An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:
An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider. The “personal food computer,” a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn’t work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation…
Ahead of big demonstrations with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the insiders said. In other instances, devices delivered to local schools simply didn’t work. “It’s fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant,” one person said…
One worker told the site that at one school the students “would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers.”
That pilot program “ended shortly thereafter.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot