From the LOGIS news alert subscriptions (ending 16/10):

Business & management:
• An article from a London School of Economics publication looks at a possible new way to measure inflation, given the British public’s increasingly sceptical view about official inflation numbers reflecting the true rise in the cost of living.
• The UN Climate Change Secretariat has announced that it is on track for the Kyoto Protocol emissions trading system to go live.
• The rise of the electric car industry is going to result in an increase in niche industries needed to support it.
• Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria were announced at an international conference last week, that set standards for eco-friendly and socially responsible business operations in the industries catering to travelers.

Education
• The Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand has launched a programme for schools and is inviting them to take part. The programme aims to provide guidance for schools to recognise dyslexia, and to outline their strategy and to take action to implement the strategy.
• A new state law in Florida requires school districts to create their own full-time virtual schools, collaborate with other districts or contract with providers approved by the state, so that students could earn their public school diploma from kindergarten through to the 12th grade without physically attending school.

Environment & sustainability:
• A small community in Denmark is now a world leader in sustainable alternative energy, becoming carbon neutral in 2007 by producing 10 percent more than its 6,000 residents use each year so that it now exports energy to Norway.
• The 2009/10 funding round for the Ministry for the Environment’s Sustainable Management Fund has just opened, looking for community driven projects.
• NIWA is running trials using watercress in waterways, to see whether the plant removes nutrients from waterways, especially nitrate and phosphate.
• British Waterways, a public body in charge of waterside land, wants to add wind turbines and small-scale hydroelectric turbines along canals & rivers to generate electricity for up to 45000 homes. Money raised will be used to maintain the waterways.
• Almost 200 countries signed up to an agreement to curb loss of biodiversity by 2010, but the world’s government’s are expected by experts, to fail to reach that target.
• In the next week or so, a Spanish solar thermal storage plant will begin generating power that takes its energy from the solar collectors and stores it in molten salt, allowing the plant to continue to generate power overnight.

Health & wellbeing:
• International research highlighted by a UK foundation indicates links between higher levels of trust and better mental health in more equal societies, and greater levels of fear, distrust and poor mental health in societies with large wealth gaps.
• British researchers say that people on lengthy sick leave for psychiatric illness are twice as likely to die from cancer than healthy employees.
• Doctors have safety concerns about a growing trend amongst people like students or shift workers to use prescription drugs like Ritalin, Provigil (modafinil) or beta-blockers for non-medical reasons such as boosting alertness and brain power.
• A UCLA research team has found that using the Internet may boost the brain power of middle aged and older people.
• An EU study has found that 10% of people listening to MP3 or CD players could suffer permanent hearing loss because their music is too loud.

Law & Government:
• British councils, police authorities, fire services, universities and charities (as well as Transport for London) have been caught out by the collapse of Iceland’s banks, but while Britain has used anti-terror laws against Iceland, and had advised councils in 2004 to spread their investments across a “wide range of banks”, the government has refused to commit to guaranteeing council’s savings.
• As part of the Statistics NZ ongoing programme of making statistics freely available via their website, the new Infoshare database has been launched, providing a wide range of statistics in a time-series data format. (Some of the data sets are available down to territorial authority area, but not all.)
• The Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage will enter into force in January 2009, aiming to safeguard over 3 million shipwrecks and submerged ruins around the world.

People, culture & diversity:
• Another article from the London School of Economics publication mentioned above, highlights how attitudes about the differences between the rich and the rest have been changing.
• A UK conference on the care and conservation of cemeteries, graveyards and memorials is raising awareness that the resources to maintain this part of British heritage are tight and there are concerns that the day will come when inscriptions will no longer be legible due to gradual decay.
• Virtual worlds are already evolving to try to attract users other than gamers or the highly tech-savvy. For example, Twinity is a virtual world that allows avatars to move around inside an accurate virtual version of a real city – Berlin. London, Singapore and New York are to follow. Or you could learn something about the culture and history of China by visiting the virtual Forbidden City.

Science, technology & transport:
• ITC technologies produce a lot of greenhouse emissions in their production and use. However, it is possible for these technologies to reduce more emissions than they produce. (This article is from McKinsey Quarterly – if you aren’t on the distribution list for the journal, but still want to see a copy of this article, let the LOGIS Librarian know.)
• Robots that can think like humans still sounds like science fiction to most people, but the technology is coming closer, as recent experiments in the UK have shown.
• The Smart car has become popular in NZ cities and ads – a new electric version has been on trial in London, but there seem to be some reservations about the car’s battery performance.
• Some futurists are predicting a form of transport on electric monorail-like systems, called Personal Rapid Transit.