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Kurt Laitner

Impact of Social Sciences - The right tool for the job: Five collaborative writing tool... - 2 views

blogs.lse.ac.uk/...ve-writing-tools-for-academics

collaborative writing tool roundup

shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Kurt Laitner on 11 Apr 14
     
    may be helpful for assessing potential tools
Francois Bergeron

Cell Tester Opens the Window of Discovery | Product Information | Articles - 0 views

www.wpiinc.com/...window.html

company physiology cell tester tools sensor

shared by Francois Bergeron on 17 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Written by Lisa J Fulghum    Physiologic Mechanisms in Cardiac Myocytes and Skeletal Muscle Cells The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investiga
  • The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool for cellular investigation that can (without any changes) be used for one single living cell, for a small multi-cellular preparation and for single or larger skinned muscle strip preparations. Translational experiments from the single living cells to the intact multi-cellular level can be accomplished.
  • The Cell Tester offers: Integral microtweezer apparatus that facilitates cellular attachment Two integrated piezo manipulators are included Bio-compatible adhesive (MyoTak™) included Unique rotational stage that allows for easy cellular alignment, improved experimental throughput (shown in the image above) Ultra-quiet force transducer included Linear displacement motor stretches or compresses cells with 25nm precision Fits ANY inverted microscope Use native cuvette or ANY 35mm glass bottom dish
  • Francois Bergeron on 17 Oct 12
     
    The revolutionary Cell Tester SI-CTS200 is a new research tool
Kurt Laitner

Digital Reality | Edge.org - 0 views

edge.org/...il_gershenfeld-digital-reality

*neilgershenfeld fab labs IoT molecular computing nano star trek replicator

shared by Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
  • first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts
  • digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
  • is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
  • That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
  • Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
  • detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
  • The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
  • The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
  • The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
  • On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
  • a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
  • There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
  • There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
  • By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
  • Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
  • Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
  • What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
  • The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
  • the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
  • It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
  • At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
  • To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
  • conducting, resistive, insulating.
  • The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
  • Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
  • We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
  • You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
  • Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
  • But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
  • because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      great quote (replace challenges with changes for effect)
  • Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
  • And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble. 
  • irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
  • At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
  • We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude. 
  • Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
  • Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
  • Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
  • Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
  • The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
  • You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
  • To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
  • There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
  • Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
  • If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
  • You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
  • What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      !!!
  • It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
  • 2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
  • To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
  • But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
  • In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
  • It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
  • There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      worse actually.. the trash stays
  • The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.
  • instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      this may solve greece's problem, walk away from debt, you can't buy other people's (country's) stuff anymore, so make it all yourself
  • The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
  • Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
  • it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
  • the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
  • Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
  • To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
  • I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
  • The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
  • My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
  • The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
  • My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
  • If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
  • Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
  • The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
  • If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
  • I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
  • When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.  
  • the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
  • you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
  • For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
       
      our challenge in the OVN space
  • Kurt Laitner on 17 Feb 15
     
    what is heavy is local, what is light is global, and increasingly manufacturing is being recreated along this principle
Steve Bosserman

Scientist beams up a real Star Trek tricorder | Reuters - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...ricorder-idUSBRE83C1FK20120413

sensor_technology open_source medical_applications

shared by Steve Bosserman on 13 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 13 Apr 12
     
    While it may sound like the stuff of science fiction, Jansen isn't the only one to take notice of just how useful a real functioning tricorder would be - especially as a medical tool. Telecommunications giant Qualcomm Inc this year launched the "Tricorder X-Prize Contest" with the slogan "Healthcare in the palm of your hand." Qualcomm hopes to motivate developers with a $10 million prize to make medical tricorders a reality. Wanda Moebus of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, who is not affiliated with Jansen or Qualcomm, told Reuters the X-Prize "is really cool," but cautioned that making a real medical tricorder device "would have to be measured on its safety and effect, like all other medical technologies." Jansen said he has been approached by "a couple of teams" about the X Prize, but added that his prototypes are more for science research than medical tools. Besides, he said he already is on to his next frontier, making a sort of "replicator," another "Star Trek" device that will create 3D objects and foods that are dimensional copies of real items. Jansen's "replicator" is a 3D printer, which in itself is not really new, but the scientist thinks about it in terms reminiscent of "Star Trek's" famous prologue. It's "like nothing we've ever seen before," Jansen said.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

www.edge.org/...is-shame-necessary

shame collaboration cooperation paper theory

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
  • Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
  • Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
  • humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
  • The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
  • Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
  • Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
  • Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
  • Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
  • It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
  • Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
  • The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
  • The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
  • Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
  • Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
  • five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
  • Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
  • shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
  • What if government is not involved in the shaming?
  • Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
  • Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
  • vertical agitation
  • Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
  • But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
  • corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
  • shame and reputation interact
  • in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
  • Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
  • why we learned to speak.1
  • Language
  • The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
  • allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
  • in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
  • Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
  • Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
  • What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
  • We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
  • what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
  • Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
  • Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
  • Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
  • In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
  • which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
  • Today's world allows for amorphous identities
  • It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
  • Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
  • Some people have no shame
  • shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
  • a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
  • if the payoff is high enough
  • There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
  • shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
  • This is why punishment remains imperative.
  • Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
  • Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 28 Oct 11
     
    The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt 
Kurt Laitner

Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool on the web | Engineering - 1 views

engineering.stanford.edu/...ut-free-text-analysis-tool-web

free semantic text analysis sentiment tools

shared by Kurt Laitner on 04 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Kurt Laitner on 04 Feb 14
     
    Perhaps useful tool
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Votorola - 1 views

zelea.com/...home.xht

decision making tool tools

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 04 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 04 Jun 12
     
    Votorola is social software in support of non-party primary elections and public rule making. We develop the tools to enable a radically free democracy based on unrestricted voting, drafting and discussion. Our alpha prototypes cover everything from voter registration in electoral districts to consensus making, and we lead the field in design, theory and inventions.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

AN OPTICAL FIBRE SENSOR FOR USE IN A TISSUE CUTTING TOOL - 1 views

docs.google.com/viewer

fiber sensor paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 13 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 13 Dec 11
     
    AN OPTICAL FIBRE SENSOR FOR USE IN A TISSUE CUTTING TOOL
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

CT generation 2 is here! | Community Tools - 1 views

communitytools.info/en

Open opensource OVNi OVN tools tool

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • almereyda on 09 Jul 14
     
    Hrrm. That one looks nice. If it had not only Facebook One-Click login ...
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Making the Tools to Do-It-Together: Open-source Compression Screw Manufacturing Case St... - 0 views

www.cairn.info/-economics-2023-1-page-109.htm

paper bussiness model economic model Joshua Pearce OSH open source model IoPA economic level

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 10 Oct 23
     
    "Making the Tools to Do-It-Together: Open-source Compression Screw Manufacturing Case Study"
kozak30k

MUSTREAD AND LEARNBurleigh® PCS-6000 Motorized Micropositioning System - 2 views

burleigh.thorlabs.com/products-pcs6000.php

xyzpiezo_project sensor tool tools supplier collaboration company

shared by kozak30k on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • kozak30k on 06 Mar 13
     
    "Piezoelectric micromanipulator system combines ease of use with ultra-precise positioning to achieve the best possible results with the highest productivity."
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