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Segway Inventor Turns To Environment
MBCook writes "CNN has an article in which they talk about Dean Kamen's latest inventions designed to provide water to rural villages. His goal is also to provide electricity and opportunities for entrepreneurship. From the article: 'Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,' says Kamen. 'The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"
"If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime."
Candle manufacturers express skepticism.
And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"
Apparently he's not too concerned about giving them clean air, though.
* One well-armed team of entrepreneurs to protect the machines from the covetous warlords, militias, kleptocracies, etc. which are the real "pandemic" of the Third World.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
So now, instead of a village in the Phillipines using relatively clean water that's been percalating through a forested area, they will just burn even more of the trees to power their water cleaners, resulting in even more of this (which surviving local villagers said was due to illegal logging on the surrounding hills). Yes, TFA indicates that it's cow dung that will be burned... but that just means that the wholesome goodness of that dung is not going into agricultural fertilization, which means either shipping in artificial/processed fertilizers, or very inefficiently using more land for grazing and crop production... including cutting into forests (see above).
Yes, most of us "burn things" for clean water (to extract from a well, or to run a municipal water treatment facility), but things like this at the local level strike me as putting a tiny, tiny bandage on the symptom of a much larger problem. To wit: too many freakin' people in areas not developed enough to sustain them without very poor land use. I mean... a kilowatt? Between solar, and perhaps some of the village kids taking turns in a big hamster wheel, you could do that without burning more stuff. And, for someone who included the notion of improving the "leisure time" of poor villagers, he's not thinking too clearly about the delightful aroma that comes with 24x7 burning of cow dung.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe, maybe not, but look at his other work before deciding.
If Benjerman Franklin was only considered for his stove*, he would be considered a failure.
While they work extremely well if kept stoked, once they began to cool a little, they got extremely smokey. Meaning they weren't practical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm usually skeptical of a lot of efforts to solve poverty through technology- but this is definitely headed in the right direction. In my opinion, the most pressing needs in the developing world are the most basic ones: clean water, food, medical care, roads, electricity, basic literacy. Laptops or whatever are way down on the list because their potential payoff is relatively small compared to their cost. Things like clean water and cheap electricity could have big payoffs with relatively little investment; if you're suffering from less disease your productivity will go up, if you have light in the evening your kids can do their homework and the parents can do more work.
Whether or not he's got the solution, he's at least got the right problems.
All of this is true, but irrelevant in the face of the fact that big power plants won't be built in these places. You've got a chicken and egg problem there, and these solve some of it.
A big power plant requires a large base of ready users to make it economically feasible, and if you have a bunch of villages using a couple kilowatts a piece then the power company will take notice. Plus, this primes the villagers to start finding ways that electricity will enhance their lives, making them more likely consumers of large scale electrical delivery.
The individual devices themselves also aren't as important as the entrepreneurial model behind the delivery of them. Creating jobs and helping keep wealth within these communities is a worthwhile end unto itself. They're right, it will help foster democracy and it will also help drag up the standard of living in those areas.
From TFA: A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times. -- Yes, and then it's all downhill from there: first light bulbs, then telephones for telemarketers to call, televisions for advertisers to stuff with their ads all aglow, microwave ovens to provide late-night high-fat carbohydrate-laden heart sludge, personal computers from which to have one's identity stolen, not to mention thirty-five clocks to set forward every Spring, etc. I hope these people who have lived in the beautiful nighttime darkness for so long know what they're getting themselves into.
The Big News Page
One thing to keep in mind is the scale of the problem. Did you eliminate 1000 people dying of dysentary to replace them with 10 people dying of cancer a few years down the road? Certainly they need to fix the arsenic problem, but even with it the technology is still a huge win.
I read the internet for the articles.
No matter how stupid, useless and over-hyped the Segway was, Dean Kamen is still a fucking genius and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
His insulin pump was so brilliant, it looks obvious in hindsight (as the best inventions often do.)
Even the Segway, which is a silly gadget, makes a sort of sense. He was hoping to make a consumer product which (had it caught on with people) would apply economies of scale to his gyroscopic concepts, which would eventually make his stair-walking wheelchairs cheaper.
If he wants to turn his mad skillz to the problem of getting clean water to people, I gotta take off my hat.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
More than likely they'll end up doing this. The more then can sell, the cheaper they'll be to produce. Simple economics of scale. You might not get a $1,000 model, but what about a $2,500 one?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This would be fucking great for fish farms.
Fisheries generate a lot of crap-filled water that generally gets pumped into (and pollutes) a local river.
