Green Design » Emerging Technologies

Worldchanging Update: Better Place Targets Tokyo Taxis

Christa Morris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:30:25 +0000

We’ve written before about California start-up Better Place’s plan to build a network of battery swapping stations and standardized EVs, including its scheduled $1 billion project in the San Francisco Bay Area. As of January 2010, Better Place is taking on the Tokyo taxicab. Partnering with the cities’ largest taxi company, Niho Kotsu, they will create the first all-electric fleet in the world, complete with a battery swapping station in the Roppongi Hills.

Founder Shai Agassi’s plan is to supply cheaper EVs and generate profit by selling power-up time much like cell-phone companies sell minutes (you can even pick your plan; unlimited mileage, monthly allowances, or pay-as-you-go). Battery stations will then allow drivers to swap out their standardized, used batteries for fully-charged ones in under 5 minutes. It’s like going to the gas station without the guilt — especially if Better Place employs renewable energy and becomes part of a smart-grid system.

Testing out this system in the high volume Tokyo taxi market is an important step in Better Place’s long-term vision, as Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher explains:

First off, Tokyo is often the purveyor of “cool” and advanced technology, and services and products that gain acceptance in Toyko often find their way to other parts of the world. The city has become a good test bed for technology because it’s filled with a lot of people, not much space, a lot of disposable income, and an unusually high level of attention to electronics and gadgets. While the Better Place Tokyo taxi deal will have to impress the taxi owners first, if it’s successful, it could mean a more consumer-targeted push in Tokyo in the future.

The other benefit of this deal is that Better Place gets to test out its system in a fleet. Tokyo taxis will give the Better Place cars, batteries and battery swap stations a run for their money — far more than the average car user would. That will enable Better Place to test the battery range, the IT networks and the location of the battery swap station in a much faster manner."

As they continue to develop simultaneous projects in the U.S., Australia, Israel, Ontario and Denmark, we look forward to seeing how Better Place’s strategy catches on.

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(Posted by Christa Morris in Emerging Technologies at 1:30 PM)

Worldchanging Update: Better Place Targets Tokyo Taxis

Christa Morris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:30:25 +0000

First off, Tokyo is often the purveyor of “cool” and advanced technology, and services and products that gain acceptance in Toyko often find their way to other parts of the world. The city has become a good test bed for technology because it’s filled with a lot of people, not much space, a lot of disposable income, and an unusually high level of attention to electronics and gadgets. While the Better Place Tokyo taxi deal will have to impress the taxi owners first, if it’s successful, it could mean a more consumer-targeted push in Tokyo in the future.

The other benefit of this deal is that Better Place gets to test out its system in a fleet. Tokyo taxis will give the Better Place cars, batteries and battery swap stations a run for their money — far more than the average car user would. That will enable Better Place to test the battery range, the IT networks and the location of the battery swap station in a much faster manner."

As they continue to develop simultaneous projects in the U.S., Australia, Israel, Ontario and Denmark, we look forward to seeing how Better Place’s strategy catches on.

CC photo credit

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(Posted by Christa Morris in Emerging Technologies at 1:30 PM)

Solar Power from Space: Moving Beyond Science Fiction

Yale Environment 360 — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:18:29 +0000

by Michael D. Lemonick

For more than 40 years, scientists have dreamed of collecting the sun’s energy in space and beaming it back to Earth. Now, a host of technological advances, coupled with interest from the U.S. military, may be bringing that vision close to reality.

Despite the enormous promise of solar power, the drawbacks of the technology remain significant. People need electricity every day, around the clock, but there’s no part of the United States that is cloud-free 365 days a year — and no solar radiation at night. You have to find some way to store the energy for those sunless periods, and there’s not yet a large-scale way to do that.

Moreover, the best locations for solar arrays — the deserts of the American Southwest — are far from the centers of population, so even under the best of circumstances you’d have to send electricity many hundreds of miles through transmission lines that don’t yet exist.

But there is a way to tap into the sun’s energy 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and send it anywhere on the globe: Launch solar panels into space and beam the power back to Earth.

The concept sounds far-fetched and wildly impractical, and when the Pentagon and space enthusiasts began talking about it back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was. Recently, however, the idea of space-based solar power, or SBSP, has begun to look less like science fiction and more like a technology whose time may be coming, with the Pentagon and private companies ramping up efforts to make space-based solar power a reality.

Two years ago, the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office (NSSO) issued a report recommending that the U.S. “begin a coordinated national program to develop SBSP.” A year ago, engineers did a small but successful experiment using some of the technology that will be employed in SBSP, taking energy from solar cells, converting it to microwaves, and then beaming it 92 miles from Maui to the Big Island of Hawaii, where it was converted back into 20 watts worth of electricity.

And last spring, the California-based Solaren Corporation signed a contract with Pacific Gas & Electric (PE&G) to provide 200 megawatts of power — about half the output of an average coal-fired power plant — by 2016 by launching solar arrays into space. Several other companies have announced their intentions to put up solar satellites of their own.

Doubts abound that space-based solar power will come to pass anytime soon, and for good reason: The technology involves launching a series of large satellites into space, using robotic technology to assemble the solar arrays, transmitting the energy 22,000 miles to earth using microwave technology, and then converting that energy to electricity on the ground.

The fact is, however, that all of that is now feasible — if pricey — thanks to technological advances in recent years. These include cheaper and more reliable launch technology, lighter and stronger materials for solar stations, significant improvements in the robotic technology needed to assemble the solar arrays, far more efficient solar cells, more precise digital devices to direct that energy accurately to earth, and significantly smaller and more powerful microwave transmitters and receivers.

The big question is whether this engineering feat can be pulled off at a price competitive with terrestrial solar power. So far, the Pentagon’s estimate of what it will cost — $10 billion to put a 10-megawatt experimental solar station in orbit by 2016 — is five times higher than Solaren’s and would produce far less power.

A number of factors are driving the renewed interest in space-based solar power, including the push to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and growing interest from the military. But neither of these forces would mean much if the technology was outrageously expensive or too impractical.

It was a little bit of both when SBSP was first proposed in 1968 by an engineer named Peter Glaser, who worked for the consulting firm Arthur D. Little on a variety of space-related projects. The basic components — solar cells and microwave transmitters and receivers — already existed, and as the Apollo program began to wind down, NASA was trying to figure out what to do next.

