Industry News
MentorsAcrossAmerica.com & ScienceBusUSA.com are Educational NonProfit Organizations.
US schools Rank 22nd/30th in Science/Math.
We need Goals & Role Models for our kids (to build our Jobs & Employment base);
We are creating a small fleet of buses to cover as many states & counties as possible,
doing science exhibitions at public schools across America,
getting kids:
interested in the sciences
& most importantly;
into many existing year-round science competitions for Middle & High Schools.
We *need* a Nationwide Mentor Network (role models).
Our schools have been floundering w/o co-operation from the real world, of jobs, business & research.
Before we go to each school, we contact companies willing to support mentors in each school,
so when the bus(es) pull in & auditorium presentations start,
the potential mentors & school sponsors get to observe kids' level of interests.
To assist kids in the science competitions, we are building:
MentorsAcrossAmerica.com (esp. co' sponsored)
which also is Nationwide Learning Resources, which assist one-another.
This is also the easiest way we can help re-establish some moral compasses in the schools,
via using real-world examples, without being pushy.
Kids don't get any exposure to developing technologies,
how to get their hands dirty creating solutions,
nor develop creative thinking & problem solving skills, to real world problems.
The goal is for every school to start MAKING THEIR OWN VERSION of what we show them,
via DIY (Do It Yourself) projects.
ScienceBusUSA.com is building Hard Science exhibits for interactive displays at schools,
with emphasis upon:
Alternative Energy (Green Technologies)
Medical Research,
Microscopes (literally projecting atomic/molecular/viral images to PC screens)
Nanotechnology (Click Top, center pic)(more pics)
Quantum Mechanics ( Computers )
Robotics & Artificial Intelligence
3-D Printing (plastics & metals)
& the plethora of disciplines that make up each of those fields.
The problem with most museum exhibits is that they only scratch the surface
& don't get into any details of the science,
let alone give teaching resources.
Both took pride in *educating* their audiences.
Missing: Jobs & Education:
In the US, high school dropouts commit ~75% of crimes.
$60.3 billion/yr for: 2.3 million prisoners ($24,000/inmate/year), $5.1B/yr for new prisons.
Extra: Add 4,814,200 on probation/parole (2011). That's ~1 in 32 Americans. Wiki
Over 1.2 million students/ year drop out of HS (7,000 / day).
Over 50% come from ~2,000 HS "dropout factories" w/over 40% dropout rates.
7-10% drop out of Middle Schools (Only CA has started reporting MS; up to 15%)
Less than 25% of students obtain skills to sustain themselves; the rest become struggling participants of welfare, courts & prison.
H-1B visa workers: The US imports well over the "65,000 extra/yr cap": FY2010: 499,218 FY2011:671,837 FY2012: 820,431 DOL/ Wiki /Cri
Who profits, from what you, a taxpayer, pays for? What is *your* ROI (Return on Investment)?
Lost: Jobs & Education: Most of the US is caught in a vicious Catch-22.
When Tech Co's look to expand, in most regions of the US, they do NOT see an Interested,
Capable, Technically Skilled, nor Experienced workforce. Ergo, a catch 22, whereby they pass said regions.
We *need* a Nationwide Mentor Network! SciencBusUSA->Donation Link
Education: The earlier the better(1):
"Testing" has killed American ingenuity.
"Common Core" is proving to be a worse joke than 1960's "new math".
"Traditional schools" kill multiple ways of tackling a problem.
We learn how to spit out a rote result, but we have no idea of *how* things work "under the hood".
Feynman emphasized that if you can simplify & play with the math, you can work wonders(Movie Clip).
Few students get lucky to find teachers that emphasize "as long as you show your work, use what works best for you".
"Fenman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, "Explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it." "
“If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough”- Einstein
Pay it Forward: This is a continuously increasing-quality, up-scaling in-size project:
Each school will be given opportunities to help replicate part of their own interests,
so more State/Regional buses can be brought online.