Of course, this guy's invention would have to be scaled waaaaay up for farmers of any kind in the 1st world, since they have enormous plots of land compared to most farms in 3rd world & developing countries.
Still, Kudos to him, because he's right. Finding potable water is actually a greater problem than access to food in most of the 3rd world. However, the second you increase survival rates in those developing countries, you create a host of other problems as the population increases.
Countries are like ecosystems, once you fiddle with one variable, you usually have to deal with a rash of unintended consequences.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't understand all the backlash against the Segway either. I mean, if you want to attack stupid, wasteful and obnoxious vehicles, start with snowmobiles, trail bikes, then work your way to SUV's. The biggest problem with the Segway is that common folk can't afford it. If you could walk into the nearest bike store and take one home for $300, the critics would be drowned in the pool of fans. As it is, it's an attractive anti-yuppie target.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Perhaps you mean Tesla:) Edison was more businessman than inventor.....
...and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
Does that mean Kamen's stealing all of his inventions from Nikola Tesla, too?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
is good governance and a lot less corruption. A lot of those other things would take care of themselves if you took care of the first two. And without it, you're not going to get the other things. Look at Zimbabwe. Used to be the largest net exporter of food in Africa. Corruption, mismanagement, and ethnic violence by the indigenous blacks against white farmers have turned the place into a pauper's paradise, complete with famine and babies being thrown into sewers.
As for roads, they used aid money to build roads in the Congo. Nobody uses them (for the most part). They use the bush trails. Same thing with schools.
Until you (or they) solve the tribalism and corruption issues in the development world, all we are doing is throwing good money after bad in offering up "solutions".
What will happen when you magically solve the clean water, food, and medical care issues in the developing world? Population explosion even worse than they are experiencing today, without the social revolutions that preceeded and enabled the developed world's evolution. And at the end of the line, population crash, and more misguided intervention on the part of the developed world.
If this particular Stirling engine design is capable of being made in volume at a sensible price and is not simply an over-priced toy for rich yacht owners like the WhisperGen, it deserves to succeed.
One reason it might just is crime. You could make a perfectly adequate generator for a village using standard technology, but it would get stolen in no time. A washing machine sized design is going to be much harder to steal.
However, as with many alternative technologies, the likely problem is going to be seals. Seals have been the problem with Stirling engines in the past (and are the continuing problem with the Wankel.)
Pining for the fjords
Hand-dug wells:
1. Oxfam well building guide (up to 30m) (0.5MB pdf) (html)
2. Tearfund well building guide (up to 50m)
Or, in the media and government version, it's easy to lose sight of the overall benefit when focusing on the individuals.
Sometimes, it may make sense to base policies on cold math rather than the emotional level of individuals. For example, pesticides vs. malaria.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Really? Ever price out a Vespa? Sure, the $3,000 price tag on a Segway is way more than it needs to cost for it to be wildly popular (anything under $1000 would make it sell, I think), but it's not a ridiculous price.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
Edison's skill was not just the creation of novel devices, but the creation of the infrsastructure and market manipulation that went along with making the novel part of his invention a success. In that respect Kamen, smart as he is, is as far from Thomas Edison as you can get.
You have to be able to do more than invent to be in the same league as Edison.
All jokes aside, pipes from central plants are a LOT more expensive than locally created potable water. A 2" diameter PVC pipe costs a little over $2/foot. That's over $10K per mile. Now add the cost of burying the pipe or otherwise securing it from harm.
Kamen's idea is better.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The condensation run off from the window-unit air conditioners in my house generate about 100 liters every 24 hours.
First of all, I'm calling bullshit on this. Either you live in a swamp, or there's something wrong with your air conditioner. Buy a new one and save the world 1kWh/day instead of producing distilled water with electricity.
Secondly, you realize you're advocating air conditioning as a means of water purification for undeveloped nations? That's just goofy.
Then you say a "3 or 4 square meter" solar panel is "cheap to make". And, assuming such a thing would even run a single air conditioner, you'd need one for, say, every two African villagers. Let's say this contraption costs $2000, which is a conservative figure. To outfit 100 million Africans, you're talking about $100 billion. And then of course who knows how long the things will last and whether they will be immediately confiscated by warlords and diverted to people who are actually productive enough to afford solar panels.
