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Google To Fund Ideas That Will Change the World
Peace Corps Online writes "This week, as part of their tenth birthday celebration, Google announced the launch of project ten to the 100th, a project designed to inspire and fund the development of ideas that will help to change the world. They have called on members of the public to share their ideas for solutions that will help as many people as possible in the global community, offering a $10 million prize pool to back the development of those chosen as winners. 'We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition,' says Bethany Poole, Project Marketing Manager for Google. 'These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact.' The project's website asks entrants to classify their ideas into one of eight categories listed as Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter and Everything Else. Members of the public have until October 20th to submit their ideas by completing a simple form and answering a few short questions about their idea."
a gun that shoots cookies. either at 600f/s or just gently enough to hit my mouth.
I think the goal here is to give some funding to profit-losing ideas that help people. It's not hard to get profit-making ideas funded.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
How ironic, here was my entry
10. What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)
Beer Sandwiches.
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11. Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)
Ever since that first man drunk a fly infested bucket of rancid water and fermenting honey, alcohol has been a mainstay of society. If we were able to fuse the brilliance of beer with the genius of the sandwich, the possibilities would be endless!
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12. What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)
Beer is an aqueous solution which is prone to spilling. A "sippy cup" would address the problem, but will leave the user humiliated. A beer sandwich is the most logical solution
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13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)
Most importantly, people who drink and drive. You see, a beer sandwich is a food, and there are no laws against "eating and driving". It would take stress off of the courts and put less innocent people behind bars.
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14. What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)
Someone needs to cross beer and sandwiches. Is it really that hard? You're freaking google!
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15. Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)
Everyone around the world gets to enjoy beer sandwiches!
Google isn't asking for profitable ideas or anything like that.
Sure, some of them could end up being profitable, but that's not the point. They want to invest in nice ideas which could improve the life quality of people. From the video, you can clearly see they're interested in ideas that could, for instance, ease the burden put on poor people in countries like Africa. You can hardly profit from that.
This is called philanthropy. And it's amazing how people from the US find this so absurd.
Sometimes, there really isn't a catch.
Use Google's infrastructure and clout to combat censorship and surveillance of dissidents by oppressive regimes.
So, let's see, that means that you're simply going to dismiss the technology because you assert that the people doing the work aren't capable of doing it correctly. Do you have any proof, or are you just expressing your own anti-nuclear bias. Oh, and before I forget, fusion is a form of nuclear energy as well.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Didn't you know? Only the smart people read the warnings.
So removing the warnings would only kill smart people; stupid people already kill themselves.
If you really want that effect, you should remove legislation such as helmet and seatbeat laws.
GPL Deconstructed
May those who help most win so they say.
I made three entries - the hexayurt, the infrastructure package, and the low cost medical care.
The Hexayurt
The hexayurt is a reasonably well tested next generation disaster relief shelter built on free/open source principles and industrial supply chains. It comes from work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The basic idea is to take 12 standard 4âx8â industrial panels, cut six in half diagonally and fasten them into a cone (see the site for pictures) and use six whole panels for the walls, giving a durable shelter of 166 square feet, big enough for 5 people at UN standards. These shelters will survive 80 mph winds easily.
The emphasis on using standard industrial materials is the key. Nobody can afford to carry extensive stocks of emergency housing for disasters in the developing world, which often displace millions of people. Airfreighting tents is expensive and inefficient, and tents are lousy shelter for long term use, which is all-too-frequently how they are deployed. The Hexayurt idea is that industrial cities near regular disaster zones (Bangaladesh, strife-torn areas of Africa, the hurricane belt) take their existing industrial infrastructure and add a few simple new skills so that before or after a disaster they can mass produce a simple, long-life shelter for affected populations. This is a step towards disaster relief self-sufficiency at a regional level, so that these areas begin to be able to cope without being so reliant on patchy and poorly-funded international relief effots.
The Hexayurt concept has been tested by US DOD, and is an integral part of the STAR-TIDES program. American Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross both think it is a great idea and have supported its development, and AMURT is considering the system. All of this has been done by a persistent self-funded open source development effort.
http://hexayurt.com/
The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package
The hexayurt is a free/open disaster relief shelter which has its own entry. However, a shelter alone is not enough to really help people after a disaster. If you have 100,000 perfectly good shelters in a field, the next problem you face is water and sanitation: without some deployed solution, people will get sick and die.
There are lots of appropriate technology solutions to sanitation, cooking without wasting wood or generating toxic smoke, purifying water to drink. All of them are under-funded, under-tested, and under-adopted. Millions to tens of millions die every year because this âoeappropriate technology infrastructureâ is not being properly funded, and the result is needless loss of life.
The key is to understand that credible candidate technologies exist to provide all the same basic essential services that people enjoy in the developed world on a budget of maybe $200. Furthermore, the services can be provided house-by-house. For example, rainwater is collected on your roof, then purified using a biosand filter to give you safe drinking water, rather than having a water purification factory down the road and pipes. These systems are basic, and some need work, but some combination of SODIS, solar water pasteurization, thermophilic composting toilets, sulabh toilets, solar cookers, rocket stoves, gasification stoves, biosand filters, microsolar, microwind and microhydro will provide all the basic essential services of life in nearly any climate anywhere in the world. What hasnâ(TM)t been done is a global systematic program of testing each of these individual technologies in each region of the world, making local adaptations, cleaning up and publishing the designs, making training videos, running educational courses, and looking for chances to integrated, combine and synthesize systems into whole packages which are proven to provide all essential services in the field. This is our proposal.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
This reminds me of Microsoft's Competition:
http://www.microsoft.com/nz/imaginecup09/about.aspx
In 2009, the Imagine Cup challenges the world's most talented students to "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today."
I find the goal a bit too broad for a challenging competition, there are also a few requirements, some of which I find a bit odd:
Ask me about repetitive DNA