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Emma james

Windcatchers Natural Ventilation for New Lostock Hall Primary School Building Info - 0 views

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    Children at the new school will also benefit from a natural ventilation strategy supplied and installed by Monodraught, the UK's leading supplier of natural ventilation solutions. Specified by the Lancashire County Architects department and Lancashire County Property Group
Colin Bennett

Sustainable schools: Must try harder, says Ofsted - 0 views

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    Schools and sustainability? Must try harder, seems to be the report card from watchdog Ofsted. If they carry on at this rate, they'll have to go and stand in the naughty corner.
Glycon Garcia

Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy | Video on TED.com - 0 views

  • Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy
  • What's the key to using alternative energy, like solar and wind? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun's not out and the wind's not blowing. In this accessible, inspiring talk, Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy. As he says: "We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap." Donald S
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    "Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy Tweet this talk! (we'll add the headline and the URL) Post to: Share on Twitter Email This Favorite Download inShare Share on StumbleUpon Share on Reddit Share on Facebook TED Conversations Got an idea, question, or debate inspired by this talk? Start a TED Conversation, or join one of these: Green Home Energy=Hydrogen Generators-alternative sources Started by Kathleen Gilligan-Smith 1 Comment What is the real missing link in renewable energy? Started by Enrico Petrucco 8 Comments Comment on this Talk 60 total comments Sign in to add comments or Join (It's free and fast!) Sort By: smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Nice smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Good David Mackey 0 Reply 3 hours ago: Superb invention, but I would suggest one more standard mantra that they should move on from and that is the idea of power being supplied by a centralised grid. This technology seems to me to be much more beneficial on a local scale, what if every home had its own battery, then home power generation becomes economically more viable for everyone. If you could show that a system like this could pay for itself in say 5 years then every home would want one. Plus for this to be implemented on a large scale requires massive investment that could be decades away. Share the technology and lets get it in homes by next year. Great ted talk. Jon Senior 0 Reply 1 hour ago: I agree 100%. Localised energy production would also make energy consumers more conscious of their consumption and encourage efforts to reduce it. We can invent and invent all we want, but the fast solution to allowing renewable energies to take centre stage is to reduce the base energy draw. With lower baseline consumption, smaller "always on" generators are required to keep the grid operational. Town and house-l
Colin Bennett

7 Tech Trends for 2009 - 0 views

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    The trendspotters at JWT are predicting: - The mobile device as everything hub: Mobile rules. If you're a marketer, take note, made-for-PC sites don't make the cut for a mobile experience. - Customizable mobile: Apple's iPhone made mobile applications all the rage and other smartphone makers are having to follow suit. JWT says watch for more open mobile systems and an "onslaught" of mobile apps. - Decline of email: If you've tried emailing a teen lately you may have noticed that's considered only slightly less old-school than two tin cans and a string when it comes to communications. Text messaging, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly preferred by email recipients who are ready to cry uncle under the weight of their inboxes. According to JWT, after a decade of dominance, email will gradually be eclipsed by more efficient, manageable solutions. Hear, hear. - Cloud Computing: Software, storage -- everything we needed in our desktop computers or carried around in our laptops is now in the 'cloud.' Wikipedia calls the cloud a metaphor for the Internet, an explanation that is difficult to convey to new users. I found myself trying to explain this to a friend as I was helping her set up a netbook she received as a Christmas present. She wanted to know: Was it on the computer? On a disk? On a USB drive? I just waved my hands in the air and said 'it's all on the Internet now.' That, plus the appearance of 600 of her holiday photos on an online photo site seemed to convince her. - Social networking for jobseekers: With companies handing out more pink slips than Christmas bonuses in the past month or so, jobseekers who know how to maximize the benefits of such sites as LinkedIn and others will find those social networking skills could come in handy. - Web/TV convergence: This prediction has been paraded out in one form or another for quite a while and no telling if 2009 will be its year. The convergence of entertainment media on one viewing device
Colin Bennett

Revolutionizing Nano-Device Fabrication Using Amorphous Metals - 0 views

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    Unlike most metals, "amorphous metals" known as bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) do not form crystal structures when they are cooled rapidly after heating. Although they seem solid, they are more like a very slow-flowing liquid that has no structure beyond the atomic level - making them ideal for molding fine details, said senior author Jan Schroers of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.
Colin Bennett

Robot nannies threat to child care - Telegraph - 0 views

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    The robots are being developed for nursery schools and researchers in California reported last year that toddlers even regard the more sophisticated artificial friends as human.
Colin Bennett

Scrap price slump cools hot metal trade - 0 views

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    "At the start of the decade, Network Rail was hit by a wave of cable thefts which approached 1,000 cases a year as the price of scrap copper and other industrial metals soared. New data show that thefts in England and Wales fell below 41,000 in the year 2013-14 - down from 60,000 in the previous 12 months. "In recent years, we have witnessed a huge reduction in the number of incidents of cable theft on the railway," said a Network Rail official. "Disruption caused by the crime has fallen tenfold since its peak in 2010-11, when passengers suffered more than 6,000 hours of delay." Raids on church roofs, to strip copper and lead sheeting - another traditional target for thieves seeking to supply unscrupulous metal dealers - have also subsided with the price of scrap. Other areas affected include telecommunications and power networks, road signs, memorials, libraries, schools and children's playgrounds."
Wade Ren

