Get Ready, Get Set, GO!
Sunday, September 30, 2007
HOW to THINK thought to be important! (28%)
Don’t Worry, Be Students
LAURIE HOACHLANDER'S PARENTS may have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the psychology courses she took as an undergraduate at the
There was her year as a resident adviser to a cluster of freshmen in her dormitory at Penn, an experience colored by the attempted suicide of one of her charges, followed by his recovery and return to the hall. “That taught me a lot about crisis management,” she says. Then there was her work as a campus tour guide, which taught her “how to be a better public speaker.” That, she says, wound up serving her well in one of her first jobs, as a leader of seminars for real estate brokers: they would interrupt her presentations with offbeat questions, just like the pesky parents on her tours.
As high-school juniors and seniors descend this fall on fact-finding missions to the nation’s colleges and universities — an indispensable part of the uniquely American hazing known as the college-admissions process — a fresh cast of cheerful student tour guides will steer the conversation through familiar scripts. They’ll dutifully note the number of volumes in the library and the opportunities for undergraduate research and the ratio of professors to students. Only the most persistent of pesky parents will draw out a story like Hoachlander’s of a moment in college life that really made a difference; arguably, it’s the rare undergraduate that has the perspective to recognize that moment, let alone go off script to recount it.
But talk to a couple of thousand recent college graduates, as the magazine did this summer — alumni roughly five years out of school, with the perspective that comes from having got a taste of the real world but with memories of freshman and sophomore years still relatively intact — and enough moments spill out to begin to tell a story. Some graduates fondly recall a special professor, others the opportunity to become more self-sufficient. Some say they didn’t study hard enough; others, though fewer, regret working themselves too hard and wish they’d taken more time to relax or learn about life from their peers. Yet overall, the story told by these survivors of the admissions process is actually pretty simple: college is great. And their message to those coming up behind them — the classes of 2012 and 2013 and 2014, bigger than any generation of college prospects before them and as anxious as their parents are hovering — is pretty simple, too: chill out.
To an astonishing degree, recent graduates surveyed by The New York Times Poll said that they are satisfied with the choices they made about where to go to college and with the educations they received. That seems to hold true whether they went to big schools or small schools, costly private colleges or somewhat more affordable public universities, their first-choice school or their fourth. Like Laurie Hoachlander, though, the young alums acknowledge, in a variety of their responses, that the qualities they or their parents thought were crucial in choosing a college were not necessarily the things that mattered most once they got there. Magazine rankings and a school’s reputation — both extremely important in the minds of many applicants — are often of far less significance to graduates as they reflect on what made their college years worthwhile.
“Now I value the goofy and formative life experiences — driving to Atlantic City on a whim, playing a weekly basketball game with my friends, playing pranks in the dining hall,” wrote Dan Diamond, a newsletter editor who was a classmate of Hoachlander’s in the class of 2002 at Penn.
THOUGH A LARGE industry exists to convince teenagers and their parents otherwise, there is not much science in the search for the right college for a particular student. The data that fill many college guidebooks paint a picture of the student body as it passes through the university’s front gate, taking the students’ measure with SAT scores, class rank and the like. Those lists of “top party schools” or best school for “Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians” — an actual category handicapped by
So The New York Times conducted a series of surveys over the summer. Telephone polling in conjunction with mtvU, the music channel’s on-campus network, produced a sample of 271 college graduates under age 30. (The nationwide poll, conducted June 15 to June 23, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus six percentage points.) Separately, online surveys by The Times gathered the replies of more than 1,300 graduates, most in the class of 2002, from three institutions generally regarded as among the finest and most selective in the nation: Penn, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia; Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Ore.; and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a state university. I called a dozen alumni afterward to probe more deeply into their responses to the poll questions.
Much of what the polling found falls safely into the category of “reassuring” — not an adjective that tends to be associated with the college search. Among the group surveyed nationally, 93 percent described their overall undergraduate experience as “excellent” or “good”; the results were comparable for the alumni of Penn (95 percent), Michigan (96 percent) and Reed (98 percent). Likewise, asked if their college education “was worth the money you and your parents paid for it,” 89 percent in the national poll said that it was. At Reed and Penn, where tuition bills are among the highest in the nation, 81 percent and 79 percent, respectively, said they got their money’s worth. (At Michigan, where tuition is lower for state residents, 84 percent of alumni agreed.) To plumb whether that learning served any practical purpose, those alumni who said they had jobs were asked whether their undergraduate education “prepared you for the work you are currently doing.” Seventy-five percent in the national poll said yes — very nearly as positive a response as among the graduates of Penn (82 percent), Michigan (83 percent) and Reed (86 percent.)
(The upbeat responses from alumni of those three colleges come with a caveat: the graduates surveyed chose to be in close-enough touch with their alma mater to at least supply an e-mail address where they could be reached. But their answers were similar enough to those of participants in the national poll — who were part of a random sample — to suggest confidence in the results all around.)
Of course, a high-school student staring at a blank college application may be most interested in the answer to the following question: Why? What made these individuals’ college experiences so good? Why was it worth the angst and the hard work and — their parents would probably also want to know — the lingering debts?
For the Penn and Michigan graduates in particular, the answers are not always what they expected back when they were writing essays and filling in SAT bubbles. They recalled being extremely focused on their schools’ brand names: 88 percent of the Penn alums said that reputation was “very” important when they were deciding which school to attend, as did 78 percent of the Michigan alums. Similarly, 85 percent of the Penn graduates and 72 percent of the Michigan grads said that their university’s ranking by U.S. News & World Report was “somewhat” or “very” important when they were making that decision.
Yet five years after graduating, about one-third at each university said that the rankings seemed “less important” to them now than they did in high school. Asked to volunteer what they valued most about their college experience, 10 percent of the Penn alums — and 5 percent of the Michigan graduates — mentioned their alma mater’s reputation. Graduates of both universities were more likely to cite the friendships they made at school. The responses suggest that the critics of college lists are onto something: maybe the devaluing of the rankings can serve as a tonic to the unrelenting obsession they foster among many applicants and their parents.
The Reed alumni teach a different lesson. Reed has long stood opposed to the very idea of college rankings, electing not to provide data to U.S. News, so students in the yearly classes of 300 or so freshman start out picking the school for what it stands for rather than where it stands. And the graduates, looking back, seem to reaffirm the notion that students following their instincts can find their way to the right school. As if parroting the marketing copy in the college’s brochure, alums overwhelmingly endorse Reed’s “conference” style of learning, in which lessons transmitted in lectures are later reinforced in smaller groups where students engage in spirited debates. Twenty-eight percent of the respondents from Reed said that learning “how to think, to work, to learn” in college was what they valued most now. Another 27 percent cited research skills or other kinds of training.
One was Andrew Schpak, 27, a litigator in Portland who graduated in 2001. He said the school’s emphasis on Socratic learning was perhaps as valuable as anything he learned at Cornell law school in preparing him to argue before judges, juries and opposing lawyers. “Reed taught me to think on my feet, to think beyond my gut reaction and to think about what might make me change my mind,” he told me in a follow-up interview.
One conclusion to be drawn from Andrew’s obvious satisfaction with his education, when laid alongside the responses of so many of his peers, is that the convoluted process of matching students to colleges ultimately does what it is supposed to do. But in the end, I also find myself reflecting on the ongoing regrets expressed by so many of the alumni we contacted — not with their overall college experiences but with the day-to-day choices they made, whether it was the belly-dancing class that one Reed graduate said she missed out on because she was studying too hard or the Greek tragedy that lay untouched on another Reed student’s dorm-room bookshelf and now, in all likelihood, will never be opened.
