WaterSeer

[Cerebus]

I read one of those comments as saying "Grail shaped bacon" and started salivating. It actually said "Grail shaped beacon". Awww... 

[RGB255_0_0]

http://www.baconsizzling.com

They said they wouldn't delete comments. They deleted all links to Thunderf00t's video and started blocking people. They also only reply privately.

[EEVblog]

They said they wouldn't delete comments. They deleted all links to Thunderf00t's video and started blocking people. They also only reply privately.

Yep, classic behaviour when they know they have been busted and their product doesn't work as claimed.

[josecamoessilva]

(Feynman Almighty but I'm about to defend U.C. Leningra… Berkeley. What's wrong with me??)

To be fair to the two U.C. Berserkley centers involved, both design and entrepreneurship student projects tend to let the engineering and science part be the responsibility of their technical partners (that would be the Vici Labs here). In this case, hilariously, these partners seem to have no understanding of basic physics; but the freshmen and sophomores in the video aren't to blame for that.

(Even more hilarious is the student with the "I'm a Berkeley Engineer" t-shirt; this is probably a fresher, he'll soon learn.)

Cheers,
JCS

[Kalidor]

New video from Thunderf00t:

https://youtu.be/pen6dBszLgA

[Refrigerator]

that was a good video, i want more 
These people make these failed projects and after they themselves fail at delivering their promises, despite them receiving their funding, they blame the people who called them out on their bullshit. 
The lack of self awareness that these specimen show is amazing.

[madires]

Maybe the Dunning–Kruger effect? Possibly it wasn't intented as a scam and they really want to make the world a better place. They've seen condensated water and got the idea of WaterSeer. The only problem is the total lack of knowledge to check if the idea is feasable. It's like a company with a marketing department only, no R&D and no working product. That's outsourced to UC Berkeley to give some young students an industrial experience. R&D on the cheap. Now they're hit by the harsh reality of scientific facts and try to defend their vision. Let's see how long they need to realize their major faux pas.

[Corporate666]

If WaterSeer's claim of "the ground temperature is always cooler than the air" was correct, then the device known as a heat pump would not work.

Except there is a multi-billion dollar and very successful industry surrounding the very sound engineering and science of heat pumps, that exist for the very reason that the ground fluctuates in temperature much less than the air - and as such - despite what the air temperature is doing, the ground stays much more consistent.

That right there renders WS's most fundamental claim as bullshit and hence renders the product as a total sham.

Since they know it can't work and are still pushing it, that makes them outright scammers.  And yet IGG still doesn't take action.  And whatever state they are based in has an attorney general that is too weak and meek and too disinterested in actually protecting consumers to investigate this scam of a company.

[max_torque]

The sad thing for me is that these sorts of projects, run by major seats of learning, are leading to, potentially, a generation of young engineers for whom "marketing" and "media" now take primary position, way out in front of actual engineering foundations.
  When i did my engineering degree, we had no multi-media bulls**t to distract us, you just got a load of old, dry, dusty and un-appealing reference text books, and reams and reams of black-board based tuition, but because of that dull but necessary work, you got the "real" engineering right.  Today, it's much more "fun" for students to get involved in these high profile, high media content projects, and as a result, they aren't really interested in learning how the basic engineering works.

You can imagine the conversation with their tutor:

  "who wants to be involved in a project to help save poor peoples lives"?
  "I need some students to come up with some ideas, film some soundbites, make us look good" 
  "Make some models, do some virtual design, make some stuff that looks futuristic"

And they did ALL that, but forgot to actually check if the device in question was practicable and viable, you know, the boring, dull bit of being an engineer.  The hundreds of hours doing "The Math" and working out if the laws of physics support your concept.....  But the students are reliant on their tutors etc for direction and support, so it's not their fault.

In my experience, the best engineers i've ever worked with are the natural ones, the ones who spent their child hood taking stuff apart to see who it worked, who were always questioning other people assumptions and statements, who were always reading, learning, gathering input and forming their own opinions, rather than just being "yes" people. They didn't need to dress it up with pretty pictures, video presentations and the like. Today, we try to make engineering degrees more appealing to more students, but in doing so, i suggest we are also losing the ability to actually do engineering as a result........

