Here is a video from the talk that I gave with Lynwood Walker and Claudia Gold of Difra Inc. at TEDxBoston. The portion of the talk where we went into the most technical detail was unfortunately abbreviated by accident, but it turned out well and it was a pleasure to participate. The event was fantastic and I really enjoyed the other talks and connecting with people in the audience. Everyone was filled with questions and curiosity, in true TED spirit :)
Matthew Gordon, Claudia Gold, and Lynwood Walker as their talk about digital fabrication of homes began at TEDxBoston 2010
Matthew Gordon showing wooden pieces cut by laser for Difra Inc. at TEDxBoston 2010. Larger pieces like these serve as the building block for homes constructed by Difra Inc.
Check out this video of the software that I’ve been making to create wooden frames for houses. The software converts the model of the house into all of the pieces required for actually building it.
I have spent a lot of time contemplating sustainable homes and communities recently. The monotony and wastefulness of suburban neighborhoods filled with single-family box homes has always weighed on me. I dream of a different future where people live in unique structures that reflect their needs and encourage interaction with others.
I was delighted to come across a short article in Worldchanging called “De-Industrializing the City” which focuses on how we have been sold a future full of complex machines that do ecologically stupid things to solve problems in our cities that should instead be solved by better planning.
I recommend you read the article in full because it gets right to the point, but I’d like to share the opening quote from Bjarke Ingels:
Engineering without engines. We should use contemporary technology and computation capacity to make our buildings independent of machinery. Building services today are essentially mechanical compensations for the fact that buildings are bad for what they are designed for—human life. Therefore we pump air around, illuminate dark spaces with electric lights, and heat and cool the spaces in order to make them livable. The result is boring boxes with big energy bills. If we moved the qualities out of the machine room and back into architecture’s inherent attributes, we’d make more interesting buildings and more sustainable cities.
“We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.”
I am constantly amazed that people will argue against healthcare reform in the United States on the basis that it will lead to rationing. Is it not clear that we are already rationing healthcare based on arcane, arbitrary, and morally irrelevant rules such as pre-existing conditions and the size of a person’s bank account?
This article explains the obvious absurdity of the current rationing system:
A report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services indicates the current health insurance system “leaves millions behind” due to coverage denial practices.
The report, issued Tuesday, cites a recent national survey showing 12.6 million non-elderly adults – 36 percent of those who tried to buy insurance on the private market – were deemed ineligible for coverage by insurance agencies. Many of the denied patients had cancer. According to the survey, insurance companies either charged a higher premium or refused to cover the condition.
Another survey cited in the report found one in 10 people with cancer said they could not get health coverage, and 6 percent said they lost their coverage because of their diagnosis.
“The insurance company practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions is not confined to serious diseases,” HHS officials said. “Even minor problems such as hay fever could trigger prohibitive responses.”
An insurer could charge high premiums, deny coverage or set a restriction such as denying any respiratory disease coverage to a person with hay fever, according to the report.
The study also found that some insurance companies respond to an expensive condition such as cancer by initiating a thorough review of the patient’s health insurance application. If the insurer discovers that any medical condition, regardless of how minor, was not reported on the application, it could revoke coverage retroactively for the patient and possibly all members of the patient’s family, the report said. That practice is known as rescission.
Companies can do this even if the condition found is not related to the expensive condition or if the person wasn’t aware of the condition at the time. At least one company encouraged employees to revoke sick people’s health coverage through rescissions, the report said.
It is vapid and unproductive for critics to claim that healthcare reform will lead to rationing because any limited resource is going to have to be rationed somehow. In fact, introductory economics classes typically begin with a discussion about how resource allocation is necessary in a world of inherently scarce resources. This need to allocate resources is used to introduce the concept of the free market (ie. lets allocate based solely on supply and demand). It is ironic then that the conservatives are arguing that healthcare is going to be rationed under reform proposals when conservative economic theory is rooted in this idea that everything must be rationed.
There’s also the fact that the current healthcare bills don’t have a public option, an opt-in to medicare for older people, or most of the other hallmarks of progressive healthcare reform. Since the current bill seeks to expand health insurance coverage by mandating insurance and providing subsidies to the private insurance companies instead, where do these conservatives think this (supposedly new) rationing will come from? Won’t care be rationed almost as it is now except that insurance companies will be less able to deny coverage based on health, family history, and wealth? It sure sounds like more equal rationing to me, although we should really get the profit-driven insurance companies out of our healthcare completely.