Perhaps we should be spending a little less time coaching and cajoling high-school students about how to get into college, or even how to identify that mythical “right” college, and instead help them prepare a little better for how to strike a balance, or explore what they hope to accomplish, once they get there.
INSIGHTFUL and INTENTIONAL!
The Unsung Heroes Who Move Products Forward
Illustration by James Yang
AT first blush, the iPhone from Apple, the new microprocessor family from Intel and the ubiquitous Google search engine have nothing in common. One is a gadget, one is an electronic part and one is a service.
Yet all of these products — much acclaimed for their creativity — depend on obscure process innovations that, while highly complex and lacking glamour, are an essential part of establishing a winning edge in commercial electronics. Indeed, the success of Apple, Intel, Google and scores of other technology companies has as much or more to do with their process innovations as the products that inspire loyalty among fans and admiration from foes.
First, a definitional detour. Processes are the stuff in the proverbial “black box,” the alchemy unseen by consumers or the inelegantly termed “end users” who buy computers, cellphones, cameras and all manner of digital devices and services.
Snazzy products are the stuff of legends, romanticized by “early adopters” and skewered by neo-Luddites. Yet while these products bring glory to companies, novel processes are often more important in keeping the cash registers ringing.
The proof of this proposition is that while companies often spend millions to advertise and market new product designs and innovations, they guard intensely the details of their process innovations.
Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).
I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”
Process innovations like Google’s computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components. Certainly, there are exceptions to these patterns, but even companies like Apple that buy essential processes on the open market nevertheless invest in gaining a working knowledge of the technologies and an understanding of their future arc.
Intel treats its process innovations as a competitive weapon, striving to create a “new generation” every two years. That enables the company’s chips, even if there were no changes in their design, to perform better and cost less to make.
Consumers are usually blind to the importance of novel processes. Even when they learn about these innovations, they tend to think only of the product itself.
“The average consumer doesn’t care what processes are used,” says Mark T. Bohr, an Intel physicist who oversaw what is arguably the most important advance in decades in the technology for making microprocessors, the brains inside computers and other digital devices.
Faced with ever-faster chips that threatened to explode into flames, Intel searched desperately for new processes to make microprocessors. Enter hafnium, a rare metal. Designers led by Mr. Bohr in Hillsboro, Ore., chose hafnium to replace silicon oxide, the venerable insulator in chips and a material used in making glass. Mr. Bohr also helped to identify new materials, whose identity Intel is keeping secret, for the crucial transistor “gates” that sit atop a chip’s insulators.
On Nov. 12, Intel will begin shipping its first chips using the new processes. Gordon E. Moore, Intel’s co-founder, recently declared that the hafnium-and-gate process innovations should allow his so-called Moore’s Law, whereby chips grow ever faster and less expensive, to hold true for some time.
Despite the enormity of the achievement, Mr. Bohr is relatively anonymous, even within Intel. “The work of process development comes second to creating new designs for chips,” he says. Not surprisingly, when Intel starts shipping the new chips, neither the hafnium nor the gates innovations will be trumpeted as selling points. Rather, Intel will emphasize how customers can benefit from using the chips.
If process innovations are unheralded, consumers may misunderstand the nature of technological change.
“Process innovation tends to receive less attention from the informed public for the same reason that incremental innovation tends to receive too little attention: it is more difficult to encapsulate in a press release or photo opportunity,” says David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of technological change.
“Process innovation, even more than most product innovations, also tends to realize its economic potential through a lengthy process of incremental improvement based on learning by doing and other types of learning,” he added. “So ‘breakthroughs’ in process engineering are, if anything, even rarer than in product innovation.”
As a result, process gurus are resigned to playing in the shadows, leaving fame, if not fortune, to others. John Feland, human interface architect at Synaptics Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., knows this enduring truth of invention. He helps design arrays of sensors that drive the touch screens in the newest cellphones like the Prada from LG. Such touch screens are earning raves from consumers, yet Mr. Feland is essentially an invisible man.
“My job is to make our customers look like heroes,” he says philosophically. Then he sums up the special role played by fellow members of the process tribe: “We are like Q to James Bond.”
Friday, September 28, 2007
Reality Check: The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!
Dismantling Detroit
By PAUL CLEMENS
Published: September 28, 2007
Detroit
TO get to the auto plant that I’ve been drawn to for much of the last year, I drove, on my lunch hour last Monday, past an auto plant that members of the press had been drawn to for a full 45 minutes. As I drove east from midtown Detroit along I-94, the Ford Freeway, I could see a helicopter ahead, circling the General Motors Detroit/Hamtramck assembly plant — “Poletown,” in these parts.
TV news crews were parked outside it, to cover the strike that had begun at 11. I exited the freeway to see a dozen or so strikers, a handful of Detroit police officers and a couple of people holding tape recorders interviewing a couple of others holding picket signs. The United Auto Workers had called a national strike against G.M., and Poletown, for the press, was the place to be.
Back on the Ford Freeway I continued east, past the abandoned Packard plant, empty for half a century now, on my way to a more recently shuttered factory just up the road. I was pretty sure there’d be no TV crews at the Budd Detroit plant. Built in 1919 by the Liberty Motor Company and bought by the Budd Company in 1925, it had been a parts supplier, producing brake drums, wheels (old-timers still call it “Budd Wheel”) and auto body stampings for the major car companies. For eight decades, it supplied jobs to the city and the industry that drove the expansion and symbolized the strength of the American middle class — a class, the striking U.A.W. workers rightly asserted, that they were proud to belong to and didn’t want to see disappear.
The Budd plant — latterly, the ThyssenKrupp Budd plant — helped shape the contours of Detroit’s 20th century. Literally: in the 1950s, Budd Detroit built and assembled the body of the iconic, two-seat Ford Thunderbird. Last December it closed, and this past summer I spent much of my free time at the plant, observing workers from General Rigging disassemble it.
I wasn’t “press,” not here. In the Budd plant, “press” means stamping presses, and many of them still stand, a couple of stories high, in numbered lines of half a dozen presses each. A Spanish auto supplier, Gestamp, has bought 16 Line for one of its Mexican plants. A couple of Mexican engineers from Gestamp, along with German engineers from Müller Weingarten, the press maker that Gestamp contracted to oversee the 16 Line’s installation in Mexico, have been observing the disassembly. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” said Duane Krukowski, General Rigging’s electrical foreman.
If the picketers I’d passed a few miles back, with their demands for job security, were trying to counter the effects of globalization, Francis Blake Sr., the owner of General Rigging, embraced it. In addition to Mexico, press lines had gone or were going to India and Brazil. “None of it’s staying here,” Fran said, “here” being not just Detroit, but America.
Fran’s foreman on the Budd Detroit dismantling is Matt Sanders, an affable fellow in a Stars-and-Stripes hard hat. General Rigging had just completed a smaller job at a plant in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, owned by Tower Automotive, the bankrupt auto parts supplier, and had moved on to another Tower plant in Kendallville, Ind.
This process has been likened to the clear-cutting of a forest. The forest, in this case, spreads through parts of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York State, and goes by the name of the American Rust Belt. Whether anything will grow back is unclear. What is clear is that dismantling America’s industrial infrastructure has become a growth industry.
