Unterbahn

Nadya Peek at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT is leading up an effort to get a FabLab build in Haiti, so that as reconstruction progresses, Haitians have an opportunity to circumvent the traditional manufacturing and supply chain paradigm — and to create a broad range of goods for themselves.

A Fab Lab are high-tech and relatively expensive ‘universal factory in a box’ – including a ShopBot CNC, laser cutter, and so forth, with which you can make all kinds of electronics, furniture, replacement parts, and even more machines. They exist in a variety of places around the world and part of having a Fab Lab is being connected with a global network of makers and tinkerers at other Fab Labs.

I initially balked at the idea of spending $250k (yowza!) on something like this, but I think that enabling and empowering Haitians to challenge the global manufacturing powers-that-be is a fundamentally important part of helping Haiti become self-sufficient. Once the ‘theatre of disaster’ shifts to somewhere else, and the spotlights move to other disasters, a Fab Lab will support their years-long reconstruction effort.

But first they need $250k, so please consider donating!

Go-go Google! It’s official you can CAMP (yes with a tent) at #wherecamp this year. Pack your gear boys & girls camping at Google!! #gis (twitter.com/wherecamp)

That’ll be much more convenient, sweet.

About halfway through there’s some great stop-motion work done by the kids at Cantagallo.

A University of Washington-based IGEM 2009 team (see project page) has created a Lego-based robot to assist gene synthesis researchers – for only $700 in parts, as opposed to the over $100k price tag of a commercial liquid handling robot (see for example Tecan’s Freedom EVO product).

This reminds me strongly of Jonathan Ward’s MTM A-Z personal fabrication machine, developed at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. I bet Jonathan & co. could make a cheaper and more powerful machine for less… they should collaborate!

Read about a hard-working team which competed in iGEM’s 2009 event without access to a robot in a recent New York Times Magazine article.

Daniel Miracle is in the midst of a month-long project with Lima-based art/technology/culture program Escuelab, where he has been collaborating with a group of arts-oriented members of the Cantagallo community on a range of projects. Most excitingly, he’s been setting up a hyperlocal TV station with a range of only a few hundred meters — and helping kids from Cantagallo broadcast live TV programs on channel 39. (Some programs are taped and are available on the group’s web site) The entire transmitting setup (parts of which you can see in the picture below) cost around $200. I was amazed to see kids interviewing each other on live TV in the Shipibo language — asking questions like ‘why did we move to Lima’ and so forth.

The Shipibo arts group is called Shuawa after the ‘satellite bird’ from Shipibo legend; the shuawa bird acts as a network to relay messages among Shipibo maestros. With Daniel’s support, Shuawa has also been running arts workshops for kids, including video and hand-drawn animation. As part of their workshops, Carla del Carpio and I were lucky enough to be able to do some Grassroots Mapping sessions there. (The coincidence of the meaning of Shuawa and the “people’s satellite” we built as part of our balloon mapping work there was great!)

This project was super inspiring to me — above all because among media technologies, I think of television as the least participatory, and as one which is typically used to support centralized power structures. While Daniel isn’t the first to use short-range television broadcasting as a community-run cultural medium, it’s nevertheless a very exciting inversion of an ‘old’ technology.

Here are some quick updates from Alice Gray at Bustan Qaraaqa. First, news of Abed’s farm at Um Salamoneh (I’d written about it earlier under the name Umm Salamuna where we did kite mapping):

We also organized tree-planting days at Bustan Qaraaqa, at Abed’s farm in Al Wallaja and in Um Salamoneh, on land threatened with confiscation to make way for an Israeli cemetery. Abed’s situation has improved quite significantly since our last newsletter, as his lawyer has managed to secure him a blue Jerusalem ID. This means that he is now legally entitled to be present on his land, although there is still a serious threat from Israeli real-estate developers, who continue to push for his expulsion to make way for settlement expansion. This season we were able to raise enough money to install a rainwater harvesting system at Abed’s, donating 2 water tanks (thanks Imo!), and are still working on a project to create a greenhouse outside the cave.

