Loading

Tag archives for technology

Raising the social media generation

Leave a comment

This week the fashionable Beckhams shunned their publicist and opted to announce the birth of their daughter and share family photos via social media. It’s one trend they weren’t the first to set.

My son was on Facebook before he was even born. I announced my pregnancy on the social networking site to my wider circle of friends. Some people also got word of his arrival before I’d had chance to tell them personally thanks to a round of eager congratulatory messages posted on my wall within 24 hours of his birth. And that could be considered slow when compared to the growing number of breaking news babies whose mums tweet between contractions or update their status as they push.

The young Demsteader part 1.

We are indeed giving birth to the social media generation and even raising them online. Parents devote time to blog about their kids in diary form, they post cute photos and funny videos for everyone to see. Given that the Swedes are ranked first out of 138 countries in the latest World Economic Forum report on the usage of communications technology, it’s likely they do so more than most. Find out more fascinating facts here about the Swedes and their social media habits.

Now I found some old baby photos of myself the other day. I had forgotten about them until they fell out of an old book where I’d stored them to stop them curling at the edges. I’ll get round to that photo album someday. The matt-finished polaroids have stood the test of time despite their 34 years. They have that authentic antique tinge which adds to the air of nostalgia when I look at them.

The young Demsteader part 2.

Personally, I’m happy that my childhood pics and the memories that come with them have been privately preserved for me, rather than posted around the block. I wouldn’t normally want to share them with the world but, for the sake of this post, it seems I am.

Regardless of your online restrictions, today’s photos, videos and blogs are out there in the networked community cloud. And there they will likely stay until your baby turns teenager and beyond.

I wonder how William Nilsson will feel in a few years time when he replays his famous YouTube clip, knowing over 130 million have seen it before? The innocent, amateur video of this little Swedish boy went viral, became an internet phenomenon and is one of YouTube’s most watched clips to date.

We parents really don’t yet know the repercussions, if any, of uploading both a visual and verbal commentary of our kids’ lives online. We do know, however, that we won’t be stashing photos in a Kindle for safe-keeping.

Christine Demsteader

July 20, 2011

Can underground water cool Stockholm’s city houses?

Leave a comment
Houses-by-Sergels-Torg.

The house to the right could be the first one by Sergels Torg to be heated and cooled by undergreound water reserves. Photo: Vasakronan.

We don’t often think about what’s under our feet when walking around in the middle of a city, but in the centre of Stockholm there is actually several aquifers – large underground layers of water-bearing rock or gravel – that can be of great use. Since water has an ability to store heat or cold, these aquifers work a bit like a thermos.

The idea is more or less to pump up the cold water at summer to cool buildings above ground. This makes the water temperature rise a bit. Then the water is pumped back down into the ground and stored until next winter, when it can be used for heating buildings. This gives about three or four times more energy than what is used for pumping the water up and down.

Vasakronan, which is a large property company, hopes to be able to use this technology for example in one of the big high-rise buildings just by Stockholms main square, Sergels Torg. According to Vasakronan’s head of development and environment, this system can save energy equivalent to the energy use of 450 detached houses.

I must confess that to me it’s a bit of a mystery how only a few centigrades of difference in the water’s heat can make this big a difference, and how it can spend several months under ground without losing the heat… But in an article about aquifers in the construction industry journal Byggindustrin, Olle Andersson who is a professor in energy storage at the University of Lund stated that this is actually a technology where scientists actually have failed to find any disadvantages.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

June 27, 2011

5000 kilometres on one litre of petrol?

Leave a comment
Spiros-test-drive

Test driving "Spiros", which is made to work in normal city traffic. Photo: KTH.

We’re used to car races all being about being first and fastest. Today there’s a contest in Lausitz, Germany, where the goal is quite different. The main objective here is to come as far as possible on one tiny litre of petrol. The world record is 5000 kilometers and now the question is: Will someone be able to beat that?
Teams from all over the world participate, many of them made up by researchers and professors. Swedish KTH Royal Institute of Technology sends two teams entirely made up by students and the other day I spoke to Jonas Severin, who has built one of the vehicles, “Sleipner”, together with a group of fellow students.

Sleipner runs on petrol, but being much lighter and having a less powerful motor that turns itself off in downhill slopes where the car can roll down by itself, the energy use is very much below a “normal” car.
The speed isn’t exactly breathtaking, Jonas Severin explains, with an average around 30 km/hour. But if the aim is to get as far as possible on as little energy as possible, going there fast can’t be a high priority. Just can’t get both. And as you see on the photos, Sleipner isn’t really the kind of vehicle you imagine packing your family into.
The other Swedish car in the contest, called Spiros, is more like the cars we are used to and has to be able to work in city traffic and pass a normal vehicle test, having proper lights, working brakes etc.