The end of Bretton Woods 2? - 0 views

  • The Bretton Woods 2 system – where China and then the oil-exporters provided (subsidized) financing to the US to sustain their exports – will come close to ending, at least temporarily. If the US and Europe are not importing much, the rest of the world won’t be exporting much.
  • And rather than ending with a whimper, Bretton Woods 2 may end with a bang. In some sense Bretton Woods 2 has been on life support for a while now. China’s recent export growth has depended far more on Europe than on the US. US demand for non-oil imports peaked in 2006. One irony of the past year is that the US was borrowing far more from China that it was buying from China. Campaign rhetoric that the US was paying for Saudi oil with funds borrowed from China isn’t far off – though it leaves out the fact that the US also borrows from Saudi Arabia to pay for Venezuelan, Mexican and Nigerian oil.
  • If Bretton Woods 2 ends in 2009 – if US demand for imports falls sharply in the last part of 2008 and early 2009, bringing the US trade deficit down – it won’t have ended in the way Nouriel and I outlined back in late 2004 and early 2005. We postulated that foreign demand for US debt would dry up – pushing up US Treasury rates and delivering a nasty shock to a housing-centric economy. As Brad DeLong notes, it didn’t quite play out that way. The US and European banking system collapsed before the balance of financial terror collapsed. Dr. DeLong writes: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The end result of this crisis though could be rather similar: a sharp contraction in credit, a fall in US economic activity, a fall in US imports and a fall in the amount of foreign financing the US needs.* The US government is (possibly) trying to offset the fall in private demand by borrowing more and spending more — but as of now there is realistic risk that the fall in private activity will trump the fiscal stimulus.
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  • Or, to put it more succinctly, Bretton Woods 2, as it evolved, hinged both on the willingness of foreign central banks to take the currency risk associated with lending to the US at low rates in dollars despite the United States large current account deficit AND the willingness of private financial intermediaries to take the credit risk associated with lending at low rates to highly-indebted US households.
  • But now US financial institutions are neither willing nor able to take on the risk of lending even more to US households. For a while the US government was able to ramp up its lending to households (notably through the Agencies) and in the process effectively take over the function previously performed by the private financial system (over the last four quarters, the flow of funds data indicates that the Agencies provided around $800 billion of net credit to US households). But now the US government is struggling to keep the financial system from collapsing. It doesn’t seem like it will able to avoid a sharp fall in the overall availability of credit.
  • It is now clear how the financial sector kept profits up: it took on more risk, as it shifted from borrowing short to buy safe long-term assets (Treasuries and Agencies) to borrowing short to buy risky long-term assets. Leverage in the system also increased (and for some broker dealers that seems to be an understatement), as more and more financial institutions believed that the US had entered into an era of little macroeconomic or financial volatility. The net result seems to have been a truly explosive concentration of risk in the hands of a core set of financial intermediaries in the US and Europe. Securitization – it seems – actually didn’t disperse risk into the hands of institutions able to handle it.
  • I hope that the process of adjustment now underway isn’t as sharp as I fear. The US economy gradually can shift from producing MBS for sale to US investors flush with cash from the sale of safe securities to China and Saudi Arabia to producing goods and services for export – but it cannot shift from churning out complex debt securities to producing goods and services overnight. Indeed, in a slowing US and global economy, improvements in the US deficit will likely come from faster falls in US imports than in US exports – not from ongoing growth in US exports.
  • But right now it looks like there is a real risk that the adjustment won’t be gradual. And it certainly looks like the flow of Chinese (and Gulf) savings to US households over the past few years has produced one of the largest misallocations of global capital in recent history.
  • US taxpayers are going to be hit with a large tab for the credit risk taken on by undercapitalized financial intermediaries. Chinese taxpayers may get hit with a similar tab for the losses their central bank incurred by overpaying for US and European assets as part of its policy of holding its exchange rate down. The TARP is around 5% of US GDP. There are plausible estimates that China’s currency losses will prove to be of comparable magnitude. Charles Dumas puts the cost at above 5% of GDP: “Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research estimates that China makes 1-2 per cent on its (largely) dollar reserves. It then loses up to 10 per cent on the exchange rate and suffers a Chinese inflation rate of 6 per cent for a total real return in renminbi of about minus 15 per cent. That is a loss of $270bn a year, or a stunning 7-8 per cent of gross domestic product.”
  • Jboss — if some of the Chinese inflow could be redirected into investment in alternative energy, that would indeed be a win/ win. Some infrastructure bank style ideas have promise in my view — basically, the flow that used to go to freddie/ fannie could go to wind farms and the like. I would rather see more adjustment in china (i.e. more investment in Chinese infrastructure) but during the transition, if there is one, to a lower Chinese surplus, redirecting chinese financing toward new energy tech would be offer real benefits.
  • China likes 3rd generation nuclear power. Safe, lower cost than NG or coal, very much lower cost than coal with carbon sequestering, and zero carbon footprint. Wind is about 4X more expensive than our electric costs now. That’s in an area with consistent wind. Solar is worse. I don’t know if we can sucker them into investing in our technical fairy tales. Here’s a easy primer on 3rd gen nukes. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower
    • Wade Ren
       