“I get no pleasure from taking these places apart,” Matt said to me more than once this summer, exhaling cigarette smoke. Tower Automotive’s new owner, Cerberus Capital Management, also owned the Chrysler assembly and engine plants that bookend the Budd plant. Despite himself, Matt couldn’t help but speculate on which stamping plants Cerberus might decide to close.
While the Big Three seek to shed workers, Matt is always looking for bodies. “When can you start?” he asked when we first met. Some of the older guys on the crew are former U.A.W. members, and the younger guys, in an earlier era, might well have been Big Three workers. Yet even they seemed to realize that by working the Budd job they were part of something historic. Still scattered about the plant were Frisbees and buttons bearing the logo for U.A.W. Local 306, and this message: “I Believe in Budd Detroit.”
“See you Saturday?” I said to Matt on my way out. “I’ll be here,” Matt said.
On my way back downtown, I saw that the picketers in front of Poletown remained, but the news crews had departed. A day and a half later, the strike would be over, and among the reported U.A.W. concessions was the acceptance of a two-tier wage structure, one that could pay new workers as little as $12 to $15 an hour. That means that a young worker starting out could conceivably make as much taking an auto plant apart as he could working in one. It’d be dirty work, occasionally dangerous and done without union backing, much like auto work had been before the U.A.W.
“I want to be here to take this apart,” Duane, General Rigging’s electrical foreman, said to me this summer. He considered the Budd plant holy. “I used to work at Ford’s,” he said, applying the possessive, as working-class Detroiters do, “and I got laid off from Ford’s. What they did was, they built a new assembly line. One day, we went over for a tour of the new line, and they showed me a machine that was doing my job. This was in 1979. They turned the lights out, and the machine was still doing the job. So I said to myself, ‘Now I need to learn how to build machines.’ Which is why I’m here taking them apart. Because I know how to put them together. Now I’m 50 years old, and I wouldn’t give up being here for nothing.”
Paul Clemens is the author of “Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir.”
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
NSF ITEST STEM Grant Initiative
Published Online: September 25, 2007
Published in Print: September 26, 2007
Engineering a Blueprint for Success
A rapidly growing program aimed at propelling more U.S. students toward engineering careers is attracting recruits beyond the usual pool of prospective high school talent.
Wheaton, Md.
Amid the clicking of computer mice and muted consultation, Wheaton High School teacher Marcus Lee’s class of 11th and 12th graders pored over the electronic blueprint for a four-story building they were designing on their desktops. The calculations for each floor needed to be set just right if the structure was to stand on its own.
“What we want to do is lay a foundation,” Mr. Lee explained. He was addressing the students in his civil-engineering and architecture class, but he could just as well have been talking about the goal of his school’s Academy of Engineering—and that of Project Lead the Way, the national curriculum it uses.
| A Search for Answers in Science and Math |
|---|
Often referred to by its acronym, PLTW is a rigorous four-year program of honors-level math and science, plus engineering, culminating in at least precalculus and advanced science classes, along with an intensive, hands-on collaborative engineering project. The curriculum is produced by Project Lead the Way Inc., a 10-year-old, Clifton Park, N.Y.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of American college students who study and ultimately work in engineering fields.
The program has swiftly grown to include about 2,200 schools in 49 states. Last school year, 175,000 students were enrolled in PLTW classes nationwide.
Shane R. Stroup, the director of Wheaton High’s Academy of Engineering, gives the rigor of PLTW’s curriculum much of the credit for the success his students have had so far.
Members of the academy’s 26-student class of 2007—its first graduating class—went on to study in mechanical, electrical, nuclear, and other engineering fields at such selective universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University, claiming more than $1.6 million in scholarships. Eighty-nine percent of Wheaton High’s 1,325 students are members of racial or ethnic minorities, and 41 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches.
“I think the reason was because of the Project Lead the Way curriculum,” said Mr. Stroup. “It prepared these students.”
It’s a familiar refrain that the United States is critically short of students prepared to perpetuate the nation’s decades-long pre-eminence in science, engineering, and the mathematics critical to both.
But when it comes to doing something about it, educators who have studied the alternatives say there’s no one else offering as much rigor in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math education to as many students as Project Lead the Way.
“What we found was that PLTW offers the best curriculum out there,” said Bart Aslin, the director of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Education Foundation in Dearborn, Mich. “It’s a pipeline vision to let as many students as possible see the excitement of science, technology, math.”
The Technical Track
Students at the Project Lead the Way program at Wheaton High School in Montgomery County, Md., can choose from among several sequences of courses designed to prepare them for the postsecondary study of engineering.
Click on graphic below to see the Grade 9 - 12 curriculum.
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NOTE: The curriculum also calls for freshmen and sophomores to take physical education, and for seniors to take an engineering-related college course, elective, or internship.
PLTW was singled out by the congressionally chartered National Academy of Sciences in its oft-cited 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which recommended that the program serve as the national model for expansion of science and engineering education.
Still, the program is neither cost-free nor easy. Because of the hands-on nature of many PLTW classes, implementing the curriculum can cost up to $95,000 per school depending on what computer equipment and facilities a school already has. Robotic equipment and automated manufacturing machinery required for PLTW elective courses, such as Computer Integrated Manufacturing, can cost tens of thousands of dollars more.
Schools or districts must also pay for the specialized two-week summer training for teachers at one of PLTW’s 30-plus partner colleges and universities. The per-teacher cost of the required course varies, but can exceed $2,000.
To the teachers who attend—70 percent of whom have previously taught career and technical education, and may not have any formal engineering training—the cost may feel like the least of it. Mr. Stroup, the Wheaton High engineering-academy director, called the training “boot camp.”
“These classes are very hard-hitting,” concurred Renny Whittenbarger, an engineering teacher at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tenn. “PLTW will fail you. … You have to pass their exam before they let you [teach].”
At Wheaton High School, a clutch of adults filtered into Mr. Lee’s darkened class early one recent Monday morning, watching as the students compared notes on their building project. The students were showcasing the kind of collaborative effort that PLTW emphasizes, in lieu of the “eyes on your own paper” style of learning that prevails in many classrooms.
“What’s really impressive to me is to see the kids helping each other out—you never see that at the university level,” whispered James W. Sturges. “That’s how we work in engineering.”
Mr. Sturges was visiting in part because he’s the president of the Montgomery County school district’s advisory board on careers in engineering, scientific research, and manufacturing technologies, but also because he is the director of mission assurance at the Bethesda, Md.-based aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp.
“We’re the biggest employer of engineers in the United States,” said Mr. Sturges, who is himself an engineer. “If we can’t get [enough of] those, it’s going to affect our business.”
Student Sephar Simon uses a measuring device known as a digital multimeter to gauge resistance during the class.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
Those same concerns gave rise to the project that would become PLTW.
In the 1980s, Richard Blaise, now a vice president of PLTW, was the director of occupational education for the Shenendehowa Central School District in Clifton Park, N.Y. To help expand his district’s technology education offerings, he reached out to local industry leaders, including Richard C. Liebich, now PLTW’s chief executive officer and the chairman of its board of directors, to form a technology advisory board.
Mr. Liebich, a former president of Houston-based Sysco Foods, was then running Transport National Development, an industrial cutting-tool manufacturer in Orchard Park, N.Y.—one of several similar companies he would eventually head as CEO and chairman.
Mr. Liebich was having trouble hiring engineers, “and it became apparent then that, yes, we need to do something,” said PLTW spokeswoman Crickett Thomas-O’Dell.
