So one of the students’ projects that I had the chance to observe over the past two weeks was the construction of an open source AFM. What is an AFM, might you ask. Well, as you have probably guessed by the title, it is an Atomic Force Microscope, and here is how it works: A sample is put on a stage, and the stage moves in x and y axis under the microscope head tip. This head is attached to a microcanteliver (see figure 1). When the stage moves under the tip, the sample moves with it. The tip, however, stays at the same place. This tip is as fine as a single atom, and does not actually touch the surface of the sample, because of electronic repulsion. The tip will move up and down following the reliefs on the surface of the sample. Because the tip is attached to a microcanteliever, this piece will also move following the sample’s surface. A laser beam is thus projected onto the canteliever, and is usually reflected through an astigmatic lense (the same kind we use for prescription glasses). The beam out of the lense will be analysed. This method allows for incredible precision and can analyse components with an atomic precision. This is even more impressive if you look at the scale of such equipment: Imagine that one atom is the size of a football. Then the size of the tip of the microscope is the size of the Mont-Blanc, tallest mountain in Europe! First tested in vacuums, it now is able to scan samples under water, which means that it makes in-vivo observation of what happens inside the cells possible (1) (especially used to study the physics and resistance of organelles since you basically poke them with a needle using this method). The link to sustainable development is not obvious, unless you think outside the biology box for a minute. We all hear about air pollution in terms of Particulate Matter, whose size varies between 1 and 100 microns. This means that in most cases, we don’t really know what pollution looks like due to the size and diversity of the particulate matters (2). What the students I was with were trying to do, was to build an open source AFM, using a DVD player’s laser to measure the canteliever’s movements. Those would be relatively easy to build without having to buy industrial quality lasers, and could even “read” the pollution that falls on a DVD. (provided you leave the DVD outside for a given amount of time). The ambition is to have students in middle and high schools build AFMs in their schools and analyze the data on air quality in their respective neighborhood and thus crowdsource a better understanding of air pollution in general. (1)C.Lavelle, O.Piètremont et al. Microscopies moléculaires des complexes nucléoprotéiques, reflets de la physique, 2011 (2) https://www3.epa.gov/ttn/atw/188polls.html
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Some of what I do those days is to find a way to run an innovative, sustainable development-oriented network. So this requires thinking about every aspect of it, including partners, human resources, but also money. And money is an issue. For the kind of projects that I am working on, starting small with a few grants should not be so much of a problem : Government and private agencies often have an envelope dedicated to projects they would want to throw money at. But if this is a good safety net for starters, it is neither scalable nor sustainable. And the whole point of my internship is to build a scalable and sustainable system! One solution is called social impact bonds. What is it? Well to put it simply, it is to 1) ask for private small investment, 2) coming up with a working prototype, and 3) asking the public sector to fund the project entirely. This kind of fundings is also called pay-for-success bonds for the following reason The principle of a social impact bond is that not one but a gathering of stakeholders. All of them agree in advance that the private sector will pay for the upfront costs, and the public sector only has to pay the whole project if the prototype ensures that once the project is up and running, it will result on government savings. The public sector in theory than does not lose any money, as it pays a smaller amount than what it saves with the new solution. The private sector is paid back entirely once the project-holders get the money, and gains a good reputation in the process. The Project holders gain sustainable fundings and a proof-of-concept. It is kind of a win-win(-win) situation provided that the prototype actually yields good enough results. This system is already working on some level, including in works for the UK's ministry of justice and NYC's justice department: . But it has some downsides. First, how do you measure success? Sometimes, showing that something works is easy, sometimes it is really difficult to come up with tangible “success stories”, especially in the social entrepreneurship world. Second, it only works for projects working on a short to medium term. If what you are trying to implement only shows some results after some years, it might be hard to get the initial fundings and to show a cause-to effect relationship between what you did and the end result. Third, government fundings is usually reliable, but it is not always the case. Only in France, the fundings for medium size projects is decreasing and a lot of government-funded initiatives are now struggling to get money. And let’s not talk about some countries that are really struggling with their economies! The conclusion is: no system is perfect but this one offers the advantages of being relatively reliable, relatively sustainable, and to not depend on corporation waiting for opportunities for whitewashing. An before we come up with a revolutionary idea, this one is the best solution yet. Sources come from the economist, the harvard magazine, wikipedia, and the state of hawaï's "study on the feasibility of using social impact bonds to fund early learning programs" if you want to know more, this document is really well done Hi all, Today we are going to learn about the Chinese maker movement, which is pretty fascinating and very different from the maker movement you might know from how europeans handle it. So the first maker space in China was created by a guy named David Li. This was back in 2010, and it was quickly followed by a few notable maker space along china’s coastlines (because they are the most open to the “western world”). The maker spaces were at first used by mostly occidental expats who were already makers at home and a few chinese people from engineering and electronic backgrounds. This concentration of highly skilled “makers” made for fast innovation in the few existing makerspaces. Indeed, the most successful makerspaces today issue highly technical products. So pretty soon, the few existing makerspaces became quite successful because they started issuing products that were worth a lot of money. In 2011, Eric Pan founded a company called Seeed studio, that you know because we all used their kits while playing around with arduino. Eric Pan also created a makerspace in Shenzhen, called Chaihuo, which became incredibly popular when China’s Prime minister came over to shenzhen to visit it in 2015. During this visit, the Prime Minister Announced that makerspaces were the way of the future, and that they should be encouraged. So local governments (mostly cities’ governments) started subsidizing maker spaces. And they did it big. This means that if you are getting a space that is larger than 500 squared feet, and call yourself a maker space, you can get extensive government funding. You can imagine that there are a lot of “makerspaces” in China (especially Shenzhen), that are essentially empty of people. Oh sure, they have a 3D printer and a laser cutter and all, but there are no real makers there, only people looking for easy money. Most of them have a few “makers” in it, but the main problem about maker spaces is that they usually can’t sustain themselves. It is very hard to make money from a place that only has machines and people that play around with them. Most makerspaces get barely enough income to keep going, and such income comes from membership fees, that “makers” pay to have access to the machines; government funding and possible workshop with the local community (with companies and schools). This is usually not enough to sustain the makerspace. So very few innovation actually comes from this very large number of makerspaces (there are more than a hundred of them in Shenzhen alone). The best makerspaces are built around a community and are not actually trying to be cash machines. Or, like Chaihuo, they are supported by a successful company, and they serve as showcases to advertize the company’s products. This took me a long time to learn, and as you see, it is radically different from the european/amercian maker movement as we (think we) know it. As part of my work is to collaborate with makerspaces, I have to know which are the ones who actually have a community, and which are the ones who won’t cease to exist when the government decides that maker-fever has been around for long enough, and decide to re-direct fundings to the next big thing. Hello!
