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SkyTran is being developed by Unimodal, Inc. Contact them about the status of development or building a SkyTran system. This site, skytran.net, has been the source for detailed explanations of the SkyTran technology since it was created by SkyTran's inventor, Douglas Malewicki. He maintains it with the help of a number of volunteers, some of whom have brief bios or acknowledgments below.
One feature of SkyTran that struck me immediately was its benefits for handicapped people. Our youngest son had moderate/severe retardation and seizures, but also strengths. He only made it to age 11, but we had thought a lot about his future. Our son had persistence and the beginnings of a work ethic and a winning personality. We were pretty sure he could work and enjoy various activities, but driving or riding public transportation with strangers would have been dangerous for him. SkyTran is automated transportation; so you don't need driving skills, and there could easily be special protections. I discovered SkyTran in the last class I took at U. Mass. Lowell. Our proposal, "SafeTran", included several such protections, like a list of backup destinations and passwords or smart cards for caregivers: if no one authorized to pick him up signed in at the arrival station, the car would be re-routed someplace safe. In 2006, I built skytran.org, a wiki site about the likely effects of SkyTran.
Paul Goodell
Paul has a background in politics and social policy. He is a graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois (BA in Political Science) and has his Masters in Public Policy from The George Washington University in Washington DC. He’s lived in four different time zones on two different continents. He’s worked as a direct-care social service provider, a health care policy researcher, a telecommunications policy lobbyist, and an ESL teacher (in South Korea). Currently he lives with his wife in the Chicago area, where he is the Fundraising and Development Coordinator for Emmaus Ministries. He sees SkyTran as the most beneficial and revolutionary innovation since the Internet, and he's firmly convinced that people everywhere will be better off once they are able to use and enjoy robust SkyTran networks.
http://derekshannon.com/
Contributors
Chris Fry
Chris Fry worked at the MIT Media Lab for many years. He is a principal of Clear Methods Software in Cambridge, MA and primary author of their XML-based Water language for developing Web services -- including a service for designing and simulating SkyTran systems.Howie Goodell
hasn't decided what to be when he grows up. In the late 1970's I dropped out of a chemistry PhD program and happily programmed instruments and semiconductor production equipment for two decades. In 2006, I started career #2, finishing my Computer Science doctorate (Human-Computer Interaction; Information Visualization; Bioinformatics) and enjoying my post-doc year at Universite' Paris Sud immensely. I do bioinformatics research at a Boston hospital.One feature of SkyTran that struck me immediately was its benefits for handicapped people. Our youngest son had moderate/severe retardation and seizures, but also strengths. He only made it to age 11, but we had thought a lot about his future. Our son had persistence and the beginnings of a work ethic and a winning personality. We were pretty sure he could work and enjoy various activities, but driving or riding public transportation with strangers would have been dangerous for him. SkyTran is automated transportation; so you don't need driving skills, and there could easily be special protections. I discovered SkyTran in the last class I took at U. Mass. Lowell. Our proposal, "SafeTran", included several such protections, like a list of backup destinations and passwords or smart cards for caregivers: if no one authorized to pick him up signed in at the arrival station, the car would be re-routed someplace safe. In 2006, I built skytran.org, a wiki site about the likely effects of SkyTran.
Paul Goodell
Paul has a background in politics and social policy. He is a graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois (BA in Political Science) and has his Masters in Public Policy from The George Washington University in Washington DC. He’s lived in four different time zones on two different continents. He’s worked as a direct-care social service provider, a health care policy researcher, a telecommunications policy lobbyist, and an ESL teacher (in South Korea). Currently he lives with his wife in the Chicago area, where he is the Fundraising and Development Coordinator for Emmaus Ministries. He sees SkyTran as the most beneficial and revolutionary innovation since the Internet, and he's firmly convinced that people everywhere will be better off once they are able to use and enjoy robust SkyTran networks.
Derek Shannon
Derek is an artificial intelligence researcher with a start-up company in Los Angeles, California. He holds degrees from USC and Caltech in geobiology, astrobiology, and technology commercialization. Hailing from North Dakota, Derek hopes SkyTran will someday make LA as congestion-free as his home state, but with palm trees.http://derekshannon.com/
Billy Tetrud
Billy Tetrud has a degree in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara. He is a SkyTran veteran, having corresponded with Doug since high-school. He has since re-purposed his high-school senior economics project into a short paper on The Economics of SkyTran in San Francisco.Acknowledgements
Many other people have helped this effort with discussions and advice. We acknowledge a few here.- Daniel Cookson has a biology degree from MIT and two decades of experience programming embedded systems and PDAs. He contributed to skytran.org and early discussions about this site.
- Jeremy Gayed has a law degree from the University of Notre Dame, and is an experienced intellectual property attorney. He has practiced in Chicago and Ft. Wayne, IN, and has clerked for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, GA. He provides legal advice to the SkyTran development team.
- Kathy Goodell has degrees in Journalism and Education from Pepperdine College. She runs a real estate school and is active in local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.