OK, admittedly, so-called "smart" electricity meters may not have the cool factor of say, smart refrigerators. But Britain is banking on them to help citizens save money, and help the country meet its European Union obligations to reduce energy consumption and cut carbon emissions. If all goes according to the British government's plan, the next decade will usher in a huge roll-out of smart meters in the UK. So, my Wide Angle assignment was simple: find someone in the smart meter industry who could tell me how smart meters work, and what kind of energy savings one might be able to expect. I found Mark England, Managing Director of a company called Sentec, which is based in beautiful Cambridge, England. England in England...I like that. Anyway, Mark told me that Sentec's been around for 12 years or so, and has been working on smart meters, and in particular the sensor technologies embedded in smart meters, for the past five years. I start the podcast with a very simple question: just what is a smart meter, and how does it work?
Fighting between the Pakistani Army and Taliban forces in the Swat Valley has created nothing short of a humanitarian disaster. More than two million people have been forced to flee their homes, becoming what the aid business calls Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs. United Nations groups such as the World Food Program have been on the ground for weeks now, trying to get aid to where it is most needed. Those groups can't get that done without modern, secure communications. And that means two-way radios, laptops, GPS, and satellite data uplinks. And that's where people like Dane Novarlic come in. He's an emergency response coordinator for the World Food Program. He and his team go into areas affected by natural disasters and wars, and help aid groups get connected to each other, and to the rest of the world.
OK, so MIT's Pranav Mistry doesn't exactly inspire the same kind of fear that Arnie's Terminator (or, for that matter, actor Christian Bale on the set of the new Terminator movie) does. Then again, Mistry's not trying to. Mistry works in something called the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. The group as a whole is working on a set of amazing projects that are trying to bridge the current gaps that they feel exist between the real and virtual worlds. Now, if you're one of those people who has watched one too many Terminator films and doesn't want to see the real and virtual worlds melded any further, then by all means do not go the Fluid Interfaces Group website. If, however, you like the idea of a wearable interface system that allows you to check your email against an airport wall, then Pranav and crew have just the thing. It's called SixthSense, an "always-on" wearable interface that is designed to determine who and what you're interacting with, and then proactively go out, scour the web, and find relevant information for you.
OK, so it's true that mobile telecom giant Vodafone knows a thing or two about making money. The company currently operates in more than 25 countries, and has more than 250 million customers. Many of these millions are in developing countries, where things like infectious diseases and sudden natural disasters take heavy tolls. Well, the Vodafone Americas Foundation, a non-profit arm of the company, is looking for ways to help. It just ran what it calls the Wireless Innovation Project. One hundred applicants submitted ideas that harnessed new and existing wireless technologies in pursuit of social good. The idea was to show not only great use of technology, but also a clear sense of how these products could, and would, make it to market. The three winners were recently announced at the Global Philanthropy Forum in Washington, DC.
OK, there's no messing about with Technology Podcast 240 from PRI's The World. We know what you've come here for -- robots. The BBC sent me along to the RoboBusiness 2009 Conference and Expo here in Boston recently. There were some fascinating 'bots on display, including this little number, which is called a WAM arm. There was a lot of talk at the conference about the markets that are driving robotic advances. The first is an aging world population that will need extra care, the kind of care that maybe only robots will be able to provide. The other big market driver, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the military. Robots are already seeing action in Iraq and Afganistan, and by all accounts there will be more 'bots seeing even more action in the coming years. The podcast includes an audio segment I did for The World on the conference. But you want to see the robots, don't you?
This week's podcast also includes an in-depth look at a Swedish court's decision to jail and fine the founders of a website called The Pirate Bay. We start with an explainer on what, exactly, the Pirate Bay website does and does not do, and then have analysis on the global implications of the court's decision.
