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MIT’s guru of low-tech engineering fixes the world on $2 a day
Logan Ward, Popular Mechanics
… Smith is trying to turn the cobs into charcoal. For an award-winning engineer from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this would seem to be a humble goal. Wood charcoal has been in use for thousands of years. However, for many of the world’s poor, it can be a life-saving technology. Compone’s farmers are among the 800 million people worldwide who use raw biomass—agricultural waste, dung, straw—for fuel. Globally, smoke from indoor fires makes respiratory infections the leading cause of death for children under the age of 5, claiming more than a million young lives a year. Charcoal burns much more cleanly. “I don’t know how quickly we can change cooking habits here,” Smith says, “but I’d like to see people breathing less smoke inside their homes.”
A well-liked instructor at MIT and member of the Popular Mechanics editorial advisory board, Smith is a rising star in a field known as appropriate technology, which focuses on practical, usually small-scale designs to solve problems in the developing world. She has brought four undergrads to Compone, along with Jesse Austin-Breneman, an MIT graduate who works for a community organization in Peru, and one of her engineering collaborators, 53-year-old Gwyndaf Jones. To get here, the team has lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a heavy wooden crate bearing a pedal-powered grain mill more than 3500 miles in taxis, airplanes and buses.
(21 July 2008)
Contributor Brad Bonham writes: Great Popular Mechanics article published in the August issue. It’s good to see MITers advocating and implementing “appropriate technology” in low tech settings.
BA:Long article. Related articles in Popular Mechanics:
3 Small, Low-Tech Inventions for Big, World-Changing Problems
More on Appropirate Technology
7 rules of design From MIT’s guru of low-tech engineering
Amy Smith, Popular Mechanics
Amy Smith, a senior lecturer at MIT and an editorial advisor to Popular Mechanics, is a leader in the appropriate technology movement, in which engineers from developed countries work with people in the developing world to create practical, affordable solutions to everyday challenges. Here are some of Smith’s rules of thumb for design in the developing world.
1. Try living for a week on $2 a day. …
2. Listen to the right people. …
3. Do the hard work needed to find a simple solution. …
4. Create “transparent” technologies, ones that are easily understood by the users, and promote local innovation.
5. Make it inexpensive. …
6. If you want to make something 10 times cheaper, remove 90 percent of the material.
7. Provide skills, not just finished technologies.
(16 July 2008)
Short week for state workers proposed
Tim Hoover, Denver Post
The workweek for state employees should be changed to four 10-hour days, Rep. Don Marostica said Tuesday, noting the move would cut greenhouse gases, reduce traffic, and save money on road maintenance and energy.
Marostica, R-Loveland, said he planned to push legislation next year to make the change.
“What I see is on Mondays or Fridays (employees getting another day off),” he said. “It gives a lot of people with kids the chance to go visit their kids at school and take time with their families.”
He pointed to an effort underway in Utah that will shift 17,000 of its 24,000 employees to a four-day week next month. Officials hope the move will save the state as much as $3 million in energy costs per year. The executive order issued by Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. does not apply to state police, prison guards, court employees or public universities.
A spokesman for Gov. Bill Ritter said the administration is evaluating the four-day workweek proposal.
(16 July 2008)
As gas prices rise, police turn to foot patrols
Shaila Dewan, New York Times
People around here are seeing a lot more of Officer Robert Stewart.
Following strict new orders, he frequently leaves his squad car, hopping out to visit a bartender, then a barber, then a bank teller who squealed and clapped her hands, demanding to see the latest photograph of his son.
As gasoline soars past the $4-a-gallon mark, police chiefs in towns and cities across the country are ordering their officers out of the car and onto their feet in a budgetary scramble…
…The Houston Police Department exceeded its gasoline budget of $8.7 million last year and expects to spend $11.3 million this year. San Diego, which budgets fuel costs citywide, already expects to exceed its budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 by $1.5 million…
(20 July 2008)
