Good use of engineering skills...

Student-designed Device To Help Poor East Africans Coax Oil From Coconuts

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2008) — A team of Brigham Young University student engineers designed an innovative and cost-effective apparatus that enables poor East African women to turn abundant coconuts into valuable coconut oil.

While coconut oil production is relatively prevalent in East Africa, the manufacturing process can be complicated and costly. The BYU team's challenge was to use their engineering skills to create equipment that economically-limited Africans could purchase individually through microcredit.

A field test in Boza, Tanzania, represented the culmination of nearly a year's worth of problem solving. The students designed an oven to dry the coconut meat and a press to squeeze out the oil.

"One of the best parts was seeing the excited expressions when they first saw the oil coming out of the press," said Shara Richards, a BYU team member from Rock Springs, Wyo.

The venture, one of 25 projects sponsored this year by the Capstone program in BYU's Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology, was first conceived by the Pope Foundation, a Utah-based nonprofit aimed at economic development in Africa.

"We wanted to find a way to push the production of coconut oil down to the bottom of the economic pyramid, into the homes of rural families," said Troy Holmberg, executive director of the Pope Foundation. "The BYU students accomplished exactly what we had hoped they would-a low-cost, robust system to produce virgin coconut oil in a rural African setting."

Villagers can turn virgin coconut oil into a solid income by selling it locally or to exporters for uses in cooking or health and beauty. The students' invention would allow some local villagers to increase their stunted incomes by as much as tenfold.

After rustling up mosquito nets, malaria pills and large suitcases before departure, the students and their faculty coach enjoyed the culmination of hundreds of hours of effort: watching how their designs worked in a real-life setting.

"The objective of the trip was actually to test the people and see their reactions while using the press," Richards said. "Some of the villagers don't even read numbers, so written instructions were of no help. We had to show them how to use it, but after only a few practices they knew exactly what they were doing."

Despite months of planning and preparation, the group hit a snag when only days before departure, they found that airline luggage restrictions would prevent them from transporting an oven they had designed as part of the oil extraction process.

"We thought about designing a smaller oven and even considered just leaving it behind," said Benjamin Hillyard of Salt Lake City, who was also on the team. "We put our engineering heads together and came up with a plan to partially dismantle the oven to reduce it to the appropriate size."

The team redesigned some of the oven with parts they could transport, while also considering components that would be accessible in Eastern Africa.

"If you give them a part that they can't buy in Africa, and it breaks, they can't fix their tools," Richards said. "We successfully got everything we needed to Africa without losing anything. That was really a miracle."

After building a second oven, setting up the coconut presses, and practicing the process with natives, the group completed their field testing.

"The people there were so helpful and excited in assisting with the project," said Terri Bateman, a part-time BYU faculty member and the team's coach. "Both the villagers and the students worked really hard together."

Bateman oversaw the project, guiding the students through months of conceptual schematics, prototypes and ultimately the final press design.

"They came up with a lot of models and ideas, and then they did a ton of testing," Bateman said. "After all the testing they did, seeing everyone's face when we got the first batch of oil out of the press in Africa, was like the sum of everything coming together all at once."

According to the Pope Foundation, now that the BYU team has designed the tools, the next step is to pilot the coconut press microfranchise project. If the pilot is successful, they hope to have 100 women with presses by the end of the year and up to 3,000 women in five years.

"I knew this project would allow us to be a part of a tremendous change in the lives of the people that we aimed to help," said Hillyard. "I saw the gratitude in the eyes of the people as they realized the opportunities this project opened to drastically improve their lives."

Tell me, please tell me what's wrong with this viewpoint.. And I will have to think twice before watching one of her movies and paying for her bills in the future.

Anne Hathaway's politics, in her own words

1 hr 29 mins ago

AP – Actress Anne Hathaway, left, arrives at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Monday, Aug. 25, …

DENVER – Celebrities are getting serious at the Democratic convention.

Sure, there are parties aplenty. But a contingent of Hollywood types under the Creative Coalition banner are gathering for sober-minded luncheons and forums to discuss issues facing the Democratic Party and the country.

At one such event, Danny Strong, an actor and screenwriter who is keeping a video diary of the DNC for The Associated Press, spoke with actress Anne Hathaway about what brought her to Denver.

___

AP: What issues are you most passionate about?

Hathaway: "That's a good question, and it should be a simple one. But right now I feel like there's so many aspects of our great nation which could use a little bit of help, or a lotta bit of help, that it's hard to pick just one. I think the most important thing is the economy. We need to figure out the housing crisis. We need to build up our middle class again. Right now, the disparity between the uber-rich and the uber-poor, it's worrying and it's not getting better. We need to focus on a way to just get our economy back, to get it back on track.

"Obviously the war is a very important issue to me. We need to get our troops home, and we need to get them home now. My own personal feelings about it is when the world is kind of perfect, and we have those two things — when we're at peace and everybody has a good job — although we should be working on these at the same time, I don't mean to imply otherwise, I'm really a big advocate for health care and of course my heart lies with education."

AP: What inspires you about Obama?

"I was kind of afraid of Obama the first time I saw him. I thought, I've been burned by guys like you before. I've been burned by politicians before that I wanted to believe in and just didn't live up to it. And I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him. It was around the time that he gave his speech on race that I just said 'I can't deny how I feel about you, Barack Obama. I want you to be the president. I want you in the White House.'

"I think that not only can Barack cause change — because that's where his heart lies — as a true American success story, he understands how hard it is. And when he says that he will, when people come to him with problems, he's been there. I just heard the other day, he just paid off his student loans two years ago. And so when people talk about financial issues and the higher cost of education, he really gets it. So not only do I think he has the power, the temperment and the tremendous character that can cause change in the government, I think he's the sort of person that inspires us all to be our best selves.

"He inspires us to be the best Americans we can be. And I think if he's president — when he's president, I should say — we're going to find people changing on the inside. And once we all have hope for the future, I think you're going to find everyone's going to wake up and take control of this amazing moment where there's so many things that need help, and people will all be inspired to help."

AP: Do you think that the entertainment industry has a positive or negative effect on politics?

"I think the entertainment industry has all good intentions when we try to come out. The thing that is unfortunate is that some of us who are maybe a little recognizable, we've got to come out as private citizens and support our country in any way that we can ... .

"There's a media spin on it that we're all out of touch. How could we possibly have an awareness of what real Americans feel and think and need because we just ride around in limos and — I don't know — buy diamonds all day long? That's kind of the perception. But I don't know anyone like that. I'm certainly not like that. I'm a passionate American, and that's what I am first and foremost."