Guest Blogger: Greg Tao ’10, graduate student, Department of Mechanical Engineering
For those who don’t know know me or a lot about our project, my name is Greg Tao, and over the last six months I have been developing a low-cost autoclave [sterilizing instrument] for middle income clinics of the developing world.
I am pursuing a master’s degree from MIT’s mechanical engineering department and am working closely with two Nepali students, Pramod Kandel ’14 and Shambhu Koirala ’14, as well as Sue Cho, another mechanical engineering master’s student. We have used their network of family and friends to identify 16 clinics within Nepal that have committed to using our autoclave. We have designed, fabricated, and shipped all the autoclaves in our luggage and will be traveling around Nepal for the next 10 weeks, seeding the autoclaves in rural health clinics.
With that, I’d like to take you through my first day in Nepal.
Pramod and Shambhu picked me up from the airport on Sunday (June 12th). We were continuously accosted in the parking lot for money as we walked through the parking lot searching for a good deal on a taxi. We finally found a fair deal loaded in all the bags. As we took off one particularly persistent beggar kept walking along side the moving taxi hoping for a handout.
After dropping the bags off at the hotel, we hit the streets for some food. The streets near the hotel are very busy and crowded. We walked for about 10 minutes and dropped into a hole in the wall restaurant on a side street after meeting one of Shambhu’s friends. I got to try momo for the first time, which is the equivalent of Nepali fast food. They are essentially vegetable, chicken, or beef dumplings that come fried, steamed, or swimming in a chili sauce.
We headed to see the tourist sites around the city after lunch. Below are a couple pictures from the adventure.
Typical side street in downtown Kathmandu. Credit: Greg Tao
Shambhu and Pramod touring around Basantapur, a famous tourist area and hangout in Kathamndu. Credit: Greg Tao
After a long day of touring, we finally settled into the hotel.
Pramod and Shambhu watching TV in the hotel. Credit: Greg Tao
We’ll post more as the adventure continues. With that I will leave you with the Nepali salutation Namaste, which is used for almost all formal greetings and goodbyes.
Blanchet is now more than 760 miles from Springer Mountain and doing well, hiking a lot and logging between 20 and 25 miles per day. He recently contacted us to share some photos, and he mentioned (in response to our inquiry) that he’d love to receive notes of encouragement–and food–from any alumni who are interested in supporting him. For breakfast alone, he tries to down at least six packets of oatmeal and two poptarts–and he’s still lost 20 pounds since he began.
Because picking up packages from specified post office locations can be tricky timing-wise, Blanchet has requested that folks send everything to his parents, who will then forward items on to him. Their address is:
Holley Allen (Mother of 3Stove)
39 Shattuck Rd.
Hadley, MA 01035
Scroll down to see images that Blanchet sent. View more and read frequent updates from the trail on his tumblr blog: http://gabehikestheat.tumblr.com/
Guest Blogger: Jessica Lin ’12, computer science major
Alumnus host: Bela Prasad PhD ’02
Jessica wielding a hoe.
Mr. Rosignol wields his red chainsaw like a toy. The whole day, he’s been cutting trees on this precarious fifty-degree slope, strewn with loose leaves and soil that give way beneath even his small frame. I’ve slipped just standing on the lower part of the incline. He’s wearing bright red coveralls and no ear or eye protection, which makes me nervous as his saw groans and revs and wood chips spray in a fifteen-foot radius around him.
This afternoon, I’m helping him pile logs from the trees he’s cut onto his tractor. The logs will go to the wood shed, where they’ll age for at least three years before they’re ready to be used as firewood.
Mr. Rosignol stops and says something. He speaks only French and has a thick accent local to this rural southwestern region of France–definitely not the crisp speech I heard in high school French class recordings. At first, I can’t figure out what he’s saying, so I have to ask him to repeat himself.
“I’m sixty-seven,” he’s saying. “You look like you’re twenty.” Yet I’ve been doing less work than him, and he’s probably less tired.
The four MIT students on the farming externship. From left: Alexandra de Rosa '13, Jessica Lin '12, Harrison Chen '11, and Patrick Gichuiri '13.
This was just one of the first days of my externship at a small farm on the outskirts of Najac. The farm—owned by Bela Prasad PhD ’02 and Vig Haraldsson SM ’00—is just starting up, soon to become a vineyard. For the past three weeks the three other MIT students here and I have been clearing land in preparation for planting. It’s physical work—turning soil and digging out tenacious weeds, chopping down small trees, laying down gravel paths, and so on.
