Selected pulses

Measuring energy consumption

Jerry Rodgers on January 29, 2010

The first step in reducing energy consumption is measuring how much you are using. Energy consumption consists of two primary components, power and demand. Power, measured in watts, indicates the rate at which energy is expended. Demand, measured in volt-amperes (VA), indicates the requirement that a customer places on the utility to deliver voltage and current without regard to the efficiency of that delivery of whether or  not it does actual work. Power is usually less than demand and the ratio between the two, kW/kVA is called the power ...

Solar Power in Public Transportation

Dean Dowd on January 26, 2010
Solar-powered mass transit is key to U.S. energy sustainability. Did you know that one full city bus can keep 50 or more cars off ...

New MicroPhotoVoltaic Cells for Solar Concentrators

Jose Vaz Pinto on January 13, 2010
"Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that are expected to be less expensive and have greater efficiencies than current photovoltaic collectors ...

Pulses

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Why Cliamte Change is Divisive and Why It Should Not Be

Elizabeth Crenshaw on February 8, 2010
Climate change is frequently referred to as a hot-button issue. It’s a “platform” issue, with political parties taking definite stands on either side.  Both ...

In a lighter vein

Shrikant Dhekne on February 1, 2010
The name wattwatt strikes a ring of familiarity and is seen extremely apt. In Marathi language of western India, a phonetically similar word वटवट (pronounced ...

Solar scooters in Rio de Janeiro

Yvonne Flavin on January 22, 2010
We're hearing a lot of talk about electric cars but not so much about two-wheeled vehicles. Those of us who live and work in ...

Smart meter plans threatened?

Philippa Martin-King on January 14, 2010
It seems that the British plans to install smart meters is threatened by consumer fears. Householders are worried that employees of utility companies could use ...

Harvesting energy from other devices to power up

Philippa Martin-King on January 13, 2010
At CES 2010, RCA was showing a prototype of a handheld energy-harvesting battery designed to convert energy transmitted in a Wi-Fi signal into DC power ...

2010 - year of the electric car and a little food for thought

Philippa Martin-King on January 12, 2010
The 2010 Detroit and LA motor shows have a concentration of electric cars. These are either hybrid, where they are differentiated into two categories of ...

High Amp service versus low

Aple Newtons on January 9, 2010
So you only pay for the electricity you use, we all 'know' that. However, the question is, is there a small amount - due to increased ...

Cleantech - Top ten green universities in US and top 10 countries

Philippa Martin-King on January 6, 2010
A long while back, I mentioned the LED lighting in the city of Ann Arbour in one of my pulses. It's no surprise then ...

Times Square New Year's Eve Ball goes green

Yvonne Flavin on January 1, 2010
And to continue our "pedal power" series, here's another one that caught my eye on the Engadget website the other day. I'm afraid ...

Fixing a vibrating transformer

Jerry Rodgers on January 1, 2010
I ran into an interesting problem a few weeks ago so I am sharing in case it helps anyone else. A client in a large ...

Stores photovoltaïques et éoliennes productrices d'eau

M. Denis Bloud on December 21, 2009
Nouvelle page sur les stores photovoltaïques et sur les éoliennes productrices d'eau de condensation: http://dbloud.free.fr/eauli... (brevet industriel à saisir ...

SmartGrid - Compteurs intelligents

M. Denis Bloud on December 21, 2009
La France va enfin installer, comme d'autres pays, des compteurs intelligents permettant une autorégulation du réseau par CPL. Ils s'agit des ...

looking for softcopy of P-IEC 60687 ed2.0 standard for 0.2S/0.5S Class electronic taroff meters

Gurmeet Anand on December 17, 2009
IEC 687 standard has been replaced with a updated standard. Can somebdy give me a softcopy of this older standard? P-IEC 60687 ed2.0  regards  

Copenhagen's Christmas tree is lit by pedal-power

Yvonne Flavin on December 14, 2009
Copenhagen has always been particularly bike-friendly - they were proposing free bikes to get around way before other cities - but this is taking things one step ...

When plugs start to talk... and help save energy

Yvonne Flavin on December 14, 2009
The stuff of science fiction movies has become reality! Imagine if all electrical outlets had the ability to monitor and capture your home or office ...

Ringing bells - a state of urgency

Philippa Martin-King on December 11, 2009
Bells are going to be rung throughout the world on Sunday, 13 December. In middle ages, the church bell was rung to warn villagers of ...

Mandatory energy efficient HDTV screens for California

Philippa Martin-King on December 7, 2009
There's a new move towards energy efficiency in California. This time, the State's energy commissioners have voted beyond the federal government’s voluntary ...

Robot electric taxis

Philippa Martin-King on December 7, 2009
According to Der Spiegel  a new European Union-funded project will see the introduction of driverless Taxis at Heathrow, "cyber cars" in Rome and an automatic ...

How green are Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs)?

Francois Becheret on December 7, 2009
Some countries and states like Australia, California, and the European Union plan in the near future to ban incandescent light bulbs, to the benefit of ...

World heritage city installs new street lighting

Philippa Martin-King on December 2, 2009
When visiting Chilean world heritage city, Valparaíso, last month I was interested to see that they had not only installed new street lighting but ...

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February 5, 2010

Do you know what’s going on?

Apparently, social media sites Twitter and Facebook are perfectly sufficient to keep you up to date with what’s going on in the world. Sometimes people even learn about things ahead of the main press.

That’s the conclusion of the week of huis clos (which literally means “behind closed doors”) spent by five French speaking journalists. They were shut away and asked to comment on world news using, as sole sources of information, what they could gather from Twitter and Facebook.

There are drawbacks however to using social media. One of the comments is that it’s very difficult to analyse the information you come across. It’s endless. How do you decode what you find? You have to rely considerably on your contacts. How can you decypher the notes from the noise? What happens if you don’t speak English? Or French? The #huisclosnet  was classed in the top five Twitter themes in French this week yet hardly mentioned in English. How do you verify your information? Or classify it? The web uses horizontal hierarchy where traditional media structures information vertically.

140 characters is hardly sufficient to more than map out a story. Or is it? Can we content ourselves with the bare outline we receive through a Tweet? Can we really find out what’s going on in the world?

Carel Pedre is the journalist in Haiti who informed the world about the earth quake on 12 January. All the phone lines were down and his only means of communication was with Twitter via the Internet. Nicolas Willems, one of the participants in the Huis Clos was able to track him down through his Twitter contacts and finally get hold of his telephone number to talk to him in person.

There are advantages too for networking through the web.

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