(Above, a photo of Abed and Jared)

Unfortunate news, however, about friends Jared and Faith, who were such good hosts when Josh and I visited:

The latest move in what seems to be a sinister trend aimed at silencing dissent and removing ‘witnesses’ to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has been the denial of entry to international NGO workers and journalists based in the West Bank. Many such people had been out of the country over Christmas and were refused entry at Ben Gurion airport when they attempted to return to their homes and jobs. Among the ‘casualties’ of this policy were our dear friends Jared Malsin (chief editor of the Maan News English Desk) and Faith Rowold (Public Relations officer of Dar Annadwa) who had been on holiday in Prague. Faith was immediately deported to Prague, whereas Jared spent a week in detention attempting to contest his case on grounds of ‘freedom of the press’ before he too was put on a plane and flown out (read story here).

Jared and Faith, like many internationals, were living and working in the Palestinian Territories on Israeli tourist visas, being unable to obtain work permits from Israeli authorities. They were deported for ‘refusing to cooperate’ during their interrogation at Ben Gurion airport; yet they were placed in this position by Israeli authorities themselves who would not give them the necessary visas to pursue their legitimate work and have a long history of refusing entry to people admitting to connections with Palestinian organisations or individuals. Recently, Israel has stopped issuing work permits to all West Bank based NGOs including Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and Handicap International, forcing all foreign employees to rely on tourist visas (see story here) and placing them in a very precarious position.

That sucks. You can also read about it at the Washington Post. Good luck, Jared and Faith!

Caroline of OurGoods.org has organized a “Trade School” where you can come to learn or teach among peers!

Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.

Come to Trade School for thirty days of classes, co-working and bartering at GrandOpening’s Lower East Side storefront from January 25 to February 28, 2010.

I remember seeing this in a documentary when I was a child – French field biologists created a giant inflatable netted raft which sits above the rainforest canopy, and from which they can rappel down into the trees to take samples and do observations. The researchers lived on the raft for an extended period in tents. What an enchanting idea! They’ve apparently done expeditions since the 80s.

Read more

The day after working with landowners and activists in Umm Salamuna in the West Bank, we stopped by to visit Alice Gray, who organized the protest. She runs a permaculture farm project in Bethlehem called Bustan Qaraaqa, and was interested in mapping the farm periodically to monitor growth and erosion. She was quite excited about the kite concept so we thought we’d give it a try.

The attempt was somewhat frustrating – while the day before we had over 30mph winds, at the farm we had the opposite problem: very little wind. BQ is located in a sharp valley where it’s hard to get a view from above (see picture) but we finally managed to loft a small parafoil kite (thanks Nadya!) with an iPod nano attached. We let it out about 500 feet, but the kite flew at a very low angle, and in the wrong direction. In the end we got a reasonable image of the other side of the valley, which we’ll try to rectify as a proof of concept.

We’re using VLC to review frames manually, saving the clearest ones as PNG images. Then we use hugin with the SIFT algorithm to auto-stitch the video frames together. This is a bit involved and if we continue using video we may want to make a web interface to do this automatically. As in: point it at a YouTube video and it generates a panorama as well as it can and opens it in Map Warper. As it turned out, the hilly terrain proved too much to successfully warp this capture into a usable map; see the final product. What we need is a much higher point of view, if there are going to be any hills. Luckily some of the kites I bought in San Juan last week are ideal for this – and they fly much more vertically so we won’t have to worry about being as far upwind of the target site.

These two days definitely show the ‘worst case scenario’ for this kind of mapping… super high and low winds, steep valleys and ridges, low-res video and time limitations. Anyways the best part of the day was when two Palestinian kids and their dad came out to see who the idiots were who couldn’t fly a kite… and helped us get one in the air:

Coming soon – our last day of mapping in the middle east was at the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan, where we captured some absolutely fantastic images under some of the best conditions we’ve seen so far.

The Children’s Environments Research Group at CUNY developed a curriculum with UNICEF on the topic of participatory environmental exploration by children as a part of the urban planning process.