Tag Archives: Nokia

About the BP oil spill, greening the desert, and using bicycle power to recharge your mobile

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I found a couple more comments relating to the BP oil spill  in the Gulf. Pasco Phronesis offers this May 30, 2010 blog post, Cleaning With Old Technology, where the blogger, Dave Bruggeman, asks why there haven’t been any substantive improvements to the technology used for clean up,

The relatively ineffective measures have changed little since the last major Gulf of Mexico spill, the Ixtoc spill in 1979. While BP has solicited for other solutions to the problem (Ixtoc was eventually sealed with cement and relief wells after nine months), they appear to have been slow to use them.

It is a bit puzzling to me why extraction technology has improved but cleanup technology has not.

An excellent question.

I commented a while back (here) about another piece of nano reporting form Andrew Schneider. Since then, Dexter Johnson at Nanoclast has offered some additional thoughts (independent of reading Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science post) about the Schneider report regarding ‘nanodispersants’ in the Gulf. From Dexter’s post,

Now as to the efficacy or dangers of the dispersant, I have to concur that it [nanodispersant] has not been tested. But it seems that the studies on the 118 oil-controlling products that have been approved for use by the EPA are lacking in some details as well. These chemicals were approved so long ago in some cases that the EPA has not been able to verify the accuracy of their toxicity data, and so far BP has dropped over a million gallons of this stuff into the Gulf.

Point well taken.

In the midst of this oil spill, it was good to come across a successful effort at regreening a desert. From the Fast Company article by Cliff Kuang,

Today, the Buckminster Fuller Institute announced the winner of its 2010 Challenge: Allan Savory, who has spent the last 50 years refining and evangelizing for a method of reversing desertification that he calls “holistic management.” The African Center for Holistic Management International, an NGO he helped found, will take home a $100,000 grant.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is meant to award big, sweeping solutions to seemingly intractable problems. …

… Savory’s prescription seems shockingly simple–and it’s taken him 50 years of work to convince others that he’s not crazy. The core of Holistic Management is simply grazing local livestock in super dense herds that mimic the grazing patterns of big-game (which have since disappeared). Those livestock in turn till the soil with their hooves and fertilize it with their dung–thus preparing the land for new vegetation in a cycle that was evolved over millions of years.

Savory works in Zimbabwe which is where the greatest success for this method is enjoyed but it has also been employed in the Rockies (between Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho Note: As a Canadian, I would not describe this area as the ‘northern Rockies’ as Kuang’s article does) and in the Australian outback.

… Savory’s African Center for Holistic Management has transformed 6,500 acres of land [in Zimbabwe]. There, even though livestock herds have increased by 400%, open water and fish have been found a half mile above where water had ever been known during dry season.

Bravo!

On a similar good news front, Nokia has announced a mobile phone charger that you can power up while riding your bicycle. From the Fast Company article by Addy Dugdale,

The Finnish firm’s [Nokia] Bicycle Charger Kit consists of a little bottle dynamo that you attach to the wheel of your bicycle to power up your phone as you pedal away. It comes with a phone holder that attaches to the handlebars using a hi-tech system composed of an elastic band and a plastic bag, in case of rain. Its price (in Kenya) is a little over $18 bucks, and it’s a wonder that no other phone manufacturer has thought of this before.

…

The Nokia Bicycle Charger Kit starts to work when you’re pedaling at just under 4mph and clicks off at 31mph. Hit 7.5mph and your bike will be charging your cell as quickly as a traditional charger would.

This reminds me a little of the projects where they try to create textiles that will harvest energy from your body that can be used to power mobile phones and other battery-powered devices that you carry around.

Nanotechnology and the European Economy; Nokia and IBM’s augmented reality meetings; Don Eigler hypes nanotechnology; physical/virtual/augmented reality meetings with IBM and Nokia

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In keeping with my belief that the developments I’m observing are threads in a complex conversation (as per yesterday’s [Oct.20.09] posting), I’m back to highlighting various news items that hint at possible trends.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research has published a call for proposals to study the economic impact of nanotechnology and nanosciences. You can get more details here on Azonano or view the call here.

There’s an interview with Don Eigler, the IBM scientist who’s known for moving Xenon atoms individually so they spell out IBM, in New Scientist here. Interestingly, Mr. Eigler does not have any concerns with regard to health fears related to nanotechnology. He’s aware of toxicology issues but he thinks that if we get it right, there’ll be very few problems, if any.