DIY (Do it Yourself): Most high tech equipment and tools can be DIY made.
The best way to learn anything:
Get your hands dirty.
Every problem encountered, is a teaching experience!
"I have not failed.
I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” -Thomas Edison (More Quotes!) (Tesla Quotes)
Funding (Phase 1):
We are looking at military surplus Buses needing rework,
so we can turn them into cross-hybrid systems.
Each bus & it's alt. power system is slated to cost $5,000 - $15,000
depending upon which technologies we have sufficient funds to integrate.
Traditionally, a low scale exhibit is $5,000.
Mid scale: $10,000
Target scale: $50,000 SciencBusUSA->Donation Link
Multiple Buses to cover multiple spots across the US.
Bus 1's target area is KY-IN-OH
Bus 2's (& each bus further financed) target regions
are based upon Best Donations' choices of priority school areas.
These are mobile displays
& transportation for larger exhibits to be set up within gymnasiums, etc.
This bus fleet's designs are hybrid electrical/mechanical systems utilizing
Ethanol alcohol, H2 & Vegetable oils
with multiple power storage technologies ( mechanical &/or chemical).
Some energy generation sources will be active during travel;
even a few small scale wind turbines (wonder how well they'll fare, at 65+ MPH?)
Dyslexic Inventors (http://dyslexiaUntied....):
Michael Faraday (Magnetism/Electricity) Henry Ford (Ford automobiles), James Russell (inventor of the compact disc),
William Hewlett (HP- personal computer), Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab (created Guitar Hero, Lego Mindstorms, etc),
&.... Dean Kamen. (Look at his world-wide FIRST Robotics competition, started in 1989! )
Kamen, in HS, had his own incorporated machine shop & at age 25 made his fortune with
the 1st at-home dialysis. Discovery.com Dekaresearch(De Ka)
Biographers have compared Kamen's early years to those of Thomas Edison's. Both inventors did not do well in public school, both had teachers that thought they were dull and would not amount to much. However, the real truth is that both men were too smart and bored by their early educations, and both were avid readers who constantly educated themselves about what interested them.
Microscopes (to the Atomic layers, for Schools):
The most powerful light microscopes can resolve bacteria but not viruses.
500 nm (nano meters) is the wavelength of visible light.
How do you see something THIS small & smaller?
All of these can be made DIY (Do It Yourself)
(& we have a good variety of blueprints...);
MRI's were thought to be impossible. What's next?
Proteins Folding (& moving):
Stanford University's Folding@home (Sony partnership: 100 Million hours)
- The problem with nano exhibits is that
the elements of life are based upon protein folding, esp. our DNA & RNA.
This is a topic more complex than tangled phone cords....
which is literally the name for some of the research.
DNA Copying Problems: a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy:
each looks worse that the subsequent original.
Many of our most serious disease are replication errors in copying
upon the cellular level.
Our aging process has a cellular equivalent of knowing that
& limits the # of copies every living cell makes via telomeres.
Example: Dolly the sheep, (the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using nuclear transfer), had telomere chains all-ready shortened to 6 of the 12 years of the average sheep life expectancy.
(Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts).
Since the donor cell to be copied was taken from a sheep's mammary gland, Dolly was named after Dolly Parton.
Quantum Computing: (Google)
The laws of physics (Macro world) change in unsuspected ways
when going down to the nano & quantum scales.
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."- Feynman
This is where our society is building into;
(WSJ) (BBC)Google is purchasing a 512 qubit quantum computer from D-Wave for an estimated $10 million.
How do this rig compare to current SuperComputers?
During R&D phase, 512 qubits (439 operational) ranked w/ the 10th fastest SuperComputer–
the IBM/DARPS ( 63,360 64-bit cores)( 1.5 petaFlops )
NanoTech: Imagine being able to create ANYTHING atom-by-atom.
Nature can. Only we're looking to do it with Diamond, too.