In particular, says John Mankins, who became the manager for advanced concepts for NASA during the 1990s, “They were trying to figure out what to do with the space shuttle.” One idea was to begin launching space habitats — to get large numbers of people living and working in space. “These people would need something to do,” says Mankins, “so one idea was that they’d build solar-power satellites.”

Studies showed that it was a feasible, but daunting, proposition. “This was in the days before PCs, microelectronics, robotics,” says Mankins. “The idea of something like the shuttle’s robotic arm was unimaginable. So you’d need these big crews to bolt the things together — and the satellites themselves would have had to be physically enormous. We’d need a new launch system that would dwarf the space shuttle.”

The bottom line, he says, was that it could be done, but it would have cost the equivalent of a trillion of today’s dollars to get the first kilowatt of power, and it would have taken 20 years. “The National Research Council and the Office of Technology Assessment looked at it,” recalled Mankins. “One of them said, ‘Let’s revisit this in ten years.’ The other said, ‘Let’s never consider this again.’”

In the mid-1990s, NASA did revisit the concept. Under Mankins’ direction, a team of engineers was assembled to see whether advances in technology made space-based solar power more feasible. “The basic answer,” he says, “was ‘yes.’”

In the past decade two other factors have emerged to boost the prospects of SBSP: climate change and interest from the military.

There is a growing recognition that non-carbon energy sources will be crucial if the world is going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. It’s almost inevitable that carbon emissions will end up being taxed one way or another, and when they are, renewables like SBSP will immediately become more competitive economically.

That’s what motivates Solaren and PE&G. Although it is cloaking its work in secrecy, Solaren has said it will cost roughly $2 billion to launch a handful of satellites carrying the equipment that will be robotically assembled into a single, large solar station. One way the company plans to boost efficiency is to use parabolic reflectors to concentrate sunlight onto the solar cells.

“The biggest expense,” says Cal Boerman, Solaren’s director of energy services, “is the cost of getting into space, and we’re convinced we can get the weight down to the point where we can do this with a minimum number of launches.”

As with any SBSP system, the energy will be converted into microwaves and beamed down to a so-called rectenna — an antenna that “rectifies” the microwaves back into electricity. Solaren’s, to be located near Fresno, Calif., will consist of an array of smaller antennas that will cover about a square kilometer — far less real estate than you’d need if you were using ground-based solar cells to gather an equivalent amount of power.

Because Solaren’s satellite will be in geostationary orbit, the antennas won’t have to track it across the sky; like a satellite TV receiver, they’ll always aim at a fixed point in the sky. At 22,000 miles up, a geostationary satellite is in full sunlight virtually all the time.

As for safety, he says, the fact that the microwaves are spread out over a square kilometer means that they’d be relatively harmless to, say, a flock of birds that happened to fly through them. And if the beam should wander, the satellite will be programmed to scatter it.

Solaren isn’t the only company trying to commercialize SBSP: PowerSat, based in Everett, Wash., has recently filed patents for its own space-power system, which will use an array of hundreds of small satellites linked together rather than one large one. PowerSat says it can reduce some of the high costs of putting the technology in space by using solar energy to power electronic thrusters to maneuver the satellites into orbit. A Swiss company, Space Energy, is also working on SBSP. Solaren is the only one, though, with a contract with a utility. “As we talked to investors,” says Boerman, “they naturally asked, ‘Can you sell it?’”

If this first project works out, Solaren eventually wants to put in orbit satellites that can generate a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power roughly 1 million homes.

Such futuristic schemes have understandably generated a great deal of skepticism. Space experts have been debating the issue online, with some arguing that Solaren’s project will be far more expensive than the company estimates, in part because it could take more than a dozen launches — not just four, as the company stated — to get the solar station into space.

But the military’s interest in SBSP could give a major boost to the technology. According to Marine Corps Lt. Col. Paul Damphousse, Chief of Advanced Concepts for the National Security Space Office, the military is interested in SBSP for two main reasons.

The first, he said, is that “we’re obviously interested in energy security, and we’re also interested in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels because climate change could pose national security risks.” But there would also be a tactical advantage to space-based solar, Damphousse noted. When the military is operating in remote regions of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, it uses diesel generators to supply forward bases with power.

“We have a significant footprint getting energy in,” says Damphousse, noting the need for frequent convoys of oil tankers, the soldiers to protect them, and air support — all of which is expensive and dangerous.

Being able to tap into power beamed directly down from space would clearly have a lot of appeal, says Damphousse, even if it were relatively costly. And it’s not just useful for the battlefield, he says, but also for areas affected by natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina.

For those reasons, Damphousse supports the idea of coordinated studies by the Pentagon and other agencies — such as NASA and the Department of Energy — that would have a stake in space-based power.

“We might, for example, do some experiments on the International Space Station, which is already up there and generating 110 kilowatts of power from its own solar cells,” he says, “rather than having to send up a dedicated test satellite.”

Such cooperation might appeal to NASA. “I suspect that NASA will start working on energy and on more advanced technology and less on, ‘Let’s get to the moon by 2018,’” says Mankins.

By undertaking some of the research and being an early customer for SBSP, the government could rapidly accelerate development of the technology. Historians of aviation agree that the government’s decision to back air mail played a major role in developing the aircraft industry, leading to technological innovations and economies of scale. The same phenomenon could take an emerging but outlandish-sounding technology and push it into the energy mainstream.

This piece originally appeared on Yale Environment 360
Image by National Space Society/Mafic Studios, Inc.

Learn more about space-based solar power in the WorldChanging archives:
Space Solar Power, Collaboratively
Solar Into Space
Ask Obama to Restore NASA's Home Planet Mission
To Understand and Protect Our Home Planet

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Emerging Technologies at 11:18 AM)

My Fridge Could Power the World

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:49:02 +0000

by Jennifer Langston

Beer + leftovers = energy

According to two news stories today, the contents of my fridge -- a six-pack, open bottles of wine, dregs from last week's farmers' market and leftover stir-fry -- might help power my house some day.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur has invented a system that makes ethanol out of old beer, wine and other waste kitchen products. My favorite part: the still doubles as a fuel pump for your car!

Also in the Bay Area, a pilot program is using leftovers to make electricity. Food scraps from 2,300 restaurants and grocery stores are collected and pumped into tanks at a local wastewater treatment plant, where microbes do their stuff. The decomposing food releases methane, which is used to make electricity. (A catch: Forks, oysters, and plastic bags are big problems.)