[josecamoessilva]

The sad thing for me is that these sorts of projects, run by major seats of learning, are leading to, potentially, a generation of young engineers for whom "marketing" and "media" now take primary position, way out in front of actual engineering foundations.

Much as I dislike having to defend the University of Berks, these two centers are specifically for entrepreneurship and design, meaning that they address those two "disciplines." There are many wrong things at Berserkeley, but that they specialize their centers isn't one of them. I too find that the engineering of the products should have been analyzed by engineers before making the projects available to the students, but that's a separate issue.

There's a lot of dumb stuff going on at universities in the US in general and at UC Leningrad in particular, but affording some students exposure to design and entrepreneurship isn't dumb. It's dumb to not have the engineering faculty vet the projects, but I'm sure from now on they will. 

In my assessment, having a lot of exposure to these students, the engineering ones tend to be the least ignorant and arrogant of all Berks. That's generally true of engineering students, methinks, as they have to deal with the unforgiving reality of machinery. (The reason why I like engineering.)

Cheers,
JCS

[jonovid]

In my experience, the best engineers i've ever worked with are the natural ones, the ones who spent their child hood taking stuff apart to see who it worked, who were always questioning other people assumptions and statements, who were always reading, learning, gathering input and forming their own opinions, rather than just being "yes" people. They didn't need to dress it up with pretty pictures, video presentations and the like. Today, we try to make engineering degrees more appealing to more students, but in doing so, i suggest we are also losing the ability to actually do engineering as a result........

So true  I am one who spent my child hood taking stuff apart to see how it worked, was always questioning other people assumptions and statements 

billions people don't have access to safe water. because of ongoing Wars in Africa, backed by the UN it is in New York after all / US government.?
but why? Because the growing Africa Population is an eugenics nightmare for the globalist think tanks. so proxy wars are used to keep a lid on the same Populations. but as humanitarian aid is big business. so help is encouraged, But not to permanently fix the problem, as this will add to Africa's Population.

 
Oh, i wasn't aware that lead contamination of air and drinking water is a problem in Australia too.
Probably best for Australians to don ABC masks and only drink the clean water made by WaterSeer. That should keep the risks of brain damage in check, but could lead to dehydration...

  So WaterSeer is Not science, But a religious cult,    your guru eye sees water.  out on the Highway in middle of the day, no doubt.

A religion now i see .  and So the design may just work as a powerful money magnet. the gathering of new age minded and the mystical separation of their money. 
Ammmmmmmmm i feel this is every artist's dream of making a full time income from their work.

[Corporate666]

There's a lot of dumb stuff going on at universities in the US in general and at UC Leningrad in particular, but affording some students exposure to design and entrepreneurship isn't dumb. It's dumb to not have the engineering faculty vet the projects, but I'm sure from now on they will. 

I really hate the word "entrepreneur".  It screams "wannabe business owner" as opposed to "actual business owner who earns a living from their business".  A bit part of the problem with all this entrepreneurship bullshit is not teaching practical applications of things.  So you get a generation of douchebags who think that they need to be visionaries and that means a lot of buzzwords and swanky offices and hipster dress codes and raising money being the metric of success.  Meanwhile the thing that actually matters - delivering genuine value in the form of a product or service that people will pay more for than it costs to produce - is glossed over. 

And a huge, fundamental, inescapably important part of practical business would be having a product or service that actually works.  I would say if the college is supposedly exposing these kids to entrepreneurship and part of that isn't reviewing if the product can actually work, then they should be humbly offering refunds to each of those students for wasting those kids' time.   There's no excuse.  They shouldn't be developing a single logo, typing a single press release, having a single 'ideation' meeting, or doing anything really, unless they have done their due diligence.  They should practice what they preach.  No actual entrepreneur would invest time or money in an idea without doing due diligence, and if they didn't have the skill to do so, they would reach out to get the help of those that did.  At UCB, that help can't be more than a 5 minute walk or a phone call away, at most. 

They ought to be ashamed.  And shamed.  Publicly!

[CJay]

I really hate the word "entrepreneur".  It screams "wannabe business owner" as opposed to "actual business owner who earns a living from their business".

I kind of agree and then again don't.

