Calling all Inventors, Makers and Hackers. This is a fun idea for a hacker invitation. Teams decode the invitation embedded in hardware to reveal their password for an invitation to the creation event.
Related: Botball 2009 Finals – Teen Goalie Designs Camouflage Pads – Engineers in the Workplace
Link broken by pointy haired boss at Votizen, so I removed it. This phb behavior will make those of us who link to websites hesitant to trust anything Votizen posts will stay around 🙁
A nice presentation on why software engineers should work at Votizen.
Related: How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer – The Software Developer Labor Market – Want to be a Computer Game Programmer? – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?
Google Summer of Code 2011 is accepting applications. This is a great initiative I have highlighted previously: Google Summer of Code 2009, Google Summer of Code 2008. The deadline for applications is April 8th.
Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. The program has brought together over 4,500 students with over 300 open source projects, to create millions of lines of code. Participants (including students and mentors) have represented over 85 countries. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its seventh year.
Participating organizations include: R Project for Statistical Computing, Debian Project, WordPress and the Marine Biological Laboratory. (9 of the 175 participating organizations list Ruby as part of their project :-).
For 2010 the effort had a budget of $5,000,000 and accepted 1026 students partnering with 150 Open Source organizations. This year they plan on 1,150 – 1,200 student positions. For 2007 they had 6,200 applications and 7,000 in 2008. I don’t see any data on applicants for 2009.
As for the application it should include the following: your project proposal, why you’d like to execute on this particular project, and the reason you’re the best individual to do so. Your proposal should also include details of your academic, industry, and/or open source development experience, and other details as you see fit. An explanation of your development methodology is a good idea, as well.
Related: Engineering Majors Hold 8 of Top 10 Highest Paid Majors – How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer – posts from my management blog on software development
This reminds me of great times I had experimenting with my father when I was a kid. Though, to be honest, Sarah is much more impressive than I was.
Catapulting to Success with Design of Experiments
Sarah Flexman with her trebuchet at the Storm the Castle science challenge in North Carolina.
Here’s Sarah’s whole process: She built the trebuchet, tested it, used JMP for DOE during optimization, changed the hook angle and sling to improve performance, did more tests, entered this new data, reran the model, and made her final prediction graphs. The variables in her DOE were string length, counterweight and projectile weight, and she optimized for distance – that is, how far the projectile would go.
“Rather than doing 125 tests because we have three variables with five levels each, DOE found a way for us to perform only 26 tests and get approximately the same results. I typed in the results, ran the model and used the JMP Profiler. I understood how the variables predicted the outcome and found several patterns,” she explained.
…
“I hadn’t done any building like that. The whole day was fun. It was a very open learning environment. You were experimenting with things you had never done before. I would definitely do it again,” Sarah said. And she will – next year.
I have collected quite a few design of experiments resources, for those who are interested in learning more. Here is a nice webcast by brother: Combinatorial Testing – The Quadrant of Massive Efficiency Gains, discussing the incredibly efficiency designed combinatorial testing (very similar ideas to design of experiments) can provide.
Related: Learning Design of Experiments with Paper Helicopters – Playing Dice and Children’s Numeracy – Statistics Insights for Scientists and Engineers – Sarah (a different one), aged 3, Learns About Soap – Statistics for Experimenters – Multi-factor designed experiments – Combinatorial Testing for Software – What Else Can Software Development and Testing Learn from Manufacturing? Don’t Forget Design of Experiments (DoE) – Letting Children Learn
Pepsi bottles: no more plastic
Coca-Cola said it welcomed other advances in packaging, but noted that it has scaled up use of its own plant-based bottle since introducing it in 2009. It also says it has demonstrated a 100 percent plant bottle in the lab and is still working to ensure it is commercially viable.
There are other plant-based plastics available or in development, but Herskowitz said these are not environmentally preferred because they typically use plants grown solely for that purpose rather than using the estimated 2 billion tons of agricultural waste produced each year. And these alternative plastics cannot be recycled.
Related: Albatross Chicks Fed Plastic Ocean Pollution by Parents – Bisphenol A (used in plastic bottles) – Biodegradable Plastic Bags and Bottles – Electrolyzed Water Replacing Toxic Cleaning Substances
Bill Gates talking about energy, and climate change, at TED. He is looking at a new type of nuclear reactor using as fuel, what is now nuclear waste.
And, because you’re burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today’s reactors. So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It’s a great thing. It breathes this uranium as it goes along. So it’s kind of like a candle. You can see it’s a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I’ve got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the left over, the 99 percent, where they’ve taken out the part they burn now, so it’s called depleted uranium. That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years. And, simply by filtering sea water in an inexpensive process, you’d have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet.
