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Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven
stylemessiah writes "The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10..."
Last time I checked, they had already figured out how to produce low-cost solar cells. They're already shipping. The tech mentioned in the article may take 5 years to fully commercialize.
How many solar cells do you need to power a pizza oven, anyway?
MacGyver would have done it with just the nail polish.
Heaven forbid anyone seek financial benefit for their innovations...
She wants to help the poor people of the world.
So, she found a process that uses cheap, easily accessible parts that would allow people in poor countries to help themselves.
And she patented it. So she can commercialize it.
Fuck off and die, bitch.
Just because you patent it that doesn't mean you have to charge an arm and a leg for it. Some people simply get a patent so others can't steal their idea. Say some gready corp who says hey this is cheap and effective and we can make a fortune even if we up the cost 5000% or more.
She's a PhD student -- she probably didn't have any choice in the matter, as the patent is probably held by the university.
now we just need to figure out how to get every poor country an abundance of pizza ovens, nail polish and inkjet printers
The term 'feminazis' is sexist and demeaning. We demand to be called pro-female Fascists. From hereon in anyone who utters that degrading neologism will be executed without trial by way of snoo-snoo.
Pig.
That's impressive. Though there seem to be scant details on efficiency and cost comparisons (I'm assuming this is more environmentally friendly to make as well as much cheaper).
Of course, it would of been more impressive if full details were diclosed online for people to take advantage of.
Is it possible to have your patent cake and eat it? The woman is clearly a brilliant engineer and deserves full credit for her work, she also states a worthwhile desire to help people across the world. So is it possible for her to obtain full commercial protection for her invention and then release all the details free for non-commercial use and reduced license fees for the third world? This would be ideal.
After all, no technology is going to change the lifestyles of poor people if they cannot afford to buy/license it.
On the other hand it would be unfair if she learned the Trevor Bayliss lesson the hard way - really clever little gadget swamped by low cost clones from asia from which he gained not a penny. As always I guess the big winners were the lawyers.
Nah. In that case she would have been a crafty sheila.
And yes, I'm male.
*checks URL* Yep, still Slashdot.
Mod parent redundant! :P
When asked to describe the process she says "To pattern the cell we spray on something like nail polish and then inkjet print a kind of nail polish remover which lets us etch certain parts of the wafer. This creates a metallisation pattern so we can deposit aluminium on the back surface of the solar cell and create our metal contacts to both the P and N-type silicon simultaneously using a very cheap, low temperature pizza oven! And hey presto we've created a simple, low-cost solar cell without having to use expensive high tech equipment or high temperature processes!"
(from here)
I wish I could spend mod points to send an electric shock to especially bad posters.
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In most Australian Universities the postgraduate student owns the IP. I can't find the equivalent for UNSW, but here is the University of Sydney's policy (a close competitor to UNSW). It is quite clear that by default postgraduate students own their results.
Why? Let's say she didn't patent it, just released it to public domain. At the moment, the cells she has can be made inexpensively, out of cheap components. What happens when GreedyDeepPockets Corp decides to get into the business? It drives the cost UP, for everyone (for the raw materials at least). Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it. Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
I don't know what part of the world the submitter is from, but round here (South Africa) calling someone a "chick" is no more or less offensive or degrading than calling a man a "guy". Minor cultural difference, but it does make a lot of these "OMG Sexism" comments a bit confusing.
Sorry, Al.
Join the fucking twenty-first century.
This might sound like nitpicking, but people seeing women as equal to men isn't a "twenty-first century" concept. In fact, 2400 years ago Plato was already defending that, for example, if a woman is capable of governing a state, she should be allowed to, not blocked because of her sex.
We should stop being chronocentrists, which is as much a discriminatory state of mind as ethnocentrism. A given year, or a collection of years, has no attached value. Something happening "in the 21st century" isn't better just because it's happening "after" whatever came before. Ideas, such as that women and men must have equal rights, must be judged in themselves, not because of when they appeared, or when they became mainstream, or when they stopped being mainstream, or whatever.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, I must disagree with the way you express it. Calling for someone to change his behavior because of the "age" or "era" in which he lives is to incur in the "appeal to authority" fallacy. In fact, the only intellectually correct approach is to defend an idea by its own merits, not dwelling into its "ageity" at all.
Do more, or less, than this, and what you'll be doing won't be a rational defense of an idea, but merely a rhetorical one. In other words, politics, not reason.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I don't think Outback Steakhouse would lie to me about this.