Independent radio producers like the Kitchen Sisters record thousands of hours of sound, but have no system for digitally preserving or providing access to this material. The Pop-Up Radio team built a free, open source archive system with partners at SoundCloud and the Internet Archive, for easy use by producers who lack funding and technical expertise. Pop-Up Radio Archive offers an invaluable opportunity to diversify media access in an era of consolidation. Independent producers of broadcast audio face major challenges: a lack of archival and technical training, a lack of resources, and a lack of understanding about how best to preserve and create access to cultural audio artifacts. Pop Up Radio Archive is a free, open-source, scalable archive system for broadcast audio content, that gives producers a system for storing audio content. Using web services, sound files are uploaded to the Internet Archive for permanent preservation, and producers are given the option of sharing their content through SoundCloud for public consumption.
Andrew and Virginia Rudd present big ideas winners a pitch day award, April 2012.Photo credit: Blum Center
This project addresses the unmet needs of clinics serving the most at-risk populations in developing countries, where anemia is prevalent and has a great effect on treatment of other diseases. The ability to rapidly detect hemoglobin levels throughout pregnancy and during childbirth mitigates the risks associated with anemia. Working with Dr. Megan Huchko of UCSF and Nick Pearson of the non-profit Jacaranda Health, the team seeks to develop an improved method to assessing hemoglobin levels that is affordable and accessible to mobile clinics working in resource-poor areas. One current method commonly used in clinics, the WHO Hemoglobin Color Scale (HCS), uses a comparative color scale to determine hemoglobin levels. While affordable and yielding quick results, the test is based on subjective assessment from the clinician and can give inaccurate results due to variation in color interpretation and lighting. The project’s goal is to program a phone application that can measure hemoglobin concentration based on the RGB values of a digital phone image of a blood sample, allowing for the quantification of color and eliminating the ambiguities and human error.
Big Ideas Award Celebration, May 2012Photo Credit: Blum Center
Campus InSight is an online forum for discussing ideas meant to engage students in solving campus problems and encourage communication between students and administration. Each week, discussion will focus on one question or problem that affects the campus community. Students can log in with their school IDs and start discussions, in which other students can reply to. Up-voted comments earn points and are moved to the top of the discussion. At the end of each week, the discussion is closed and the student who submitted the best idea or solution, as determined by number of up-votes, is declared the ambassador of that week. Each month, the ambassadors of each week sit down to a meal with
administrators to discuss the solutions they came up with and how they can be implemented. In as little as two weeks, students can identify, discuss, and solve key issues, in a truly democratic fashion.
In a survey of 132 students about 84% of them agree that a better campus-wide lighting system will increase their sense of safety at nighttime. Footstep Energy provides an interactive renewable-resource solution utilizing the human footstep to generate electricity. When a person walks, there are vibrations between the footsteps and the road surface. This project is aimed to capture and convert that kinetic energy into electricity. This would involve paving piezoelectric tiles into the ground of the busiest areas of campus, which also need an improved lighting system, such as VLSB and Faculty Glade. When a person steps on the surface of the tile, the compression on the piezoelectric material creates voltage to generate electricity. Higher foot traffic will generate more electricity through the Direct Piezoelectric Effect, which can be stored and used at night. UC Berkeley’s 35,838 students give the campus the ability to utilize footstep energy.
Commercially available motors have certain limitations for solar-car-racing applications and focus on delivering higher than necessary top speeds at the cost of sacrificing torque output. The goal of the Rotors in Motion project is to develop a general method for optimizing motor designs and to then use this method to manufacture a motor for the UC Berkeley Solar Vehicle Team CalSol.
The goal of Smart Building is to validate an adaptive, real-time, automated energy management solution, Energy Management System (EMS), through pilots at commercial building sites, starting with restaurants and office buildings. Restaurants have the highest energy intensity of all commercial buildings, and office buildings are the largest energy consumers of all commercial buildings. Estimated annual energy cost savings are over $3,200 for the median restaurant, and $22,000 for a medium-large office, representing ten and twenty percent savings, respectively, on the utility bills for these buildings. Once validation is completed, and feasibility is established, the team plans to commercialize the product, and will seek to scale rapidly through strategic partnerships and licensing.
Haath Mein Sehat (HMS) seeks to address the need for health interventions that concern a broad range of health issues. In order to meet this need, HMS proposes to pilot a Community Health Worker (CHW) program in Hubli, India during the summer of 2012. CHWs will provide front-line medical advice and care that is not easily accessible to slum community residents and will involve the community in order to create an effective and sustainable program.
Jacaranda Health works to address safe motherhood in the underserved peri-urban areas of Nairobi, Kenya through a model that combines mobile health vans with high-quality local clinics. Jacaranda has launched their mobile health van system which provides antenatal and postnatal care and is looking forward to opening their first standing clinic in January 2012 which will provide labor and delivery care allowing for the much-needed continuity of care in these underserved areas. Jacaranda’s non-profit healthcare uses evidence-based standards of medicine, quality improvement methodology and is driven by feedback from clients.
Earth energy is a technology that produces electrical energy from the change in the rate of chemical reactions produced by microorganisms that can be found in soil, mud, and decomposed organic material. Light from Below takes this existing technology to the undeveloped areas in Panama in order to create Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) Lamps. The goal is to prepare a design that will facilitate the low-cost manufacture and cheap maintenance of MFC lamps in the community. The project will generate electricity for the community for about one year at an estimated initial cost of $10.00 per lamp and will have a positive impact on tourism, safety in the community and the environment.
