IgNobel Lectures at MIT

One of the biggest perks of living in Cambridge, MA has to be this annual event.

MIT Media Lab at 25

So amputees can walk and the blind can see once again thanks to research that happens in these labs.
Having witnessed one of these miracles, how could I not be happy to have been part of this birthday bash?

Stem Cell & Personalized Medicine

Interesting lecture by Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT yesterday. We might be close to the goal of reprogramming adult stem cells to cure  some human diseases.

!Salud!

Ever since I watched the Buena Vista Social Club, I wondered what makes Cuba's citizens lead a long, healthy life despite their obvious poverty. Watch a clip of Candela, Candela and you may get a sense of what I am talking about. The old singers are setting the concert hall on fire with their energy.




This documentary gave me an answer to that question.

!Salud! -- Spanish toast meaning "your health" and one of the few words I know in the language.

Film Synopsis: !SALUD! looks at the curious case of Cuba, a cash-strapped country with what the BBC calls "one of the world's best health systems."

From the shores of Africa to the Americas, !Salud! hits the road with some of the 28,000 Cuban health professionals serving in 68 countries, and explores the hearts and minds of international medical students in Cuba -- now numbering 30,000, including nearly 100 from the USA.

Their stories plus testimony from experts around the world bring home the competing agendas that mark the battle for global health and the complex realities confronting the movement to make health care everyone's birth right.


Pipa's Note: Also read Doug Starr's Senseless Crackdown on Cuba

Meeting Nexi

Nexi, the robot, features in articles on MIT Media Lab's Center for Future Storytelling. I am not entirely sure why this should be the case. Anyway, I decided to go meet this robot in Cynthea Brazeal's Personal Robotics Lab . Currently, the humans in the group are training their newest robot to be more personable.

Nexi was in a booth-like setup; dark make-shift walls cut us off from the rest of the room. Undeniably, robot has this cute, child-like quality, but definitely needs to work harder to gain people's trust. It asked me my name and ignored my response totally. You can't do that to people Nexi.

Next, it informed me it is kind of jealous when people play with the Huggable Teddy Bear. Wanted to know if I had any similar experience in my childhood. So, I found myself telling the robot: "I don't want to talk about it now." Unlike some moronic members of my extended family, who can be really prying, the robot took the hint and moved on to the next question.

Nexi is just a bunch of metal, chips & wires but for a moment, it had me on edge. It made me uncomfortable. I suppose another person in my place would have given it some irrelevant reply, laughed at the robot, or misled it totally. But this session is all about furthering artificial intelligence, right? So, I didn't lie.

I wish the graduate student in charge of the experiment had told me more about where all these interactive sessions are leading. Can the robot learn from experience? Would Nexi ask better questions in the future? Perhaps, next time, it will be able to tease out confessions more efficiently.

Isn't this how humans make friends too -- by bartering personal information?

I left with the promised $10 Amazon gift certificate and have picked a book to buy. It is by a local author, it is about food, and I look forward to reading it. I should check in a few months to see if Nexi has become more emotionally intelligent.

Firefly Power

The first model of the rickshaw -- a form of human-powered transport in Asia-- saw the driver function as a beast of burden. In subsequent models, pedals took some of the drudgery out of the pulling.

Pedal-power doesn’t lighten the load for the rickshaw-puller but thanks to a simple attachment, the physical exertion could help light his home when the sun goes down. A whimsically named mini-generator, the Firefly, designed by a Kolkattan engineer, converts the steady motion of the wheels into energy that can be stored in batteries.

Picture of a typical Kolkata rickshaw-puller

Check out Firefly Power, a simple innovation that won its inventor, Suprio Das, a berth at the IDDS 2008 hosted by the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology last summer.





"More work needs to be done to increase the efficiency," says Das. "It will take more time till I am ready to commercialize it. "

So can someone like Hameed, the driver featured in this video, afford this Rs. 1000 ($25) system? Shouldn't some non-profit agency give it to him for free? In his book Out of Poverty, Paul Polak, the development guru, makes the convincing argument that hardly anyone is too poor to invest in their own future.

Globally, 1.6 billion people, who have no access to electricity, use fuel lamps or stay in darkness every night, says Das. "How can one expect to reach even a small fraction of this population without a business model?," he asks. The true test of a product like Firefly (or any other development design) lies in its market success. If the product does not sell, it means that either it does not serve the purpose or it is too expensive for that particular market. Either way it is a design failure, he points out.

Das, whose terrace is his workshop, is not in this business to make money. Seven years ago, he gave up his full-time job to run an Internet cafe Cyber-Vibes that also allows him to devote his time to development work. He started going to the villages (around 60 to 80 km from his place) with a group working on the mitigation of arsenic in ground water.

Millions in eastern India and Bangladesh are exposed to very high level of arsenic contamination in ground water and have no access to any alternate source of drinking water. "Men, women, the old and the unborn are inching towards death with every drop of water that they drink," says Das. Visiting these villages he noticed that drinking water was not the only problem. Health, sanitation, education, electricity -- everything needed improvement.

Das has started building small things, with his limited resources, that could possible help some people in some way. This is what his team built at IDDS, check out the video.

Pipa's Note:

While developing countries in Asia hope to banish the rickshaw to history as they grow wealthier, some cities in the U.S. promote pedicabs as an eco-friendly way for tourists to get around and take in the sights.

The Year of Food in America Books

And some excellent ones too thus far:

0. Squeezed: What you don't know about Orange Juice Alissa Hamilton

1. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Harvard's Prof. Richard Wrangham

2. The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite again by Harvard's Dr.David Kessler

Of the first title, I have this to say. The first time I had O.J. out of a box on a British Airways flight, I thought "There has been some terrible mistake." That is a very distinct memory because I was 100% sure the flight attendant had given me a yellow colored concoction of chemicals instead of fruit juice. "These mixups happen," I wanted to tell her as I struggled to gulp that first mouthful.

Over the years, my taste buds came to terms with the reality of food in America; now my jaded tongue registers faint surprise when it encounters the real thing. So, that was a story idea waiting to be explored except I wouldn't have known how to go about it. Kudos, Alissa.