I was happy to see photos from our Make@Mack program in yesterday's SF Chronicle feature about the West Oakland high school. Congratulations to the Mack team on the profile and to maker Alex Nolan and educator Joel Rosenberg who are organizing the after school making program.

I very much like the idea of community schools.

Two big points in this year’s survey stopped Schuler cold when he read them. First, 60 percent of respondents could name a reason not to go into a science and tech field. "They’re daunted by something," he says, whether it’s that the path through school seems too hard, they don’t know anybody in those fields to look up to, or another reason. Secondly, Schuler says, nearly a third said they had little to no experience building anything hands-on, whether it’s a digital product like a website or a physical project like piecing together circuit. "These two are connected pretty strongly," he says. Building cultivates DIY skills and kick-starts a person’s interest in making things.

Those numbers would probably alarm President Obama, who spent a chunk of last night’s State of the Union address hammering the need to enhance American STEM education as a means to boost the economy. Schuler says he was grateful that Obama made such a high-profile argument. "STEM is the foundation of technology, invention, and innovation," he says.

But, Schuler says, it’s critical to remember that strengthening American STEM education isn’t just about churning out more Ph.D.s. Vocational-technology schools, junior colleges, and other institutions must help students reach their inventive potential, he says. "We need more of the bulk of the U.S. population appreciating STEM and thinking in creative ways."

via Lyn Gomes

Cube 3D versus MakerBot at CES. Old guard versus the rebel forces. ThingiVerse versus Cubify.

Genomics research increasingly depends on access to large pools of individuals’ genetic and health data, but there is mounting dissatisfaction with governance approaches that erect barriers between donors and the biomedical research in which they are participating. Typically, participants have little or no opportunity to track how their data are being used, what discoveries result, and what the new knowledge might mean for them, even when findings are of life and death significance for the participant.

Some frustrated communities have built their own scientific enterprises outside of traditional research settings.  Disease advocacy organizations have established biobanks, for example, and firms like 23andMe and PatientsLikeMe have used crowdsourcing methods to build up repositories of genomic and health data, each attracting over 100,000 participants in just a few years. Often labeled “citizen science,” these projects offer a two-way connection between participants and research—participants contribute their data, while seeing how it is used in research, what findings it generates, and how that new knowledge might impact their own lives.

Such citizen science efforts have also begun to achieve something that is crucial to the future of personalized, or “precision,” medicine.  A cornerstone of such medicine, according to a 2011 National Research Council (NRC) report, is a dense “knowledge network” (i.e., biobank), built by “mining” genomic, phenotypic, health, behavioral, and environmental data from many people. Indeed, former National Cancer Institute director John Neiderhuber has predicted a near future in which “every citizen” will contribute biosamples to biobanks and funnel health data into a centralized databank via biosensors linked to smartphones.

Yet, few will submit to being “mined” in this way.  The NRC report notes that to realize such a vision, there must be a “gradual elimination of institutional, cultural, and regulatory barriers to widespread sharing of the molecular profiles and health histories of individuals.” But this emphasis on overcoming barriers neglects that such a knowledge network is necessarily also a social network, a network that connects people, whether they are the people who experience disease or the people who study it.  The robustness of the knowledge network will depend on social connections—on the relationships, rules, and forms of trust that hold it together.  Far from “barriers” to be removed, these are connections that must be built.

This has been well demonstrated by some citizen science projects, which stand or fall on the strength of the social networks that underlie them.  Though far from perfect, these projects begin to sketch the outlines of an altered social contract between science and society—one that is open, participatory, and dependent on the collective energy of the community.

A key barrier to forging similar relationships in mainstream research is the dominant approach to informed consent.  The consent process tends to treat participants as outsiders to the projects that depend on them.  Signing the form is often the first and last interaction between participants and the research enterprise. These practices engender exceptionally weak social connections between donors and research: the focus is on mining information, not forging relationships.

Some have proposed that the ethical rules governing biobanking should encourage broad consent—or eliminate the need for it altogether.  A better solution lies in the opposite direction.  Mainstream research should invite forms of participation that treat donors as citizens committed to achieving a public good, not as repositories of informatic gold, ripe for mining.  Thanks to continually evolving network technology, participants could easily remain connected to research, electing personalized privacy protections or providing additional study-specific data upon the researchers’ request via flexible web-portals.  Such a system would recognize the right and the competency of participants who have given material from their bodies to govern that material’s future uses.  It would give participants a means to do more than the minimum, and the authority to say no when research goals do not comport with their values or preferences.

