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India Continues to Blog

- Adam Clare

The Indian Government recently tried to stiffle free speech of many of its citizens by blocking their access to certain blogs and blogging sites. This was in reaction to the recent terror attack in Mumbai, the blogosphere and many people around the world felt that India reacted too strongly.

India has announced that they wanted to selectively censor some pages and that “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.”

Well, today, the Indian Government has said that itwon’t ban bloggers. Free speech online can continue in India!

Accelerating Developments for Green Cars

- Adam Clare

smart car
A few car makers are actively trying to make our over-reliance on oil less of an issue. The most interesting one is the car made by Tesla motors.
Here is a quick round-up of recent announcements:

Toyota is thinking of making a ethanol-powered vehicle in the “near term” and is “pursing a plug-in hybrid vehicle” for the USA’s auto market.

“DaimlerChrysler has turned its popular teeny Smart car into an EV. The electric version of the Smartfortwo will be available for lease to 100 customers in Great Britain in November.”

A car made by Tesla Motors (who gets funding from Google founders and a Pay-Pal founder) has made and electric car that can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in about four seconds.

Go green cars go!

Students Cleanup Their ‘Hood

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Students at Spain Middle School, which is nowhere near Spain, in fact the school is in Detroit Michigan. Detroit is renowned for it’s urban areas that are falling apart, well these kids had enough. For a school project they utilized technologies used by NASA and marketing corporations, GIS – also known as Geographic Information Systems.

They went around their neighborhoods documenting all things wrong. They plotted the location of say an abandoned car and took a picture of it and went on to the next sign of urban blight. After collecting all their data they took the next logical step.

“They students have compiled their material into Power Point presentations for Detroit city council members, highlighting areas that have been neglected and need improvement. They were able to show, for example, that the number of abandoned homes in one neighborhood had increased by more than 50 percent. The Wayne County prosecutors’ office began targeting the area.”

With GIS technology becoming more accessible hopefully we can see it used for more projects like this and maybe for tracking environmental damage too.

Wind Powered Boats

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

It looks like the more things change the more they stay the same. A German company, SkySails, is going to start selling a new style of sail to help large freighters move through the ocean faster.

“SkySails’ system consists of an enormous towing kite and navigation software that can map the best route between two points for maximum wind efficiency. In development for more than four years, the system costs from roughly $380,000 to $3.2 million, depending on the size of the ship it’s pulling. SkySails claims it will save one third of fuel costs.”

World Cup Scores!

- Adam Clare

The World Cup has scored a green goal! Sorry, I couldn’t resist such cheesy writing. Seriously though, the World Cup organizers in Germany have surpassed their own goal of making the event have a small ecological footprint as possible. One thing they wanted to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that normally would have been released for such a large event by encouraging bike riding and riding public transit. They did more too!

“There are water-free urinals, overflow limiters on the wash-basins and electricity-saving measures, which are all things that save resources but go virtually unnoticed. The fans also don’t get to see the solar panels on the stadiums, which is a shame.”

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