And somewhere in there we also talk about President Obama's pick to be the government's Chief Information Officer. His name is Vivek Kundra, and his appointment did not come without a touch of controversy. The conversation also strays, strangely enough, into politics. Obama depended heavily on tech tools during the campaign. Now that he's in Washington, he's set up a White House blog and Twitter account. But are these technologies really making a difference when it comes to ways US citizens communicate with their leaders? We include a couple of very good clips from Phil Noble, founder of a website called Politics Online.
Some weeks it is very hard to pull out one story from the Technology Podcast to feature front and center on the blog. After all, this week we run a wide tech gamut, featuring everything from writer Evgeny Morozov talking about the so-called "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova to Urban Pac-Man on the streets of Lyon, France. But for my money, the worthiest little story this week is about a solar oven, or "cooker" as the Brits would call it. It's called the Kyoto Box, and it recently took first prize for "green ideas" in a competition run by an organization called Forum for the Future. Solar ovens, which use sunlight to cook food or boil water, are not a new idea. But the Kyoto Box may be a game-changer because...well, they've kept the cost down by making it of cardboard. Yep, cardboard. We have an interview with the Kenya-based inventor of the Kyoto Box, Jon Bohmer. He tells us that he feels widespead use of the Kyoto Box would cut down on the burning of wood and other fossil fuels in resource-deprived parts of the world. Advantages: no carcinogenic wood smoke to be inhaled, or to contribute to global warming. Disadvantage: can cardboard really work as a cooker without catching on fire? Ah....listen in to find out.
There are also a couple of interesting, and potentially scary, security-related items in this week's podcast. We hear about the growing cyber-threats to America's electricity grid, and also about how extremist groups are using US servers to host their websites.
At the end, we lighten things up a bit. Jerome Burg is a retired teacher living in northern California. For more than 35 years, he taught high school English and tried to avoid chaperoning dances by also teaching technology to the school's journalism students. Then, a few years back, he was at Google headquarters learning about Google Earth, and it hit him: why not use Google Earth's different tools to help "three-dimensionalize" great works of literature? You know, add pictures, notes, geographical details, etc. Yeah, not bad, is it? And that's how Burg came to create GoogleLitTrips was born. The site recently won the 2008 Goldman Sachs Foundation Prize for Excellence in International Education.
Oh, and just because you know you secretly just HAVE to see this...video from Urban Pac-Man in Lyon, France:
As Europe's population ages, more and more research, and money, is going toward finding ways to help the elderly feel better, and take care of themselves, for longer. It turns out that light and lighting can play a huge role in the health of older people. It can affect sleep quality, changes of mood and cognitive performance. And so the European Union has given more than two and half million dollars to a project called Ambient Lighting Assistance for an Ageing Population, also known as ALADIN. A group of research universities and companies across Europe are trying to find ways to help older folks' circadian rhythms stay intact. And it revolves around the bio-sensor glove you see here. For this Wide Angle podcast, I speak with Walter Ritter, a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg in Austria. He began by explaining how and why light is so important to our health:
It might also help to see a graphic representation of how it works, so here it is.
(Photo courtesy of Edith Maier. Graphic from ALADIN website)
You may remember the horrific collapse of I-35 Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007. The catastrophic failure of the steel truss arch bridge during rush hour left 13 people dead and more than 140 injured. The collapse led to questions about the safety of other bridges critical to the country's infrastructure. It also caused many to rethink the way bridges are monitored and inspected. Now, a group of transportation specialists and civil engineers at the University of Michigan has begun a feasibility study for self-monitoring bridges. The program, which was launched in conjunction with Michigan's Department of Transportation and which will use federal money, plans to use of a whole range of new sensor and wireless technologies. Imagine it: cars being able to send data to bridges, which in turn can send that data to a collection point. The idea is that a bridge could be monitored not only from a distance via the Internet, but also continuously, to evaluate the stresses and strains it may be under.
