Consumers were warned that shops could start running low on supplies of fresh vegetables and fruit, and analysts said economic costs could spiral. Howard Archer, chief European economist at IHS Global Insight, said "the longer that the problem does persist, the more serious will be the economic repercussions". British and Irish scheduled airlines are losing up to £28m a day, with the total bill to European carriers hitting $200m, according to the International Air Transport Association.
One of the UK's biggest fresh fruit importers said business had ground to a halt. Anthony Pile, chairman of Blue Skies, said the company was losing £100,000 a day.
More than three-quarters of flights were lost yesterday across Europe, with barely 5,000 taking off or landing, the Eurocontrol air traffic agency said. This compares with 22,000 on a typical Saturday. Among the flights that did make it were three British Airways planes from New York which scraped into Glasgow and Prestwick airports in Scotland.
Around Europe, 73 transatlantic flights landed yesterday morning, less than a third of the 300 that would normally arrive. The situation deteriorated from Friday, when 10,400 flights out made it out of the normal 28,000.
Met Office forecasters said it would take a prolonged change of wind direction for the situation to improve. "The UK and much of Europe is under the influence of high pressure, which means winds are relatively light and the dispersal of cloud is slow. We don't expect a great deal of change over the next few days," Mr Leith said.
The Eurostar trains quickly sold out when the volcano closed European airspace this week, but the secondary trains were able to help keep passengers moving towards their destinations.
The extensive network of intercity trains in Europe were able to step up and help when airlines were grounded. Do we have this capability in most of the United States? No, unfortunately most of the US is not covered by adequate train transportation to be helpful.
The exceptions in the Northeast Corridor (NEC) and California not withstanding many locations with Amtrak service only see one train in each direction a day. This of course, would not be enough to replace the thousands of daily short and mid-distance flights.
After 9/11/01, Amtrak was able to help move stranded passengers, but to do this it has to have trains scheduled and available.
Now is the time to expand AMTRAK so that it can help when it is needed in a Natural or other disaster.
America desperately needs an institution dedicated solely to the public good, that serves all its citizens equitably, promotes genuine community and fosters a healthy, integrated sense of recreation and self-improvement. Our libraries have done this magnificently for over a hundred years, through good times and bad, in the largest cities and the most rural communities. It’s one of the reasons library service offerings have remained constant for decades and funding secure for even longer.
I believe we do not need to remake our public libraries; we simply need to shore them up. As we envision change, it seems important to preserve the local autonomy and authenticity that have collectively made these institutions a national treasure. The right change would bolster libraries’ ability to leverage digital technology while increasing use of their physical facilities and surrounding amenities. It would also be advantageous to attract more users with high-end needs, for they would likely spur new service development and be able to deliver more financial and political support than traditional constituencies.
In my view, the public broadcasting model is a good way to meet these goals. Imagine a single, non-profit entity positioned to attract major funding and provide technology solutions far better than any municipal organization or system can do on its own. Imagine freeing countless public librarians and volunteers from rudimentary tasks to give them more time to collaborate on activities that inform, inspire, and entertain. Imagine libraries providing trusted information and facilitating meaningful dialogues across America. Imagine extending the work of passionate, outstanding librarians beyond their local libraries. A National Public Library (NPL) Corporation to augment the existing public library system would make this possible.
What a great idea - as pub media moves to Public Service Media, we are finding our best partners are libraries.
Imagine a real network - not a hub and spoke like NOR is now - but NPL acting as a Chaord that Facilitates the entire system - as NPR under Vivian Schiller is starting to do.
Imagine also how the two networks can help each other and so help you?
The digitization facility at the University of PEI is a state-of-the-art facility capable of digitizing most print and microform documents. The Library will be using this facility to create a comprehensive collection of Prince Edward Island's print as well as rich media heritage. The Library's partners and external agencies (with a focus on Atlantic Canada) who wish to digitize similar material and make it freely available would also be able to make use of the facility. If you would like to work with the Robertson Library on digitizing content with an Atlantic Canadian theme, please contact Mark Leggott, University Librarian (902-566-0460, mleggott@upei.ca).
CLEVELAND — Michael Substelny is crafting a console that will hold his GPS unit on his bike's handlebars.
Andrea Lane is fashioning a solar-powered recharger to keep her cell phone and iPod juiced.
Lynne Morgan is cranking out plastic sock-blockers, needle gauges and other knitting supplies that are so popular her online business can barely keep them in stock.
And Noah Rasor plans to help power his pickup truck with a hydrogen generator he's assembling from dollar-store parts, including a salad bowl.
