How Green Is Our Valley - The greenest countries

Jack Dikian

November 2011

The table below lists the top 10 greenest countries (2010) as compiled from the Environmental Performance Index (EPI); a joint effort between Yale University, Columbia University and collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. We also present the current top 10 courtiers against rankings from 2008.

We’ve looked at some of large trading partners and their standing both in 2008 and 2010. Both the United States and China had in fact a more favourable EPI standing in 2008.

The 2010 Environmental Performance Index ranks 163 countries on 25 performance indicators tracked across ten policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. These indicators provide a gauge at a national government scale of how close countries are to established environmental policy goals. The EPI’s proximity-to-target methodology facilitates cross-country comparisons as well as analysis of how the global community is doing collectively on each particular policy issue.

Country	Ranking in 2008	Ranking in 2010
Iceland	11	1
Switzerland	1	2
Costa Rica	5	3
Sweden	2	4
Norway	3	5
Mauritius	58	6
France	10	7
Austria	6	8
Cuba	41	9
Colombia	9	10
Australia	46	51	We export to	We import from
United States	39	61	✔	✔
Japan	21	20	✔
China	105	121	✔	✔
India	120	123	✔

Courtesy of http://epi.yale.edu

The Google X factor - our future

Jack Dikian

November 2011

There are some of us who as kids didn’t grow up having a microwave oven to heat afterschool snakes. Some of us would never have dreamed of replacing batteries in a toothbrush. And household products like the Blue-ray, Bluetooth, Dyson, Flat-screen, iPod were to be in our collective future.

Sometimes we see products emerge from lesser ones. Products change, evolve and transform as with the introduction of DVDs replacing VHS Video or CDs replacing Cassette decks. In other cases products just seem to emerge; almost overnight and we are left asking how did we do without - a paradigm change.

Did we see the electric toothbrush coming; the car radio aerial imbedded into the windscreen, the light bulb that messages us, warning it’s nearing the end of its life. Okay, so we can’t buy a message send light bulb just yet – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

This brings me to my point, the Internet of Things somewhat like the current Internet of Networks which serve our insatiable appetite for information and data communication. Think the Jetsons, where pantries keep their own inventories, supermarket trolleys that know what’s thrown in them and homes that remember what’s in their own junk drawers. How about your dinner plate posting to Facebook what you’re eating, even better your toilet analysing what comes out the other end for the presence of substances indicating failing health.

See http://ideasclinic.blogspot.com/2010/12/seamless-urine-testing.html

We made a great deal of inroad in showcasing the “store of the future” in the nineties when I was a Management Consultant at Accenture (Andersen Consulting). I was also fortunate enough to visit the MIT Media Lab which has always been known for its broad range of human-machine research and innovation. It seems now (probably for a while) Google has been dabbling and bringing shoot-for-the-stars ideas that little bit nearer.

Google X, is the clandestine lab where Google is tackling ideas which are, according to some, at various stages of development with some close to becoming reality within a year or two.

“They’re pretty far out in front right now,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics. “But Google’s not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies.”

"We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today," Sebastian Thrun, a software engineer at Google, blogged last year.

Bongo Bongo

Jack Dikian

November 2011

Recently a friend (a good friend) has been fascinated by the SMS Text-based Bongo service. The idea is that you text your name, age and your town/city, and it will shortly return a text message that she says is freakishly accurate. And from all accounts it seems so.

The concept certainly pricked my interest for a lot of reasons. After all, how can a system return meaningful information based on so little context? Yes I am aware that in Artificial intelligence, EXPERT systems have been designed to interrogate knowledge bases using a natural language interface and return useful knowledge, however, they all work within limited purpose-build data/knowledge repositories.

What Bongo seems to be doing is more generalized and I would think probably using a human element to decipher the question posed (the very difficult part) and then use a gamut of search engines to piece together a response.

So it’s an interesting service from a number of perspectives; Information systems, Information theory, the impact of the advent of social networking, the rise of personal information in 3^rd party repositories, and so and so forth.

Oh, and how does Bongo work? Well most of the answer is actually provided by Bongo themselves. You just need to read their published service policy carefully. It pretty much gives you all the clues. Go to http://199bongo.com/our-policy

Success of the human species

Jack Dikian

October 2011

Today marks the symbolic date for when Earths population will hit 7-billion. Demographers at the United Nations Population Division set Oct. 31, 2011 this milestone, acknowledging also, that it's impossible to know the specific time or day.

