Index Award, and Rob’s talk from Science City in Kansas City
First up, we’ve got a bit of fantastic news today: we won an Index Award last night here in Denmark. The Index Award is the world’s biggest design award, and it comes with €100,000 for the Foundation, which we’re absolutely overwhelmed to receive. We’ll be using the money to take on two new hires over the next few months (you’ll be hearing more about them when they come on board) to work exclusively on free educational materials and outreach. We’d like to thank the Index Award jury for choosing us from an enormous pool of more than 1000 nominees: we’re enormously grateful, and the prize will help us to make a real difference to the way we work with kids all over the world. I’m hoping to get some pictures from last night’s ceremony at Elsinore for you later in the week.
In other news, Rob Bishop has just returned from his mammoth tour of the USA, where he was speaking at hackspaces across the whole continent. I saw him very briefly in the office on Wednesday, when I was leaving for the airport and he was returning from it. It’s good to have Rob back (although we do notice that any sweeties or baked goods left in the office disappear about 78% faster when he’s around). Here’s the talk he did at Science City in Kansas City, Missouri (not Kansas the state, as we mistakenly published earlier – sorry, Science City!) last week.
24 comments
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Congratulations! You guys deserved it!
The Raspberry Pi Guy
Ashutosh
Great New..
My vote counts (Unlike in my home country) ..
Anyways so where should i apply ?
Gert van Loo
….take on two new hires…
I assume you’re preparing for a flood of resumees.
liz
We’ve already hunted down, interviewed and selected both people.
ukscone
what selection method did you use? 10minute head start then let Clive hunt them down with an elephant gun?
ColinD
Fabulous news! Incredibly well deserved.
Jim Manley
Rob says, “Two new hires? Who’s this guy at my desk? Hey, wait! I’m back!! I’m back!!! NOOOOO!!!!”
Anthony S
Always love reading the articles. May I add a comment involving the speech at Science City? This is odd but Science City, which is in Union Station, is on the Missouri side of stateline. It is within city proper of Kansas City. Hate to be picky but the state of Kansas has been rather harsh on their education budget the past few years so I have made an effort on calling out undue credit and other issues involving their state. Thanks!
Jim Manley
You’re from Missouri? Prove it! ;)
For the baffled, Missourians (Missourites? Missouricians?? :D) are famously hardy, plain-spoken, salt-of-the-Earth folks who aren’t easily led down the garden path or otherwise bamboozled by purveyors of all manner of snake oil, especially suspicious types who talk with a funny accent (and especially who look like Rob :lol: ). Their unofficial motto, when they suspect they’re “being sold a bill of goods” is, “I’m from Missouri, prove it!”.
Jim Manley
Dadgummit! I meant to say “SHOW ME”, not “prove it”. :roll: Missouri is officially THE SHOW ME STATE! I’m amazed my own far-flung relatives there haven’t already tarred and feathered me, but that just goes to show you how down-home hospitable the folks there are.
Josh
Science City at Union Station is in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s not in the state of Kansas, although very close to it.
3xBackup’s
Rob might want to lookup the history of PS3 hacking. The PS3 had the ability to install linux by default, geohot tried to break it’s security by glitching the hardware and using linux to see memory he should not be able to see. Then Sony in fear of loosing control (money) through a firmware update removed Linux from all PS3’s on the 1st of April 2010. Alexander “Graf Chokolo” Egorenkov would be one of the people who tried to get Linux back onto the PS3. The last I heard, in 2011, Sony tried to sue Graf Chokolo for 1 Million Euros, I haven’t heard anything else since.
Rob Bishop
Yes, you’re correct. I realise that I was slightly inaccurate in my comments during the talk. One of the major issues with doing these things unscripted is that my memory occasionally slips up on me!
The general point about the average kid generally being surrounded by very advanced but highly abstracted computing systems is still valid I feel though.
3xBackup’s
I will give you that the inaccuracy did not change gist of what you were saying. And that you are fundamentally pitching to the iPhone/iMac/iWhatever generation – that may have heard of Geohot, but be scratching their heads at Graf Chokolo :)
Mac Rutan
Congratulations!