You won't find these budding Northeast Ohio inventors toiling in their basements with secondhand tools. They're all at work in a personal fabrication laboratory, or fab lab, the greatest boost to individual ingenuity since the neighborhood hardware store.
Fab labs are stocked with computers running easy-to-use design software, and linked to cutting-edge production machinery - laser-powered cutters and etchers, table-top milling equipment, devices that slice copper sheets into circuitry, high-precision robotic routers, and even a sort of super-printer that spits out three-dimensional plastic parts. The labs are meant to stimulate creativity and spark innovation.
"It's a technological sandbox, a playground where you can play with impunity," said David Richardson, a retired professor who helped launch the pioneering fab lab at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, one of two in Greater Cleveland.
Scott Shaw/The Plain DealerMC STEM High School students Andrea Lane and David Boone Jr. work on a programmable router called a Shopbot in the school's fab lab.
The LCCC fab lab was the second such public facility in America when it opened in 2005. Today there are about 32 worldwide. One of the latest is at Cleveland's new MC² science/technology/engineering/math high school -- the nation's first fab lab in a public school.
The popular Lorain lab is undergoing a major expansion to accommodate more users. At the MC² fab lab, students gladly stay as late as 7 p.m. on Wednesdays, the lab's extended-hours day, to work on projects.
National educators are closely watching the MC² fab lab experiment, which already has helped raise students' math test scores and is attracting imitators. A mobile fab lab from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will visit Northeast Ohio this summer, and there are tentative plans to open additional permanent ones in the area.
When MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld and his colleagues dreamed up the fab lab concept in the 1990s, they saw it as a way to bring digital fabrication to the masses. The goal was to simplify and streamline the process of turning an idea into a product, by giving the public access to design and manufacturing tools previously only available to engineers at big companies.
If ordinary people could make stuff themselves, quickly, cheaply and easily, they'd get the exact item they wanted, whether for personal fulfillment, to meet a unique need, or to solve a problem too small for major commercial manufacturers to address.
Fab labs can fit in a large room and cost between $50,000 and $100,000 to set up - far less than the expense and environmental impact of building a full-fledged factory. Gershenfeld figured they would be ideal for developing countries and remote areas that lacked manufacturing capability. Indeed, that's where many of the initial fab labs sprouted, in villages in Ghana, India and Costa Rica, where locals used them to make things like Wi-Fi antennas, and sensors to warn if a cow strayed into the family garden.
But as the fab lab movement gained momentum, helped along by Gershenfeld's 2005 book "Fab," new and unexpected applications popped up. In economically ravaged areas like the Midwest, fab labs are emerging as a place where workers can re-invent themselves and hone marketable new talents and ideas.
"They're thinking about a fab lab as being the way to not just retrain for digital manufacturing, but to train in terms of entrepreneurial skills - to create their own industries and businesses," said Sherry Lassiter, program manager of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, home of the original fab lab.
"We're trying to create innovation networks, and fab labs create that kind of infrastructure," said economic advisor Ed Morrison of Purdue University's Center for Regional Development. "For 50 to 100 grand, it's a cheap investment. We ought to have these things spread all over."
Lorain County Community College was one of the earliest to realize fab labs' potential. Gershenfeld described the concept during a visiting lecture there in 2005. Afterward, in a question-and-answer session, a high school student in LCCC's Early College program asked Gershenfeld, "Can we have one?"
"He smiled and said, 'I think we could manage it," said Richardson, who had arranged Gershenfeld's visit. "Twenty minutes later, the provost [Karen Wells] had offered $20,000 towards the creation. We had senior administrators, experienced and committed faculty members, and curious students. You put those together and it just took off. "
Courtesy of Noah RasorIn this conceptual drawing, 22-year-old inventor Noah Rasor outlines the workings of a hydrogen generator he hopes to use to help power his pickup truck. He machined some of the parts in Lorain County Community College's fab lab.
The LCCC fab lab was the 10th in the world and the first American one outside of the Cambridge/Boston area where MIT is based. With previous fab labs, MIT had played a strong advisory role, suggesting equipment, providing open-source software and sending teams of people to do training and get new facilities up and running smoothly.
But LCCC "bought all the equipment and installed their own fab lab before we even knew they existed," MIT's Lassiter said. "It was the first time somebody didn't want us to hold their hand through the whole process. We just thought that was great."
LCCC has a 10-week course in personal fabrication using the lab, and may eventually offer a program where students can earn a certificate or degree in digital fabrication. "We consider these 21st Century skills," said engineering technologies professor Scott Zitek, who runs the fab lab. "You need to be able to work with software, to physically make stuff and solve problems and understand electricity and mechanisms."