Yes, I study computer science, and this externship has blissfully nothing to do with it. Instead of thinking about code, I’ve been thinking about how to best protect an area of soil from weeds long-term, how to best move mounds of heavy pebble to its needed location, and how to maintain the structural integrity of centuries-old dry stone walls. Instead of sitting at a keyboard tapping for hours at a time, I’ve cut down my computer usage to, on average, less than an hour a day. Computer science has removed me from physical work, but I’ve had a healthy dose of it here.
I’m gaining muscle and strength every day, but working here is also surprisingly good for the mind and spirit. I’ve improved my concentration simply by being removed from constant context-switching between different classes and p-sets and events. I’m always content, maybe due to the consistently beautiful and quiet surroundings. Mr. Rosignol, my fellow worker for a day, sets an example of the grittiness and self-reliance of the countryside, a place that through its austerity shows me there’s much I don’t need for happiness. The absence of traffic sounds and bright city lights at night is striking.
Life here seems to move more slowly; it takes longer to do some simple things. To throw out the trash, for example, we walk a quarter mile to a bin at the mouth of the small road that runs in front of the farm. But taking out the trash has also never been this scenic and pleasant a stroll.
The front of one of the two farmhouses, showing a fraction of the students' work. The slope on the left side was overgrown with brambles, bushes, and small trees before they arrived, and the path was not visible.
Guest blogger: Clara He MNG ’10, grad student in mechanical engineering
Alumnus host: Michael Daugherty ’07
Clara He hard at work at a coffee shop with two other local entrepreneurs, Steven and Olof.
What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
To be frank, I don’t know. That is why I applied for the externship with Mike, who in 2010 founded Bespoke Row, which provides tailored men’s clothing online.
After so many internships and long hours sitting in an office yet not accomplishing much, I realized that being an entrepreneur seemed to be a good choice. Yes, why not? I always have so many ideas, and I’m good at doing business models. It wouldn’t be that hard, right?
Then I came to Beijing this January to see how Mike runs his company. Like most of the entrepreneurs, Mike is running Bespoke Row without an investor; therefore, we work at coffee shops since it’s very expensive to rent office space in Beijing. I used to think working in a café was cool and romantic (poisoned by romantic movies). Yet in reality, we have to bear with occasional heated discussions around us, unexpected renovation that goes on all day, and smokers. Mike has set up a Beijing working group, so we always have other entrepreneurs working together with us. I can’t imagine how troublesome it would be to work alone since no one is there to take care of your stuff when you want to go the restroom.
I talked to Mike before I came to Beijing. I really liked his idea of shopping online while designing your own style, but sales weren’t that encouraging yet. We made only one sale to a returning customer (he brought a lot though) after Christmas. Apparently, we need to let more people get to know us before seeing some real money. Mike told me he has been running Bespoke Row with his own savings for more than a year. But there are just so many things to spend on! Data analysis websites, SEO applications, not even mentioning the tailors and fabric suppliers.
See, this is the truth: it takes much more than just a great idea and a good business model to start a business. You need to endure low income or even no income for a long time, poor working environments, and heavy workloads—you will be busy and thinking about your business all the time! Worse still, you may fail.
Be prepared, being an entrepreneur is far from easy.
Back in the spring we announced the MIT Alumni Travel Program’s MIT Around the World Photo Contest. The idea was to photograph people, places, or things reminiscent of MIT culture or impacted by MIT. Finalists were then voted on by the MIT community, and winners received cool loot, a feature on the Alumni Association homepage, and a place of honor in the Travel Program’s 2011 Explorer catalog.
The winners have been announced and one thing became clear in the voting—MIT peeps prefer their images without gravity—the force, not the demeanor.
Dan Tani ’84, SM ’88 took home top prize with “Brass rat around the world in 90 minutes,” snapped aboard the International Space Station, which seems both a bit of an unfair advantage and ragingly awesome.
"Brass rat around the world in 90 minutes," by Dan Tani '84, SM '88.
Second place went to Nathaniel Sharpe ’09 for “Defying gravity outside the lab,” taken in the mountains of Norway. I’m not sure if they used their camera’s timer but extra points if they did.
"Defying gravity outside the lab," by Nathaniel Sharpe '09.
Oh sure, you could play another round of Tetris or wade into the sea that is YouTube when you’re doing your best not to be productive. But here’s a better idea—especially useful if, in addition to not wanting to work, you’d rather be somewhere else: Go look at somewhere else!