But since I don't eat out that much, I was more interested in the beer-to-energy solution.

I can't personally vouch for this system, and the Times points out that there's only one of them in existence. But the E Fuel MicroFueler (invented by the same guy who developed part of the Nintendo Wii gaming system) apparently turns high-alcohol organic feedstock -- such as old wine and beer -- into ethanol.

It's being marketed to homeowners, but even all the booze in my fridge wouldn't get me very far. That's where the commercial brewers, soda and candy companies come in. In San Diego, the distributor of MicroFuelers is working with Karl Strauss Brewing Co., Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. and Sunny Delight Beverages Co. to convert 29,000 tons of their liquid waste. The idea is that a truck would pick up their dregs in volume and deliver them to home-based MicroFuelers, who would then generate ethanol at their homes.

The systems cost $10,000 but, implausibly, there's a $5,000 federal tax credit available to anyone who buys one. Along with a $2 per-gallon charge to pump out the ethanol, the company estimates the average payback time for the MicroFueler would be two years. And the end product could be used to power cars (albeit less efficiently than gasoline) or a home generator.

It does seem a little too good to be true, but it would be nice to find a higher calling for the bad bottles of wine I never remember to return.

This piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily

Photo courtesy of flickr user add1sun via the Creative Commons

Related posts:
Jungle Rot: the Future of Ethanol?
The Biofuel Dilemma
Bourbon, Beer and Biofuel

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 12:49 PM)

Create Your Own Bike Lane, For Real

Adam Stein — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:40:30 +0000

This past winter, I wrote about LightLane, a concept design for a lighting system that paints a virtual path around your bike at night to encourage cars to keep a safe distance. The idea caught the Internet's imagination, so much so that it's soon going to be a real product:

The video is kind of cool, and I tend to think something like this actually could work. If I were a driver, I'd take the hint. More info at the LightLane web site.

Now maybe someone will get to work on that bike-based street chalker...

This piece originally appeared in The Terra Pass Footprint.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Emerging Technologies at 2:40 PM)

Create Your Own Bike Lane, For Real

Adam Stein — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:40:30 +0000

This past winter, I wrote about LightLane, a concept design for a lighting system that paints a virtual path around your bike at night to encourage cars to keep a safe distance. The idea caught the Internet's imagination, so much so that it's soon going to be a real product:

The video is kind of cool, and I tend to think something like this actually could work. If I were a driver, I'd take the hint. More info at the LightLane web site.

Now maybe someone will get to work on that bike-based street chalker...

This piece originally appeared in The Terra Pass Footprint.

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(Posted by Adam Stein in Emerging Technologies at 2:40 PM)

From Skins of Onions, Farmers Develop Promising Biogas

Yale Environment 360 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:04:10 +0000

A large onion processor in California is taking 300,000 pounds of onion waste a day — skins, tails, and tops — and converting much of it into a biogas that he uses to power his operation. Steven Gill, a partner in Gills Onions — which dices, slices, and purees onion for wholesale and retail customers — has worked with Southern California Gas Company to create an energy recovery system that produces 600 kilowatts per day, which meets up to 40 percent of the electricity needs of his processing plant. The onion waste is shredded and pressed to squeeze out the juice, which is then diverted to an anaerobic digester. Workers add microbes that convert the juice into methane gas, which helps power Gill’s facility. Gill used to spread the onion waste on fields but soon ran out of room. Southern California Gas provided $2.7 million in incentives for the $9.5 million energy recovery system. Gill estimates that converting the onion waste to biogas will save him $700,000 a year in electricity costs and $400,000 in waste disposal costs, meaning the plant will pay for itself in about six years. Nearby carrot and wine producers are interested in installing similar systems.

This piece originally appeared in Yale Environment 360

Creative Commons Photo Credit

Related posts:

Biogas
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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Emerging Technologies at 1:04 PM)

Software Carpentry: Open Source Site Offers Courses on Basic Development Skills

Hassan Masum — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:38:00 +0000

Software Carpentry is a "how to program effectively" boot camp for scientists and self-starters. Course notes are all online, and are even available as one monster page of concise insights.

The focus is on "the 20 percent of ideas that account for 80 percent of real world use...about putting an extension on the house, rather than building the Channel Tunnel." Beyond programming itself, the authors imbue their lectures with insights on design, what not to do, and the spirit of elegance - the kind of experiential knowledge that differentiates dilettantes from pros.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

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(Posted by Hassan Masum in Emerging Technologies at 8:38 AM)

Beth Kolko and Design for Digital Inclusion

Ethan Zuckerman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:40:51 +0000

Beth Kolko manages the Design for Digital Inclusion research group at the University of Washington, a group that includes undergrads, grads and faculty across fields, focusing on a wide variety of topics: technology in Central Asia, non-instrumental uses of technology, technology and autism, games for development, and other topics.

Uniting her work is a basic questions about technology use in different communities: What ICTs (information and community technologies) are adopted in diverse communities and why? The “what” gets very complicated in this question - a technology may be used very differently in one community than another. The overarching questions focus on what people in diverse communities do with ICT, and how can we design better technologies and policies?

There are lots of people in different academic fields looking at these questions - Beth points to user-centered design, learner-centered design, and value-sensitive design. Her goal is to contribute to how people think about design, and to incorporate more varied perspectives and functions, especially “discourse at the margins”. She argues that diversity lends robustness to environments, and helps you avoid designing brittle, fragile systems.

Beth’s field, information and communication technologies for development - ICT4D - focuses on technology in areas of resource constraint. She points out that these constraints aren’t static - they tend to change over time, sometimes even within a day. Constraints are also not purely geographic - Beth believes that some of the work she’s been doing in Central Asia has direct applicability for the Yakima Valley, for instance.

Most of her work relies on two sets of data, a yearly survey of 4,000 people in four Central Asian nations, with questions on media confidence as well as technical use. Only 11% of the survey respondents identify as Internet users, which gives a small sample for those questions, but it’s carefully demographically controlled and should be an accurate representation of the net-using population. She and her team also run qualitative, ethnographic studies based on interviews with teachers, businesspeope, and mobile internet users in Central Asia.

Her observations are organized into two categories, “form and function”:

Form - internet as weather dependent:
In northern Cambodia, Beth wanted to interview customers at a local cybercafe. It was empty. Beth asked the proprietor why - it had just rained, and regular customers knew that the internet usually went down for a couple of hours during a rainstorm. “Wait two hours and come back - we’ll be full.” They were.