Funding the nascent idea through Mr. Liebich’s Clifton Park-based Charitable Venture Foundation, Mr. Blaise and his staff were able to field-test what would become PLTW at upstate New York middle schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the 1997-98 school year, when PLTW was spun off to become a separate nonprofit group, high schools piloted the program, and by 2000-01, over 300 schools in more than 25 states offered the curriculum.
Project Lead the Way is now self-sufficient, running on revenues from the licensing of PLTW software and the sale of teaching tools to schools, Ms. Thomas-O’Dell said.
David Waugh, a dean emeritus of the University of South Carolina’s college of engineering who has observed PLTW with interest but is not involved with the program, attributes much of its rapid expansion to the fact that while many precollegiate educators recognize the importance of engineering, few teach the subject.
“So many people in high school have very little idea about what engineering really is,” said Mr. Waugh, a past president of the Alexandria, Va.-based National Society of Professional Engineers. “They have science classes, and they’ll encounter things like chemistry and even physics, but with engineering, they don’t encounter anything. That’s sort of where it ends.”
By contrast, PLTW puts engineering firmly in the foreground, and it mixes lots of projects into the curriculum.
Ninth grader William Mendoza works on a class project as part of a pre-engineering program at his Wheaton, Md., high school that follows a curriculum from a national initiative called Project Lead the Way.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
“We make it fast-paced and hands-on,” said Steve Clariday, the career education director at Cleveland High in Tennessee.
As part of a Cleveland High PLTW engineering class, students work in teams to build cardboard boats that they’ll race in the school’s swimming pool. But first they have to calculate how many cubic feet the boat should be, how fast it will sink, and other factors on their own; the only equation they’re given is that one cubic foot of cardboard will sustain 60 pounds.
“They get frustrated,” Mr. Clariday said, “but they get to know the math.”
Cleveland High students also have designed tools to help people in their community, including a can opener with an extra mechanical advantage to help a woman with arthritis, and a rake that a one-armed man can use comfortably.
Along with other nations’ more-aggressive prioritization of technical education, raw population trends do not favor future American pre-eminence in engineering.
According to projections by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s directorate for education, India will produce more than twice the number of American and European college graduates combined by 2015. China will have even more.
The United States “cannot build a workforce of just white males in engineering,” said Laurie Maxson, the director of Science Technology & Engineering Preview Summer Camp Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.—a transition between PLTW’s middle-school-level Gateway to Technology program and its high school curriculum.
“They’re focusing on all groups—all groups in this country are underrepresented when it comes to engineering,” the University of South Carolina’s Mr. Waugh said of PTLW.
According to data gathered on behalf of PLTW in 2005-06
by the evaluation firm TrueOutcomes Inc. of York, Pa., the program has had some success in recruiting students of color.
White students still account for more than 70 percent of PLTW students. But they’re only slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes compared with the enrollment of the schools in which they operate. Hispanics also are slightly overrepresented in PLTW classes, relative to the populations of their schools.
African-Americans are underrepresented by about 20 percentage points in PLTW classes, compared with their share of their schools’ overall enrollment—“not where we want to be,” said Carolyn Helm, PLTW’S pre-engineering curriculum project director.
“But we’re doing a heck of a lot better than colleges,” in whose engineering programs African-Amerian students are even more underrepresented, she said.
The program has had trouble attracting girls, who make up only 17 percent of PLTW classes. “We really have a hard time getting females involved,” Ms. Maxson said.
Yet Project Lead the Way has made strong inroads among two other groups that are not always well represented in STEM fields: the less-well-off and the academically unspectacular.
Senior Jessica Steinmann, bottom at right, and junior Marcos Rego work on computer-generated building designs during their civil-engineering and architecture course.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
According to the TrueOutcomes data, the program is available at schools across the economic spectrum, but is represented especially well at schools that serve free or reduced-price lunches to more than 70 percent of their students.
“We don’t have money for college,” said Jessica Steinmann, a 16-year-old senior in Wheaton High’s engineering academy. “This is a way out.”
A Haitian immigrant, Ms. Steinmann now plans to study aeronautical engineering in college.
Andrew Kim, a 17-year-old Korean-American senior in the Academy of Engineering, came into the program in 9th grade as a special education student with poor grades. Now he is breezing through honors-level classes and hopes to study mechanical engineering at either MIT or the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
“My dad actually didn’t want me to go to Wheaton High School,” said Mr. Kim, recalling his father’s fears about “thugs in the hallways.” The school is the poorest in mostly affluent Montgomery County, Principal Kevin E. Lowndes said.
Senior Andrew Kim, second from right, works with Richard Sutton during their class in engineering design and development at Wheaton High’s engineering academy. Mr. Kim, who started out with poor grades, plans to study mechanical engineering in college next year.
—Christopher Powers/Education Week
But Mr. Kim said the academy’s rigor has won his father over, and now his younger brother, a 9th grader, has joined the program.
If PLTW hewed to the usual strategy of putting high-rigor academic programs only in well-to-do areas, said Mr. Sturges, the Lockheed engineer and advisory-board president, “you wouldn’t put this [engineering academy] in a high-FARMS [free and reduced-price meal system] area, you’d put it in a no-FARMS area.”
Mr. Lowndes, the Wheaton High principal, said “the most impressive thing” about the engineering program is what it does for average students. “It’s teaching them through a cohort how to be successful in school and why it’s important to take the rigorous courses,” he said.
As Lynne M. Gilli, the program manager of the Maryland Department of Education’s career and technical education instructional branch, put it: “We are not trying to recruit the best and brightest” for PLTW pre-engineering programs. “We’re trying to recruit the top 80 percent.”
Monday, September 24, 2007
Asset Utilization Project?
LTU solar home coming to Troy after Solar Decathlon
Lawrence Technological University's Solar Decathlon home has found a home after its turn on the National Mall in competition next month. Michele Hodges, president of the Troy Chamber of Commerce, said her organization has obtained federal funding to buy the home at the conclusion of the competition. It is to be delivered to Troy on Oct. 23 and re-assembled on the Troy Civic Center campus. It will then be used as a living laboratory of sustainable practices. Hodges said the city and chamber in Troy are also sending a delegation to Washington, D.C. for the competition.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
The Milford Powerhouse Project
The Milford Powerhouse
http:www.milfordhistory.org (click-on "powerhouse" on left-side)
Powerhouse (Virtual Tour)
http://www.visualtour.com/shownp.asp?SK=13&T=843903
The Pettibone Creek Powerhouse blog-site
http://pcpowerhouse.blogspot.com
Milford Powerhouse Renovation Committee
NEXT Meeting: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 7:00PM (Informal Presentation)
Friday, September 21, 2007
SWEET! (UWSEM Agenda for Change Initaitive)
September 7, 2007
United Way for
Ref: UWSEM Agenda for Change “Educational Preparedness” Collaborative LOI
Agenda for Change Committee:
Communities to Schools Regional Digital Collaboratory
SKETCH of INTENTION “Pilot Project”: Create and develop a youth-based digitally networked community (networked two-way telecommunications) of inclusive entities to include schools, neighborhood and city community centers, human service organizations, various community capacity building organizations, public service organizations, arts and cultural organizations, business, industry and government.
Attributes of Aspirations (Limited Only by Our Combined Imaginations, Creativity and Innovation)
- Community Interaction and Engagement
*Build deeper and richer community alliances. Build organizational leadership and capacity, service-learning and engagement vehicles for change from merely synergistic to systemic imperatives.
