria (for instance.) This is why most Third World development takes place in crowded cities rather than rural areas.
But as to why you are a troll. One North American baby = nearly 12 African babies in terms of resource consumption. In terms of resource consumption, the US uses as much as a Third World country of around 4 billion people, and the EU probably uses as much as 2-3 billion Third World people. Now do you get it? The answer is for US, you (and to a lesser extent me) to stop having growing populations, not the Third World. Then we don't need to build kleptomaniac corporations that steal all their resources.
The average North American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton or German, and two and a half times as much as the average Italian. Germans and Italians have a pretty good lifestyle; I'd much rather live in Munich, say, than most American cities. New York has almost European population densities and energy efficiency, yet it is a desirable place to live. If you could just drive sensibly, live in adequate but not bloated houses, and stop trying to commute fifty miles each way to work by three tonne truck, you would free up enough energy to make a significant difference to the entire Third World. And then you would not need that huge army and the array of missiles, because nobody would be coming after you.
Parent
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People in third world countries make very little money, so they can't save any. When they get old, they need their children to look after them because they don't have any savings and are unable to work [enough to make a living]. Unless you want to die alone of starvation, you NEED to have many babies.
Also, children are much more likely to die in third world countries so it is good policy to have a few spares.
Finally, contraceptives are expensive and/or, depending on your religion of choice, their use may be