She argues that this complicates what is the internet - unlike in developed markets, it’s not a ubiquitous technology. It also forces us to rethink what an internet user is - “it’s often defined as someone who’s once touched the internet.” Understandings of internet users need to recognize that the net is not ubiquitous, and there’s a vast gap in how people use the internet, how often and how long they get to use it for.

Form - Internet as a shared public resource:
In Central Asia, internet use is primarily in shared spaces like cybercafes. It’s not always net use as we think of it. In a Kyrgyz cybercafe, we see pricing structures, which charge 2.5 times as much for web usage - downloading web pages - as for playing LAN games or chatting. The constraint is bandwidth, which is the cafe’s most expensive cost. Other behaviors, like Voice over IP, tend to be shaped by policy environments.

Form - Phones as banks:
Phones weren’t designed to be a banking device, but in countries like Kenya, they’ve become one. This raises questions about phones and security - people access their money, their email and other sensitive information on their phones, and often don’t set passwords. “How transparent is password protection on your phone?” Beth wonders.

Function - internet as strengthener of ties:
Beth and her team have been trying to do surveys of internet non-users as well as of users. Non-users generally offer three reasons why they’re not online: it’s difficult, it’s expensive, and there’s nothing to interest them online. She observes that everyone characterizes the Internet as appropriate for “the youth” - and that everyone defines the youth as themselves and younger, whether they’re 20 or 40 years old. Controlling for demographics, she and her team see a small but visible correlation between people with strong social networks and trust in those social networks and use of the internet.

Function - mobile phone as purveyor of fraud
It’s currently fashionable to look at the mobile phone as the platform of the future for the developing world. While Beth acknowledges the power of the mobile platform, she warns that it’s a dangerous platform - she points to a spam message she got in Kenya, promising her that she’d won a Safaricom contest. She returned the call, and her scammer proceeded to demand her passport number, which she refused. Her message - don’t assume that these platforms are always going to be used the way we’d want them to be used.

Function - SMS as weapon
With protests in Iran taking place as Beth gives her talk, it’s worth considering the ways SMS can be used - and is actually used - at moments of conflict. Analyzing the Lemon revolution in Kyrgystan, she explains that SMS wasn’t really used for planning demonstrations. Instead, it was used to warn people to stay away from riots, or to organize family and friends to protect businesses from looting. There is speculation - which she couldn’t confirm - that SMS was used by looters to coordinate their work. In Kenya, during election violence, SMS was a very effective platform for disseminating virulent ethnic hatred, using stories that were mostly true - and therefore credible - but had been exaggerated to be inflamatory.

Function - games as tech training
Since games are cheaper than the internet in many countries, people who aspire to modernity often gravitate to them first as an introduction to an online existence. As such, they end up being an alternative pathway towards technical training for users.

Based on these observations, Beth has tried to inform her design processes. This involves design ethnography - exposing aspects of a design to end-users and studying their reactions - as well as to modified design methods and prototyping. Her lab has worked on two main projects, MoSoSo and Starbus.

MoSoSo is a yellow pages - business directory - service for mobile phone users. It tries to take advantage of the realworld social network behaviors Beth observed in Central Asia to build trust in the system. It includes a general directory of businesses, where any user can rate the businesses. It also has a private, password-protected directory which users share with family and friends - the theory is that this closed directory will be believable and reliable in a way that the public directory might not be.

Starbus attempts to solve a common developing world problem - waiting for the bus. In Seattle, where Beth lives, there are great mobile phone and online tools designed to let riders figure out where the bus is and when it’s arriving. In developing nations, where transport tends to be adhoc and shared, there’s very little information on routes and timing. She and colleagues designed a tool called “the starbox” - a GPS receiver attached to a bus which communicates to a server via SMS - users can access the bus position on the server or query its location via SMS.

The system worked great in Seattle as she prototyped it, but failed utterly in Bishkek for the first several days. She and colleagues had made a design decision to use as little power as possible, to conserve battery life - a classic developing world strategy. Unfortunately, GSM towers in Bishkek weren’t as powerful as in Seattle - she needed to use more power to get the tool to work. Once they adjusted the signal strength, users of the system loved the new functionality and urged her to find a way to bring the system to Bishkek permanently.

One of the takeaways for me from Beth’s talk is the sheer complexity of reframing thinking about design in developing world environments. I’ve offered my set of suggestions for designing from constraints, which has some overlap with Beth’s observations, but not much. My guess - there’s no hard and fast rules for designing for constrained environments, just lots of practice, observation and careful information sharing…

See also David/JOHO’s take, as well as Rebekah/Jackfruity’s take.

This article originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/kiwanja.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Emerging Technologies at 10:40 AM)

Beth Kolko and Design for Digital Inclusion

Ethan Zuckerman — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:40:51 +0000

Beth Kolko manages the Design for Digital Inclusion research group at the University of Washington, a group that includes undergrads, grads and faculty across fields, focusing on a wide variety of topics: technology in Central Asia, non-instrumental uses of technology, technology and autism, games for development, and other topics.

Uniting her work is a basic questions about technology use in different communities: What ICTs (information and community technologies) are adopted in diverse communities and why? The “what” gets very complicated in this question - a technology may be used very differently in one community than another. The overarching questions focus on what people in diverse communities do with ICT, and how can we design better technologies and policies?

There are lots of people in different academic fields looking at these questions - Beth points to user-centered design, learner-centered design, and value-sensitive design. Her goal is to contribute to how people think about design, and to incorporate more varied perspectives and functions, especially “discourse at the margins”. She argues that diversity lends robustness to environments, and helps you avoid designing brittle, fragile systems.

Beth’s field, information and communication technologies for development - ICT4D - focuses on technology in areas of resource constraint. She points out that these constraints aren’t static - they tend to change over time, sometimes even within a day. Constraints are also not purely geographic - Beth believes that some of the work she’s been doing in Central Asia has direct applicability for the Yakima Valley, for instance.

Most of her work relies on two sets of data, a yearly survey of 4,000 people in four Central Asian nations, with questions on media confidence as well as technical use. Only 11% of the survey respondents identify as Internet users, which gives a small sample for those questions, but it’s carefully demographically controlled and should be an accurate representation of the net-using population. She and her team also run qualitative, ethnographic studies based on interviews with teachers, businesspeope, and mobile internet users in Central Asia.