But are these just fun experiments for students? Jonas Severin says that a developed form of Spiros could maybe be out on the market in 10 to 15 years, able to roll for 500 kilomtres on one litre, instead of a max around 40 kilometers/litre for today’s smartcars.
A while left, apparently. But today is the big test for the KTH teams. Will their vehicles make it in the competition?
- Obviously it isn’t easy for a team of students to beat teams of professors, but it’ll be exiting to see how Sleipner does, says Jonas Severin.

making-of-Sleipner

The student team behind "Sleipner" has made the vehicle themselves and are now going to a contest in Germany to test it. Jonas Severin on the right at the group picture. Photos: KTH.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

May 26, 2011

How green is all that surfing?

Leave a comment

Sweden is the most Internet connected country in the world, I recently read in a report. Watching people on Stockholm’s public transports, sitting with their noses buried in their smartphones and mini laptops, e-mailing and Facebooking on their way to work, I’m ready to believe it’s true.

surfing

Photo: Sara Jeswani

Being connected to people who are not at the same physical spot as yourself can have enormous impacts, as we have seen lately in North Africa, or why not when it comes to spreading the word about a new farmer’s market? Working with a magazine where the contributors are sometimes in cities far apart or even in different countries, I myself have had a great use of services where you can share documents in “the cloud”.

But all these activities on the Internet also have impacts on the global climate, through the electricity used for running all the machines.
Jorge Zapico calls himself a “computer ecologist” and is a researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Communications at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. He wants to make these impacts more visible both to internet users and developers. Therefore he has constructed Greenalytics, a site which mashes up data from Google Analytics and environmental research and estimates the carbon footprint of websites, including server, infrastructure and final user.

KTH’s own website, for example, caused about 7,1 tons of CO2 emissions during last year, equivalent to driving a car 41 266 kilometers or 72 hours of traveling in an airplane. Sweden’s Green Party, also featured on the site, emitted about 424 kilos during the same period of time.

Jorge Zapico’s own best tip on how to reduce a site’s carbon footprint is to check how the electricity that runs the server for the site is produced.
– Choose a server in a country with a good mix of energy, like Sweden. If the server is run by environmentally certified energy it’s even better. It’s also important to construct websites that don’t have to load heavy content, he says.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

May 16, 2011

An ode to technology

Leave a comment

When you’re several thousand kilometers from home, and know you’ll be there for at least the next 263,520 minutes, a few things come to mind right away:

Pay phones are usually too expensive to use to stay in contact with friends and family back home, and about as hard to find as a homeless guy at the Ritz.

  1. Where’s the nearest bar?
  2. Will I be able to find my way back to my apartment after the bar?
  3. What’s the deal with classes?
  4. Will I freeze to death?
  5. Will my girlfriend survive us being so far apart?
  6. How will I stay in touch with everyone back home?

While I can’t exactly answer questions 1-5, you’re in luck for the last one, bucko. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, hamming it up all night with your friends, family, or ferret named Freddy is more than doable – though not recommended on nights you have a class at 8 a.m. the next morning. Let’s take a look at some of the options:

SKYPE  While mobile phones are unquestionably cost-prohibitive for all but the children of movie stars or royalty, the Internet makes having a conversation with someone on the other side of the world quick, easy, and – above all – affordable. Services such as Skype not only let you talk to someone, but you can see them as well (provided your computer has a webcam), pimples and all. Remember to brush your teeth before logging on.

INSTANT MESSAGING  Of course, for those who prefer the written word to the spoken word, there’s more Instant Messaging (IM) services available than there are empty seats at Råsunda Stadium these days. AOL, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even Facebook all offer free IM services, meaning you can practice your writing while sharing your day with Mom, Dad, and Grandpa Fritz. Just make sure your fingers are warmed up first.

With email, sending photos like this one is just a click away.

EMAIL  If you’re like me, and your parents are still using dial-up Internet or prefer only to talk to people back home when you absolutely have to, then email is your best bet. If I were writing this column five years ago, I might offer a brief explanation of where to get an email address, but these days I can safely say if you don’t know how to use it, you’ve either been living under a rock, just awoke from a decade-long coma, or are a dog. Anyway, you can say a lot in an email, and once you’re done you can relish the fact you won’t have to hear from your family for the next six weeks. And if you don’t want to say a whole lot, well, just attach a couple of self-explanatory photos. Just don’t attach those pictures of you and four of your girlfriends taking Jell-O shots at the bar last weekend, if only to avoid having to explain the whole potentially embarrassing situation to your equally disappointed and dumbfounded parents when you finally get back home.

POSTCARDS  They may be “snail mail,” but they sure look cool, and make great souvenirs. Remember that, literally, getting a post card from you might be the closest some people will ever come to actually going to Sweden. And to boot, most girls find postcards to be just a little evocative of old-fashioned-y romance. And ladies, us guys don’t mind getting them when our girlfriends are abroad, either.

Postcards make great souvenirs, even if they are just pieces of cardboard with pictures on them.

Technology. It’s a blessing, and a curse. Kind of like the Swedish winter. But when it comes to staying in touch with friends and family, it usually falls into the “blessing” category. But some days… (text deleted due to offensive comments towards computers)

Ben Mack — Student

April 19, 2011

Flickr Favorite: Pressure

Leave a comment

Pressure
Photo by: Ragnar Jensen, (CC BY)

Swedish picture of the day

March 14, 2011

Vertical farming for future cities

Leave a comment
plantagon-greenhouse

Could vertical greenhouses help cities meet future food challenges? Image: Plantagon International.