So, by now we've gotten to the point where you've completely lost your mind. As further evidence, "with a lot less complexity... than a boiler-driven generator". Umm, okay.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
They were both important. They both invented incredible things in several distinct areas. Where their paths crossed is where everyone gets to argue about who was the better scientist/engineer/inventor. Long story short, Edison picked DC, Tesla picked AC, and as it turned out, Edision didn't know when to admit he was wrong. Both are geniuses in their own right. The principal reason most people who know of both like to defend Tesla is that he was considerably less well-known for his inventions; he worked with Westinghouse to market most of his ideas, and it was Westinghouse that gained most of the fame. Tesla died a poor man, though he had devoted a good portion of his life to improving others' standards of living. Edison, in comparison, was made rich through his inventions. I'd guess some see it as unfair, when both were comparable in terms of technical brilliance.
The late 20th century reversal of this process is being played out in the American economy (as well as other industrialized countries worldwide). Local entrepreneurs are being pushed and bought out of business by large concerns (i.e. national and multi-national corporations). The economy of scale and polical clout of these giants are impossible to compete with effectively for most small, individual run businesses. The effect is to drain profit out of local economies and into a much larger scale economy. This robs resources from local-scale economies, and makes them less self-sustaining. Overall the economic engine seems to be running better, but fewer people benefit. The resultant concentration of resources eventually make such systems unstable.
The idea outlined in the article is brillant. I suspect, though, it will never come to pass. Not because it won't work, but because it will work. As soon as small scale success begins to be seen, larger concerns will interrupt the process, buying out the local entrepreneurs, and concentrating production and profit where it is subject to corruption and incompetence.
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
TFA says, "The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it." If it vaporizes the water, couldn't it also be used to desalinate seawater? That would be a boon for poor dry coastal villages, like in Baja California.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Biosand Filter.
Cost - about thirty bucks.
Technology - rudimentary.
Efficiency - "Overall, these studies have shown that the Biosand filter removes:
More than 90% of fecal coliform; 100% of protozoa and helminths; 50-90% of organic and inorganic toxicants; 95-99% of zinc, copper, cadmium and lead; 67% of iron and manganese; 47% of arsenic; all suspended sediments" (So it's not going to help with that arsenic-tainted water in India.)
IMO, there is no better filtration system. Cheap, low-tech, highly effective against the most common pathogens -- why should we be using anything else?!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Good governance is a side-effect of affluence
Cart before the horse, I'm afraid. Wealth doesn't buy good governance. Example, the Middle East nations that contain a good deal of the world's oil. Good governance can, however, create wealth. Example, South Korea. In 1954, it was one of the poorest nations in the world, on par with the poorest in Africa. Today, it's a first world nation with the world's 12th largest economy. Democratization, in the case of South Korea, proceeded slowly, but good governance, and the sociological factors were there in 1954, and wealth followed
It was when the European middle-class began to develop that democracy began to sprout in Europe.
Um, no. The Magna Carta didn't come about because a bunch of burghers were pressing for their rights. It was a squabble between rich nobles and an even richer king. And yet, it's one of the most significant democratizing documents in human history. And has absolutely nothing to do with a middle class.
Another significant democratizing influences were things like the Protestant Reformation. Again, had nothing to do with the middle class. Once you have a group of people with some free time on their hands, they can start hassling their government, getting involved in politics, giving money to the right people to fund the right initiatives, etcetera.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Absurd, and obviously false given the facts.
You seem to think it's like a recipe. Have some wealth, bake for a period, and voila! Democracy! Good government! Um, no. The Roman Empire had a large, vibrant middle class for much of it's history, enabled by good governance..and, ultimately, grinded down to serfdom by bad. For the first 100 years, most people in the United States were essentially peasant farmers. The difference between a peasant farmer who owned his land in Pennsylvania as opposed to a peasant farmer who "owned" his land in Africa, however, were little things like established property rights, the rule of law, and a well functioning government. Take out the rule of law, and a well functioning government and the US would not have made it this far.
Good governance preserves and builds wealth, and bad governance destroys it. Affluence, in and of itself, does nothing positive. A good example of this is looking at the result of windfalls, either at an individual level or a national level. On an individual level, look at lottery winners. Or a national level, look at what happened to Spain and its New World fortune. Squandered. Or Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. It's in the process of being squandered. And again compare them to South Korea. South Korea had good governance before they had wealth.
Good governance, btw, isn't the same thing as democracy. You can have a poorly run democracy (which won't last, of course), and a well run autocracy. South Korea, for much of it's history, was a well run autocracy.
Wealth will not be built and sustained in the developing world until those countries build a culture and society that is capable of sustaining a well run government first. The last and only experience most of these countries have with that is, unfortunately, the colonial administrations that ruled over them briefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.