In These Times recently featured an interview with Melody Petersen about the pharmaceutical industry where she made several great points. The entire interview is worth reading, but here are a few quotes that stood out.
Two-thirds of men, women and children in the United States take at least one prescription drug. And children in the United States are three times more likely to take anti-depressants and psychiatric drugs as children in Europe. We spend at least $300 billion a year on prescription drugs. That is about twice what we spend on higher education.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the drug companies. The federal government has collected billions of dollars from the industry to settle charges of illegal marketing. But the drug companies just raise their prices, so they can pay out half a billion dollars on lawsuits, and continue doing exactly what they have been doing. It’s an endless cycle. I think some of the top pharmaceutical executives should face criminal charges, so they would think twice about allowing these fraudulent practices.
Do you know of another industrial country that does not negotiate with drug companies for better prices?
The United States is the only country in the world that allows the drug companies to charge whatever they want.
You write that there are two pharmaceutical lobbyists for every member of Congress. What are they doing on Capitol Hill?
The pharmaceutical industry fights against any measure that threatens its profits. Present law gives the drug companies a 20-year patent on each drug. During that time, they have a monopoly in the market. They can charge whatever they want for that drug. They have fought against any measure to allow more reasonable drug prices.
That last quote brings us full circle to my point earlier about the deeply flawed intellectual property laws in this country. It’s particularly unpleasant to see how our capitalist-driven morality has led to a situation where large pharmaceutical companies control medicine even though they clearly put profit before health and innovation.
It is difficult to know the best way to make a positive impact on the world. We spread our beliefs through our conversations and, hopefully, through our work as well. I often contemplate going to law school because it would be so meaningful to be able to influence the rules of our society.
Intellectual property law has become particularly contentious. Technology companies are in an arms race to accrue such large portfolios of patents that their competitors are unable to compete or sue them based on other patents. A recent New York Times article used the following graphic to depict the lawsuit mayhem that has erupted in the mobile device space.
The New York Times article was written in response to the news that Apple has threatened to sue HTC, Motorola, and other mobile device companies for infringing on iPhone-related intellectual property. Apple acts as if they invented the touchscreen phone and they are trying to intimidate rival companies from including features like multitouch and gestures on their devices in the United States. I find this sort of behavior to be slimy, selfish, and short-sighted. It makes me seriously doubt that I would purchase another iPhone in the future, even if it happens to be the best phone for my needs at the time. I’d rather buy from a rival handset maker like HTC or Palm that is trying to improve upon recent ideas instead of using threats and lawyers to stop innovation from happening.
The Copyright Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) of the Constitution empowers the United States Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” I believe that there is a logical basis for this and I would expect software and “business method” patents to exist for this purpose. In practice, however, people seem to think that they should be able to patent ideas so that they can own them forever, completely control how they are used, and get rich quickly by licensing them. This certainly was not what the founding fathers had in mind when they instituted copyrights “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
Additionally, notice how the Copyright Clause states that copyrights should be for “limited times.” In one of the most disastrous Supreme Court decisions that I can remember, the court ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft that there was no limit to the number of times Congress could extend the lengths of existing copyrights. This means that Congress can effectively make copyrights last forever in spite of the language of the Constitution which clearly indicates that they must have “limited times.” This means that older works are not becoming part of the public domain, where we are all free to use them, even though many of them are out-of-print and no one is making money off of them anyway.
In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark. (the NYTimes)
It’s going to be worth the fight to make sure that important ideas aren’t locked up for the rest of time.
How bizzare is it that there are 960,000 farmers in the United States while there are an estimated 75 million people who play the Facebook farming simulation FarmVille every month?
I recommend watching a lecture and Q&A with Lawrence Lessig from 6-7:30 PM ET today. His books discuss how the nature and future of creativity are unfortunately being dictated by our flawed laws surrounding copyright and intellectual property. He has also organized efforts to reform Congress. The wonderful Elizabeth Stark will be moderating the event on behalf of the Open Video Alliance. Get more details here.