Following on my ‘nature of reality’ kick, this item about IBM and Nokia developing software that allows virtual reality/augmented reality meetings in physical space caught my attention.From the news item on Physorg.com

With support from IBM Research and Nokia Research Center, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland created an experimental system that enables people in multiple locations to interact and collaborate with avatars and objects in a single, virtual meeting . Objects and avatars are located in a “virtual” space that mirrors the corresponding physical room.

There is a video included with the story and it looked like the meeting was taking place in three spaces, two of them were physical and one was virtual. One office (physical) had two people who were interacting with virtual objects while simultaneously meeting in a virtual meeting room with their avatars and the same virtual objects they’d been interacting with in the physical space. A third person (in a geographically removed physical office) joined them in the virtual meeting. Do take a look.

The questions that spring to my mind are these: are all the spaces real? Is one space more real than the others and why? Some might argue that the virtual space is less real because it isn’t physical but then neither are your emotions. Also in the postings here about perception and quantum realities (Oct. 16, 19, and 20, 2009), I noted that our perceptions of reality at the macro level do not coincide with the realities of the quantum world which occasions this questions, What is the nature of reality?

Alberta welcomes a new nanotechnology product and research centre plus some news on a kissing phone

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The new facility will be called the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Development Centre (HEMiC) at Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. From the media release (on Azonano),

“Alberta’s strength in nanotechnologies, and the province’s coordinated strategy for nanotechnology made our decision to seek a partnership here easy,” said John Cole, President of Hitachi High-Technologies Canada, Inc. “This initiative engages Hitachi with Alberta’s nanotechnology community at the leading edge of research while contributing to commercial opportunities.”

…

The Centre will house three new electron microscopes valued at $7 million, including the first-ever Hitachi environmental transmission electron microscope Model H-9500 in operation outside of Japan.

There are many quotes in the media release, surprisingly, none from Dr. Nils Petersen, NINT’s  Director General.

Fast Company is featuring an article by Kit Eaton about phones that won’t require buttons for control (more touch screen-type technology but introducing a new level of innovation). As it turns out, these phones will be coming from Nokia. Kissing the phone as a gesture that you want to contact a loved is just one of the ideas being explored. More here including a Nokia video about the project. The product designers are looking at how people gesture and, depending on your culture, the meaning behind gestures can vary greatly as the Nokia designer notes in the video. Anyway, this type of project relates to my interest in multimodal discourse and my suspicion that we won’t be writing (or for the matter reading) as much as we do now.

Rob Annan over at Don’t leave Canada behind has picked up on my series of last week’s about innovation in Canada, in his posting Canada not simply hewers and drawers.

Finland, Canada, innovation, and risk taking

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In Konrad Yakabuski’s article (I started commenting on it yesterday), Canada’s innovation gap, Finland is held up as an example of where innovation has fueled economic success. In yesterday’s posting I included quotes from the article which outline some historical reasons why the Finnish have embraced innovation. Now it’s Canada’s turn.

Yakabuski mentions Harold Adams Innis (an influential professor of political economy at the University of Toronto) and his work,

The staples theory was originally developed in the 1920s by historian Harold Innis to explain Canada’s development as a provider of valuable raw resources – initially fish and fur – to the British Empire. …

Though the staples theory seemed outdated as Nortel rose to prominence and Ontario’s auto sector grew to overtake Michigan’s, it has been revived recently by economists to explain the slide back into resource dependence. Raw or lightly processed resources declined steadily as a share of Canada’s exports between 1960 and 2000, falling by half from 90 per cent to about 45 per cent. But since the beginning of this decade, their share of exports has risen dramatically to 65 per cent in 2008, according to new research by Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford.

Not everyone buys this picture of Canada’s role as a “drawer of water and hewer of wood.” Preston Manning, former politician and leader of the Reform Party of Canada (which later merged into the Progressive Conservative Party) doesn’t. In his May 27, 2009 speech, Stimulating an Ailing Economy: The Crucial Role of Science, Technology and Innovation, at the Public Policy Forum’s Science Day in Canada he suggests that Canada’s founding was more than just a vision of uniting British North American Colonies into a single country.

