Day: 18 June 2007

Buoys Make Power

In 2008 along the UK shoreline small underwater buoys will be generating electricity using that age old technology: wave power. The advantages to putting the buoys 50 meters under the water surface lies in that storms will not damage them, surface wave-powered generators can be damaged by rough seas.

“A town with 55,000 inhabitants would need half a square kilometre of seabed covered with 100 buoys to power it,” says Grey.

He adds that they could be effective in the North Atlantic, from Scotland down to Portugal, along the Pacific US shoreline, from San Francisco in the US up to Vancouver in Canada, along the coast of Chile, and even in South Africa and New Zealand.

But calmer seas, such as the Mediterranean do not have enough wave height to pump the buoy.

Women Change the World

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I found two articles today that highlight how women can – and do – change the world. In Africa, there was a recent meeting of women who work in development to help spur gender equality throughout the continent and embed equality into development practices.

Uganda has passed legislation stipulating that a third of the seats in parliament and local authorities should be occupied by women. Now, 29.8 percent of legislative seats are in female hands, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).

“These milestones have promoted women’s visibility and voice in decision-making processes at all levels, which is the key tenet of democratic governance,” President Yoweri Museveni remarked when opening the meeting

Meanwhile in Germany, women from the corporate world met and discussed how they can fight for better gender equality within their community.

“In one generation alone we have moved from a population of women who were far less educated and represented in the workforce than men to a 21st century reality that now has 40 to 50 percent of women working worldwide,” Natividad, who is of Philippines descent, said at the opening ceremony.

Rising women’s employment has been the main driving force of business growth over the past couple of decades, she said. Women may still not be paid on average as much as men, but that would not halt their progress, she said.