Related: Unless We Take Decisive Action, Climate Change Will Ravage Our Planet – Molten Salt Solar Reactor Approved by California – Wind Power Capacity Up 170% Worldwide from 2005-2009 – Helium-3 Fusion Reactor
MIT engineers have designed a new type of nanoparticle that could safely and effectively deliver vaccines for diseases such as HIV and malaria. The new particles, described in the Feb. 20 issue of Nature Materials, consist of concentric fatty spheres that can carry synthetic versions of proteins normally produced by viruses. These synthetic particles elicit a strong immune response – comparable to that produced by live virus vaccines – but should be much safer, says Darrell Irvine, author of the paper and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering.
Such particles could help scientists develop vaccines against cancer as well as infectious diseases. In collaboration with scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Irvine and his students are now testing the nanoparticles’ ability to deliver an experimental malaria vaccine in mice.
Vaccines protect the body by exposing it to an infectious agent that primes the immune system to respond quickly when it encounters the pathogen again. In many cases, such as with the polio and smallpox vaccines, a dead or disabled form of the virus is used. Other vaccines, such as the diphtheria vaccine, consist of a synthetic version of a protein or other molecule normally made by the pathogen.
When designing a vaccine, scientists try to provoke at least one of the human body’s two major players in the immune response: T cells, which attack body cells that have been infected with a pathogen; or B cells, which secrete antibodies that target viruses or bacteria present in the blood and other body fluids.
For diseases in which the pathogen tends to stay inside cells, such as HIV, a strong response from a type of T cell known as “killer” T cell is required. The best way to provoke these cells into action is to use a killed or disabled virus, but that cannot be done with HIV because it’s difficult to render the virus harmless.
To get around the danger of using live viruses, scientists are working on synthetic vaccines for HIV and other viral infections such as hepatitis B. However, these vaccines, while safer, do not elicit a very strong T cell response. Recently, scientists have tried encasing the vaccines in fatty droplets called liposomes, which could help promote T cell responses by packaging the protein in a virus-like particle. However, these liposomes have poor stability in blood and body fluids.
Irvine, who is a member of MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, decided to build on the liposome approach by packaging many of the droplets together in concentric spheres. Once the liposomes are fused together, adjacent liposome walls are chemically “stapled” to each other, making the structure more stable and less likely to break down too quickly following injection. However, once the nanoparticles are absorbed by a cell, they degrade quickly, releasing the vaccine and provoking a T cell response.
Related: New and Old Ways to Make Flu Vaccines – Engineering Mosquitoes to be Flying Vaccinators – New nanoparticles could improve cancer treatment – Vaccines Can’t Provide Miraculous Results if We Don’t Take Them
Very fun presentation by 10 year old on 3D printing and the open source Makerbot at Ignite Phoenix.
Related: 3D Printing is Here (2009 post looking at 3D printers) – Open Source 3-D Printing – Expensive Ink (for regular printers)
In a first-of-its-kind experiment, Bongard created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. And, over generations, his simulated robots also evolved, spending less time in “infant” tadpole-like forms and more time in “adult” four-legged forms.
These evolving populations of robots were able to learn to walk more rapidly than ones with fixed body forms. And, in their final form, the changing robots had developed a more robust gait — better able to deal with, say, being knocked with a stick — than the ones that had learned to walk using upright legs from the beginning.
Bongard’s research, supported by the National Science Foundation, is part of a wider venture called evolutionary robotics. “We have an engineering goal,” he says “to produce robots as quickly and consistently as possible.” In this experimental case: upright four-legged robots that can move themselves to a light source without falling over.
Using a sophisticated computer simulation, Bongard unleashed a series of synthetic beasts that move about in a 3-dimensional space. “It looks like a modern video game,” he says. Each creature — or, rather, generations of the creatures — then run a software routine, called a genetic algorithm, that experiments with various motions until it develops a slither, shuffle, or walking gait — based on its body plan — that can get it to the light source without tipping over.
Fun, an engagement ring that plays a 20 second audio clip “Shelina, I’ll love you forever. Marry Me!…Shelina, I’ll love you forever. Marry Me!” made by artist and inventor Luke Jerram.
Using the ring, I proposed to Shelina in a hot air balloon over Bristol in 2005. We’ve since got married and had 2 children Maya and Nico.
Much better than marketing driven expensive diamonds, in my opinion.
Related: Camera Fashion – Get Your Own Science Art – Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote – Cellphone Microscope