Author: Jonny Hankins

Jonathan's Author Bio: Co Editor of the International Handbook on Responsible Innovation, and author of Responsible Innovation, A Narrative Approach, Jonny works for the Bassetti Foundation in Milan publishing articles on innovation and responsibility on their website and in academic and trade journals and also blogging about his interests. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Responsible Innovation and member of the the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation

Second Hand Technology Finds

9 Replies Jonny Hankins

If you walk round Cambridge in Massachusetts in June, you find the streets filled with discarded belongings. The students are leaving Harvard, MIT, Boston University and all the others institutions and as they leave they abandon the things they cannot take with them by the side of the road. Many stacks of things have a little note or post it attached saying ‘take me’ or ‘free, working’, and it is very much part of the culture to take things.

On my final few days in Cambridge last week I walked the streets with my kids from one park to another, and I collected some interesting things, including some very interesting and expensive pieces of second hand technology.

A common sight on Cambridge Streets

I collected a pair of M Audio AV40 studio speakers, fully functioning and beautiful to listen to. List price $229.99. A few scratches on the top of one but obviously only had light domestic use. Into the back of the bike trailer they went and onward on our hunt.

Further down the road I picked up a large 27 inch LCD computer screen, again lightly used and well looked after. At least $200 if you buy it new, as its previous owner had done probably 9 months before.

I was fortunate enough to pass a young student as she emptied her office into a box on the street, so I collected 6 Moleskin divided folders ($26 each), 200 blank DVD’s and cases, about 60 blank CD’s and 2 nice moleskin notebooks. Into the trailer, the kids can walk.

Last year I saw bags of cables, modems and power units, and as I moved from Europe I took what I needed.

On this trip I also saw a 32inch flat screen TV but I couldn’t carry it, and a standard size LCD TV too but with no remote control. I left that where it was too and will explain why.

The thing about TV’s and monitors is that you have to pay $25 for the city services to pick them up, so many are abandoned. If you pick one up and it doesn’t work you have to pay to dispose of it, or leave it outside again for someone else to do the same. Either way not a great result. I also saw at least 10 old cathode TV’s, only one with the label to demonstrate that it had been paid for.

This started me thinking about the effect that a moving student population must have on the technology market and by extension the development of new products. Practically every student has a laptop, smart-phone, TV and high speed internet at home and these things are all paid for when they move to their university of choice. Producers must see a massive peak in September, and an associated rise in profits.

So this leads to the question of what happens to all of this stuff when they move on. In many cases they take it, but some cannot be transported and is left, either by the side of the road, dumped or left in the house.

As we all know the dumping of technology is extremely damaging, recycling a must but also ethically dubious, so how about something like the Cambridge model?

The model is also used here for cans and bottles. If you buy a beer in a bottle or can, the can or bottle has a value. If you take it back to the shop they recycle it and give you 10c back. I have seen the same model with plastic bottles in Scandinavia. The result of this scheme is that a business has grown up around collecting empty bottles etc from the bins, students in the case of Scandinavia and homeless people here.

Well, for however much you might not like the idea of going through somebody’s recycling bin for returnables, it looks like an extremely efficient form of recycling to me, and revenue for those people that really need it. And although I don’t do bottles you should see my well stocked office and hear my stereo at home!

Waste less!

An Incubator from Car Parts

12 Replies Jonny Hankins

One of the most serious issues with using medical equipment in the developing world is breakage. Some statistics state that the average life of a large piece of machinery is about 5 years, and hospitals typically have stockpiles of broken machinery that they cannot use.

The problem is availability of spare parts. In some cases machines are taken out of service for minor problems, even fuse replacement, because the distribution network required to get the part does not service that area.

Here in Cambridge Massachusetts, a design company has produced as prototype of a baby incubator for use in such situations. The machine has all of the necessary functions of the most expensive incubators, but is built using car parts.

An easily repairable machine

Why car parts you might ask? Cars are found everywhere, and in many cases they are the only things that get regularly repaired. As a result parts are also available practically everywhere, both formal and informal networks serving even the most remote areas, and the designer believes that this makes the prototype product serviceable and repairable wherever it is found.

A simple idea that could have great knock on effects, I hazard to say. The incubator is heated using a pair of car headlights placed under the mattress, the temperature gauge is a car standard, as is the wiring loom and the air intake and filters. The alarm is a door bell and the emergency lights are direction turning indicators. If power is lost a motorbike battery takes over and it can even be run from jump leads.

The Massachusetts General Hospital has one of the prototypes on display in its museum, but unfortunately it looks as if the designers are still looking for a backer in order to put the project into mass production.

Given that millions of babies are born each year and many die on their first day of life, let us hope that somebody offers them some funds.

Sequencing the genome of unborn babies

2 Replies Jonny Hankins

As a follow on from my post about genetic testing last month, I would just like to point community members towards a story that is just breaking here in the US.

The New York Times carried a story on its front page on 7th June in which it reported that an unborn baby’s DNA was sequenced with 98% accuracy using just the mother’s blood and father’s saliva. The testing was done when the fetus was 18.5 weeks old. The accuracy was tested after the baby was born with a full sequence conducted on blood taken from its cord. A second experiment involving blood taken from a mother much earlier in the pregnancy (8 weeks) showed similar results although slightly less accurate.

non-invasive testing of a fetus now possible

In purely practical terms the authors point out that this system of testing for genetic disease is completely non-invasive, and this will save the lives of many unborn children. Presently amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling are the preferred means for conducting tests for genetic disorders, but these techniques lead to the loss of the baby in about 1% of all cases as they both require the insertion of a needle.

The ethical implications of such a breakthrough are being widely discussed however. Much of the debate revolves around the idea that parents may choose to abort a fetus because it may not carry the traits they desire, and not only in terms of possible genetic diseases. We all know about the problem of female fetus abortion, and here we are introducing an entire matrix of more or less desirable features. There is also a serious problem of false positives, as some mutations were missed in the experiment and other positives given that at birth were found not to be present.

An argument that recurs involves the identification of diseases that may affect the individual in late life such as dementia. What kinds of decisions are parents of unborn children likely to make if they are told that it carries a mutation in a gene that raises its chance of getting cancer, or dementia or any other typically later life problems?

In this world of information however I imagine that there will soon be a market for such tests in the style of 23andMe, and as the price comes down many people will want to see the probable health future for their unborn children, as well as whether they will be tall or short, blond or brown or have blue eyes. This will have practical consequences for society.

If the model follows the existing 23andme path of offering statistical analysis of the chance of developing diseases in life the problem becomes even more complex. What might the effect be of telling the parents of an unborn child that it has a 40% increased possibility in developing for example Alzheimer’s disease? How can these statistics be analyzed and how will they be interpreted?

And what might the consequences be for an otherwise healthy fetus that finds herself caught up in statistical gambling?