Entrepreneur has become sullied like the word 'hacker', its original meaning was quite respectable but now it screams 'wideboy' (which if you've never heard the term means a chancer, slightly dodgy who will try and profit at any cost to anyone). Plenty of 'entrepreneurs have become successful and established business owners.

[RGB255_0_0]

They had a mass ban spree on their Facebook over the weekend.

[Cerebus]

I really hate the word "entrepreneur".

I couldn't agree more. The word was once respectable but is no more. Before the Thatcherites and Reaganites got their hands on it the commonest usage of entrepeneur was as someone who prompted some entertainment (a play, a show) at the risk of their own money with the understanding that this implied a more than normal risk. So, perhaps it has not changed its meaning so much. It seems to now denote people who promote a public spectacle, that is entertaining to some onlookers, at high financial risk, with other people's money.

...shouldn't be ... having a single 'ideation' meeting, or doing anything really, ...

Again, changing words. I first encountered this as a psychiatric term as in paranoid ideation or delusional ideation. Seems somehow unintentionally apposite.

...unless they have done their due diligence.

Again, another phrase that has lost its proper meaning. For once, it's a bit of business jargon that is reasonable and properly means, and I'm quoting the dictionary here, "reasonable steps taken by a person in order to satisfy a legal requirement". So I have to take you slightly to task for using it here where a more appropriate phrase would have been:
        "...doing <list of anything else> until they had done their basic research".
The effect is, I would argue, even more damning.

[Corporate666]

I kind of agree and then again don't.

Entrepreneur has become sullied like the word 'hacker', its original meaning was quite respectable but now it screams 'wideboy' (which if you've never heard the term means a chancer, slightly dodgy who will try and profit at any cost to anyone). Plenty of 'entrepreneurs have become successful and established business owners.

I pretty much agree.  I don't think you can really learn to be an entrepreneur anymore than you can learn to be an inventor.  You either have a skillset to do it or you don't.  And there's nothing wrong with not being able to do it... I'd make a really shitty music composer or poet or sculptor. 

But there has been this fascination with people being business owners.  That usually entailed a lot of hard work, a little bit of luck and a hell of a lot more frustration and hassle than 99.9999% of people ever realized.  I think colleges are largely to blame for the new wave of wannabe-entrepreneurs.  Just like they don't tell drama students that they have a 0.00001% chance of ever actually making it in theater or in hollywood, they don't bother with the practical side of entrepreneurship.  So they spend time on bullshit projects like this Waterseer shit, when an actually valuable lesson would be to show the students why this is the sort of project you DON'T get involved with and use it as a case study of doing due diligence.

Because what they have done is exactly like you have described (never heard the term before, BTW, but it fits well) - groom a generation of wideboys who are vomiting buzzwords and thinking themselves "entrepreneurs", but when called on it are just absolving themselves of any blame by saying they weren't tasked with vetting the technical details.   But if you are supposedly learning entrepreneurship and involved with a scam of a project, then you can't just claim ignorance and say it was outside your scope to vet the project.  That's a fundamental part of entrepreneurship!

[EEVblog]

Maybe the Dunning–Kruger effect? Possibly it wasn't intented as a scam and they really want to make the world a better place.

That's how most of these things start, and this one is no different.
They actually believed it worked, and likely still believe it can work, all they have to do is test it and refine it and ignore the "haters". You have to have either extreme cognitive dissonance/delusion to continue with a project like this when every one says you are wrong, or you really really really need to know your stuff and know something unique others don't. These people don't know Jack.
In the case of uBeam, she really does believe it will work, and the PhD's she threw money at to come work with her gave her a false of the later.
In the case of Batteriser, they really do believe they know something we don't because they have lots of letters after their name.

[josecamoessilva]

Maybe the Dunning–Kruger effect? Possibly it wasn't intented as a scam and they really want to make the world a better place.

That's how most of these things start, and this one is no different.
They actually believed it worked, and likely still believe it can work, all they have to do is test it and refine it and ignore the "haters".

I dunno… if this was the first such venture for this individual, maybe. But given the address in a "mailbox office building," the multiple companies that appear in sequence once the previous one fails, the PR offensive taking advantage of U of Berks and the Peace Corps Association (not the Peace Corps), the deleting of comments…

At some point the balance of probabilities moves from "well-meaning ignoramuses" to "confidence artists" in some definitive way.

