I just found out today that CARES will also receive an Honorable Mention Award for Bears Breaking Boundaries 2009 - Curricular Innovation contest.
I submitted a CARES grant that would establish a community service learning project between UC Berkeley and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation to work on renewable energy technologies.
Competition was rather stiff, but the email I got says "We hope that we can support your project if you continue to pursue it in the coming year. Please also consider re-submitting it to Bears Breaking Boundaries next year."
My answer: You darn skippy CARES will be entering again next year!!
CARES still might win the CITRIS Big Ideas grant though. I will let you know happens next Wednesday after I present to the judges.
Today in my Qualitative Research Methods class, we were discussing to role of ethnography in new product development (NPD).
We read an interesting paper from Paul Dourish entitled "Implications for Design" that I really loved because it started a discussion about what is contextual inquiry (CI) and ethnography (EG).
In my view, CI and EG are both tools that can be used by engineers to design, invent, and implement new products. These tools are used to understand the needs/requirements of end user groups, the relationships that end user have between products, and the importance of these relationships.
Understand user needs is important because at the end of the day engineers have to build something that works and can be sold to a target end user group.
If the product that has been created works, but is not marketable than that is a failure. Likewise, if you sell a product and it does not work that is a failure. I will get into what "work" means in another blog.
There is, however, a difference between CI and EG and I always struggle with understanding where CI and EG begin and end.
Both contextual inquiry and ethnography can be used to build new products, the difference it seems is that the end goal of CI is to solely aid in new product develop while EG's end goal is to understand the relationships, dynamics, and importance between people and products.
It just seems that EG is just a more in depth study and analysis of the interaction people have with an object, people, and/or an environment.
I will be trying to further refine my understanding of CI and EG as the semester comes to a close, but I am really glad I took that Qualitative Research Methods class. :)
It is Earth Day today!!!
Our dear President Obama kicked it off with style by announcing that the federal government will open up its lands for projects that aim to produce electricity from wind and ocean currents.
This is another strong signal that President Obama recognizes that that the key to national security, economic security, economic prosperity, energy independence, and sustainable living involves producing energy from sources other than fossil fuels.
Currently, ~ 49% of the electricity produced in the US comes from coal-fired plants. The next biggest chunk comes from nuclear plants.
There is significant amount of renewable energy available within the United States and it is high time we start using it and generating more jobs for Americans.
Producing electricity from renewables is not enough though. We need to start implementing energy conservation and efficient programs and policies at the local and national level in tandem with renewable energy production.
It is much easier (and cheaper) to save a watt than it is to produce a watt.
I have more good news about CARES.
A few weeks ago, I submitted a white paper to the Bears Breaking Boundaries competition to design information technology to improve the sustainability of communities.
This competition is sponsored by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).
Today, I found out that CARES is a finalist for the CITRIS IT in the service of society competition!
The final round of the competition will be on April 29, 2009 from 3 - 5 pm at the Jean & E. Floyd Kvamme Atrium.
Please click here to read the official announcement.
Please come on out and support CARES!!!
I am 25 years old today!!! Woohoo.
Time to party with some good people.
The CARES database and resources are now listed in the directory for the National Science Digital Library!!
The National Science Digital Library is America's online library for education and research in the fields of
Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.
You can find the CARES collection here.
The Pinoleville Pomo Nation has decided to build the yurt style home that was designed and modified by students from E10 and CARES.
Construction is slated to start in July '09 and finish by Sept '09.
LACO Associates is the engineering firm being used to construct the home.
A special thanks goes out to Cindy, Tommy, Yao, Tobias, Yael, and Francesca for all their hard work on this partnership.
Today, we finally launched the first version of the CARES website and database.
You can access our resources here.
As most of you know, CARES is a non profit that I co- founded a year ago while at UC Berkeley.
Our mission is to enable consumers to make informed decisions about sustainability and renewable energy technologies.
This website is the first step to creating a sustainability hub where everyone from academics, homeowners, manufacturers, researchers, and businesses can come together to co-develop tools to help address our sustainability issues.
January 31, 1958 - Explorer 1 became the United States of America’s first satellite to orbit the Earth after it was launched on January 31, 1958.
After the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, the United States of America embarked upon a program to launch it own artificial satellite. The first American attempt to launch a satellite using a Vanguard 1 rocket occurred in December 1957 and failed miserably.
Following this failure, the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL, was directed to launch a scientific satellite using a Jupiter C rocket developed under Dr. Wernher von Braun.
The artificial satellite was designed, built and operated by the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory under the direction of Dr. William Pickering.
The satellite instrumentation of Explorer 1 was a cosmic ray counter designed by Dr. James Van Allen, a physicist at the University of Iowa. The cosmic ray counter experiment was designed to measure the radiation that surrounds the Earth. Once in orbit, the cosmic ray counter began to overload and measured a much lower cosmic ray count than previously assumed.
Given this new information, Dr. Van Allen theorized that the cosmic ray equipment may have been exposed to very strong radiation caused by a belt of charged particles trapped in space by Earth’s magnetic field.
The data returned by Explorer 1 and another satellite launched in March 1958 prove the existence of intense belts of radiation that surround the Earth. These belts of radiation are now called Van Allen Belts and are considered to be the first major scientific discovery of the space age.
Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Explorer I and satellites.
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