From Manning’s speech,

But what few of us fully appreciate is that there was also a science-based dimension to that story and vision. A generation earlier the leaders and people of those same British North American colonies launched a scientific endeavour which was to contribute as much to the building of Canada as the BNA Act and the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was called the Geological Survey of Canada and began with a £1500 grant from the legislature of the United Colony of Canada to carry out a geological survey of its territory.

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Why do I make reference to the historical role of the Geological Survey of Canada (which still exists today) in the formation of Canada? Because it reminds us that the Fathers of Confederation recognized that scientific investigation, and the technologies, innovations, and economic activities which flowed from it, had a vital role to play in the realization of the national vision. And if that was true in their day and generation, when many aspects of scientific investigation and technology were in their infancy, surely it is even more true today in an age when the scientific method has become the principal approach to problem solving and where science based technologies have become the principal drivers of the modern knowledge based economy.

Given the current emphasis on funding scientific and technological infrastructure over research and development (see Rob Annan’s postings on Don’t leave Canada behind for many examples including this one on Arctic research stations) I think we’re not taking risks, which is an essential element of innovation.

Finland is not an economic miracle right now, nor is Nokia. According to a June 30, 2009 statement from Finland’s Minister of Economy, the country is moving towards an 11% unemployment rate and as much as a 7% contraction in its economy. Nokia which has had economic woes since last fall, announced (April 16, 2009) that its earnings plummeted 90% year to year. Buying the Nortel division (mentioned in Yakabuski’s article) is a gutsy move and contrasts strongly with how Canadian business is dealing with the current economic uncertainties.

A phone that sniffs and molecules on a really big screen

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A prototype phone that can ‘sniff disease’ was introduced at nanotech 2009 by Nokia and Applied Nanodetectors (AND) Limited. They claim that the cell phone can detect various diseases by sniffing the user’s breath. There are sensors and a chip that somehow work together to detect gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ammonia. Somehow the gases are analyzed and compared to the composition you’d expect in someone who has a particular disease. I am intrigued by this but I don’t think there are enough details to determine just how this technology works. Plus I’m not sure how useful this would be. One of the claims is that asthma can be detected. Well, I’ve had that since I was a kid; I can tell you when I have a problem breathing. In fact, you can tell when I’m having trouble breathing; it’s very obvious. If you’re interested in more details, there’s [nano tech] Nokia Handset Checks Breath for Diseases or Phone Tech Detects Diseases by Analyzing Breath on Gearlog.

There’s  a ‘nano type’ movie opening at IMAX theatres in early 2009, according to Shekhar Garde at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Hidden Before Our Eyes: Tiny World Makes Giant Leap to Silver Screen on Pnysorg.com. It’s a simulation called Molecules to the Max which is being projected on the very large screens found in IMAX theatres. It’s a collaboration between artists and scientists. I hope it makes its way to Canada.

The poetry of Canadian Copyright Law

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Techdirt had an item, Intellectual Property Laws Rewrittten as Poetry. The poet, Yehuda Berlinger, has included Canada’s copyright law in the oeuvre. You can read the verse here. It’s surprisingly informative given how amusing and concise the verses are.

On a completely other note, there’s an article in Fast Company about a haptic exhibition in Japan that’s quite intriguing in light of the Nokia Morph. Part of an exhibit last year, the Morph concept is a flexible, foldable, bendable (you get the idea) phone. As far as I know, they (University of Cambridge and Nokia) have yet to produce a prototype (last year they had an animation which demonstrated the concept). Getting back to Japan, one of the exhibits was a design for speakers where you control the volume by changing their shapes. Haptic Speakers: Reach Out and Touch Some Sound is the article. Do go and read it. I found it very helpful to see the pictures (which seems ironic given that the article is about the sense of touch).

I’ve been curious about research concerning disabled folks and using their ‘thought waves’ to control equipment or machinery. I’ve found a description of some of the research in Richard Jones’s blog but it’s in the context of a discussion of Ray Kurzweil and some of Kurzweil’s ideas regarding the ‘singularity’. Anyway, Jones offers a good description of some of the ‘thought wave’ research. As for Kurzweil, one of these days I will try and read some of the material he’s written. The little I have seen suggests that he has absolutely no concept of human nature, in much the same way that economists don’t.