“Far from lagom” (lagom meaning something like “just enough”, or moderate) is the slogan of the municipality of Botkyrka in the outskirts of Stockholm. So when they started thinking about urban food safety the idea that came up was also far from lagom: A sphere-shaped vertical greenhouse, about the size of the Stockholm landmark Globen.

But why a giant glass ball filled with vegetables? United Nations expects that the world’s cultivable area won’t be enough to feed a growing global population. At the same time an increasing part of this population lives in cities and transports will be more expensive because of a peaking oil production, so why not produce the food directly where it’s needed?

According to Hans Hassle, CEO of the company Plantagon that makes the sphere greenhouse, this type of greenhouse can get up to four times as productive as an ordinary one, providing as much as ten times the cultivable area compared to the surface needed for the building itself.

Now the Swedish Delegation for Sustainable Cities have granted the Plantagon project 150 000 SEK (about 21 500 USD) to investigate if a greenhouse like this might be something for Botkyrka. The municipality sees it as a way of renewing the million programmes in this area. So who knows, maybe we’ll have a new – food producing – landmark in Stockholm in a few years?

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

January 10, 2011

The wonders of technology

Leave a comment

skype-workshop
Ruth Potts talking from London, for an audience seated in Stockholm.

Right now world leaders are meeting in Bangkok trying to advance before the big climate top meeting in Copenhagen in December. Going there isn’t really an option for me, but thanks to technology there are plenty of ways to follow what’s happening and what the particular delegates who are representing us are doing. For example, climate activists from Global Campaign for Climate Action have each adopted a negotiator from their country and follow their every step. On adoptanegotiator.org Jonathan Sundqvist from Sweden blogs about the EU.

Technology also did a lot of good this weekend. At the big climate forum that I helped organizing here in Stockholm we had two workshops given by persons in the UK. As an organizer I unfortunately had to do more of running around than listening, but it was incredibly inspiring to peek into a room with about 90 persons listening to a lecture given in real time on Skype, with the audience asking questions to Naresh Giangrande from Transition Towns UK and Ruth Potts from New Economics Foundation. This gives a lot of ideas for the future, enabling us to connect the ongoing discussions about how to tackle climate change in different parts of the world – without having to contribute to global warming by sending people around by flight.

 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

October 5, 2009

Swedish invention cleans water with help of the sun

Leave a comment


Solvatten demonstration in Nepal.

In many places of the world clean water is a scarce resource, which makes life hard for around one billion of people and causes a lot of diseases.
Now a Swedish idea can help people who lack access to clean water to purify the water themselves. The Solvatten (“Sunwater” in English) system works as a 10 liter container, which uses UV light and heat from the sun to kill microorganisms. Here is an animation that describes how it works.

Helps stopping deforestation

Where people do not have access to electricity water is often purified through boiling on a fire, which contributes to deforestation. Using the light and heat from the sun could save a lot of firewood.
Right now Solvatten is being tested in Nepal with money from the United Nations.
In an article the inventor, Petra Lundström, says that her invention has received interest from Unicef as well as from the government of Sri Lanka.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

September 10, 2009

Rainfall energy gives water prize

Leave a comment

Stockholm Water Week young prize winners
Happy prize winners. Ceren Burçak Dag in the middle. Photo: SIWI.

Every year at the World Water Week, the Stockholm Water Prize attracts great attention. The award winner this year is  Bindeshwar Pathak from India, who has developed a toilet system which is improving sanitation and converting the waste into energy . (Read more about it here).
But there is also a competition for young scientists from all over the world. This year 18-year-old Ceren Burçak Dag from Nisantasi in Turkey won the prize for her idea to generate energy through piezoelectric pulses from falling rain drops.
Personally, I had never heard about piezoelectricity before, but according to an explanation I found it is “ ability of some materials to generate an electric potential when mechanical stress – such as the impact of a raindrop – is applied”. What Ceren Burçak Dag has done is using a “smart” material that transfers the kinetic energy of raindrops into electrical energy.

Reducing CO2 emissions

The prize jury says in its statement that it is pleased to see young people take action to identify technical solutions to reduce CO2 emissions.
– I hope that my work will contribute to the development of the next generation of energy panels where rain, sun, and wind are combined, says Ceren Burçak Dag.

Other meetings

During the World Water Week there are also many other meetings and side events going on, where the situation of developing countries is brought up. For example, The Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa is meeting to highlight African countries, climate change and its links with development.
The association’s general secretary Pär Granstedt says in a comment before the meeting that Africa has contributed least to the emissions that is causing the climate change, but is hardest hit by their effects.
- We need to develop common strategies to cope with the impact of climate change both in Europe and Africa, and we should learn from each other. However, we should under no circumstances accept that new burdens are loaded
on Africa. Europe has a responsibility to help Africa to cope with the climate change.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 24, 2009