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ThinkCycle: Solving World Problems With A Cluster of Brains
eaglemoon writes: "ThinkCycle is an MIT Media Lab project to apply SETI@Home principles to design problems for underserved communities. Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles.' Their aim is to build a community of designers, inventors and innovators that want to collaborate on developing novel solutions to some what intractable problems like clean water access , cholera treatment and appropriate shelters. Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
That should probably be 'apply SETI@Home principles to design challenges." If the communites are underserved, they have enough problems already without designing more.
you will be providing the lazy-boys w/ a hole cut out of the head rest, as well as the necessary implants to the back of my head where a spiky-thingy can be shoved, right? and for the hardcore there is always the "donate some spare electricity" version complete with plexiglass goo-bucket and full interface including "liquified dead" being "intraveneously fed" into my blood stream?
cool
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In preparation for being slashdotted, they have already posted a mirror site link.
According to a press agent for Microsoft, MIT's project "ThinkCycle" is nothing more than a smoke screen for anti-capitalistic "Viral Thinking". Microsoft has long established thinking is best done for multinational corporations that are engaged in the accumulation of capital. Thinking outside of the confines of a corporation with a group is nothing more than anti-capitalism. Projects seeking to provide clean water and the treatment of cholera are just pretty window dressing of this Anti-American activity.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
So this is a wonderful idea..
I somehow do not see this working. Of course I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but how do they plan
on breaking these big, complex, problems up into manageble pieces?
How can they make all these peoples ideas work together without it all turning into a watered-
down compromise-type idea without any edge?
I, for one will be interested in seeing the
results of this experiment..
His infant son recently passed away from SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and he's been enlisting people who've got some spare time to throw it at creating a baby monitor that can be used to collect statistics so in time, that information can be used to determine what symptoms cause SIDS. So far he's gotten tons of responses.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Sorry, but any "spare cycles" my brain has are going towards figuring out how I'm gonna pay my bills in this piss-poor economy.
an overgrown newsgroup. Or a benevolent (now that's mind boggling) Slashdot.
;)), but more often than not ideas get thrown around online pretty quick and easily...and then nothing comes of them.
The primary problem with anything like this is going to be the fact that just like in Usenet, people - valuable, vital people - will move on due to lost interest, changes in their lives, and the fact that anything like this started over the net tends to die off pretty quickly.
There are exceptions notably some software projects (What I can't imagine
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Looking at it this way, this system is simply a clearinghouse for problems people find interesting. If people work to break these big problems into manageable and concrete pieces, then these little pieces may be perfect for undergraduate or even graduate students to work on. I know that such a clearinghouse would be very valuable in mathematics. I've always imagined that such a thing would exist before too long for the mathematical community, and this would be a good thing.
The main reason that I think this would be a good thing is that for a young researcher starting out, one has to spend a lot of time understanding the big picture of a certian field, and generating good open problem on one's own. Such a system could bring the problems to the researchers more quickly. This could speed the process up by quite a bit. Such a thing sort of exists already, in the form of preprint servers, and I'm sure there's more to come! What doesn't really exist now is such a "big picture" fremework in a public domain, IMHO.
Come on, give it up, that's
"Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
Redesign the wheel and tell the underserved community members to RTFM if they have a problem using the redesigned wheel?
[o]_O
A lot of problems in third world development and disaster relief are not cash-limited, they're brain limited: we really do not know the best ways of treating epidemics in places without any decent high tech infrastructure, for example. Innovative ideas and approaches help: I've seen structures at Burning Man which were a lot better for their purpose than yer average disaster relief tent.
I think opening the design process up to the widest possible collaboration and really encouraging people to follow through could make a difference: kinda like the Simputer project may: a diversity of minds, of approaches, may be the best way to help the poor and the starving.
We can't wait for government to feed the people, you know? Too big, too slow. It's up to us. And it always has been - this is just one more way to help.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Given that the devil in most large systems is in the number of inter-dependencies, not the complexity of any one given component, not having everyone involved relatively close in meatspace is going to make re-constituting a total solution based on the individual component solutions quite difficult indeed.
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But atleast this project is has more societal value than some of the other a virtual dog that you can pet.
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Remember innovation is 99% persperation, and 1% insperation. Looks like they are focusing on the 1%, and assuming that the rest will take care of itself.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these third world areas are in desperate need of people to do some work. Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents). Teachers to show them how to think. There is a total glut in the food market. (The US could easially supply all the world's nutrirtion needs if people would be willing to live food that doesn't taste good)
AIDS is a large problem in Africa. We don't have a cure, but we know how to prevent the spread. However most goverments in Africa are doing little to prevent the spread. (In fact some are actively doing things to cause more cases - at least in groups they don't like) We could use a cure, but until there is a cure, we don't need more non-biologists thinking about AIDS (where they are unlikely to make progress), but we could use those same people in Africa teaching people how to prevent aids. Of course if you actually go to Africa you will soon discover that other problems need to be solved before the AIDS problem can be solved.
We don't need more thinkers, we need more doers. That is much harder. I can go home tonight and think about a methane digester that can be used in a mud hit. I can't go to a village and build them after work tonight.
There seem quite a few people concerned about it not working because problems will be too complex. Two cases that this could be so suited too. Both effective yet so simple. 1 - the clockwork radio. 2- The guy that recenbtly realised that if you put one pot inside another, fill the gap with wet sand, the evaporation of the water makes it act as a crude fridge. The idea is now sweeping across africa & co. In both cases, the execution is so simple it was the original idea that eluded everybody. This is the sort of thing that ThinkCycle could achieve.
...because I'm heavily reminded of Marc Siegler's nifty SF novel Earthweb . I commend it to everyone's attention for its depiction of the functioning of "idea futures" markets. (Contrary to an earlier troller, a very capitalistic idea.)