Joseph McMichael, a grad student in electrical engineering and computer science, has hacked Google Street View and developed Globe Genie, a random way to see the world. Simply choose from among five continents (sorry, Antarctica and South America) and Globe Genie, according to McMichael as quoted in the Guardian, “generates random latitude and longitude coordinates within several pre-specified rectangles around regions that have Street View imagery. It then queries Google’s servers to determine whether the point is valid. If not, it repeats this process until it finds a valid location.”
The most amazing thing might just be that when seen in small snippets, locales around the world, no matter how exotic, can also be quite familiar. A lonely street in Trajere, New South Wales, Australia could be a dead ringer for one in rural Michigan (trust me). Be sure to take a 360-degree twirl via the tool in the top left corner of the page.
Amy Qian ’11, a mechanical engineering major, has been named one of Glamour magazine’s Top 10 College Women of 2010. Her inventions have helped many in Himalayan communities live safer, more productive, and more comfortable lives. As part of the SolSource team, she traveled to Tibet with the support of a Public Service Center fellowship to field test their three-in-one, solar-powered device for cooking, heating, and generating electricity. The device has won the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment and grants from the Clinton Global Initiative University and the Environmental Protection Agency.
This summer, as part of team HeatSource, she again traveled to China but with a new invention—a line of clothing and bedding that can serve as clean and healthy sources of heat. Her team is helping some of the 2.5 billion people worldwide who rely on unclean biomass fuels for heating, many of whom die from indoor air-pollution-related diseases. HeatSource received a Legatum Center Summer 2010 Seed Grant, which funds market research, travel, project scoping, and pilot studies for innovative, sustainable projects in low-income countries.
Qian’s inventions are produced by the student-founded company One Earth Designs, for which she is chief engineer. One Earth helps Himalayan communities adapt to lives altered by climate and socio-economic change. With her knowledge of local materials and techniques, Qian consults project teams on solutions for both rural and urban communities. She also offers her knowledge to locals. Check out video of Qian running an engineering workshop to explain woodworking tools and design principles and thus empower Himalayan people to engineer their own solutions to aid their community.
For the past four years, Nitin Sawhney SM ’98, PhD ’03 has traveled to a part of the world most people wouldn’t think of when considering a summer break: Gaza. For Sawhney, a researcher and lecturer in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, it’s more rewarding than any trip to the beach. He runs a digital media and storytelling program that engages young Palestinians in refugee camps in producing short films and photography about their everyday lives and aspirations. It’s called Voices Beyond Walls, and this year it was supported in part by the Center for Future Civic Media. Here’s a slideshow from this summer’s project, “Re-imagining Gaza.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yynGfAGMUQ’
Sawhney was born in India and grew up in Iran and Bahrain. He did his undergraduate work at Georgia Tech. In 2000, Sawhney was pursuing his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab when intense violence broke out in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Sawhney was increasingly drawn to the conflict as he tried to come to terms with the needless loss of life and suffering in the region. He found himself regularly attending and organizing many events on campus to make students better informed about the conflict, including dialogue sessions, film screenings, exhibits and a large public lecture on the topic by Noam Chomsky. “The students and faculty at MIT have been incredible about helping me understand and come to grips with these issues,” he says. “For all its technical legacy, I found the MIT community far more socio-politically engaged and open-minded than many other such academic environments.”
After graduating from MIT, Sawhney founded a startup company that developed open source software to support publicly funded biomedical research. But the Middle East conflict continued to weigh upon him. In 2006 he decided he had to stop thinking and do something. That summer, he took an unpaid leave from his firm and traveled to the West Bank with little more than a laptop and some video cameras in a backpack. His plan: develop a youth media program as a pilot project on the ground. Voices Beyond Walls was born out of a collaboration with local community centers in the refugee camps he visited. Through an international and local volunteer team of artists, filmmakers and educators, the program has been expanded to seven refugee camps in the West Bank, with over 60 video shorts produced in the past four years. Many are posted on the Voices Beyond Walls YouTube channel.
This summer, Sawhney and colleagues conducted the program in parallel in the Al Aroub camp in the West Bank and the Jabaliya camp in Gaza. They first trained 50 young Palestinian adults in a three-day training workshop on digital media and storytelling techniques. This is a short film produced during one of these workshops:
Many of these young adults then facilitated month-long workshops with kids aged 10 to 16 at community centers in the refugee camps. The kids learned photography, neighborhood mapping, script-writing, storyboarding, acting, filming, and video editing. Sawhney regularly blogged about his experiences running the program in Gaza, and the kids interviewed each other as the program came to an end. (“How did you handle the editing software?” one student asked another. “I had some difficulties at first,” came the answer, “but now I feel like a professional.”)