Jim Manley
The really interesting thing about the Index awards is that the Pi is pretty much the only recipient that actually exists in large numbers, let alone is way beyond a concept video as most of the other recipients only have to show, so far. I do love the idea of glow-in-the-dark road markings, and especially markings that would become visible near freezing temperature. The street lights that only come on as cars approach is interesting, but for security purposes is probably not practical, especially in populated areas, where they’re a major crime deterrent. The anti-bacterial paper looks like the most important of all given its potential to save at least 25% of food from becoming spoiled, not to mention lives saved from starvation and disease.
Skateboard parks that are overflow basins to prevent flooding? Sorry, but if you still can’t landscape your city in the year 2013 to prevent flooding, you deserve to have a flooded basement. Just letting nature take back coastlines and rivers that have been ravaged by 50 years of over-development would solve most of the problem in a few decades. If everyone else lives uphill/inland from you …
After watching Rob’s talk, I was very happy to see that the theme is being updated on these presentations to reflect the demography of the audiences. It was particularly interesting to see mention of the plight of the Midwestern cities losing their best and brightest as they’re scooped up by the appetite for talent on the coasts, especially the Western one here. The message of needing to grow their own, and startin’ ’em young was good to hear from Rob, and I hope the audience understands how critical that is to their future economic survival.
Everyone thinks that the secret to successful startups in SillyCon Valley is beanbag chairs, foosball tables, and free foofy drinks, but the real secret is having world-class educational institutions and, most importantly, as Liz will attest, as many and varied sources of authentic food from all over the planet as you can possibly attract. If I were running a Midwestern city/state, I’d offer completely tax-free status to any food truck operator where they can generate lines around the block of people waiting to pay $5.00 for fantastic meals whom have never had the opportunity to taste such fare. If your town doesn’t have places or trucks where you can get real cuisine from West Kabul and the Akaki Kality section of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, start banging your utensils and cups on the tables, folks. You’re never going to keep your talented people with just Steak ‘n Shake places (although don’t get rid of those, as the newly-transplanted there are going to want to sample their fare, too!).
Trees inside buildings is a good start, BTW, as the Southern part of the state, where few ever visit, is actually pretty nice, with rivers, forests, cliff formations, etc. At the rate California is burning this year, Missouri could wind up with more trees – they just need to figure out how to build a Half-Dome, Tuolomne Meadow, Yosemite/Bridalveil/Horsetail Falls … all rising 3,000+ feet from the bottom!
Are more videos from Rob’s trip forthcoming? Enquiring minds want to know!
Robert_M
Congratulations!
From my selfish point of view, this was the best outcome for the awards: I was able to vote for the one I felt most worthy (plastic bottle lightbulb) but the one that I was most-personally supportive of (that has benefited myself directly) ultimately won.
Also, great news that this will allow direct investment in the educational goals of the Foundation. The award further increases the stature of the Raspberry Pi which should also help advance the educational goals.
I hope some good bubbly was sacrificed in honor of this news. :-)
David
I hope you all drank deeply ere you departed Elsinore…
liz
Not half! (We were also very careful about standing behind arrases.)
AndrewS
The video is asking me for a username and password?!!
Congrats on yet another award BTW! :-) You’ll need to get a bigger office just because of the trophy cabinets.
AndrewS
Video working again now…
kneekoo
Great! :) Congrats!
Now about this USTREAM embed, I have some weird issues with it. While using Chromium 28 on my Linux Mint 13 32-bit if I leave the browser open for hours on the main page of the Raspberry Pi blog, the video will start playing at some point. It just starts playing even if it has the grayed-out layer on top of it and the play button is not changed to “pause”. It just runs in the background and I can even see the picture behind the gray layer.
It was not an accident, it happened at least 4-5 times during the last 2 days and I just stopped it again. Actually, considering the controls don’t change when the clip starts in the background, I had to click on “Play” to make the gray layer go away, then I clicked “Pause” to pause the video. It’s a USTREAM bug actually. I opened the Union Station KC channel on ustreamtv.com and I paused the video, but it just started on its own a few hours later. :)
I feel a bit lazy right now so I won’t report this bug to ustream, but I thought you guys should know this happens with your embed on your blog.
kneekoo
Oh well… their support area is rather a knowledge base so I couldn’t report the bug. I wrote them on their facebook page and liked to this comment for details.
Cheers!
max berliner
I adore that projekt and i didn’t know u were in Kansas city in that period!! :):)