In 1999, Kofi Annan, designated a boy born to refugee parents in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, as Baby 6 Billion. He had been plucked from the hundreds of thousands of babies born that day to put a face on global population growth. That boy is now 12.

The next milestone, when the globe's population hits 8 billion — is estimated to be in around 14 years from now.

The last of the B53

Jack Dikian

October 2011

The last of America's most powerful Cold War-era nuclear bombs has been dismantled in Texas. This monster is 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Put into service in 1962, when Cold War tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the B53 weighed 4,500 kg and the size of a minivan.

The B53's disassembly ends the era of big megaton bombs, with the biggest nuclear bomb in the United States’ arsenal now is the 1.2-megaton B83 compared to the B53 which was 9 megatons.

The B53 was designed to hit targets deep underground, such as bunkers in which military and civilian leaders might be sheltering and required five parachutes to land it softly on their targets before detonating an explosion, in effect simulating an earthquake. These have been superseded, now, by bombs that burrow into the ground and then explode.

According to figures released by the US state department in May 2011, the US has 5,113 nuclear warheads in its current stockpile, down from 31,255 in 1967.

Germs - The 7 dirtiest objects

Jack Dikian

October 2011

According to a new study from Kimberly-Clark Professional, the Dallas Health-care products maker, much of the everyday germs we pick up may be less to do with sharing our workplace our sniffily colleagues and more to do with objects we come in contact with on our commute.

The study was designed with help from Environmental Microbiologist Charles Gerba, a professor at the University of Arizona. Measurements of contamination levels were taken with repeated swabs of the everyday items using the same methods as in the food and other industries to monitor sanitary conditions.

These included high-traffic locations petrol pumps, mail box handles, parking meters, traffic light buttons, escalator handles and vending machine buttons in six cities; Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia.

Swabs were taken and measured for levels of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). ATP is the universal energy molecule found in animal, plant, bacterial, yeast and mould cells. Residues, particularly food or organic residue, contain large amounts of ATP. Microbial contamination contains ATP, but in smaller amounts. So ATP measurements represents dirt that otherwise may be invisible to the human eye. So the amount of ATP serves as a good indicator health risk. The greater the levels of ATP, the greater the health risk.

ATP is easily and accurately measured by treating an ATP-containing sample with a reagent that reacts with ATP and produces light that can be measured in a luminometer. The amount of light produced (relative light units) is proportional to the amount of ATP in the sample. As an aside, this reaction occurs naturally in fireflies to produce their characteristic light. ATP readings of 300 or higher indicated a higher risk for illness transmissions when the items are touched.

The results:

• Petrol pump handles had the highest levels of contamination with 71% of those tested having ATP levels of 300 or more.

• Mailbox handles were a close second with 68% having high ATP levels.

• Escalator rails came in third with 43% of tested showed contamination.

• ATM buttons tested poorly with 41% of those tested were contaminated.

• Parking meters (41%) were found to be breeding grounds for germs.

• Traffic light buttons (35%) and 35% of the snake vending machine buttons tested had higher than accepted ATP levels.

The Idiot Box - maybe not so dumb

Jack Dikian

October 2011

Television is often referred to as the Idiot box - and I suppose a lot of television, particularly reality television, caters for and attempts to attracting as many people as possible with the sole purpose of selling ads. Movies on the other hand attract those prepared to pay to see them. You could argue that movies are a form of art, similar to a painting, a play or a concert.

There may be, however, another emerging trend involving television shows. This is the opposite scenario to the idiot box. That is, television becoming more cognitively demanding. Episodes of well-known series such as Dexter, The Sopranos, and The West Wing, for example, require us to integrate far more information than we would have a few decades ago in order to make sense of the plot. As in reading, we invest in attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads.

It seems that in order to follow the story line of these shows we need to do more than just pay attention – we have to also make inferences, track shifting social relationships and debate even when a character behaves in a way inconsistent with the developing personality.

The episode often connects the lives of many distinct characters, each with a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Growing complexity involves more than just multi-threading. Often flashing arrows and social networks are incorporated. Let’s look at multithreading.

Earlier television shows typically followed one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. This is compared with say The Sopranos where the narrative weaves together numerous distinct strands -- sometimes as many as 12, though some of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode.

The number of primary characters, more than 20 recurring characters -- swells significantly. And the episodes have ambiguous borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Not only that, often a scene in 'The Sopranos will connect to two or three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another.