Her observations are organized into two categories, “form and function”:

Form - internet as weather dependent:
In northern Cambodia, Beth wanted to interview customers at a local cybercafe. It was empty. Beth asked the proprietor why - it had just rained, and regular customers knew that the internet usually went down for a couple of hours during a rainstorm. “Wait two hours and come back - we’ll be full.” They were.

She argues that this complicates what is the internet - unlike in developed markets, it’s not a ubiquitous technology. It also forces us to rethink what an internet user is - “it’s often defined as someone who’s once touched the internet.” Understandings of internet users need to recognize that the net is not ubiquitous, and there’s a vast gap in how people use the internet, how often and how long they get to use it for.

Form - Internet as a shared public resource:
In Central Asia, internet use is primarily in shared spaces like cybercafes. It’s not always net use as we think of it. In a Kyrgyz cybercafe, we see pricing structures, which charge 2.5 times as much for web usage - downloading web pages - as for playing LAN games or chatting. The constraint is bandwidth, which is the cafe’s most expensive cost. Other behaviors, like Voice over IP, tend to be shaped by policy environments.

Form - Phones as banks:
Phones weren’t designed to be a banking device, but in countries like Kenya, they’ve become one. This raises questions about phones and security - people access their money, their email and other sensitive information on their phones, and often don’t set passwords. “How transparent is password protection on your phone?” Beth wonders.

Function - internet as strengthener of ties:
Beth and her team have been trying to do surveys of internet non-users as well as of users. Non-users generally offer three reasons why they’re not online: it’s difficult, it’s expensive, and there’s nothing to interest them online. She observes that everyone characterizes the Internet as appropriate for “the youth” - and that everyone defines the youth as themselves and younger, whether they’re 20 or 40 years old. Controlling for demographics, she and her team see a small but visible correlation between people with strong social networks and trust in those social networks and use of the internet.

Function - mobile phone as purveyor of fraud
It’s currently fashionable to look at the mobile phone as the platform of the future for the developing world. While Beth acknowledges the power of the mobile platform, she warns that it’s a dangerous platform - she points to a spam message she got in Kenya, promising her that she’d won a Safaricom contest. She returned the call, and her scammer proceeded to demand her passport number, which she refused. Her message - don’t assume that these platforms are always going to be used the way we’d want them to be used.

Function - SMS as weapon
With protests in Iran taking place as Beth gives her talk, it’s worth considering the ways SMS can be used - and is actually used - at moments of conflict. Analyzing the Lemon revolution in Kyrgystan, she explains that SMS wasn’t really used for planning demonstrations. Instead, it was used to warn people to stay away from riots, or to organize family and friends to protect businesses from looting. There is speculation - which she couldn’t confirm - that SMS was used by looters to coordinate their work. In Kenya, during election violence, SMS was a very effective platform for disseminating virulent ethnic hatred, using stories that were mostly true - and therefore credible - but had been exaggerated to be inflamatory.

Function - games as tech training
Since games are cheaper than the internet in many countries, people who aspire to modernity often gravitate to them first as an introduction to an online existence. As such, they end up being an alternative pathway towards technical training for users.

Based on these observations, Beth has tried to inform her design processes. This involves design ethnography - exposing aspects of a design to end-users and studying their reactions - as well as to modified design methods and prototyping. Her lab has worked on two main projects, MoSoSo and Starbus.

MoSoSo is a yellow pages - business directory - service for mobile phone users. It tries to take advantage of the realworld social network behaviors Beth observed in Central Asia to build trust in the system. It includes a general directory of businesses, where any user can rate the businesses. It also has a private, password-protected directory which users share with family and friends - the theory is that this closed directory will be believable and reliable in a way that the public directory might not be.

Starbus attempts to solve a common developing world problem - waiting for the bus. In Seattle, where Beth lives, there are great mobile phone and online tools designed to let riders figure out where the bus is and when it’s arriving. In developing nations, where transport tends to be adhoc and shared, there’s very little information on routes and timing. She and colleagues designed a tool called “the starbox” - a GPS receiver attached to a bus which communicates to a server via SMS - users can access the bus position on the server or query its location via SMS.

The system worked great in Seattle as she prototyped it, but failed utterly in Bishkek for the first several days. She and colleagues had made a design decision to use as little power as possible, to conserve battery life - a classic developing world strategy. Unfortunately, GSM towers in Bishkek weren’t as powerful as in Seattle - she needed to use more power to get the tool to work. Once they adjusted the signal strength, users of the system loved the new functionality and urged her to find a way to bring the system to Bishkek permanently.

One of the takeaways for me from Beth’s talk is the sheer complexity of reframing thinking about design in developing world environments. I’ve offered my set of suggestions for designing from constraints, which has some overlap with Beth’s observations, but not much. My guess - there’s no hard and fast rules for designing for constrained environments, just lots of practice, observation and careful information sharing…

See also David/JOHO’s take, as well as Rebekah/Jackfruity’s take.

This article originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/kiwanja.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Emerging Technologies at 10:40 AM)

In the News: Software, Robots Green Bottom Line

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:04:17 +0000

Tech geeks turn their attention towards energy efficiency.

From robotic farmhands to new software, today's news highlights technological innovations that are saving money and energy.

Several stories detail the unveiling of Hara, a Silicon Valley startup that aims to help companies navigate a "post-carbon economy." It allows them to measure energy use, water consumption and carbon footprint, then figure out which improvements are best for the planet and the bottom line. Companies spend lots of money on consultants to track greenhouse gas emissions. Do-it-yourself types may muddle through on Excel. But that approach won't cut it when carbon becomes a regulated and tradeable commodity, The New York Times reports.

The Los Angeles Times story focuses on venture capital for clean-tech startups. While funding has dropped recently, software companies such as Hara require far less up-front cash than a solar factory. And the technology often starts saving money for companies right away.

In other tech news, advances in robotics -- fueled largely by the military's need to have them work in complicated outdoor environments -- could prove useful to agriculture. According to the NewScientist, robot farmhands could one day scan orange trees more effectively for disease or help farmers use water more judiciously.

Of course, technological innovations alone won't solve our climate problems. It also requires smart policies, true incentives and corporate leadership to make all of it happen.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Shakespearesmonkey via the Creative Commons license.

