Here’s one reason why social media and the web are great learning tools – it’s easier to understand ideas when they’re illustrated in many different ways. The web encourages new ideas, or memes, to travel faster and farther than they ever could before. It offers a kind of learning synchronicity that people will naturally follow.
For instance, while researching online education tools like the Khan Academy, I found Vi Hart’s 3 part series about Doodling in Math, the spirally things in nature, Fibonacci numbers, and how leaf designs and pine cones show how nature successfully follows the path of least resistance.
Then a few days later, amazed by the number of people who are using Tumblr, I went to the site to figure out what the fuss was all about and saw this article about Greg Dunn, an artist/scientist who was also investigating the way nature follows the path of least resistance, with neurons:
In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. “Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow,” he says. “The reason the technique works really well is because it’s directly related to how neurons are actually behaving.”
Dunn calls this the “fractal solution to the universe,” which he sees as the “fundamental beauty of nature.” He’s fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that’s nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch.
Just as plants choose the easiest path, so do people..
There’s Smart Sand and Robot Pebbles: This video showcases a nifty new computer algorithm that could one day allow tiny nano-processors to instantly analyze and assemble an exact copy of any 2D object. What we’re seeing here is the very beginning of that process.
MIT computer scientists Daniela Rus and Kyle Gilpin are behind this new algorithm, which they are currently testing on 2D grids with “smart pebbles”, which are about the size of a cubic centimeter. The key idea here is to get each of these pebbles to communicate with each other and exchange information while using as little processing power as possible. To accomplish that, each of the pebbles are equipped with four magnets, one on each of its sides other than the top and bottom.
Making complex large 3D structures used to take hours or even days but with the newly developed 3D laser printer, scientists can speed that up by a factor of 500 or in some cases 1,000 times.
An engineering firm has developed a 3D bio-printer that could one day be used to create organs on demand for organ replacement surgery. The device is already capable of growing arteries and its creators say that arteries “printed” by the device could be used in heart bypass surgery in as little as five years. Meanwhile, more complex organs such as hearts, and teeth and bone should be possible within ten years.
Today’s 3D printers, which can produce complex physical objects such as jewelry and airplane parts, are being used to print something even more intricate: human organs.
3D printers work much like inkjet printers. Instead of ink, the machines deposit successive layers of different materials, including silver, plastic, and titanium to form an actual object.
In late 2009, a startup called Organovo developed a bioprinter, which uses human cells to print functional human tissue. The end goal is to print human organs that can be used in transplants, says Chief Executive Officer Keith Murphy.
“There are a series of things that will get us closer and closer to the end goal of human organs,” says Murphy, who will speak in San Francisco on Tuesday at a conference hosted by the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine. “The biggest next step is vascularization—creating blood vessels within larger tissues.” Without these blood vessels, the tissue would die, Murphy says.
As people live longer and organ failures increase in number, regenerative medicine is becoming increasingly important.
Professor Cronin added: “3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It’s entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.
“Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to healthcare in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.
“We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software ‘apps’, similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need.”
If you travel back up a rutted dirt road from Kibera and turn right on the Ngong Road, just past the Uchumi Hypermarket, you’ll see a five-story office building completed in 2009. From the patio ringing the top floor, a haze from diesel fumes and the cooking fires of Kibera’s shacks is visible just beyond the crest of a hill. But step inside, and it feels as if you’ve been transported to a Silicon Valley startup. Dozens of twentysomethings toil away on laptops; a few blow off steam at a foosball table; Pete’s coffee bar (not to be confused with Peet’s of the United States) doles out cappuccinos, milk shakes, and slabs of banana bread. This is a business incubator called iHub, the fruit of a homegrown information technology culture that had its coming-of-age moment in December 2007. That month, ethnic violence broke out after a disputed presidential election; at least 1,100 people died and 300,000 were displaced. Ory Okolloh, a human-rights activist, put out a call to Kenya’s loosely knit blogging and technology community to help report on the fighting (see “Frustrated Innovation”). Several people responded, including Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia. In 48 hours, Kobia had written the first draft of an incident-reporting platform called Ushahidi, the Swahili word for “testimony.” Now any Kenyan could send in an eyewitness report by text message, and it would be reviewed and then posted on an online map. Ushahidi has since been used widely, in countries including Haiti, South Africa, Russia, and the United States (where it helped map flood-related problems on the Missouri River).
An incident in Ushahidi’s formative days planted the seed for iHub. Ushahidi’s developers had initially offered the technology free of charge to the Kenya Red Cross Society and other NGOs monitoring the violence. But the NGOs didn’t want it; it wasn’t part of their existing plans and funding models. “We had so much resistance,” Hersman recalls. “We kept trying to say, ‘It’s free, we will hold your hand, we will help you communicate with the public to say how you are providing a service.’ They weren’t willing to do anything with it.”
Jackie Cheruiyot (left), project leader for a Nairobi startup, tells a Kibera resident about MedAfrica, an app that provides links to doctors, dentists, and first-aid advice. After an investment of less than $100,000, the app is on 43,000 phones. Doctors are scarce in Kenya, but some people get care from storefront clinics like this one in Narok (right). Credit: Frederic Courbet/Getty Images (left); David Talbot (right)
A decade later we can see that this telescopic focus on the elephant in the room missed out on history’s biggest mouse party. The most important fact of our modern media world, the engine of such unprecedented creativity and anxiety-inducing destruction, is that the customer is no longer captive. People create their own media, for the sheer bloody hell of it, and no longer adhere permanently to one of a handful of legacy brands.
That all of this should be self-evident to anyone who can open a Web browser makes it no less relevant to our assessment of media—or, more precisely, to the prevailing assessment of media, which serves as the misplaced starting line for most discussion. Too many media critics are still obsessed with mergers, with ownership percentages, with whatever political slant they think establishment newsrooms are force-feeding down our throats, instead of recognizing that the threats to good journalism in 1972 are vastly different than the threats to good journalism in 2012. For heaven’s sake, we still have a “Project Censored” churning out annual collections, in an era of Wikileaks, ubiquitous camera phones, and homeless guys publishing popular blogs.
To those of us whose career prospects did not depend on media behemoths or academic institutions, whose view was not colored by an over-arching fear of economic and political power concentrated in the hands of would-be 21st century media barons, the AOL-Time Warner merger, like all supposedly frightening media consolidations, was only as relevant as our comparatively minor consumption of the new conglomerate’s products. (I would invite every Ben Bagdikian fan reading this to keep a detailed diary of your media consumption for a full day, count up how many different corporations and human beings compiled the stuff you consumed, note which entities did not even exist in the 20th century, and then try ever again to say or write with a straight face the phrase “media monopoly.”) As I wrote when the merger was announced, “If this is the ‘new totalitarianism’…then we’re the freest slaves in the history of tyranny.”