The Holy Grail for nanotech? Medical repair mechs the size of bacterium.
Watchmaker & Mechanical Engineering skills are becoming mission critical, since traditional electronic circuitry starts suffering from electrons jumping across circuit paths & other quantum effect problems.
This forces changes; Programs etched into diamond.
Mechanical computing akin to Babbage's Differential Engine (1823 AD),
Curta's Mechanical Calculator,
or Antikythera device ( 150 B.C.).
These fields are still in their baby-step infancy with no cap on ideas.
The holy grail of nanotechnology is microscopic robotics, capable of
cancer search & destruction & cellular repair.
Nanotechnology is the marriage of
Physics, Magnetics, Electronic, Mechanical & Chemical engineering,
powered by Brownian Motion, sugar consumption, or siphoning electrons from exterior chemical reactions.
Isn't that Impossible?
This is the same thing Nature's microscopic cellular biologicals do: rips foods down to raw molecular basics & reconstitutes the raw materials into processes that we can subsist upon; sugars, proteins & trace minerals which get transported via our red blood cells to each & every living cell within our body.
If you're still saying no,
you'd have to argue with Richard Feynman, who proposed "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (1959)
Feynman was one of the Manhattan Project physicists (& 1965 Nobel prize laureate), who was given a
Presidential Commission on investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986)
& most interestingly
Feynman was the only man alive willing to tell Einstein ( *sitting* with him & both stay smiling!), while working out a new theory
"That's the most stupid thing I've ever heard. Let's try ..."
Einstein loved to argue with Feyman, because they loved Physics (YouTube)
overlooking & not kowtowing to a celebrity name, which is why A.E. visited many times during WWII.
Jobs (That haven't gone OverSeas: Green Energy & Manufacturing):
We need to take a page out of Brazil's playbook.
37-years ago, Brazil started an alternative fuel program: ethanol, alcohol.
Their cars have been 100% alcohol powered for over 30 years.
They can also flex fuel 0-100% Ethanol or 0-100% Gasoline.
Essentially for any organic mass, anything edible can become ethanol, anything inedible, methanol.
The fastest growing organic on God's Green Earth? Lowly pond scum (there's approx. 72,500 species of Algae)
We need to diversify our job base, especially in green energy technology.
In 2012, the U.S. imported 3.9 billion barrels of oil:
We're spending over $434 billion/ yr on oil from countries we really don't want to support.
Also, When talking about alternative energy projects like
Wind, Solar & Geothermal Power Plants,
you hear excuses of they’re not as efficient as they should be.
Consider cell phones, they started off, close to youth baseball bat sized.
It took a few generations, & now you can hide them in your hand.
Unless you put in a few generations of time, money & engineering, you don’t get the rewards.
This is the last chance the US has at manufacturing.
We've lost most of our other manufacturing, overseas.
Even autoplants almost leave every few years; "We have to Re-tool somewhere else, We were just offered tax incentives to move"....
Part of the building Mentors Across America network:
Bulletin site(alpha phase): Organizing & Listing cutting edge Research in the Medical & Physical Sciences.
Meanwhile: Explore what Uncle Sam is financing (medically): ClinicalTrials.gov
Explore the rest of ScienceBusUSA.com
SBU, short & sweet:
Our traveling Science program gets kids (Middle & High School) interested in the Higher Sciences.
We get kids involved in existing science competitions (regional, national & international).
Our budding Mentors Across America brings in corporate partners, putting Role Models into our schools,
& the support needed for the science competitions.
In most cases these are after-school projects; more integration will make this potential curriculum additions.
Please spread the word of:
our Works (via the good social media links below)
IndieGo, our CrowdFunding donation site
.
Thank you for:
helping move US kids out of 30th place
& into REAL jobs!
Create your own web pages in minutes...
MentorsAcrossAmerica.com Cincinnati, OH (513) 436-4724
.jpg "The Holy Grail of NanoTech: Medical Repair Robotics (click to Enlarge)")