This piece originally appeared in Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 2:04 PM)

Cardboard Cooker Wins $75,000

Green Futures — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:10:12 +0000

By Anna Simpson

Solar-powered cooker wins $75,000 in the FT Climate Change Challenge

A solar-powered cardboard cooker, which aims to transform the lives of hundreds of millions of villagers in developing countries, is the winner of a $75,000 prize in a global competition for innovation to tackle climate change.

The Kyoto Box is targeted at the two billion people who use firewood for cooking, and has the potential to deliver huge environmental and social benefits. “We’re saving lives and saving trees,“ says Kenya-based entrepreneur Jon Bøhmer. “I doubt if there is any other technology that can make so much impact for so little money.”

Bøhmer believes it could halve the need for firewood, saving an estimated two tonnes of carbon per family per year, as well as freeing women and children from the health risks of inhaling smoke from the cooking fires.

Bøhmer’s innovation emerged triumphant in the FT Climate Change Challenge, backed by the Financial Times, sustainable development organisation Forum for the Future, and technology giant HP, which sponsored the prize. Its aim: to identify and publicise innovations which can be developed and scaled up rapidly to make the greatest contribution to tackling climate change.

Kyoto Energy is a real family affair. Bøhmer, a Norwegian, set it up with his Kenyan wife Neema, and has used his own money to fund the project. His father has mobilised support back in Norway and his five-year-old daughter Amina even helped build the prototype.

The Kyoto Box uses the greenhouse effect to boil and bake. It consists of two boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover, which lets the sun’s power in and traps it. Black paint on the inner box and silver foil on the outer help concentrate the heat, while a layer of straw or newspaper between the two provides insulation.

Bøhmer plans to use the prize-money to conduct mass trials in ten countries, including South Africa, India and Indonesia, and gather data to back an application for carbon credits.

Carbon credits are the crucial element which will make the project scalable, he explains. They will more than cover the cost of manufacturing the boxes, and the surplus will fund production of a suite of other products which offer solar-powered solutions for villagers in the developing world: a torch, a plastic bag which cleans water by heating it, and a smokeless biomass cookstove.

But he’s quick to point out that this isn’t a charity. “We’re going to make money on this. This is a whole new kind of business. I think Grameen [the celebrated microfinance institution which offers affordable credit to individuals and communities in Bangladesh] has proven that there’s interesting business at the bottom of the pyramid.”

He plans to distribute the Kyoto Box free on condition that families use them, and aims to work with women’s groups in each community. “This is all about women," he says. "Women are the ones who are fetching firewood, doing the cooking and who are responsible for the energy supply in the household.”

Having developed a more robust, longer-lasting cooker in corrugated plastic, Bøhmer plans to produce 10,000 to use in the trials. He says they can be mass-produced in existing factories as cheaply as the cardboard prototype. Publicity from the competition has already generated opportunities for his venture, says Bøhmer, and they have been contacted by a number of companies and academic institutions interested in their work.

Nearly 300 projects from around the world entered the FT Climate Change Challenge. The Kyoto Box was chosen as winner by FT readers, in conjunction with a distinguished panel of business leaders and climate change experts. The runners up were Mootral – a feed additive to cut methane produced by ruminants – and an indoor cooling system developed by Loughborough University to halve the energy use of air-conditioning systems.

Peter Madden, chief executive of the Forum, said that the finalists demonstrate “the vital role of green innovation in tackling climate change”. He expressed the hope that publicity from the competition would help speed their route to market, adding, “The Kyoto Box has the potential to transform millions of lives and is a model of scalable, sustainable innovation.”

Green Futures is published by Forum for the Future and is one of the leading magazines on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate that a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too.

Photo credit: Jon Bøhmer/Kyoto Energy

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(Posted by Green Futures in Emerging Technologies at 2:10 PM)

Go Out and Play With the City: Matt Jones’s Demon-Haunted World

Sarah Kuck — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:47:19 +0000

Pressing his finger firmly against the rapid heartbeat of urban intellectual infrastructure, designer Matt Jones has created a stunning slideshow on informatics that takes a look at all the things that make cities alive that you can't see with the naked eye. These are the conversations, signals and patterns that we are constantly creating, and are now enhancing, mapping and transforming with innovative software technology.

In his presentation, The Demon-Haunted World, he takes a look at the magical things that can happen when people mesh software with cities. This slideshow is chock-full of Worldchanging ideas, many of which we've written about before (see our archives for more on: guerrilla gardening, Street As Platform, Biomapping, OpenStreetMap, Everyblock, Fix My Street, and Feral Robot Dogs).

My favorite part of clicking through this slideshow (other than the comparison between the OpenStreetMap paths through London and Neuron Pathways on slides 63 and 64), is seeing how people are taking hold of software and using it to explore their world and make it a better place. As Jones says, the future is transparent, open, sustainable, and up to us.

The Demon-Haunted World
View more documents from Matt Jones.

Thanks to Emily Gertz for reminding me this was out there!

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 12:47 PM)

That’s Hot: EcoDrain Recovers Waste Heat

Sarah Kuck — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:05:51 +0000

You've probably heard the saying "like pouring money down the drain." Well, the innovators at EcoDrain say that's exactly what you are doing every time you take a shower -- unless you have installed their high-performance water heat exchanger, that is.

The EcoDrain device (the little gray rectangle in the illustration) circulates heat from your "used" hot water, and transfers it to the incoming cold water. Here's how it works: when you turn on the shower, hot water comes from your storage tank and cold water comes from the municipal supply. As you shower, the "waste" water is sent through a drainage pipe. EcoDrain is attached to this pipe, and transfers heat from the hot water to the incoming cold water supply. Hot water and cold water rush past each other separately inside the device to prevent mixing. Bottom line: the water will be warmer without you needing to turn up the heat.

You are essentially heating up the cold water coming into your shower for free, and therefore use less of the super hot (read expensive) water from your tank. With this device, you can continue to heat your water using 25 percent to 40 percent less energy.

So if you are remodeling, building or retrofitting, I'd say it would be worth your time and money to check out their FAQ page.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 6:05 PM)

That’s Hot: EcoDrain Recovers Waste Heat

Sarah Kuck — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:05:51 +0000

You've probably heard the saying "like pouring money down the drain." Well, the innovators at EcoDrain say that's exactly what you are doing every time you take a shower -- unless you have installed their high-performance water heat exchanger, that is.

