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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.'"
The rumormill says this time, "it" will consist of a rider on the segway carrying water bottles for the needy.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Finally, a product that's worth a crap!
What he should be doing is marketing this to rural farmers in developed countries. If I lived on a farm with access to the fuel, I would love to have a kilowatt generator for $1000 to supplement my electricity use.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
It's part of the price to pay for development.
Every industrialized nation at some point or another went through a period of dirty industry.
Also think of it this way.... London today has the highest air quality it's ever had. Think about it.... first you had cooking/heating fires, then you had dirty industry, and now you've got a clean economy. I don't doubt that the rest of the world will eventually go through the same process.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
his company was not responsible for all the hype building up to Segway's release. they have made a ton of incredibly useful inventions and i would think anyone with any interest in technology or engineering would know about his work long before the Segway. inventing a portable insulin pump seems like a pretty valid invention, right? a wheelchair that can climb stairs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen/
or
http://www.dekaresearch.com/
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.
But these sorts of projects are what the guy actually cares about.
After he made his initial fortune (in medical devices) he started up an organization called FIRST, designed to get more smart kids interested in engineering, and to help our culture value problem solving more than drama. Since then the organization has grown to include thousands of teams, tens of thousands of high schoolers in countries all around the world.
I've been working with one of those teams for three years, and every year Kamen stands up and gives a speech, not about how much fun we're going to have building robots, but about his vision for what we can do to solve these sort of engineering problems, to bring clean water to those who need it, etc. He's done a lot of good work, aside from his kind of whacky human transport device, and for all that his speeches are about as depressing and boring as you can get, it's very clear that this is where his heart is. He's put a ton of money and effort into getting people into engineering so that some day if he can't solve these sorts of problem someone will.
And for as bored as I am every time I have to sit through him talking about it, I can admire that. This is about things a lot more important than a goofy looking scooter.
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.
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
Yes.
And now I ask you - what good would a third wheel do for a wheelchair that climbs stairs? Especially when it already has more than three wheels.
The gyroscope was so that the chair would stay level when it had to go up on its hind wheels to climb the stairs.
www.linuxpenguin.net
Is London's economy really "clean" or did they just farm out the dirty work? Is the environmental hit just being taken in another part of the world?
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!
What's very interesting about village microloans is the extremely low rate of default. When you have a group of people involved in ensuring that a loan is repaid, especially in small matriarchal societies, you end up with as little as a 5% default rate.
Nice idea but boiling water (100C/212F) won't kill most bacteria in 5 minutes.
Steralizing is usually done via steam at 2atm( 250-275F IIRC) for 15 minutes. Plus it doesn't remove contaminants. Mud + heat = dryer mud.
Most of the water purification systems use either an evaporation/condensation cycle or reverse osmosis through a semi-permiable membrane.
Of the 2, evap/cond is both more reliable and more scaleable. As a bonus, you can literally do it with 2 coconuts and a banana leaf.
It's been fifteen years since I was in the water treatment business, but I doubt any of the fundamentals have changed.
Here's how it works: You mix a chemical called a 'flocculant' in with the water, which has been roughly filtered and perhaps let sit for a while to let any silt settle. This water is then mixed with air under high pressure, and pumped into tanks, entering halfway between the bottom and top of the tank with as little turbulence as possible. Because of the decrease in pressure, air bubbled form, and the flocculants cause small particles (bacteria, shit, uranium) to stick to them. The bubbles then gradually float to the surface, where the 'suds' or 'scum' is skimmed off, again with a minimal amount of turbulence. After enough of this happens, the water is then called clean and sucked out and wasted on fertilizing laws.
Generally, this is done on a continuous basis, and the equipment is a big, round vat. The ones I knew were from 5 to 23 meters in diameter. There's some real issues that make this process a bit more tricky than the description above would make it seem:
1) raw water is not produced, nor clean water consumed, at uniform rates. However, the filtering equipment works correctly at a very small flow/pressure. Holding tanks on either side are neccessary.
2) Flocculant is a consumable, and it takes a certain amount to clean a given volume of water to a certain improvement. Costs money.
3) water is not uniformly dirty.
4) generally, the larger units can let water stay and bubbles float (and grit sink to the bottom) longer, so less flocculant is needed. But these take up more space...LOTS more.
5) How clean does water really need to be? If there's some nasty outbreak (Cholera, Giardia) maybe it needs to be much cleaner. Maybe not so much at other times. Who makes that decision? My thoughts are that tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment. Real serious policy issues here. I doubt that such a poor and corrupt country as Bangladesh can handle these problems correctly. But hey, I guess eomthing is worth a try.
The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.
What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.
To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.
Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This has always been the trouble with Stirling engines. They seem simple until you actually try to make one that outputs a usable amount of power at some reasonable efficiency that doesn't cost a fortune. Many people have tried over the centuries, but so far it's always been a matter of picking which two of the three goals you want to fulfill. Dean Kamen has a nontrivial challenge ahead in trying for the Sterling hat-trick.
Don Lancaster's Blatant Opportunist #32
Wikipedia - Problems with Stirling Engines:
U.S. Patents:
6,862,883 Kamen, et al. Regenerator for a Stirling engine
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry