“You care about the environment and factor it into your daily choices. But how do you know if your decisions actually make a difference? Knowledge is power: PEIR lets you see how your daily choices affect the environment and how the environment affects you.”
fascinating take.. PEIR, the Personal Environmental Impact Report, is a new kind of online tool that allows you to use your mobile phone to explore and share how you impact the environment and how the environment impacts you. |
What’s unique about PEIR? Taking a step beyond a “footprint calculator” that relies only on your demographics, PEIR uses location data that is regularly and securely uploaded from your mobile phone to create a dynamic and personalized report about your environmental impact and exposure. |
PEIR gives you greater control over your environmental impact and exposure by allowing you to interactively explore how it creates its results from your activity patterns. |
A talking Web, solar technology embedded in windows and cell phones, and the end of forgetting will all come in the next five
years, IBM predicts in its third annual Next Five in Five list, detailing innovations that could change our lives in the next half-decade.
The other predictions: We will all have digital shopping assistants and, separately, “crystal balls” to predict our future
health.
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“The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies
from IBM’s Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible,” IBM says. (See last year’s list here.)
Here’s a look at IBM’s five predictions announced this week: |
| With seawater covering seventy-one per cent of the Earth’s surface, at an average depth of four kilometers, and another 1,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water in the first kilometer alone of the earth’ atmosphere, water could hardly be described as a rare element. Its more a case of ‘water water everywhere and not a drop to drink‘. I’m going to highlight a few different ways in which renewable energy can be used to produce drinking water. |
| One of the readers last week commented that use of wind turbines or wave energy to power desalination would be a great idea. Well in Perth Australia they are doing exactly that. Perth Australia has now established one of the largest desalination plants outside of the Middle East and set up a wind farm to power it. |
Scientists mimic essence of plants’ energy storage system |
In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine. |
Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy. |
| Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,”See more at web.mit.edu |
Europe and New Zealand to install commercial generators;
U.S. lags |
Sea Monster: A Portuguese utility plans to install
wave-power generators like these. |
The first commercial ocean energy project is scheduled
to launch this summer off the coast of Portugal. Three
snakelike wave-power generators built by Edinburgh’s
Pelamis Wave Power will deliver 2.25 megawatts through
an undersea cable to the Portuguese coastal town of
Aguçadoura. Within a year, another 28 generators should
come online there, boosting the capacity to 22.5 MW.
That may be a trickle of power, but the project
represents a new push into wave and tidal power as
governments eye the oceans as a way to meet their
renewable energy targets. |
| Engineers have come up with a variety of schemes to
harness the power of waves, the flow of currents, and
the motion of the tides. The Pelamis generators, part
of a class of wave-energy converters called linear
absorbers, each comprise three long canisters that look
like giant oxygen tanksSee more at spectrum.ieee.org |
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