- Educational Enhancement and Distribution Channels
*Utilize existing K-12 educational assets; teachers, pedagogy, curriculum, underutilized digital infrastructure, etc. Develop digital media and learning curriculum, pedagogy, distribution methodologies and modalities aligned with new 21st Century economic realities with a particular focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines. Create connections to relevant real-world experts and working environments.
- Youth Development and Leadership
*Create student-led, student-taught, project-based explorations emphasizing creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors that resonate with their world as they encounter it while also learning how to think instead of what to think.
- 21st Century Skills for New Creative Economy Career Development
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The Absence of Fear (A true MISSION Statement)
ANTI-TERRORISM
If SEND is about any specific business it is definitely in the anti-terrorism business.
Terrorism is, according to Webster is the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion. Well then what does Webster say about terror? It is 1. A state of intense fear 2. One that inspires fear, worry or anxiety and includes an appalling person place or thing 3. Reign of terror 4. Violence with the intent to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands ( an extreme form of manipulation) .
Well then our friend Mr. Webster does not declare that any one country has a monopoly on this terrorism problem . So lets examine some of the basic underlying terrors that are gripping the Earth’s populace now. They are war, poverty, hunger, and in general a deprivation or total lack of comfort in life. Wow, that covers a lot of territory. So, what if anything can a small organization like SEND add to the world that could possibly mitigate even a fraction of all this terror?
In order to gain the most ground for the Earths population in this fight, we realize that the essence of terror is fear of the unknown, fear of what is around the corner. It is fear of the dark unknown.
It is a helplessness bred from not understanding how one would go about the business of changing their worldly situation to a sustainable living environment. Sustainable from a personal immediate view could mean a general feeling that tomorrow will most likely bring about a continuation of fulfillment of their hopes dreams and aspirations. That may be just some shelter, food and health.
So let’s start with the most common denominator and go from there.
Our shared-vision of Sustainable ENergy Delivery LLC (SEND) is to create shared learning environments for people that can empower them to develop the cognitive skills as quickly as possible in order to bring light to their world .
The light of understanding of the natural world and human beings impact on it is essential in order to bring about any change that will help us to continue to exist as a species on this planet.
We will teach in ways that will chase away the darkness that has suffocated their minds and thereby been such a breeding ground for terror. We are about education of how to realize ones own potential to bring about changes in the world that will link up with positive developments already underway.
If SEND is about any specific business it is definitely in the anti-terrorism business.
Terrorism is, according to Webster is the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion. Well then what does Webster say about terror? It is 1. A state of intense fear 2. One that inspires fear, worry or anxiety and includes an appalling person place or thing 3. Reign of terror 4. Violence with the intent to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands ( an extreme form of manipulation) .
Well then our friend Mr. Webster does not declare that any one country has a monopoly on this terrorism problem . So lets examine some of the basic underlying terrors that are gripping the Earth’s populace now. They are war, poverty, hunger, and in general a deprivation or total lack of comfort in life. Wow, that covers a lot of territory. So, what if anything can a small organization like SEND add to the world that could possibly mitigate even a fraction of all this terror?
In order to gain the most ground for the Earths population in this fight, we realize that the essence of terror is fear of the unknown, fear of what is around the corner. It is fear of the dark unknown.
It is a helplessness bred from not understanding how one would go about the business of changing their worldly situation to a sustainable living environment. Sustainable from a personal immediate view could mean a general feeling that tomorrow will most likely bring about a continuation of fulfillment of their hopes dreams and aspirations. That may be just some shelter, food and health.
So let’s start with the most common denominator and go from there.
Our shared-vision of Sustainable ENergy Delivery LLC (SEND) is to create shared learning environments for people that can empower them to develop the cognitive skills as quickly as possible in order to bring light to their world .
The light of understanding of the natural world and human beings impact on it is essential in order to bring about any change that will help us to continue to exist as a species on this planet.
We will teach in ways that will chase away the darkness that has suffocated their minds and thereby been such a breeding ground for terror. We are about education of how to realize ones own potential to bring about changes in the world that will link up with positive developments already underway.
SEND is creating project environments where this new found cognitive power can grow into the known and as yet unknown answers to our most pressing problems. Right now our most pressing problem is the seeming ignorance of how to bring about any kind of real change in our world.
As our beloved Pogo said in his comic strip “We have met the enemy and it is us”. If you are going to fight your enemies then start with the one you can change first. In other words the only real thing in this world you can change is yourself.
As our beloved Pogo said in his comic strip “We have met the enemy and it is us”. If you are going to fight your enemies then start with the one you can change first. In other words the only real thing in this world you can change is yourself.
We at SEND believe that the greatest renewable energy is that of the creative spirit. The interchange of these creative minds is the currency we will use to bring about a sustainable world, a world where the ignorance of terrorism has no place to hide. Will you join us in chasing away the darkness?
Thank You,
Thank You,
James W. Bates
email- renwables@ic.org
Friday, September 14, 2007
LAW and ORDER
There are laws that have been broken and as a consequence there is a price that has to paid in order to right these wrongs. This is one of the basic tenets of the human made legal systems the world over. Is it not? The truth of these Laws under consideration here is irrefutable. These Laws are so right and honorable that one might even be moved to say “We hold these truths to be self evident”.
Well, you may be wondering, which legal system is under consideration here? Is it western law? Or perhaps it is Islamic law? Some people are already thinking “ laws are made to be broken” and the (assumed) Law of Averages is that I won’t be caught in one small indiscretion or perhaps even the successful completion of a really great caper. "Society can afford it, right?”
Other litigious type folks are lining up on both sides of the law ready and waiting to press the legal limits on both sides of the assumed to have been broken law.
The laws under consideration here are the Laws of the Universe. These are the laws or guidelines and context from which all life; organic, inorganic and spiritual are governed. The first identified transgression of these laws was documented millennia ago and is still a major news-breaking story. As a matter of fact the results of this crime have reverberated to such a degree that all of life on this planet is in jeopardy.
This was the fall from grace when humans began to believe that they were above the laws of the universe and could do as they pleased without regard or humility. These laws represent what people have come to call God. You may not believe in God , but you had better become acquainted with the Laws that govern your very existence. Because ignorance (and the supply of that is abundant) does not relieve you of the consequences of your actions or inactions.
This paper is not a thesis though or argument about who God is or isn’t.
This document is about identification of the problem and discovery of some answers.
Sustainable Energy Delivery LLC or SEND is about the business of doing it’s part to educate people about finding ways to live, work and play safely within these natural laws of our shared universe. There is a new awareness of an existing system of commerce. The system of commerce is Natural Capital development. Natural capital is simply the accumulated bounty accumulated by all life that has preceded you. Natural Capital development in human terms is working with this natural bounty in ways that do no harm and lay the groundwork for the next generation into infinity.
It is this interest or bounty, that the industrial world has rapidly consumed to the point of which we are witnessing the collapse of the very systems that have supported life on this planet for time untold.
We are about empowering people, with a focus on youth, to learn HOW to begin to think. Not WHAT to think but HOW to think. This is the essence of cognitive development. We, as all teachers should be, are project managers. These projects are learning environments, where everyone involved including the “teacher” can be empowered to discover new (and old) ways to work creatively within these universal laws. We are about discovering the pathways to sustaining life, true liberty and real happiness.
School is in session. Would you like to sit in on the classroom?
