Design Centred Approach in ICT To Conserve Energy

I am currently researching on an initiative for my Telecom Class. Its called the Green Touch. Green Touch is a consortium of companies and educational institutions that seeks to improve the energy efficiency of ICT networks by a factor of 1000. Carnegie Mellon University is a part of this initiative. The exponential growth in wireless and mobile telecommunications has led to widespread connectivity across the globe, even in the remotest villages of Africa. However there is an environmental cost associated with this unprecedented expansion. "The global network and technology required to run it produce 250 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, roughly the same as is produced yearly by 50 million automobiles (20 percent of all the autos in the U.S.), according to Green Touch" (Scientific American). Green Touch therefore seeks to redesign networks to decrease the carbon footprint of the ICT Industry.

When we talk about design centred approach in innovation, Green Touch has developed a prototype Large Scale Antenna to minimize the amount of power required to send a signal across the air in wireless systems. The Large Scale Antenna uses multiple antennas to minimize the amount of power required to transmit a signal across the wireless channel. The proof of concept proposes that the power consmption is significantly reduced as the number of antennas are increased. " For example, an antenna array comprising 100 elements would transmit only one percent of the energy transmitted by a single antenna, for the same quality of service."(CNET)

Multiple Antennas were previously utilized for capacity gains but now they can also significantly reduce power consumption. The basic concept is "focusing" a narrow radio beam through multiple antennas instead of using one antenna to disperse the signal over the whole channel which comparatively consumes more power over a wider area.

I have shared this piece to demonstrate how simple design restructuring can fuel such immense social gains. Global Warming effects are already visible in the form of steady melting of glaciers and floods. Therefore its imperative that we do whatever it takes to reduce our overall carbon footprint. This technology is nascent, however once developed can have wide ranging impact on the global environment.

Some of the questions that come to mind are:

1. What sort of investment would be required to set up an infrastructure for Large Scale Antennas?
2. Would low income governments be willing to invest in this infrastructure?
3. What sort of government policies would be required to facilitate such large scale investment?

Links

• http://www.greentouch.org/
• http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/020111-advanced-antennas-virtual-modems-to.html
• http://it.tmcnet.com/news/2011/02/03/5289356.htm
• http://www.greentouch.org/uploads/documents/pres_gregory_wright.pdf
• http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=green-touch-launch

Maybe Social Enterprise in the Education Industry?

Why this article is relevant?

After the Grameen Bank video, I remember reading articles that say micro-finance is not without its criticisms. Some poor farmers comit suicide because of some unfortunate and unexpected circumstances rendering them unable to repay their micro-debts. We can see examples like this in India, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, just to mention a few. A lot of people are now questioning whether or not micro-finance really works. My unfounded theory is that micro-finance is not the 'silver bullet' to the poverty problem. It has to be a combination of other things, for instance, the knowledge on how to use your money and manage it effectively. This knowledge can be found in education. Can we do something similar to micro-finance but in education? Maybe something called 'micro-education'.

So I typed in Google the word 'micro-education' and came across this interesting article.

Non-profit or for-profit?

Posted on April 29, 2011 by Chris Makler

Which kind of organizational structure is better for transforming education: a non-profit model dedicated entirely to the mission of change, or a for-profit model with serious financial backing? At a recent Stanford/MIT VLAB event, Sal Khan of Khan Academy and venture capitalist Philip Bronner had a great discussion on this topic (watch the first minute or so of this, then fast-forward to 1:08:20):
As an economist, I tend to gravitate towards the profit motive as second-to-none for allocating resources efficiently. However, the assumption underlying that conclusion is that value is reflected in people’s willingness to pay. In a market economy, if it costs me $10 to make a pair of sneakers and I can sell them for $20, then the market sends me the signal that I should be producing sneakers. Done and done.
But in education, people’s willingness to pay isn’t closely related to the actual value they receive. The main consumers of education — children — have no money of their own, so education is funded by parents or the government, either as an investment in children’s future human capital or out of a sense of social justice. Regardless, there’s no easy way to put a price tag on any individual bit of education (a music class, an economics lecture); therefore a market system to deliver educational services is going to be a very deeply flawed market indeed, and produce all kinds of crazy results. And as in the anecdote Khan shares, the profit motive can lead to private online colleges actually seeking out students who won’t receive a real return on their educational investment.
So there’s a strong argument to be made that educational institutions themselves should be non-profit: they should have a fiduciary responsibility to educational integrity, not their shareholders. But as Khan says later in the video, this clearly doesn’t extend to all the tools that are used in education. At an extreme, the school buses that drive kids to school are made by for-profit companies, as are the light bulbs and the computers in the classrooms. Nobody would want their kids to drive in buses, or learn on computers, that were developed by non-profits.
In other words, it makes sense for educational infrastructure to be supplied by for-profit organizations, even if educational institutions should be non-profit.
The question for education technology companies, then, is this: are we more like schools, or more like computers? Do we seek to deliver educational services ourselves, or do we seek to be a tool that educators can use to deliver those services? The names we choose are a good indication of which side of that divide we see ourselves on: “Khan Academy” sounds like a school (non-profit), while “Blackboard” sounds like infrastructure (for-profit).
Over the next few years, though, the line between educational services and educational infrastructure is going to get blurrier: Aplia and Grockit, for example, are at once educational infrastructure and educational content. In this new world, we’re going to need a new type of organization (possibly like a B Corporation) that blends the best of the non-profit and for-profit worlds, while avoiding the worst excesses of both. As Osman Rashid, founder of Chegg and Kno, puts it later on the same video: “You need the soul of a non-profit, and the mentality of a for-profit.”

This article can be accessed from http://microeducation.org/2011/04/29/non-profit-or-for-profit/.

So there is something already called "Micro-Education". But their mean of 'micro-education' might be a little different from the project I have in mind. Anyway, what makes it interesting to post this article is the author's question about whether or not educational institutions should be for-profit or non-profit. I think this is where Social Enterprise might come in to fill that gap.

My questions for further consideration would be:
1. How to tailor your curriculum to fit the scheduling demand of people at the bottom of the pyramid?
2. How to make sure that your operation is sustainable? To put it another way, who would pay?
3. What kind of education do people at the bottom of the pyramid need?