Competitive Carbon Footprint: GreenPocket

A German company had created a ‘game’ called GreenPocket that aims to make shrinking your carbon footprint competitive and fun. I’m quite curious how this will actually work, but I’m happy to see that the idea of making energy conservation entertaining is gaining steam.

Based in Cologne, GreenPocket is a software provider focusing on the visualization and interpretation of smart metering energy consumption data. As a complement to its smart metering and smart home solutions, the company recently launched a social metering app to sustain consumers’ interest in monitoring their energy use over time. Push notifications inform consumers as to how well they are doing compared with their friends in weekly energy efficiency contests, for example, as well as about other positive developments related to their energy consumption behavior. Users are also able to share their data on Facebook for others to view. GreenPocket CEO Thomas Goette explains: “This combination initiates an innovative dialogue between the utility and the customer and opens up an entirely new channel for utility marketing campaigns.”

From Springwise.
GreenPocket’s site.

Vancouver Reduces Sexual Assaults by 10% Using Male-Targeted Ads

It’s unfortunate that we still need ad campaigns to remind women to be safe from sexual assault, it’s even more unfortunate that we target these campaigns at women when men cause the vast majority of assaults.

In Vancouver they launched a campaign targeted at men called ‘Don’t Be That Guy’. After running the campaign, which told men not to take advantage of women, the sexual assault rate dropped 10%!

The poster is one of three that went up at bars and around the city last summer as part of a campaign to chip away at the increasing rate of sexual assaults in recent years in Vancouver.

Six months later, Deputy Chief Doug LePard says the Don’t Be That Guy campaign has contributed to a turnaround in statistics on sexual offences in Vancouver.

The rate dropped in 2011 by about 10 per cent, the first time in several years it had gone down.

Hopefully we’ll see more public safety campaigns targeted at people who commit the crimes rather than those that are victims.

Read more here.

Function Better in Your Old Age by Playing Music

Admit it: you’ve always wanted to play guitar, or perhaps, you’ve been meaning to pick it up again. Either way, you should!

New research has found that people with musical training on any instrument were able to certain task better in their old age when compared to non-musicians. So pick up your neglected jaw harp and get going on bringing those tunes in your head to life!

“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”

Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.”

“These are very interesting and important findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.”

Read more.

Cargo Container Coffee

In very unsurprising news: Starbucks has opened a new coffee shop. In surprising news: that Starbucks store is made from repurposed cargo containers!

With many containers scrapped at the end of an average lifespan of 20 years, the Starbucks solution served to convert a potential waste stream from the company’s supply chain into shop space.

This Tukwila store is also the first LEED-certified structure in town. It uses fully reclaimed material for the exterior. Rainwater collected from the roof reduces water consumption and nourishes surrounding “xeriscaping” — landscapes and plants that naturally require less water.

More info and pictures.

Thanks to Mike!

Victory for Chickens in Europe

Being a chicken who’s sole purpose is egg-laying can be hard because of the horrible living conditions. Too many animals, in this case chickens, are held in enclosures that don’t allow for movement. This is starting to change for chickens in Europe as they have now been granted better enclosures thanks to some ethical activists!

On the first day of 2012, keeping hens in such cages became illegal, in all 27 countries of the European Union. Hens can still be kept in cages, but they must have more space, and the cages must have nest boxes and a scratching post. Last month, members of the British Hen Welfare Trust provided a new home for a hen they named “Liberty”. She was, they said, among the last hens in Britain still living in the type of cages we had opposed.

In the early 1970s, when the modern animal-liberation movement began, no major organisation was campaigning against the battery cage. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the mother of all animal-protection organisations, had lost its early radicalism long before. It focused on isolated cases of abuse, and failed to challenge well-established ways of mistreating animals on farms or in laboratories. It took a concerted effort by the new animal radicals of the 1970s to stir the RSPCA from its complacency towards the battery cage and other forms of intensive animal rearing.

Read Europe’s ethical eggs-ample.