The Turbine Light: Engineering at Work
http://cea.mblast.com/ws/wfaward/rsp/votenomination.asp?SessionID=3849244
It's essentially a street lamp powered by a local wind turbine mountedon the lamp pole. The turbine would be primarily driven by the wind
generated by passing vehicles.
The pictures are particularly neat. These are things engineering students should be striving to invent and
design. Not necessarily green designs, but innovative designs. Who
else might have thought of something as simple as this?
Now whether this idea ever gets funded and takes off, we may never
know. But the opportunity of design is enough. What are your dreams as engineering students? What do you hope to
achieve by going into this field of study, whatever particular branch
of engineering you may be going into?
Even if you decide not to pursue engineering, or have already chosen
another path, what motivates your current decision? For me, I feel the vast power we've achieved through the use of
computerised technology is astounding. The connectivity provided by
the Internet, and the various open and closed standards and protocols
that power our interaction with the Wired Cloud, is something I want
to help advance to even a deeper level. Some would call it ubiquitous
computing; I prefer to call it integrated connectivity.
We already see this cloud phenomenon starting to take hold as more and
more people are constantly connected. 3G mobile broadband networks
like EDGE and EV-DO are helping make that possible, but they are still
terribly slow compared to Wi-Fi and Ethernet, both of which have
necessarily and comparatively short ranges. Web 2.0 technologies that are heavy on JavaScript and Ajax power a lot
of our world. In Web 1.0, static websites would hold little more than
a description, contact information, maybe even a guestbook. That
isn't to say that there wasn't useful information on these websites,
but it was all provided by the creator of the site. Now, in the 2.0
paradigm, everyone is in on the game of information technology. Web applications allow us to access essential information from
anywhere we can get an Internet connection and a web browser. Now
Google and Apple both make phones that rather seamlessly integrate
into their respective web platforms whenever they can find a
connection to the cloud; since they are phones, they inherently have
mobile broadband built in, so they aren't out of range of a connection
often. My goal is to help take this near constant connection even deeper.
Perhaps that means a world without devices, where humans have direct
neural interfaces to the cloud. Perhaps that means a world full of
connected appliances, all controlled by a central device like a phone
or tablet. Maybe it even means both. I would really like to hear from any of you on your reasons for
choosing the paths that you have, or your reasons for not choosing any
path yet.

