Business & management:
• The UK Green Building Council is making recommendations that will impact on developers, planners and policy-makers by increasing the level of biodiversity to be expected in building and urban environments.
• Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group are collaborating to work on finding the sustainability challenges that will have the greatest effect on managerial decision-making. An excerpt from the first of this series of interviews, includes a discussion about how to get out of the belief that success is only measured by growth.
• Scotland is intending to build the world’s largest tidal energy project, creating 700 jobs, to power a large computer data centre.
Education
• Male primary teachers may be unlikely to apply for jobs in schools where there are few other male teachers, contributing to the problem primary schools have in attracting them.
• British teachers are blaming an increase in bad behaviour in primary and secondary schools on the television programmes that children are watching.
• Also in the UK, researchers have confirmed that clever children may protect themselves from bullying or being shunned, by dumbing down and deliberately failing.
Environment & sustainability:
• A recent US online summit hosted by the Climate Savers Computing initiative and the EPA's Energy Star Program has been promoting the benefits of PC power management, emphasizing that some simple solutions can save a lot of power and money.
• Chicago is leading the US in green roofs in terms of total area, and has a goal of 6,000 rooftop gardens.
• Metro Vancouver Recycles is a reuse and recycling database set up in line with the region’s zero-waste policy. The database for customers, uses on-line maps to show the closest drop-off destinations, providing people with even more options than offered by municipal blue box collection programs.
• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published a guide, "Climate Literacy" to help people understand how climate influences them and how they influence climate.
Health & wellbeing:
• Initial results on a heart “polypill” seem encouraging, but experts still disagree whether it is ethical to prescribe a pill for “lifestyle issues”.
• British scientists are warning that the washing of disinfectants, shampoos and other household cleaners into sewers and rivers, is triggering the growth of drug-resistant bacteria.
• A US study has surprised South Florida public health officials by saying that commercial vessels - freighters, tankers and cruise ships - generate enough air pollution to pose "a significant health concern for coastal communities".
• A Canadian study has found that people who take public transport are more likely to meet a heart and stroke foundation’s suggested daily minimum of physical activity, with implications for urban planning and public transport development.
• “Broken heart syndrome” was recognised by doctors in the 1990s – most of the patients have recently suffered some sort of physical or emotional distress, just before their heart symptoms appear.
• A £140m scheme to offer free swimming pool use to people aged 16 and under or over 60 in England is under way (about 20 million people), but about 140 councils turned down funding, saying they could not afford to offer free swimming to children.
Law & Government:
• Identifying people through social networking took on a new focus, when a Facebook site went up in the UK attempting to catch a rapist, and there are concerns that social networking sites are being used to promote sectarian violence.
• An EU report supports security and fundamental freedoms on the Internet, in spite of moves by some countries (eg France) to implement restrictions similar to our S92A copyright amendment.
• From April 1st, 44 councils in the UK will combine to become just 9 councils, bringing two thirds of England under unitary governance, which already exists in Scotland and Wales. The challenge for these new councils is to overcome scepticism that they can deliver better, more efficient services.
• The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission is proposing that fathers get more paid time off when their child is born in recommendations to change maternity legislation, and redress the gender imbalance.
• In the latest annual survey of UK local e-government, a plea was included to authorities "to get a permissive copyright policy on your website, publish your data in a way that computers can read easily, don't charge for your data and respond positively to people who ask you for basic data sets".
• Local governments in the US expand at an astonishing rate, and one of the biggest challenges involves deciding what to do about local governments that have grown unsustainably numerous, large, intrusive, and irresponsible.
People, culture & diversity:
• An influential US science advisor says that the human population on Earth has exceeded it’s “limits of sustainability”.
• Research shows that greater use of social networking is making it more difficult for users to maintain their privacy.
• Newspapers in print may be waning, and some may simply shrug if news goes completely online, but there is a risk that the in-depth investigative journalism that newspapers produce, will not be duplicated in online media formats.
Science, technology & transport:
• An experiment has begun in Moscow involving 6 volunteers from Russia, France and Germany, to see whether humans could cope with the isolation of travelling to Mars and back.
• Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox internet browser has joined with a graphics company to work on “accelerated 3D graphics on the web”.
• Microsoft Windows 7 will have multi-touch controls built in, to help bring touch into the mainstream of computer technology.
• France’s Gendarmerie are saving millions of euros, thanks to their migration away from a Microsoft-based desktop to an open source desktop and web applications.
• US research has found that it may be necessary to have regulations in place around the number of rocket launches made globally. They have discovered that ozone losses in the atmosphere from launches will eventually exceed the damage done by CFCs if limits aren’t placed on the space industry.
Thursday, 2 April 2009
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