By seeing how their contributions are used, participants would gain a window into knowledge-in-progress, opening the black box of research to reveal just how far there is to go, and that getting there depends on a collective effort.  It would also offer a more dynamic—and more honest—picture of science, balancing hope with realism.  It would clarify the essential roles (and responsibilities) of scientists, patients, and research participants in advancing science.  It would move beyond a model that treats the asymmetry in expertise between scientists and citizens as a justification for asymmetry in research governance.  And it would build public trust in science by entrusting the public with a central role in shaping the future of biomedical research.

Science and citizens should not occupy separate worlds: by strengthening the role of citizens in science, science too will be strengthened.

Krishanu Saha is a Society in Science postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard Kennedy School, and stem cell biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J. Benjamin Hurlbut is an assistant professor at the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.

Read more about their thoughts on how to treat biobank donors in their recent commentary in Nature.

Last Saturday at the Exploratorium. Four fascinating makers talk about toy figures, Legos, recycling toys and games and more.

(in Finland) The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Lots of good ideas in this article but the idea of cooperation instead of competition seems like the best one.

This article, whic was published in the Make special issue on kits, is online at kits.makezine.com. I found it interesting that Erector sets, Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs were developed in the second decade of the 20th century, and became very significant learning toys in the second half of the century. What might we build in this decade that has a similar impact for new generations of makers yet to come?

Staff photo by Don Himsel
Make It Labs

Enlarge Purchase Photo

The region’s first hackerspace, MakeIt Labs, is working to reopen after being shut due to building-code issues in the former foundry where it set up shop in July, and the city might help out with a micro-loan.

“Something like this could be a death blow to a hackerspace, but we’re definitely sticking around. We’re here for the long haul,” said Adam Shrey of Hudson, a member of the board of directors.

Here's a story from Nashua, New Hampshire story that has nothing to do with presidential elections but everything to do with role of government. good and bad. Thanks to Dave Brooks for covering it and getting the context right. Good luck to the hard-working members of MakeIt Labs.

There’s no question that software and technology represent some of the fastest growing industries today. The internet has fundamentally changed the way we interact, do business, and spend money—without it, Frugaldad wouldn’t exist. That said, I always try and keep abreast of what’s happening in these sectors, and to be aware of how the online and tech industry makes its money.

I recently listened to an episode of This American Life called “When Patents Attack!”. Something that surprised me while listening was that while I think of patents as being mostly for gadgets and the kinds of products you see on infomercials, patents have become a huge factor in the software and online industries, to the tune of billions of dollars.

This infographic discusses some of the facts behind the patent industry and how it’s changed as software, technology, and the internet have developed at an incredible pace. I find the information to say a lot about the state of development and innovation; both how important it can be to everyday life, and the problems it can face on a larger scale.

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Excellent summary from Frugal Dad of the patent issues. Be sure to listen to the episode of This American Life, "When Patents Attack." My favorite section of the infographic is #5 referencing Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, who never obtained patents for his invention so that it might spread freely.

Two weeks ago, IBM and its development partner Eurotech formally submitted Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol to the Eclipse Foundation open source group. It's being called "the" Internet of Things (IoT) protocol, but in fairness it's only one candidate. It would serve as the communications mechanism for devices whose size may scale down to the very small level, with negligible power and transmission radius of only a few feet.

A trillion heartbeats

One example application already in the field, Piper told RWW, is in pacemakers. Tiny transmitters inside pacemakers communicate using MQTT with message queue brokers at their patients' bedsides. Those brokers then communicate with upstream servers using more conventional, sophisticated protocols such as WebSphere MQ.

"Look, this is engineered for a constrained environment," Piper emphasized. "But because of that, [these devices] are actually extremely efficient at doing things like conserving battery, and using very low bandwidth. So [MQTT] is actually a fairly sensible protocol for both the machine-to-machine (M2M) space that we're addressing with the Eclipse announcement, and also the mobile explosion as well. All these devices need to be connected."

New twist on the old idea of having a heart-to-heart conversation.

And that's great! I think hands are fantastic!

Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.

Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

The link to Bret Victor's post was sent around by Roseanne Somerson and forwarded to me by Frank Wilson.   (Initially I collapsed all of that, unfortunately, and didn't get the attribution correct.)   Bret's "rant on interaction design" says most technology ignores the hands, limiting us to interacting with "pictures under glass". We "dump the tactile for the visual."

Pastor Barry Randolph and Jeff Sturges talk to us about the Mt. Elliot Makerspace, which is located in the basement of the Church of the Messiah in East Detroit. The role that the church plays in the community is explained, and the bright side of urban blight is explored.

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Check out more episodes of Meet the Makers.

More:

• Sarah Lapinski: Detroit’s Seamstress-Engineer
• Farming Detroit
• Georgia Street Community Collective

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