DailyDirt: Challenges For Fun And (Non-)Profit

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, May 23rd 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Solving really tough problems is a more collaborative process than it used to be. Luckily, it's getting easier for a wide variety of people to come together and work on these difficult challenges. Here are a few prizes looking for creative people to produce some really cool solutions.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is looking for folks working on humanity's most pressing problems. Fuller had a pretty lofty goal "to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone." [url]
There's a $10 million prize for the Tricorder X PRIZE -- which is looking for a mobile medical device that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians. It also needs to make a cool "whoo whoo" sound when it wave it over people. [url]
NASA has several Centennial Challenges that are still active -- looking for solutions to various problems like green aviation, super-strong tethers, interplanetary robots to return samples and more. Space elevators, FTW. [url]
To find some other online challenges and games, check out what StumbleUpon has found to play. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: buckminster fuller, challenge, contest, open innovation, problems, solutions, tricorder
Companies: nasa, x prize

5 Comments

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Pixelation, 23 May 2011 @ 5:31pm

Even better...
"to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous combustion."

There, fixed that.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 23 May 2011 @ 6:34pm

Fuller Was An Amazing Guy
I saw a TV doco on him when I were a lad. He could never finish a sentence before starting the next one; it was like his brain was always way ahead of his mouth.
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Anonymous Coward, 23 May 2011 @ 6:39pm

They can make the prize for a working tricorder 100 million, Won't matter. Any successful attempt with be sued into oblivion for patent infringement by the Roddenberry estate.
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Michael Ho (profile), 23 May 2011 @ 6:51pm

Re:
nice... but it's trademark infringement -- unless Roddenberry actually got a patent on a tricorder! :P
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Migzy, 23 May 2011 @ 7:12pm

Re:
BTW from the article:

Eugene Wesley "Rod" Roddenberry, Jr., son of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, commented, "it is great to see two amazing organizations - the X PRIZE Foundation and Qualcomm - bring the technology of Star Trek to life and make the Tricorder a reality for people everywhere."
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