This Blogpost is about what I am actually doing my internship on, and what is my internship project for this summer. As you may (or may not) know, I am currently doing my internship in the CRI-like open FIESTA department of Tsinghua university in Shenzhen (China). This department hosts a few summer activities for university students, including one in partnership with the university of Geneva, where students work in with international organisations in Europe to prototype open source hardware projects before arriving in China to actually manufacture their products. There are a lot of similar team project based summer activities happening worldwide, and my goal is to connect them in order for the staff and students to collaborate and exchange. My internship tutors have an idea called the United Labs. Their long-term objective is to create a network of Labs, Universities, maker spaces and social innovation incubators. Anyone from one of the branches wanting to create a project for sustainable development would have access to the whole network, and this would facilitate the process of grassroot sustainable change. However, this idea is for now simply an idea. My role for this summer is then to create a small scale template for what this project could become in a few years. By working closely with maker spaces, companies and universities, I have to show that the United Labs could - and already does - work. Then, we will be able to present not only the results but a plan for scaling things up, and hopefully get the sufficient international support and fundings to turn this idea into reality. Cool, right? These days, I am experiencing the downsides of interdisciplinary studies. My project requires me to meet different people, see different things, and work out the interactions that could be imagined between all of them. So, might you ask, what better candidate for this job than a student who kind of knows everything? Well, the problem is in the “kind of”. Let’s take an example. Yesterday, I met a developer working for Wolfram, who will probably be helping us with providing the students with a way to analyse their data at the end of their projects, and to make the comparison easier between all the different projects. So here we were, talking data analysis and he ended up showing me the structure for a code used in machine learning. We have studied machine learning right? So I should have been able to know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, we only brushed the surface of how machine learning works, and so, when confronted with a professionally built code from an actual developer, I knew what I was watching was interesting, no doubt, I just couldn’t grasp all of what I was seeing. And this is deeply frustrating! This situation has somehow been repeated over and over these last few days. I have visited a PCB factory, several maker-spaces and electronic markets, talked to engineers, artists, teachers and designers, and every time, I felt like there was more to it than what I was able to see from my perspective. Of course, being an interdisciplinary student allowed me to have those conversations in the first place, but how frustrating to never be able to look at things like an expert would, and never ask the questions that actually matter! Hi everyone! So here is an open question for you: What do you do when all you have to do is wait?
As you may know, I am currently working on connecting different organisations and programs in order to set up an international university network. So since I am mostly working with people from other cities or countries, I send a lot of e-mails. Over the past few days, I have mostly been waiting for people to answer me, and without the answers, I was effectively stuck. And this may happen to you too! Whether it is waiting for your colonies to grow, for the new supplies to arrive, for any other reason; it is highly probable that you will also have some time when all you have to do is wait. And how do you spend time productively is what I am wondering. For my part, I started out by trying to find out more about my project as a whole, and its context. So I did bibliographical research, and I even started an online course! But those are things I could have done back home. I don’t need to go all the way to Shenzhen to simply follow yet another MOOC. So how do I take advantage of my situation? Well, I am still trying to figure that out. I have been attending events and networking, I have been discussing with my colleagues and trying to take pertinent initiatives regarding my project, and we’ll see in the future how that works out. I have also started my internship report, and written this blogpost... I haven’t yet found out an ultimate way to spend time in a productive way. So if you have any ideas, please share! Ok, so I am proudly inaugurating this blog with a story that I think, will be relevant to everyone of us.
When I arrived in China, Luping (my internship tutor) was not here and would not be here for more than a week. Although I was happy to not start intensive work right away, and have some time to adjust, I soon felt like I was killing time. And this will probably happen to you too. Our internship tutors usually are busy people, and it is actually very hard to design some tasks for an intern when you are not used to having one around. So I took initiatives. I sent e-mails named “what can I do?” to anyone even remotely involved in the project I was working on, I talked to my colleagues a lot, trying to understand what they were doing and how I could help them. I got to understand deeply what everyone was doing, and how it all fit on the vast project of coordinating summer schools. And when that was done, I could easily turn that understanding into action. As I had unexpected time on my hands, I went around the city to meet the people that could help our students in their future activities. I went to conferences, meetings and skype interviews and got things moving a bit. So by all means, don’t hesitate to to get in the way. Ask many questions, go meet people in order to know what they do; ask for help, ask how you can help, and ask for things to read and research. You will be that much more of an asset to the team you are working with, and that’s how you learn, right? |