Cheers,
JCS

(Please people, don't make me defend U.C. Leningrad or its students and faculty.)

[trophosphere]

I would imagine if WaterSeer had a meeting with some people at Berkley concerning this project the discussion would be similar to this video:

[Cerebus]

I would imagine if WaterSeer had a meeting with some people at Berkley concerning this project the discussion would be similar to this video:

Argh! That video makes me want to find a tree, a stool, a stout rope and a bunch of management types to invite to a "Focus group on practical downsizing".

I've been in meetings like that, more than I care to remember.

[Geonerd]

In case anyone missed Dave's tweet, a fellow named Scott Larsen has made a great video featuring a fairly detailed thermal analysis of Waterseer.
This is a bit deeper than TF's effort and, with none of the 'bonus' snark, it's much more pleasant to watch. 

[Dubbie]

I suspect that the claim of the thing generating 37L of water happened during the contest between all the different designs. One or more members of the team who hadn't done the sums so as to realise it was physically impossible, decided to "top up" their device overnight to ensure a victory for their device.  It's quite possible that most of the team and the organisers/faculty were quite innocent of this skulduggery, and are convinced that the thing worked way better than predicted. I feel that this is almost certainly what happened. The motivation is there ($12k prize too!) and it explains neatly the physics bending result.


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[rfeecs]

I suspect that the claim of the thing generating 37L of water happened during the contest between all the different designs. One or more members of the team who hadn't done the sums so as to realise it was physically impossible, decided to "top up" their device overnight to ensure a victory for their device.  It's quite possible that most of the team and the organisers/faculty were quite innocent of this skulduggery, and are convinced that the thing worked way better than predicted. I feel that this is almost certainly what happened. The motivation is there ($12k prize too!) and it explains neatly the physics bending result.

I think UC Berkeley and the students have to be defended a little bit.

It appears VICI Labs proposed this challenge and funded the prize.  VICI labs is run by a pair of Management consultants:
http://www.vici-labs.com/leadership.html

Here are the guidelines for the competition:
http://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/VICI-Labs-Collider-Project-Submission.pdf
The object was to produce the most water per day,  at least "3.7 liters per day from 9 Sq. Meter surface in the San Francisco climate" which is a lot more modest than the crazy claims they ended up with.

You can read the other requirements, some are a little odd:

The design must be highly
functional, appealing to very high-end clients and simple to implement in developing countries
where clean water is scarce.

Seems tailor made for Indiegogo.

This is the report that VICI labs has on their waterseer.org page:
http://waterseer.org/assets/waterseer_field_test_results_v2_7.pdf
It looks like they took the results that the students got and then scaled up, extrapolated and speculated to get their incredibly high yield numbers.  I'm assuming this is VICI lab's marketing touch, rather than UCB.

As Thunderf00t pointed out, once Berkeley saw the reaction, they plastered a disclaimer on their own website:

Disclaimer: Sutardja Center Collider Projects are academic exercises executed with the goal of helping students gain experience with real world industry projects. The Sutardja Center, Berkeley Engineering, and UC Regents do not necessarily claim to support the efficacy or claims made by any industry partners or their products which were worked on for this program.

[Geonerd]

It appears VICI Labs proposed this challenge and funded the prize.  VICI labs is run by a pair of Management consultants:
http://www.vici-labs.com/leadership.html

I think you have identified the "Root Cause" of our little problem! 

Gotta love some of the Buzzword Bullshit these people spew.
Particularly entertaining, perhaps even erily prescient, are these two lines...
Don: "Hard problems provoke unique innovations."
Nancy: "She knows how to empower individual and team talents in ways never thought possible and affect paradigm shifts."
 

[madires]

Here are the guidelines for the competition:
http://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/VICI-Labs-Collider-Project-Submission.pdf
The object was to produce the most water per day,  at least "3.7 liters per day from 9 Sq. Meter surface in the San Francisco climate" which is a lot more modest than the crazy claims they ended up with.

Thanks for the info! So they've fooled the UC Berkeley students while abusing them as an "academic shield" for their unfeasible claims. It's disgusting!