Lawrence Lessig, the foundational voice of the free culture movement, will deliver a talk on fair use, politics, and online video from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You’ll be able to tune in to a live webcast at openvideoalliance.org/lessig.
I feel so much energy, enthusiasm, and inspiration within minutes of getting to NY. I quickly find friends that I haven’t seen in too long and spend the night (and the morning…) effortlessly traversing ideas that have been on our minds. Times like this make me feel like I should never sleep. There are so many great conversations and ideas to be had.
NYC tempts me once again. Oh, it would be a charm to live here.
I conversed with so many intellectual, socially aware people this evening. There is so much to learn about meeting people, understanding them, finding shared interests, and building lasting connections. It is amazing how meeting a few new people can re-energize one to network and discover other potential friends.
I spend so much time frustrated by how apolitical many of the people that I meet are. I’m not sure if I would encounter that less here than in Boston. The structure of society is so fundamental to the well-being of the populace and yet so many people don’t think about the politics and ethics behind the decisions they make. I have countless friends who have worked on defense department projects, for finance firms, for advertising companies, and so on. I don’t want a world full of missiles and financial “innovations” where the space we inhabit is blanketed in advertisements, but this is the world that we have arrived at. Many of the brightest people apply their efforts to these ends. They spend the hours of their lives making tools that often end up causing more harm than benefit. It needs to stop. There are so many projects to work on that will help people and we need to focus on those instead of this economy that is built to help corporations at the expense of the thinker, the creator, the artist, the teacher, the learner, etc. in each of us.
The Scratch programming environment enables people to quickly and intuitively create interactive multimedia projects without prior knowledge. I am continually impressed at how successfully Scratch introduces important software development concepts while providing a hassle-free experience for newcomers. I have often wished that there were an even more developed object system, particularly the ability to create instances of a class, because I think that kids would be able to immediately understand these “advanced” concepts.
I am currently working on a design for integrating features from object-oriented systems into Scratch. Scratch is actually based on Smalltalk (note: Scratch 2.0 will be in Flash), which is an object-oriented language itself, so there should be an elegant way to do it. I’ve been trying to learn more about why the language designers chose not to include this feature originally. I suspect that they thought it would introduce too much additional complexity for newcomers to the language, but I think it could be totally intuitive for kids to work with if the new features are nicely integrated into the user interface.
I’m often jealous that kids get to play with these fun MIT Media Lab toys like Scratch and Lego Mindstorms that teach them high school or college level computer science topics without them even realizing it.
Let me know if you want to discuss pedagogy, Scratch, etc.
The way that we view food in the developed and relatively prosperous countries is so strikingly different from how it is viewed in the portions of the world that face rampant starvation. Case in point:
According to a guide presented by the Environmental Protection Agency in cooperation with Department of Agriculture, “… more than a quarter of all food produced for human consumption in America is currently discarded.” Findings in a recently launched detailed study in the UK confirm the magnitude of the wastage and provide a number of details. For instance, one third of the food bought is thrown away. (source)
It has long been controversial that all of this perfectly good food is being wasted while people are starving. I’ve had conversations with people about this and they’ll often vaguely defend our practices by bringing up how expensive it would be to transport the food to the people who need it. This article from the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog called my attention to the fact that discarded food produces methane gas, which is twenty times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
So not only are we wasting food while people are starving, but the rotting food is destroying our planet!
I felt calm and unhurried after getting back from eleven months of traveling. This newfound freedom to do things at my own pace for the indefinite future made me feel unproductive for a while, but now I have started several projects which easily take up the whole of my free time.
Claudia and I are teaching programming classes for kids at Roslindale Community Center and Sprout (a learning space that a few friends started). The kids will be building animations, simulations, games, and other fun multimedia projects. Check out our course website.
We are also designing an application that will help match up learners with similar interests who live near each other. I’ll let you know more about this as we get ready to launch version 1.0.
My friend Lynwood recently started Difra Inc. (formerly known as Difra Construction). They are using technologies to build houses more quickly and sustainably for less money. I’m looking forward to this project getting big (it certainly deserves to!) and I hope to become involved soon.
Finally, I’ve once again started work on lighting software to control the big pile of Color Kinetics iColor Coves that I inherited. Hopefully beautiful sights will come out of this endeavor in the not too distant future.