High school students in LCCC's Early College program also have class sessions in the fab lab, where projects help them better grasp science and math concepts. In one exercise, they design, build and race rubber band-powered paddleboats, learning in the process about propulsion and stored energy.
The hands-on fab lab experiences are especially important as educators try to encourage more girls to pursue science and engineering careers. "We don't have enough data yet, but girls work through math problems and hit a wall and don't experiment with different approaches," said LCCC Early College High School principal Roslyn Valentine. "Girls love to create and design, and [fab lab] will feed naturally into things they like to do."
From the beginning, LCCC decided to open its fab lab not just to its own students and faculty, but to the public, in keeping with the college's mission to boost the area's economy by helping entrepreneurs. Users pay only for the cost of materials. The mix of people who interact there is a crucible for creativity.
"Retired folks and students start working together," said Kelly Zelesnik, LCCC's engineering technologies dean. "Boundaries of age and background fade away."
The regulars who take advantage of the lab's 35-hour-a-week public availability will have to go without this summer, while the facility is shut down for an expansion that will quadruple its size. It will reopen by September.
One of those entrepreneurs is Lynne Morgan, who uses the fab lab's laser cutter three or four times a week to make items for her knitting supplies business.
The wooden forms knitters typically use to fashion socks tend to warp and shed splinters. The plastic forms Morgan makes are durable and splinter-free. She lasers holes in the forms that double as ventilation for the drying socks, and as knitting needle gauges, with the needle sizes etched into the plastic.
"They're selling like hotcakes," said Morgan, who recently shipped 24 pairs of sock-blockers to a store in Wales. "It's all because of the fab lab." Without it, "I just wouldn't have had access to the technology or the equipment. It's a wonderful thing."
Courtesy of Noah RasorThis is the assembled prototype of Noah Rasor's hydrogen generator.
Noah Rasor thinks so too. The 22-year-old inventor, whose wide-ranging interests have lately settled on alternative energy, laughs that he "kind of went crazy" at LCCC's fab lab, using it for a variety of projects and recruiting friends to try it out.
"The fab lab allows me to get more things done quickly, to figure out what's a dead end and what deserves more time," Rasor said. Besides the aforementioned hydrogen generator, he's working on something called a Tesla turbine, which uses compressed air to rapidly spin closely-spaced discs and create power.
He's shown the prototype to the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise, a business incubator and advisor that works closely with the LCCC fab lab and is located just a block away.
Rasor's fearless curiosity is what Cleveland school officials want to cultivate in students attending the district's new MC² STEM High School, which is supposed to encourage young people to follow careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The school, housed in General Electric Co.'s Nela Park industrial campus in East Cleveland, is banking on the fab lab concept to help.
MC² had $100,000 in grant money intended to equip a traditional science lab. "We were going to buy microscopes, physics things, a fume hood for chemistry," said principal Jeffrey McClellan. But a conversation with Jan Morrison helped convince him the funds ought to go for a fab lab instead.
Morrison, a Cleveland-based education advisor, is the senior STEM consultant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the charitable mega-fund established by the software billionaire and his wife to, among other things, spur classroom innovation. The Gates Foundation has given Ohio $12 million to help launch STEM schools.
Morrison had seen firsthand the effectiveness of hands-on, project-based learning. Twenty years ago, while principal of the middle school at Hathaway Brown, the Shaker Heights all-female college-prep academy, Morrison had seen her girls blossom in the "wood engineering lab." It was a sort of low-tech fab lab precursor where students could build 3-D wood models to bolster their understanding of abstract science ideas.
Morrison tracked fab labs' rise "and finally saw they had evolved to the point that it was absolutely perfect" for schools aiming to nurture train young scientists and engineers. Principal McClellan agreed. "We want entrepreneurial kids who are problem-solvers," he said. "Here's the perfect tool that not only allows them to do that here, but connects them into a [fab lab] network that allows them to have access to what's going on in other countries."
At MC², the bright, noisy fab lab is a magnet not just for students but for teachers, parents who come to work on projects with their kids, and the GE engineers who serve as mentors.
"A lot of us stay after school on Wednesday," said 15-year-old freshman David Boone Jr. "There's like so much stuff here that we're willing to give up extra time. If we go home, we'll sit there and watch TV. Here we can build the TV."
That may be a bit of a stretch, but the students are making personal solar-powered re-chargers, based on an idea by 15-year-old Andrea Lane.
"I was bored in class and was sketching out some ideas because my phone was always going bad," she said. "Our science teacher was talking to us about solar and alternative energy. I was thinking, we have solar panels, why not use them? Being able to actually touch what we designed in our heads or on paper, it's really surprised us."