Earlier this month, the kids capped off their program with photo exhibitions, film screenings, and diploma ceremonies. At the end of the final screening in Gaza, Sawhney says, “The young girls on stage were so confident responding to questions from the audience about their films; I can imagine many of them doing the same at an international film festival in a few years.”
Sawhney plans to follow the workshop participants and their families in Gaza this year, collecting data for a pilot study on the role of creative media expression among young children in areas of conflict. He wants to see if the kids regularly engaged in producing their own media-based narratives are coping better than their peers living in the refugee camp without such a creative outlet—Sawhney calls it “participatory media”—to work through the challenges they are confronted with on a regular basis.
Here in Cambridge, Sawhney is working with MIT researchers and local community organizations to jointly develop better ways to empower youth with digital media, as part of an initiative he co-founded called the Department of Play at the Center for Future Civic Media. In the fall semester, Sawhney will teach Networked Cultures and Participatory Media, incorporating many of his experiences and research into the newly-developed curricula. And in late October, he plans to host an exhibition and screening of the youth photography and films from the Re-imagining Gaza program at MIT. Later this year he is also helping to organize a symposium on Gaza with the Center for International Studies and Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative.
In a way, he’s come full circle back to his own struggles with the violence in the Middle East as an MIT student 10 years ago. “Over the years I have realized it’s a far bigger challenge helping Americans understand why the conflict continues,” Sawhney says. “So I feel we should find ways to leverage participatory media both for civic engagement and global awarness. Young voices in the Palestinian Territories are rarely heard but are far more authentic in revealing the context and humanizing the conflict.”
Jay Keyser, MIT linguistics and philosophy professor emeritus, has traveled the world reluctantly. His new book, I Married a Travel Junkie, describes with good humor why he has continued to travel and experience exotic places despite his reluctance. (Love, naturally.)
His adventures include enduring mock charges of lionesses, snorkeling in Lake Malawi rife with the bilharzias parasite, sighting an aardvark, sailing in a felucca in Egypt, and perfecting his technique dealing with baksheesh seekers. Readers will find his travel tales endearing and will also learn some things about his childhood and his marriage.
After walking in the bush in Zambia at the South Luangwa River National Park, he wrote:
“I think this was the first time in my life that I have ever confronted real fear, not the fear that knots your stomach when you’re a kid and you realize you are going to have to fight somebody because they called you “a son of a bitch.” (In my neighborhood any slight against one’s mother had to be avenged.) This was fear mixed with a healthy dose of anger. I had been telling my companions and the guides and Nancy that it was absolutely crazy to go looking for lions, especially on foot. What was the point? Everybody knows what a lion looks like. And when it is chest-high looking right back at you, there better be a bunch of bars in between. Why couldn’t they see that? The more I complained, the more sympathetic their smiles. It was maddening.
My companions were unconvinced. “Jay is really a hoot, isn’t he?” they would say patronizingly. “Afraid to go looking for lions. I’ll bet he never goes out after 10 p.m.”
“I talked and talked and tried my best to get Nancy to abandon this foolishness….So it came to this. The lions roared. And, instead of panic, I felt fear, anger and then, just as suddenly, a sense of beatific ease.”
Copies are available on Amazon.com but only in a Kindle edition, perfect to take with you when you travel or you can get a paperback copy at the Harvard Book Store!
Every year, my wife forces me to take a vacation, this year on a cruise ship. My daughter and I were cooling off on the top deck after spending a little time in the exercise room when a woman approached and, looking at my daughter’s T-shirt, asked, “Are you a math whiz?”
Comparing herself to MIT students, rather than to the population at large, she replied, “Well, not exactly.”
“Oh, I’m a high school math teacher. I know what the square root of -1 is. That’s i. But what is the rest?”
“You can work it out!”
“Ok, E/c2–that reminds me of Einstein’s equation, E = Mc2. Ah! M. But what about PV/nR?”
Here, reaching back a long time, to 5.01, and wanting to hold up my end of the conversation, I helpfully supplied “Ideal gas law. Pressure times volume equals the number of moles of gas times the gas constant times the absolute temperature.”
“Oh, MIT!” she said.
A little later I ran into the teacher again and fell into a conversation about Artificial Intelligence, high-school teaching, and this and that. As we were about to go our different ways, I said “You seemed impressed that my kid went to MIT. Would you have been impressed if her T-shirt carried a Harvard logo?”
Provost L. Rafael Reif will assume his new role on July 2, 2012. Learn about him in the News Office article and watch an extensive interview as part of the MIT150 Infinite History collection.
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Amy Qian ’11, a mechanical engineering major, has been named one of Glamour magazine’s 