The EcoDrain device (the little gray rectangle in the illustration) circulates heat from your "used" hot water, and transfers it to the incoming cold water. Here's how it works: when you turn on the shower, hot water comes from your storage tank and cold water comes from the municipal supply. As you shower, the "waste" water is sent through a drainage pipe. EcoDrain is attached to this pipe, and transfers heat from the hot water to the incoming cold water supply. Hot water and cold water rush past each other separately inside the device to prevent mixing. Bottom line: the water will be warmer without you needing to turn up the heat.

You are essentially heating up the cold water coming into your shower for free, and therefore use less of the super hot (read expensive) water from your tank. With this device, you can continue to heat your water using 25 percent to 40 percent less energy.

So if you are remodeling, building or retrofitting, I'd say it would be worth your time and money to check out their FAQ page.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 6:05 PM)

Coming Soon to a Body of Water Near You: Pollution Sniffing Robot Fish

Sarah Kuck — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:54:15 +0000

If it looks like a fish and moves like a fish -- there's a chance it may be a robot.

British scientists are ready to introduce five pollution-sniffing robots into the northern Spanish port of Gijon, according to Reuters. If this trial is successful, the scientists hope the seal-sized robots will be used in lakes, rivers and seas throughout the world.

The scientists used biomimicry principles to design the carp-shaped robots to ensure energy efficiency, which will allow the robots to sustain lengthy, underwater detection missions.

The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines.

They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology.

Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.

Rory Doyle, senior research scientist at engineering company BMT Group, which developed the robot fish with researchers at Essex University, said there were good reasons for making a fish-shaped robot, rather than a conventional mini-submarine.

"In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years' worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient," he said. "This efficiency is something we need to ensure that our pollution detection sensors can navigate in the underwater environment for hours on end."

It will be interesting to see if these bots can really return results. Being able to pinpoint underwater pollution for focused remediation efforts would be invaluable, as cleaning up our polluted waters is essential to our health and the health of our marine and land ecosystems. Planetary management hasn't been our strong suit lately, but maybe we are learning and getting smarter about how we relate to and can work with our planet.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 2:54 PM)

New Energy Innovations to Light Up Your Life

Sarah Kuck — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:40:09 +0000

I just Stumbledupon this great article form Ecoble, which presents some amazing innovations for creating light efficiently:

Vu1 Electron Stimulated Luminescence bulb

Seattle-based lighting company Vu1 has launched an Electron Stimulated Luminescent (ESL) bulb, which creates soft light like a CFL, costs about as much, and is mercury free. In fact, the company states that their product contains no toxic materials whatsoever. Could this be the beginning of a light bulb revolution? Perhaps. Learn more here.

Blink: Photocell Controlled Outlet

This plug-in device uses photocells to tell your lights to turn off when the sun's out. At the tip of Blink's flexible neck is an eyelid-like sensor, which gathers information about the amount of available natural light. Bend the neck toward the window, or lower the eyelid to create your own settings. So genius because -- as the site notes -- even with the most efficient bulb, human inefficiencies (ie, leaving the lights on) will still exist. Blink helps overcome this in an unobtrusive way. This design was recently entered in Core77's Greener Gadgets Competition.

Dial4Light: Cellphone Application Creates On-Demand Streetlighting

This cellphone application gives people power over the streetlights. Dial4Light was created in Germany, where many towns, succumbing to cost pressures, are turning off streetlights to save energy. Once dialed in, your streetlight will stay on for 15 minutes. The company states that it could save cities up to 25 percent in electricity bills. Although this idea has a lot of potential, I think it has some accessibility problems -- what if you can't afford or don't want a cell phone? But with that fairly important issue aside, if you combined this with DarkSky innovations, the idea could help us save much more than money: keeping lights off when not needed also helps reduce light pollution, which effects avian migratory and human sleep patterns.

Raindrop-Powered, Light-Emitting Umbrella

Especially intriguing to those of us from rainy cities is the LightDrops Umbrella by Sang-Kyun Park. This LED-illuminated umbrella turns each raindrop's energy potential into electricity with a polyvinylidene fluoride (PDVF) conductive membrane. The more it rains, the more light you get. Not exactly dependable, but the conductive membrane is totally fascinating. Imagine what else you could create with this type of conductive membrane! For example, it could be helpful for recreational or permanent tent dwellers.

What other cool innovative designs are helping to decrease energy while still lighting up the night? Leave your findings in the comments below!

Thanks Ecoble for the illuminating story!

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 3:40 PM)

GPS, Smart Phones Move Online Games to the Real World and Vice Versa

Sarah Kuck — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:22:09 +0000

Gamers and web developers are mixing tech tools like smart phones and GPS devices with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to create potentially hundreds of new avenues where humans can take interaction from the web to the street and vice versa.

New smart phone applications, like the soon to be launched Gowalla, for example, are helping translate our real world journeys into adventure games and opportunities to share with our online communities where we've been, what we did there and what we thought about the experience.

Worldchanging ally Janette Crawford writes on the Pop!Tech blog:

Whereas we know and love Facebook for transporting our real-world relationships and interactions into an online venue and there enhancing them, Gowalla works in the opposite direction. Gowalla will be transporting a social online game into the real world, creating real-world interactions that users wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Two things make Gowalla particularly notable. First is the aforementioned geocaching mechanic. Traditional geocaching sends GPS-equipped adventurers on expeditions to find physical treasures planted by adventurers who have gone before. Once a cache is found, participants sign a log book, sometimes take and leave a trinket (depending on the type of cache) and then log their experience online. The game has long been reserved for outdoorsy types, with many “treasures” hidden near hiking trails and the like. While urban placements do exist, they tend to be small and can be difficult to find.

Other smart phone apps have allowed users to “check in” at physical locations, including BrightKite, a location-based social network that pre-dated GPS-enabled smart phones as an online application. Now, from either phone or web, it lets users check in at a given address, which is logged on BrightKite.com and can be tweeted to your Twitter followers (an opt-in option). Both the app and the website allow you to see who’s checking in within a certain radius around you, potentially connecting you with fellow neighborhood tweeters. (Other Twitter apps, like Twinkle or Tweetie, also use GPS to let you see who’s tweeting nearby.) On the Android platform, the location-based game JOYity works on a similar level, offering both real-world video game-like missions or games of tag with strangers — you tag a user by checking in within 80 feet of them. This provides a potential human element, though it doesn’t incorporate with existing social networks. (And I’d recommend against playing after dark.)

