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Comment by s_q_b | Hacker News Reader

Meredith Perry is no fraud. She was in a Penn graduate program before this venture, and has worked at NASA.

It's directional transmission technology. The power loss is minimized as the ultrasound is directed and focused at a particular location. There's no inverse square law here, and it's easily within the bound of known physics.

As far as I know, (indirect relationship with the a good friend of the founder, that I won't say anything more about to protect his privacy) Meredith is actually genius-level and a relentless work horse. I'd bet big on this one.

If I could work for any one company it would be uBeam. And I just started a great position, and I'd do it despite the press.

This is a "First they dismiss you. Then they laugh at you. Then you win" scenario.

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Here's the thing. It's not a matter of whether Meredith Perry is smart or not by conventional standards and metrics, because ANY idea that hasn't been proven wrong is worth trying.

It's an interesting project for a student to try. Perry would learn loads getting her hands into a subject like ultrasound and learning about how to make the regulations in place to protect living organisms work with the engineering. This is an issue of scale. UBeam is doing a proof-of-concept experiment that should take about $10k (and that is very generous) to test and explore, not $10M, ffs.

That's where the beef is. Let's not look to personally assassinate Perry or her investors. What Danny wrote about was an issue that's endemic in today's investment world, where you can invest in whatever you want, and if convenience/consumer apps, devices, and their ilk are where you decide profit is, then have at it, but you're still limited by the laws of physics and how the technology you're working with interacts with living organisms.

(Because that's what we are. We are not disembodied heads.)

She was an astrobiologist. But so what? There are plenty of real engineers who are tinkering with over-unity nonsense. While this ultra-sonic charging isn't as dumb as perpetual motion it does appear to be dumb.

She's also worked for NASA, in additional to being a wet work astrobiologist. Meaning she has a high level of intelligence, experience working with technology, and the ability to improvise tools. Those all sound like great credentials.

Honestly Computer Science used to be so open to outsiders, now it's "If you don't have a degree we don't believe you."

That's really bad. Especially considering the alternative theory involves her pulling the wool over the eyes of both AH and Marissa Mayer for ten million dollars.

So what if she worked for NASA? I can probaly find NASA ex-employees who believe in homeopathy.

What's she's doing has nothing to do with computer science.

You're right that people shouldn't be dismissing her work because of her qualifications and previous work experience but that works both ways - she doesn't magically gain credibillity just because she used to work at someplace or other.

She's worked on hard problems before. No matter the type of problem, I impute an advantage to that person in other hard activities, even if they're unrelated. E.g. I believe that someone who earned a Harvard mathematics PhD to be more likely than the average person to be able to earn a Yale Microbiology degree.

As for working at NASA, she was doing hard science research on a type of spectrography, for which she was given multiple awards by NASA Ames Rearch Center. So yes, I do consider the multitude of indications of her intelligence to be directly relevant.

This negativity reeks of "she's not part of our West Coast club" and people with no knowledge of the technology are making blanket assertions that its impossible. That's wrong.

If this company had a valley pedigree and a male founder, I'm sure I'd be reading all about the amazing self-charging forthcoming revolution.

If anything people are holding back because she's female.

This thread would be far more insulting if she were male.

The problem has nothing to do with her being UPenn (I have no fucking clue about US geography or state rivalries) or not being in some club (which she clearly is part of - look at where she's raised $10 million from).

It's to do with people being sceptical of the physics. This device is implausible at best.

The Marissa Mayer who turned around Yahoo by... waiting for Alibaba stock holdings to grow in value to cover the negative value of Yahoo's own projects?

The Marissa Mayer who... turned Yahoo around financially, increased employee job seekers by over five hundred percent, cleaned up the companies' brand, and competently managed an enterprise neither you nor I would have the first clue how to run? That Marissa Mayer? Yeah, her.

What does an astrobiologist do for a living?

Her resume's online, along with a lot of other astrobiologists'. Mostly study primitive earth microorganisms, the conditions that may have led them to form, and how those conditions might come about in extraterrestrial cases. Of course they also design tests and methods, many of which are computerized.

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