In this Wide Angle podcast, I speak with Tim Gordon, who heads the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute. I started by asking Tim to remind us how bridge inspection is currently done:
A bit of theme runs through this week's Technology Podcast from PRI's The World. That theme is surveillance. In fact, we take a hard look at all manner of technologies and entities that are, in fact, looking at you. The most interesting of the bunch is this man, Canadian Rob Spence. Spence lost one eye to a shotgun accident when we was a kid. Now, he's a one-eyed filmmaker who is about to implant a special camera in his prosthetic eye. You can probably already see where this is going. He's going to use the camera to make a film. And yes, it raises all kinds of interesting questions about technology and privacy. And that's why for WTP 235 we get Rob on the line to answer those questions. He's calling his project EYEborg...
But along the way to Spence, we make some interesting stops. First, we head to Great Britain, where closed-circuit television cameras are, well, everywhere. It seems like you can't make a move in the UK without your image being captured. It's made for intense debate, as you might imagine. Some feel it is a clear intrusion on privacy. Others say it is necessary to deter crime and terrorism. Recently, Britain's House of Lords released a report questioning whether Britain was turning into a "surveillance state." You'll be shocked to learn the word "Orwellian" is being thrown around. Did anyone else hear the clocks strike 13? Anyway, we have a report from the streets of London, and then a discussion between Gus Hosein of Privacy International and the London School of Economics, and John Dwyer, a former constable and now Managing Director of Zeon Business Protection Services.
We also make a stop in Germany, where the government is mulling over "anti-snooping" legislation after some major German businesses, including the rail operator Deutsche Bahn, were caught spying on their employees electronically. We have a report from Berlin on the scandals, and the legislation.
And is spying potentially all that bad? Well, not if you're the parent of one of those reckless teen drivers. Actually, road accidents account for a huge percentage of teen deaths in the United States. And so, we have a report from Maryland on the trial of something called DriveCam. Yep, it's a little camera attached to one of the rearview mirrors. It allows parents to keep an eye on their teenagers driving habits. The idea, of course, is to encourage better teenage driving. If the camera detects an "infraction," the footage is reviewed, and an email is sent to the parents. Dude, that sucks.
A reminder that you can always peek in on what WTP is up to. We're on Twitter and Facebook. You can always check out any of our other 234 episodes via the archive.
It was just a little more than four years ago when a major undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a massive tsunami. The scale of the devastation was truly terrifying. More than 225,000 people from almost a dozen different countries lost their lives. And as the picture at right shows, many simply were not prepared, and did not know the risk that they faced. GEM, which stands for The Global Earthquake Model, is a public-private initiative that wants to increase everyone's awareness of earthquake risk. Initiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and funded by some big private companies, the idea is to create "the first global, open source model for seismic risk assessment at the national and regional scale." The group hopes to develop "an independent standard to calculate and communicate earthquake risk, raise awareness, promote mitigation and insurance use, and stimulate risk transfer." GEM is to be an online tool a map-based graphical interface. It will be written with open source code, and contain open data "wherever possible." It is hoped that GEM will be useful to everyone involved in trying to lessen the effects of major earthquakes, be they government ministers, scientists and engineers, or the public.
It sounds like a bold and ambitious plan, especially considering they'd like to have a first iteration of the model up and running by, well, soon -- early 2009.
But GEM got a nice boost this month in journal Nature Geoscience. In an editorial, the journal called GEM "a potentially important step in towards providing risk information on a worldwide basis, using a unified standard." The editorial went on: "The project is still in its infancy, and it is difficult to gauge its likely impact, let alone evaluate it critically. But it seems based on solid foundations...the success of the Global Earthquake Model is in everyone's interest; the whole-hearted support of scientists, governments and the private sector should help live up to its promise."
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=86b0e9f4-11b0-44da-8853-28573dc1485c)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=75098598-a9ef-45ee-83b0-3e91658ad881)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0d3e1178-6fd9-47d8-b05d-d33a7e7dd4a5)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=da83d45f-58f8-4250-a26d-80acc321af8e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=16b66a4e-a7ee-4fab-8acb-3e56b88e1b46)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f2d02ca3-b93f-42ff-8c27-8423e964213e)
Recent Comments