Norbert Wiener: Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1993)

“Internationally honored for achievements throughout his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener’s day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.

Wiener provides an insider’s understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener’s comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the “free-lance” scientist are particularly pertinent today.”

With an introduction by Steve Joshua Heims
Publisher MIT Press, 1993
ISBN 0262231670
185 pages

Publisher

DJVU (updated 2012-8-1)

Amy Sun: Jalalabad Fab Lab, Afghanistan: Annual Report (2009)

In May 2008 a Fab Lab was installed in the village of Bagrami near Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan with funding from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program. This fab lab is a continuation of a program started in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). Currently there are nearly 40 such labs in 11 countries interconnected by internet and broadband videoconference.

The goal of the Jalalabad Fab Lab was to investigate post-war and disaster recovery applications of digital fabrication to see how communities might benefit from access to on-demand, local, custom production capabilities rather than relying on long, slow, and expensive supply chains. The Jalalabad lab anticipated special emphasis on health care needs that require on-site customization for individuals.

We have established a fab lab that has become a community resource. After 8 months this resource show positive signs of becoming self-sustaining. There are community members that are learning basic economic and business principles by creating product in the lab for sale in local markets. In this informal setting, through hands-on projects and peer-to-peer learning structure, people are gaining technical knowledge and experience using state-of-the-art digital fabrication tools. This experience stimulates motivation to learn more deeply about science, math and engineering and develop skills that are valued around the world. Additionally we have established educational infrastructure that extend learning beyond what a fab lab can teach. We have also created a wireless network throughout the community that gives access to the internet, for free, opening up the vast knowldege resources that the internet offers, and providing a gateway to the rest of the world.

Fielding a fab lab in Jalalabad has shown that prototyping tools for digital fabrication can function in a post-war, community-stressed setting like Afghanistan and have significant, immediate applications. We’ve identified applications in Information Communications Technology (ICT), civil engineering, and first line health care that can benefit enormously from the capabilities in a fab lab.

Report written for National Science Foundation, April 2009
Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

authors

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Leo Beranek: Riding the Waves. A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry (2008)

Leo Beranek, an Iowa farm boy who became a Renaissance man—scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, musician, television executive, philanthropist, and author—has lived life in constant motion. His seventy-year career, through the most tumultuous and transformative years of the last century, has always been propelled by the sheer exhilaration of trying something new. In Riding the Waves, Leo Beranek tells his story.

Beranek’s life changed direction on a summer day in 1935 when he stopped to help a motorist with a flat tire. The driver just happened to be a former Harvard professor of engineering, who guided the young Beranek toward a full scholarship at Harvard’s graduate school of engineering. Beranek went on to be one of the world’s leading experts on acoustics. He became Director of Harvard’s Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, where he invented the Hush-A-Phone—a telephone accessory that began the chain of regulatory challenges and lawsuits that led ultimately to the breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly in the 1980s. Beranek moved to MIT to be a professor and Technical Director of its Acoustics Laboratory, then left academia to manage the acoustical consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman. Known for his work in noise control and concert acoustics, Beranek devised the world’s largest muffler to quiet jet noise and served as acoustical consultant for concert halls around the world (including the Tanglewood Music Shed, the storied summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra). As president of BBN, he assembled the software group that invented both the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, and e-mail.

In the 1970s, Beranek risked his life savings to secure the license to operate a television station; he turned Channel 5 in Boston into one of the country’s best, then sold it to Metromedia in 1982 for the highest price ever paid up to that time for a broadcast station. “One central lesson I’ve learned is the value of risk-taking and of moving on when risks turn into busts or odds look better elsewhere,” Beranek writes. Riding the Waves is a testament to the boldness, diligence, and intelligence behind Beranek’s lifetime of extraordinary achievement.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Volume 30 of Current Studies in Linguistics
ISBN 0262026295, 9780262026291
235 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)