Other educators are starting to notice. Great Lakes Science Center officials have visited the MC² fab lab and are considering installing one at the museum. Science teachers Erin Seibel and Tracy Hollars from Avon Lake's Learwood Middle School toured the fab lab in May. Their school will host the MIT mobile fab lab later this year, and they're exploring how they might land a permanent one.
The MC² fab lab "is being watched outside of Cleveland," too, said Gates Foundation advisor Morrison. "When was the last time somebody came to the Cleveland Metropolitan School District to see something on the cutting edge?"
Volunteers in Afghanistan -- both locals and foreigners from the MIT Bits and Atoms lab -- have been building out a wireless network made largely from locally scrounged junk. They call it "FabFi" and it's kicking ass, especially when compared with the World Bank-funded alternative, which has spent seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars and only managed its first international link last summer.
Pictured below is a makeshift reflector constructed from pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and, ironically enough, a couple of USAID vegetable oil cans that was made today by Hameed, Rahmat and their friend "Mr. Willy". It is TOTALLY AWESOME, and EXACTLY what Fab is all about.
The boys at the Jalalabad Fab Lab came up with their own design to meet the growing demand created by the International Fab surge last September. As usual all surge participants who came from the US, South Africa, Iceland and England paid their own way. Somebody needs to sponsor these people.
For those of you who are suckers for numbers, the reflector links up just shy of -71dBm at about 1km, giving it a gain of somewhere between 5 and 6dBi. With a little tweaking and a true parabolic shape, it could easily be as powerful as the small FabFi pictured above (which is roughly 8-10dBi depending on materials)
Most of our Aid is top down and may make people more helpless and certainly adds to corruption - This is a story of Fab Lab Aid and how different it is
Between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974 world oil prices quadrupled.
The effects of this sudden increase were dramatic everywhere, but particulary so here in Prince Edward Island, Canada. With 100% of electricity coming from fossil fuel generators, gasoline and home heating oil prices that were already higher than elsewhere, and a lower per-capita income than most of Canada, the so-called "energy crisis" hit the Island hard, and spawned interest in looking at sustainable alternatives to meeting the Island's energy needs.
Politically Prince Edward Island was well-poised to take steps in this direction: in the midst of a bold 15-year "Comprehensive Development Plan," the Island's provincial government was already on a drive to modernize the economy and infrastructure. Premier Alex Campbell, spurred on by his executive secretary Andy Wells, who had become interested in the work of the Club of Rome, of E.F. Schumacher and of Louis Mumford, redirected some of this drive for modernization into an exploration of energy alternatives, taking an uncommonly broad, ecological view of the challenges. At a 1976 speech in Montreal, Campbell laid out the broad view of his administration:
What I am presenting to you then, is a suggestion, not for a new society, but for a new direction to our society. One that emphasizes self-reliance and involvement of our citizens rather than encouraging them to be passive consumers. It accentuates decentralization of capital and decision making, rather than intensive control. I envision a highly diversified society. I believe this is in keeping not only with our traditional values but also with our modern aspirations for a pluralistic society.
This would be a bold statement for a leader to make today; in 1976 it was doubly so coming from Campbell, leader of a small, remote, conservative province averse to dramatic change.
Peter has done a wonderful job here - This is a compelling story - Told with passion by David - "I came for a weekend and stayed 35 years..."
Surely we can take Premier Campbell's words then and apply them today - Work to shift our society to "one that emphasizes self reliance and involvement of our citizens ..."
As a 60 year old with a grand daughter, I feel that I can no longer simply talk and exhort. I have tried to do a few things at home but it is not enough.
Sophia is one year old - what will life be like when she is 60? Will I die knowing that I have done my bit?
Suppose that the economy were to keep growing at 3.5 percent. If that happened, unemployment would eventually start falling — but very, very slowly. The experience of the Clinton era, when the economy grew at an average rate of 3.7 percent for eight years (did you know that?) suggests that at current growth rates we’d be lucky to see the unemployment rate fall by half a percentage point per year, meaning that it would take a decade to return to something like full employment.
Worse yet, it’s far from clear that growth will continue at this rate. The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us.
Here is Paul Krugman on good form - My own feeling is that the best kind of "growth" will come from a focus of local resilience. Local Food, Local Energy - this way people not only get work and jobs back but they keep them and keep the value created for their own community.
Pictured below is a makeshift reflector constructed from pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and, ironically enough, a couple of USAID vegetable oil cans that was made today by Hameed, Rahmat and their friend "Mr. Willy". It is TOTALLY AWESOME, and EXACTLY what Fab is all about.