Where Gowalla differentiates itself in the “digital geocaching” market is in incorporating a social game element. Gowalla will allow check-ins at both user-created spots and the game’s own “featured” spots — think popular attractions many of us are apt to visit anyway, like Wrigley Field in Chicago. When players check in at a given spot, not only will they collect a “passport stamp” that is logged online, but a set of icons are unlocked and can be collected. The icons become virtual souvenirs. This element pulls in your more traditional gamers, and for anyone, provides an inherent motivation for checking in.

Gowalla transcribes geocaching into a more urban realm and allows it more mainstream acceptance. The game shares your journeys with your social network, giving you “credit” for having made the trip — an element lacking from the traditional game. “That’s been one of the things that’s kept me from getting into geocaching,” says Gowalla developer Scott Raymond. “If I’m doing it as a solitary activity, it’s cool, but if I want people to know I did it, I have to tell them” — which, in his words, can be socially awkward.

Second is the game’s wide appeal. It can be broken into three “gameplays”: Not only 1) logging individual locations and 2) collecting icons, but also 3) completing trips of multiple locations. Any user can create trips through the game’s online interface. These could range from a 15-location trip of “best places to eat in the Bay Area,” which might take a year to complete, to a five-location Tweetup scavenger hunt to be completed in an evening. While I personally may not get caught up in collecting icons, if my favorite blogger in Cleveland curated a tour of her city on Gowalla, I’d be sure to reference it when in town. (Online community architect Amy Jo Kim describes social gamer motivations.)

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about putting this much personal information online, but I did connect with one online game that Crawford mentions toward the end of her piece called WorldWithoutOil.org, which recognizes the potential of this kind of technology to help train us for the scale of collaboration that will be necessary within the next 10 years or so. About 1,800 people played this online game for 32 days pretending to have "lived their real lives as though the world were undergoing a petroleum shortage."

“Extreme-scale collaboration becomes the most important human ability — and that massively multiplayer collaboration, trying to save the real world through these game structures, will become the new modus operandi for nonprofits, for governments — for anybody trying to change the world.” Read: Collaboration in gameplay will train us for collaboration in the real world.

My first thought was to rebuke this. We can collaborate as humans without the help of the Internet! But then I thought about how most of us live. How separated, physically and emotionally, we are from each other. Perhaps we do need these tools to help us learn how to connect once again? Especially at the level of efficiency that online tools can offer, which could be vital in times of disaster.

It will be interesting to watch the ebb and flow of information to the web, to the street and back again, as these tools develop and as we mold them for our purposes.

Image credit: Flickr/Rev Dan Cat

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 10:22 AM)

Nasa to Launch Earth’s First Carbon Dioxide Tracking Satellite

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:18:00 +0000

UPDATE: Launch Mishap Ends OCO Mission

View Mishap Press Conference here.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will map where greenhouse gas is concentrated around the world.

An artist's impression of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory Photograph: Nasa

By Alok Jha

The world's first satellite designed to map concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere will be launched by Nasa on Monday.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (Oco) will collect precise measurements of the greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, identifying where it is coming from, where it is absorbed and what happens to it in between.
This improved tracking of CO2 will help scientists develop maps how the gas is concentrated around the world and give a better picture of how it affects the Earth's climate. Policymakers and governments will be able to use the data when setting and monitoring CO2 emissions targets designed to tackle climate change.
"It's critical that we understand the processes controlling carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today so we can predict how fast it will build up in the future and how quickly we'll have to adapt to climate change," said David Crisp, principal investigator for the OCO, based at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The Oco will blast off on a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in the early hours of Monday morning (watch the video here). It will help scientists answer one of the biggest mysteries about the movement of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. Of all of the greenhouse gas emitted into the air since the industrial revolution in the 19th century, around 40% has stayed thee. Half of the remainder has been absorbed by the Earth's oceans but the rest has not yet been be accounted for. Scientists think the gas must have been absorbed on land but no one really knows where these missing carbon sinks are or what controls them.
"It's important to make clear that the 'missing' sinks aren't really missing, they are just poorly understood," said Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. "We know the 'missing' sinks are terrestrial, land areas where forests, grasslands, crops and soil are absorbing carbon dioxide. But finding these sinks is like finding a needle in a haystack. It would be great if we could measure how much carbon every tree, shrub, peat bog or blade of grass takes in, but the world is too big and too diverse and is constantly changing, making such measurements virtually impossible. The solution is not in measuring carbon in trees. The solution is measuring carbon in the air."
Previous Nasa missions, such as the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, have also measured the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere but only at altitudes of 5km to 10km above the surface. "Oco is the first Nasa mission that has been dedicated, and optimised to make precise measurements of carbon dioxide throughout the atmospheric column, between the surface and space, with the greatest sensitivity near the Earth's surface, where most of the carbon dioxide sources and sinks are thought to be located," said Crisp.
Oco will collect about 8 million measurements every 16 days for at least two years. It will use three high-resolution spectrometers to split light into its various constituent colours. By anlaysing this light to detect the unique signature of gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, scientists will be able to determine their relative concentrations and identify sources and sinks of CO2.
"Oco is primarily an exploratory science mission, whose objective is to test and validate a new technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere from space. If we find that this approach works as well as we predict, it should provide scientists with the data that they need to produce the first global maps of carbon dioxide sources and sinks on regional scales, or spatial scales comparable to the size of Great Britain," said Crisp.
This piece originally appeared in The Environment section of The Guardian, for which Alok Jha is a green technology correspondent.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 2:18 PM)

Free Google Tool To Help Measure Personal Energy Consumption

Sarah Kuck — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:41:09 +0000

Earlier this week, Google.org announced plans to develop a personal energy metering tool that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. The PowerMeter "will show consumers their electricity consumption in near real-time in a secure iGoogle Gadget," according to the organization's website.

Google believes consumers have a right to detailed information about their home energy use, and that real-time energy information could help people make smarter choices that will save them energy and money:

Our lack of knowledge about our own energy usage is a huge problem, but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and fight global warming by reducing our power usage. Studies show that people save 5-15% of their energy costs when they have access to information about their energy consumption.

Over the next three years, with support from the Obama Administration's proposed stimulus package, more than 40 million U.S. homes are set to receive smart meters. But many currently available smart meters do not display information to the consumer, which Google states is "unacceptable:"

We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see it, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it.

The organization is currently testing the software with Google employees and seeking out utilities and smart energy device makers to partner with. When PowerMeter is released, the tool will be free and is rumored to be based on an open source model.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 12:41 PM)