Peanut sheller inventor receives national award
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Wilmington inventor who came up with "the Holy Grail of sustainable agriculture" has received a $100,000 prize from a nonprofit seeking to encourage seniors and baby boomers to take up "encore careers" in public service. Civic Ventures, a San Francisco based think tank focused on boomers, work and social purpose, announced Wednesday that Jock Brandis is one of the winners of its Purpose Prize "for people over 60 who are taking on society's biggest challenges." Brandis, a 63-year-old former lighting director in the film industry, will receive the award Saturday in a ceremony on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif. "He's practically a poster child for the program," said Jim Emerman, a vice president of Civic Ventures and director of its 3-year-old Purpose Prize program. Brandis was cited for developing a low-cost, low-tech, easy-to-assemble peanut sheller for use in Third World communities, as a result of a request from a friend in the Peace Corps in Mali. This concrete device, made from materials costing the equivalent of $28, was hailed as "the Holy Grail of sustainable agriculture" and an answer to many of the problems in the developing world. With help from the Coastal Carolina Returned Peace Corps Veterans organization in Wilmington, Brandis and friends organized the Full Belly Project, a Wilmington-based non-profit to distribute the "Universal Nut Sheller" technology at no cost in countries that need it. So far, the sheller has been introduced in 17 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. "Jock's a powerful, powerful role model" for other older Americans who could use skills, acquired in a lifetime of work, for socially useful ends, Emerman said. "My house has been in foreclosure three times in three years,' Brandis said in a phone interview, "so this means a lot of reduction in stress." Brandis added that the prize money "gives me some opportunities for a lot of travel and innovation." He continues to work with the Full Belly Project on low-cost technologies, most recently on a foot-operated water pump "made up of concrete and old truck inner tubes," he said. A native of the Netherlands who grew up in Canada, Brandis moved to Wilmington in the 1980's to work with the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group. The prize ceremony will be part of a three-day "Encore Careers Summit" at Stanford, encouraging older entrepreneurs to tackle pressing social issues. Brandis is one of six $100,000 recipients from this year's Purpose Prize. Another nine recipients are receiving $10,000 grants. Funding for the Purpose Prize comes from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation. In September, the Full Bell Project was named one of 25 "Tech Awards Laureates" by the Tech Museum of San Jose, Calif., honoring technical innovations for solving critical world problems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.276 | 0.154 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".