      is this true?
  • btw, solar thermal installations are so easy & affordable to retrofit onto existing structures, it’s amazing that there aren’t more of them here…until you realize that they work to decentralize energy. cedric — china is already doing it in china. they are way ahead of the curve over there. my partner brought back some photos of shanghai — rows of middle class homes each with a small solar panel on top. and that’s just the tip of the iceberg — an architect friend just came back from beijing and wants to move to china (he’s into designing self-powering structures and is incredibly frustrated by the bureaucracy and cost-prohibitive measures in the US).
  • I went to engineering school right after the Arab Oil Embargo, and alternative energy was a hot topic then. All the same stuff you hear of nowadays. They even offered entire courses on it , which I took. Then my first mini career was in the power plant biz, before Volker killed it with interest rates and the Saudies killed any interest in alt. energy with their big oil field discovery. For the last 5 years I’ve been researching what’s changed, and it is frighteningly little. Solar cells are still expensive and only have a 15% conversion efficiency. They developed the new cost reduced film technology, but that knocks down efficiency to 7%. Wind power works where there is wind constantly. Generators are mature technology and are already 90 some percent efficient. Geothermal, tidal, ect. work where they are available. Looks like coal gasification and synfuel is out because it makes too much CO2. Good news is 3rd gen nuclear is way better than 1st gen plants. Hybrid cars are good, and battery technology is finally getting barely good enough for all electric cars to be practical.
  • According to news report today, Japan’s trade surplus is less than 1 billion $ in September 08, a whopping 94% decrease compared to September 07. Does it imply that going forward Japan can not buy as much treasury as before?
Colin Bennett

Cheap Laptops for Education - One Laptop Per Birmingham Child - 0 views

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    computer sales
Colin Bennett

Targeting the Gadget Generation - IBM Survey - 0 views

  • Marketers are recognizing the advantage of tailoring to meet the needs of the “gadget generation” according to an IBM study being released today. Findings showed “media consumption patterns are changing and marketers dollars are following the trend.” This generation refers to 18-24 year olds, including recent high school graduates, post-secondary students and those entering the work force, armed with gadgets and internet savvy.
James Wright

Japan - Cablemakers to increase capital investment in FY2012-13 - 0 views

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    Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd. and Tohoku University Graduate School have jointly introduced a medical application made of copper alloy. This development refers to an apparatus that uses copper shape memory alloy and aims to correct ingrown nails. What the apparatus does is to insert an alloy plate at both sides of the nail correcting its curvature. Tohoku University is currently using the instrument on a pilot basis, however, Furukawa is planning to start selling it within this fiscal year. The company expects to sell a significant volume of the newly developed instrument as about 10 million people in Japan suffer from ingrown nails.
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    Furukawa Magnet Wire Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Furukawa Electric Group, announced that it has expanded its facility in Malaysia. Production capacity of its TEX-E, trilayer insulated wire, which is principally used in rechargers for computers and mobile phones, has been doubled. The company expects that demand will increase in China and other emerging markets in the medium to long term. In addition, it was reported that Furukawa Electric increased its stake in Chongqing Changhua Automobile Harness Co. Ltd., the China-based wiring harness assembler, to 65% from its previously held 50% share.
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    Four major manufacturers of wire and cable are set to increase their level of capital investment in this fiscal year. The companies are expected to make large investments within emerging country markets, which promise growth over the medium to long term. Another area of investment is the field of smartphone components. Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd., SWCC Showa Holdings Co. Ltd. and Furukawa Electric Co. Ltd. will expand capital investment "significantly", while Fujikura Ltd., will do so only "slightly".
Colin Bennett

Anglo American to support reconstruction in Chile with US$10 million donation - 0 views

  • Following the devastating earthquake in Chile, Anglo American is pleased to announce the donation of US$10 million (equivalent to just over Ch$5 billion), which will be allocated to projects to rebuild houses and schools and implement emergency water and electricity services. The company will work with the Chilean government to formulate the aid and reconstruction plans.
Colin Bennett

Copper mining could yield billions for Minnesota schools - 0 views

  • The two companies that have signed leases with the state are Teck Resources Ltd. and Twin Metals Minnesota. Teck, based in Vancouver, Canada, has said little about its Minnesota plans. Twin Metals has proposed a deep underground mine costing more than $1 billion south of Ely. Neither company has sought environmental reviews or applied for permits to mine so far.
Colin Bennett

Why human health must be at the center of climate action - 2 views

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    There is a school of thought that climate is at the center of 'everything'. If we solve climate, we'll solve many other issues: not only health, but also growth, education, food, water, security, migration, ... Major thinkers such as Latour, Sloterdijk or Beck have written about this. See my discussion on LI: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hansdekeulenaer_chaire-de-philo-%C3%A0-lh%C3%B4pital-on-instagram-activity-6608189040141434880-Botb
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