Well, you may be wondering, which legal system is under consideration here? Is it western law? Or perhaps it is Islamic law? Some people are already thinking “ laws are made to be broken” and the (assumed) Law of Averages is that I won’t be caught in one small indiscretion or perhaps even the successful completion of a really great caper. "Society can afford it, right?”
Other litigious type folks are lining up on both sides of the law ready and waiting to press the legal limits on both sides of the assumed to have been broken law.
The laws under consideration here are the Laws of the Universe. These are the laws or guidelines and context from which all life; organic, inorganic and spiritual are governed. The first identified transgression of these laws was documented millennia ago and is still a major news-breaking story. As a matter of fact the results of this crime have reverberated to such a degree that all of life on this planet is in jeopardy.
This was the fall from grace when humans began to believe that they were above the laws of the universe and could do as they pleased without regard or humility. These laws represent what people have come to call God. You may not believe in God , but you had better become acquainted with the Laws that govern your very existence. Because ignorance (and the supply of that is abundant) does not relieve you of the consequences of your actions or inactions.
This paper is not a thesis though or argument about who God is or isn’t.
This document is about identification of the problem and discovery of some answers.
Sustainable Energy Delivery LLC or SEND is about the business of doing it’s part to educate people about finding ways to live, work and play safely within these natural laws of our shared universe. There is a new awareness of an existing system of commerce. The system of commerce is Natural Capital development. Natural capital is simply the accumulated bounty accumulated by all life that has preceded you. Natural Capital development in human terms is working with this natural bounty in ways that do no harm and lay the groundwork for the next generation into infinity.
It is this interest or bounty, that the industrial world has rapidly consumed to the point of which we are witnessing the collapse of the very systems that have supported life on this planet for time untold.
We are about empowering people, with a focus on youth, to learn HOW to begin to think. Not WHAT to think but HOW to think. This is the essence of cognitive development. We, as all teachers should be, are project managers. These projects are learning environments, where everyone involved including the “teacher” can be empowered to discover new (and old) ways to work creatively within these universal laws. We are about discovering the pathways to sustaining life, true liberty and real happiness.
School is in session. Would you like to sit in on the classroom?
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Digital Directions Readers Respond
Published: September 12, 2007
Readers Respond
The premiere issue of Digital Directions, launched in June, prompted many responses from readers. Here is a sampling.
Digital Natives
This is a great publication, and I truly appreciate all of the articles, especially John Q. Porter’s interview. I agree with him that technology is being held to a greater standard than some of the other instructional tools.
I am the K-12 technology curriculum leader for the Long Beach Unified School District in California and am constantly looking out for effective emerging technology for use in the district and in the classroom. Our student population has changed, and we need to help our teachers meet the needs of these digital natives.
I am currently working on my dissertation on the changing roles of teachers in one-to-one laptop classrooms and am interested in seeing what is happening in other educational institutions.
Our district technology budget is currently limited since there is no line item for technology at the state level and we have to depend on district general funds. We are looking at our needs and hope to have a budget that will allow us to support the emerging technologies.
I think this publication is above average and look forward to future issues.
Vanitha Chandrasekhar
K-12 Technology Curriculum Leader
Long Beach Unified School District
Long Beach, Calif.
Exemplary Methodologies
Congratulations! Finally, something that is both innovative and generative with regard to truly exemplary educational digital-technology methodologies and executions. Thank you on behalf of all teachers, students, and parents currently constrained by traditional education irrelevance.
Jim Ross
President
21st Century Digital Learning Environments
Clinton Township, Mich.
Keep It Up!
Education Week does wonderful work, and I’m really looking forward to this new resource for information on a field of such large and growing importance. Keep it up!
Brian Taylor
Managing Editor
California School Boards Association
West Sacramento, Calif.
Gaming in the Classroom
I wanted to drop you a note and tell you how much I enjoyed the Digital Directions magazine. I wanted to share something that we are working on in West Virginia that you might be interested in. I have done a lot of research on teachers’ using gaming in the classroom. What I found was until teachers have their own “game” to play and learn from, they will not transfer that methodology to the classroom. With that being said, we worked with Ruby Payne and one of her books, Working with Students,and used the context of it to build an online simulation game for teachers to play to practice classroom-discipline strategies. We have done formative and summative evaluations on it in five universities across West Virginia.
Nancy Sturm
Education Technology Adviser to Gov. Joe Manchin III
West Virginia Office of Technology
Charleston, W.Va.
Correction: A story in the Summer 2007 issue, “Wireless Technologies Present New Set of Challenges,” incorrectly referred to routers and hubs in wireless networks. It should have referred to wireless hubs, which do not use routers. Also, the story should have said that the common wireless standards are 802.11 b and 802.11 g, and that 802.11 b moves data at up to 11 megabits per second, and 802.11 g moves data at 54 megabits per second. In addition, the story should have said that standard wired networks move data at 100 megabits per second.
Vol. 01, Issue Fall 2007, Page 5
Something from which to "Frame" our Intentions
Some recent additions to OUR Portfolio
The Creation of Consious Culture through Educational Innovation
http://changethis.com/38.03.EdInnovation
The Mind of The Innovator
http://changethis.com/37.01.MindInnovator
The Creation of Consious Culture through Educational Innovation
http://changethis.com/38.03.EdInnovation
The Mind of The Innovator
http://changethis.com/37.01.MindInnovator
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
LTU Solar House! (UPDATE)
| Lawrence Tech sets open houses for new solar home |
 |
Posted on 9/11/2007 3:08:33 PM Lawrence Technological University has scheduled public open houses for the house it's entering in the national Solar Decathlon energy-self-sufficient home contest. They have designed and built a house with nearly 700 square feet of living space that will use the sun to generate all the power needed for heating, cooling, lighting and appliances – with some left over to operate a small electric vehicle. Two open houses supported by NextEnergy, a nonprofit that promotes the development of alternative energy technology in Michigan, will be held Friday, Sept. 14, and Friday, Sept. 21, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. at Lawrence Tech’s campus, 21000 W. 10 Mile Road in Southfield. Shortly thereafter, the house will be taken apart, shipped to Washington and then reassembled on the National Mall for the Oct. 12-20 Solar Decathlon competition sponsored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy. “The team at Lawrence Tech has built a quality sustainable home that is both economical and earth-friendly," said NextEnergy president and CEO Jim Croce. "The thinking that went into this structure is frankly astounding. This is an amazing achievement for this internationally recognized student competition and is further evidence of Lawrence Tech’s academic strength in the alternative energy sector.” Lawrence Tech’s Solar Decathlon team has also received major sponsorship contributions from Denso International, Masco Corp. Foundation and the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters and Millwrights. The field of 20 Solar Decathlon competitors includes teams from MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Germany, Spain, Canada and Puerto Rico. Lawrence Tech is the smallest university in the competition and the only one from Michigan. The Lawrence Tech team took the name ALOeTERRA, which means "nourish the earth." More than 40 students have been involved in the project, and a core of 16 students and recent graduates put in long hours over the summer to build the house they designed. Faculty advisor Philip Plowright, an assistant professor of architecture, said the students have taken advantage of construction products that are already available to the public. “This is not the house of the future. It is the house of now,” Plowright said. “We are using well-vetted products and technology, and the focus has been on keeping it simple. As a team, we made a conscious decision not to go for the wow factor.” The primary source of energy for hot water and heating is an array of tubes that has a payback period of about two years. That system can store a day’s worth of hot water. All of the home’s electricity will come from photovoltaic panels that cover much of the roof. When sunlight isn’t available, the home’s battery system will meet all the home’s energy needs, including a backup for the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. The other half of the self-sustainability equation is a reduction in the amount of energy required. Very few American households are taking advantage of some of the construction strategies used by the Lawrence Tech team to reduce energy consumption. “We want our house to be a stage for educating homebuyers about the possibilities for dramatically decreasing the carbon footprint of their homes,” said Christina Span, a member of Team ALOeTERRA. “Making homes more energy-efficient is the single biggest thing we can do as a country to reduce our country’s energy consumption and reliance on foreign oil.” For information about Lawrence Tech’s Team ALOeTERRA, go to http://solar.ltu.edu. For information about the Solar Decathlon competition, go to www.solardecathlon.org. |
Conference!
