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Check out the shoeboxed.com blog and remember to sign up to be contacted about the launch if you haven’t already!

Get ready to shoebox.

Word.

As many of you already know, I am heavily involved in the Duke Internet startup www.shoeboxed.com. The idea behind shoeboxed.com is long in the making. After daily discussions and brainstorming sessions over the course of the last two semesters, Jeremy and I have finally decided to launch the site. We chose the name shoeboxed.com primarily because I had already purchased that domain for a different, but sort of related, project.

We have brought ten Duke students on board and are operating in stealth mode for the time being. But don’t let our secrecy fool you. We are working around the clock to bring shoeboxed.com to life.

I blogged a little while back ago about a German web site’s pre-launch marketing strategy and we have decided to launch something similar. We have put up a page so that you can sign up to be contacted when we launch the beta version for phase one of our idea.

Many sincere thanks to everyone who has signed up already!

More updates to follow.

It’s time we had a talk about my music habits.

Recently I’ve been digging a relative newcomer to the Duke music scene, Stella by Starlight. They rock.

I’m friends with Greg and Sonny and have seen them play twice in the last few months. Their style of indie rock reminds me of Interpol and The Strokes, which I rank as two of my favorite bands. Here’s their band photo as published in the Duke Chronicle:

They just released their first EP “Made of Fire,” which was recorded in the new on-campus for students, by students recording studio Small Town Records. I got my copy last night. If you don’t have one yet, you can hear four of the songs online on their MySpace profile or get an EP yourself by sending an email to stellabystarlightband [at] gmail [dot] com.

So friend them on MySpace, listen to their music, and go see them live. Their shows are tons of fun. No joke.

See you at their next gig.

So I guess I will open the blog up by talking about what I am up to at Duke. I’m in the second semester of my senior year and I am taking a design course entitled “Design for the Developing World” with professor Robert Malkin. This is a biomedical engineering course, which fulfills my senior design requirment for my BME major. Professor Malkin is the founder and director of Duke University’s Engineering World Health initiative. From the EWH homepage:

Imagine living in a place where newborns have one of the highest mortality rates in the world, where poverty is rampant, and where per capita income barely covers the necessities of life. A place where power supplies may be unreliable and a simple blown fuse can affect life-saving surgical procedures. Sadly, there are many places such as this worldwide. Engineering World Health (EWH) has been created to answer the needs of disadvantaged areas through providing and maintaining appropriate medical technology.

The “Design for the Developing World” course allows us students to directly participate in this mission and to tangibly make a contribution to developing world hospitals. The “hands-on” approach is my favorite aspect of the course and the emphasis on theory over practice in the Duke engineering school has been one of my largest criticisms with that program. They have been revamping the curriculum tremendously to make up for this, though.

The course is structured as follows: A biweekly discussion section covers technical, geopolitical and social factors that affect health-care in the Developing World; an integrated laboratory component further highlights design considerations for Developing World medical equipment. The labs and projects we do for this course are its greatest strength. We spent the first lab periods of this course in small groups designing and constructing novel low-cost baby warmers with a limited amount of inexpensive plywood and ubiquitous 40 Watt light bulbs. The lab served to review woodworking and machining procedures, electrical safety, the prototyping and testing process, good teamwork skills and CAD software. But the best part about the lab is that our finished devices are being shipped to hospitals that have explicitly expressed a need for a baby warmer — instead of ending up in a dumpster on Science Drive.

The second group lab exercise entailed the design and construction of a monsoon rainwater collection device for under $20. This proved to be a much more involved task than what initially met the eye. After a few small-scale protoypes, we built and tested our contraptions with a simulated torrential downpour from a fire-hose. The Durham Herald Sun attended the testing day and wrote this article, which dubbed the course “Engineering for Good Reasons.”

My team’s device worked pretty well and placed first with 13 inches of water in the 35 gallon cistern. I’ll try to get some photos up that show the design and operation of the device.

The monsoon project marked the last laboratory exercise we will do outside of our continued work on our capstone design projects for this course. My project group is charged with designing an oxygen level alarm for baby incubators. To this end we are working directly with the Fuqua School of Business and representatives of the Duke Neonatal Unit for this project and have already completed our initial specifications for the device. It should be a good time and hopefully we can come up with something that can make a difference for those less fortunate than us.

That is what I call engineering for good reasons.