Michigan has a bright future in wind energy, according to attendees at a sold-out wind power conference held Monday and Tuesday at Michigan State University.
"Manufacturing and Developing Wind Energy Systems in Michigan" aimed to link wind power companies with Michigan's manufacturing base, which is more than capable of building the mechanical guts of wind turbine systems.
It also offered a look at ideas and regulations for creating wind power businesses, and information from veteran wind entrepreneurs.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm was the event's Tuesday luncheon speaker, earning a standing ovation from a packed conference room for promising to pass this fall a "renewable portfolio standard" law for the state. Such laws, common in many other states, mandate that a certain percentage of a state's total energy consumption be generated from renewable sources by a certain future date.
Granholm said Michigan's long coastline -- longer than California's or Florida's, longer than any state except Alaska -- combined with its deep manufacturing expertise make Michigan one of the world's top prospects for generating wind power.
"Michigan is going green," Granholm said, adding that the state's strategy is to replace lost auto industry jobs with jobs in the renewable energy industry.
Granholm also touted the possibilities of offshore wind turbines that would also harness wave energy in the Great Lakes.
Earlier Tuesday, attendees got information on company formation from Mark Willers, a director at MinWind LLC in Lucerne, Minn., a company set up by 66 farmers with interests in wind power, corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel.
Also, breakfast keynoter James Walker, president-elect of the American Wind Energy Association, said wind can actually power all of the electrical and transportation needs of the United States.
Walker said the current electrical grid has a total capacity of 1,000 gigawatts -- but that 11,000 gigawatts of wind power could be harvested in the U.S. with current technology. That's enough to provide electricity for current uses, as well as for the eventual electrification of the nation's vehicle fleet.
Jack McCloughan, economic development liaison with the city of South Haven, spoke about his community's wind power partnership with Albermarle Corp. at a local chemical plant, while Wyandotte officials spoke of the Downriver city's "brownfield to windfield" project.
And Lisa Daniels, executive director of Windustry, in Minneapolis, led a review of Midwest community-based wind projects.
The event reached its capacity of 300 attendees five days before the event, according to the MSU Land Policy Institute, the host of the event, and almost all of those registrants showed up -- 280 dinners were served Monday night.
The event's other host sponsors were NextEnergy, the state's alternative energy industry accelerator, and the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
The event also featured exhibitors -- some you'd expect, such as Hybrid Design Services Inc., a Dearborn renewable energy system design firm, and Kent Power Inc., a renewable energy contractor in Kent City.
But some you wouldn't expect -- Diversified Tooling Group of Madison Heights, the law firm of Howard and Howard, the Ann Arbor marketing and business plan advisors Shepherd Advisors.
Currently, Michigan has just three functioning wind turbines -- two in Mackinaw City and one in Traverse City. But many more are on the drawing boards, in locations ranging from Huron County to Leelanau County to the northern shore of the Upper Peninsula.
Also, Western Michigan University plans to dedicate a wind turbine generator Friday at its College of Engineering on Kalamazoo's western border along US-131.
From: OUR MAN on the SCENE and IN THE TRENCHES!
Gentlemen,
AS you know, I attended the MSU wind energy conference on 9-10 and 9-11 where I represented SEND. The only organization attending the conference that was objectively representing K thru 20 education was SEND. Although there is a Michigan Wind Energy Research Collaborative (MIWERC) and they are a big part of the effort to install large wind energy in Michigan. Their focus is mainly on higher education with an emphasis on graduate type studies, I beleive this is the case although they need to be researched more. Their lead man is now going to be John D. Warbach, PHD of the MSU Land Policy Institute website www.landpolicy.msu.edu.
Probably the most immediately relevant contact that was established was with a Mr. Dilip K. Nigam, PE OF Analytical Design Service Corporation.Phone #734-761-2626 ext.223 and website of www.adsc-usa.com. They are the redesign developers of the Mackensie (Sp?) Bay Vertical Axis Wind Turbine.
They ostensibly hold the patent on this new design and we entered into preliminary negototiations about working collaboratively in the areas of research that SEND has put forth in the Marine and other applications. I also made some great contacts with financing groups such as Cleantech Group LLC of Brighton, Mich. website www.cleantech.com.
Although I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't find one person in the room that knew about the STEM initiative, there wasn't many who hadn't heard about it by the time the conference was over. Also I didn't come across anyone who could not seemingly comprehend the need for linking up K-20 (and beyond) into real world learning environments such as we are proposing.
My main problem right now is that while I am trying to juggle the electrical work along with birthing SEND, this is all taking it's toll on my finances and sleep. The end result is my effectiveness is diminished in all areas. So my immediate goal is to break free from the gravity of the mundane from the financial aspects anyway. Any input?
Looking forward,
Jim B.
Conference shows strong interest in wind energy in Michigan
Michigan has a bright future in wind energy, according to attendees at a sold-out wind power conference in September at Michigan State University. "Manufacturing and Developing Wind Energy Systems in Michigan" aimed to link wind power companies with Michigan's manufacturing base, which is more than capable of building the mechanical guts of wind turbine systems. It also offered a look at ideas and regulations for creating wind power businesses, and information from veteran wind entrepreneurs. Jack McCloughan, economic development liaison with the city of South Haven, spoke about his community's wind power partnership with Albermarle Corp. at a local chemical plant, while Wyandotte officials spoke of the Downriver city's "brownfield to windfield" project. Currently, Michigan has just three functioning wind turbines -- two in Mackinaw City and one in Traverse City. But many more are on the drawing boards, in locations ranging from Huron County to Leelanau County to the northern shore of the Upper Peninsula.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Rethinking "Blank Slate" Design Metaphor Accomplishes "More for Less"
The New York Times
_____
September 11, 2007
Low Technologies, High Aims
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.
M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.
This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world.
Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.
Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for a year or more.
The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and Kenneth Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering school near Boston, were also involved.
The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the lab is nicknamed “Amy’s World.”
Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water, electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.
Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster, cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.
She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. “Everyone calls this an experiment,” Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind. “I call it the realization of a vision.”
The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.
“We have a real friction problem,” Ms. Stupin yelled.
The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — 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.”
She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”
Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also had to be sure that their creations could be built of local materials cheaply enough to be bought by the world’s poorest people, that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have deep-rooted rhythms.
The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50 visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other countries.
Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university programs to develop commercially viable products that advance society.
The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.
He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”
The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises. Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the push for such initiatives was coming from young people.
Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was “no paper, just prototypes.”
In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards. The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food, energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).
Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the first three-dimensional models.
Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from Ms. Smith’s black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters — people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices. They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker cabinets for a Guns N’ Roses concert.
The mentors’ task was making things work. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the verge of a Home Depot run,” announced Jock Brandis, who had driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.
Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller for a Malian village was far different from that for building a camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.
The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: “It’s, ‘Here’s the model high-rise made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it, and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles, and next Tuesday it’s got to happen.’ ”
At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one group’s design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful smoke.
“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” he said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”
Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a vendor’s inventory.
“Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums,” explained Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as a graduate student in Kanpur, India. “He comes with all his fruit and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and whatever is left he has to throw it away because he can’t store it.”
Ms. Thomas said, “Amy’s class is about the hardest class to get into at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about how to make a million dollars after you graduate.”
She added: “It’s taking industrial design theory and applying it to where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle iron and towels could mean a month’s supply of food. To me, that’s just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working on designing a slick new computer.”
_____
September 11, 2007
Low Technologies, High Aims
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time.
M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve the lives of the world’s bottom billion, those who live on a dollar a day or less and who often die young.
This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world.
Mohamed Mashaal, a young British engineer headed for a job with BP on the North Sea this fall, poured water into a handcrafted plastic backpack worn by a design partner, Bernard Kiwia, who teaches bicycle repair in rural Tanzania and hopes to offer women there an easier way to tote the precious liquid for long distances.
Sham Tembo, an electrical engineer from Zambia, and Jessica Vechakul, an engineering graduate student at M.I.T., slowly added a cow manure puree to a five-gallon bucket holding charcoal made from corncobs. In the right configuration, the mix might generate enough electricity to charge a cellphone battery or a small flashlight for a year or more.
The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in 2004 won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, and Kenneth Pickar, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology. Faculty and students from Olin College, an engineering school near Boston, were also involved.
The flurry of activity was taking place at D-Lab, a research center and set of courses at M.I.T. devoted to devising cheap technologies that could have a big effect in impoverished communities. In homage to Ms. Smith’s passion for attacking poverty from the ground up, the lab is nicknamed “Amy’s World.”
Typically, D-Lab sends students abroad in midwinter breaks to work with people who are struggling with a lack of clean water, electricity, cooking fuels or mechanical power to turn crops into products. For four weeks, though, the real world had come to M.I.T.
Throughout the workshop, Ms. Smith served as scoutmaster, cheerleader, cook and personal shopper (when work flowed deep into the night), and she provided periodic reality checks.
She seemed dazed at times, but never fazed. “Everyone calls this an experiment,” Ms. Smith said of the workshop, the first of its kind. “I call it the realization of a vision.”
The work itself was often two steps back, not one step forward. As Lhamotso, a young woman from Tibet, and Laura Stupin, who just graduated from Olin, wrestled with a whirring Rube Goldberg mash-up of bicycle and grain mill, the chain slipped with a loud clang.
“We have a real friction problem,” Ms. Stupin yelled.
The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — 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.”
She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”
Developing a pedal-powered grain mill or a backpack for water, as workshop participants did, was only a first step. The teams also had to be sure that their creations could be built of local materials cheaply enough to be bought by the world’s poorest people, that they could be fixed easily and fit ways of living that have deep-rooted rhythms.
The workshop began in mid-July, with the arrival of nearly 50 visitors from Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Tanzania, Tibet and other countries.
Most of the $200,000 budget was provided by donations from individuals and private groups, including the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which supports university programs to develop commercially viable products that advance society.
The workshop began with a lecture by Paul Polak, a psychiatrist turned entrepreneur, who develops simple solutions for the problems of the poor. Dr. Polak, who has become something of a guru to the design revolution movement, railed against conventional charity and insisted that the route to prosperity lies in inventions that improve lives but mesh with existing lifestyles.
He laid out the principles of development from the bottom up, including the importance of first listening and watching, then following the old dictum “small is beautiful” with another, equally important one: “cheap is beautiful.”
The goal, he said, should be to improve a million lives, and to make technologies that can be sold and bought in increments — like a drip-irrigating system that can expand as a farmer’s income rises. Dr. Polak said in an interview that at least in the classroom, the push for such initiatives was coming from young people.
Ms. Smith said she wanted to avoid having the workshop end up as yet another academic exercise where the only outcome is often a set of paper proceedings or pledges. This time, she said, the goal was “no paper, just prototypes.”
In fact, in the first days of the workshop, it seemed that the only paper in evidence was an ever-spreading, flower-petal array of blue, green, pink and yellow sticky notes on walls and blackboards. The notes charted the progression from basic needs (water, food, energy, health) to specific issues (a three-mile hike to and from the nearest water supply in a Tanzanian village, the lack of a well-testing kit that a Bangladeshi village clinic could afford).
Ms. Smith placed participants in project teams. Then came round-table discussions, rough sketches, technical drawings and the first three-dimensional models.
Half a dozen volunteer mentors helped the participants make their ideas more concrete. Some were academics, like Ariel Phillips of Harvard, whose specialty is group dynamics. Others were drawn from Ms. Smith’s black book filled with an array of fixers and crafters — people whose careers have been spent solving problems by turning metal, plastic, wood, circuitry and motors into working devices. They included Dennis Nagle, a former weapons designer who abandoned the profession, he said, during the Summer of Love and turned to lighting design and other things, like the 24-ton array of speaker cabinets for a Guns N’ Roses concert.
The mentors’ task was making things work. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the verge of a Home Depot run,” announced Jock Brandis, who had driven to the workshop from Wilmington, N.C. After a career building contraptions on movie sets, Mr. Brandis now helps run the Full Belly Project, which develops machines to simplify village work.
Mr. Brandis noted that the budget for developing a peanut sheller for a Malian village was far different from that for building a camera-toting vehicle in rural Mexico to film Antonio Banderas galloping through the desert as Zorro. But the challenge of filling a niche with limited materials and tools is similar.
The other similarity is that both kinds of design begin with a blank slate. As Mr. Brandis put it: “It’s, ‘Here’s the model high-rise made of Styrofoam, and then the flying saucer has to fly into it, and we need to shoot it three times from three different angles, and next Tuesday it’s got to happen.’ ”
At the workshop, Mr. Brandis examined with approval one group’s design for an oven with three grates of progressively finer mesh to hold charcoal fuel, so that big pieces that have not burned down stay separate from more fully consumed fuel, limiting harmful smoke.
“What you try to do in virtually every situation is make their lives more efficient,” he said. “That’s what the big revolution in America was between 1860 and 1960 — that a person doing a day’s work can produce a lot more product. And that means time is more valuable and that means he has more time to do other things.”
Ashley Thomas, an entering senior at M.I.T., explained the appeal of such work while struggling with a teetering metal frame for a cooler that uses evaporation from wet fabric instead of electrical components to draw heat from its contents. The idea was conceived with participants from Tibet, where meat must be stored for weeks in isolated rural areas, and India, where heat can quickly ruin a vendor’s inventory.
“Imagine a fruit vendor in a rural area or the slums,” explained Deepa Dubey, a partner of Ms. Thomas, who studies product design as a graduate student in Kanpur, India. “He comes with all his fruit and vegetables. At the end of the day he makes one dollar, and whatever is left he has to throw it away because he can’t store it.”
Ms. Thomas said, “Amy’s class is about the hardest class to get into at M.I.T., including at the Sloan School, which is basically about how to make a million dollars after you graduate.”
She added: “It’s taking industrial design theory and applying it to where you can have the greatest impact. Here, $5 worth of angle iron and towels could mean a month’s supply of food. To me, that’s just worth so much more than spending that amount of time working on designing a slick new computer.”
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