Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
Around the world, dwindling water supplies and deteriorating water quality are driving innovations in water treatment technologies. Nanotechnology is a key player since it can improve applications ranging from large-scale seawater desalination systems to community based arsenic removal units to household water filters.
Because of nanoparticles' special properties and potential applications in energy, health and agriculture, advocates of nanotechnology sometimes perceive it as a 'silver bullet' that will fix a spectrum of development problems.
Others argue that nanomaterials may be the next asbestos, with unknown health and environmental impacts,and that they should be strictly regulated. Such concerns are particularly relevant for developing countries, which have large potential marketsfor nanotechnology-based water treatment but may not have the capacity to cope with any unforeseenadverse effects. New regulations might seem the obvious answer, but we should look before we leap.
A new set of problems
The possible health risks from ingesting or being exposed to engineered nanoparticles is leading the push for new regulations.
There is also anxiety over how used filters and media containing nanomaterials might affect the environment. If nanotechnology becomes widely used, the disposal of nanomaterials will be difficult to contain, especially where they are used in household and community-level applications. The situation would be akin to mobile phones. Unless the supplier takes responsibility for collecting and managing used nano-based products — for example while servicing water treatment systems — the material will most likely end up in local dumpsites and landfills.
Unsuspecting developing countries could suddenly face a completely new set of pollution problems. In water purification applications, the nanomaterial is typically coupled to, or embedded in, other materials like filters that keep it trapped. But this may not always be the case. For example, silver nanoparticles used as odour neutralisers in fabrics have been known to leach after soaking in water.
If nanomaterials find their way into water bodies, they could affect population and food dynamics, harming aquatic life. Studies in the United States have shown that if nanoparticles end up in sewage sludge subsequently used as fertiliser, they could damage plant growth.
New technology, new rules?
New and separate regulations for using nanotechnology in water purification may seem like a panacea for managing these risks, but this is impractical at this stage for two reasons.
First, we don't yet know the full risks of using nanotechnology to purify water, so regulating for them is difficult and fixed rules might quickly become defunct as new risks arise. Regulation of nanotechnology in its broader senseis still in its infancy — usually emerging as a reaction to fast-paced technological developments. While risks are still being identified and defined, our priority should be to ensure that existing regulations have the flexibility needed to address new threats as and when they become known.
The regulatory regime for water treatment must anyway be flexible enough to cope with all concerns — whatever the technology or raw materials used. Imagine that we carve out a separate set of regulations for nanotechnology in water purification. Tomorrow, if a new technology with new properties is developed for treating water, we would need a whole new set of regulations. Such short sightedness would restrict the law's ability to respond to new and emerging risks, and also create administrative overlaps.
Creating new rules for nanotechnology in water treatment is also undesirable for a more practical reason. Water treatment as a whole encompasses a number of different aspects, including treatment schemes, supply networks and waste disposal. Most of these are already governed by multiple government bodies and regulations. For example, in India, waste management is governed by hazardous materials rules, municipal solid wastes rules, and the Water Pollution Act. Adding new regulations to this list, for instance to control how filters containing nanomaterials are disposed of, will do little beyond creating confusion. Moreover, micro-segregation of waste would be difficult due to overlapping rules.
Responsive rules
Making regulation responsive to new challenges does not necessitate new laws. Instead, precautionary principle (caution in advance) — already used in environmental regulation — can be extended to nanotechnology applications. The existing plethora of regulation for occupational and environmental health and safety can be amended to recognise that nanomaterials have distinct characteristics.
For example, requirements for labelling that indicates the quantity and type of nanomaterials used in any product,and recognising waste containing nanomaterials as potentially hazardous, can help people take adequate precautions when handling and disposing of these. Similarly, standards for permissible limits of different substances in drinking water can be updated to reflect the concerns around nanotechnology.
Fostering policymakers' and regulators' will and capacity to understand and address the challenges of nanotechnology is more important than new regulation. Greater inter-ministry and department coordination, information exchange and capacity building is needed. After all, any regulation is only as good as the sincerity and success of its implementation.
Malini Balakrishnan is a bio-chemical engineer and Nidhi Srivastava is a lawyer. Both work at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi, India. These are their personal comments. The authors acknowledge the IDRC supported project on capability, governance, and nanotechnology developments in India that provided the background for this article.
If you're anything like me, you are constantly creating social data. From your blog posts and your tweets, your photos and videos, bookmarks and status updates, you are creating new information, big and small. You might do so in spurts, or you might be creating new content throughout the day. But with so many different social networks out there, and friends scattered here, there and everywhere, there's always the potential you're not sending the right data to the right place. But if you start by knowing where your data is flowing now, you can make minor adjustments along the way to get the recipe right.
China and India: Taking it to the next levelBy Gordon Orr26 February 2009China and India will be important centers of innovation in the coming decades. Not only are both nations producing a rising share of key technological innovations, but they are also pioneering innovations in business models that allow their companies to prosper in low-income markets. These new models tend to be capital light while heavily leveraging technology. The companies employing them produce goods and services at surprisingly low cost and use the vast scale of home markets to create new technology standards. These are practices that companies in developed nations will need to watch closely as they attempt to grow within China and India and as they meet new competitors from both countries in global markets.
There’s no formula for creativity and risk taking but there are conditions that encourage those traits. Many of those conditions are present today in China and India. Start with the basics. When an economy is growing at 8, 10, or even 12 percent a year, the environment for risk taking becomes much more forgiving. Even a moderately good innovation can succeed simply by rising with the tide. For innovations that need scale to pay off, there are few better places than China or India, with their immense populations. New services for mobile phones, for instance, can reach 100 million subscribers within a couple of years. As a result, even lower-margin businesses can generate returns on innovation that exceed those of companies in more developed midsize economies.
Then there’s the talent issue. Education levels are rising in both countries. China and India have world-class technical universities and produce a steady flow of talent at the top of the world’s academic pyramid. In addition, both cultures reward entrepreneurial risk taking. Innovators in China and India resemble first-generation immigrants to the United States or Europe in their drive and desire to succeed. Their commitment and focus on business execution make them notable entrepreneurs on the global stage. It helps that both China and India allow successful people to retain much of the wealth they create, though both governments expect contributions back to broader society from those who become millionaires or even billionaires.
Getting funds to entrepreneurs can still be difficult. China is rich in capital, and larger enterprises have ready access to the banking system. Start-ups can often tap networks of family and friends. The problem is midsize companies, which often need to finance themselves because they fall between the banks and family networks. In India, such self-funding is critical because the pool of domestic capital is smaller. Such constraints do have the benefit of seeding innovations that can flourish where capital is limited.
Similarly, the fact that the masses have some spending power, but not a lot, is actually a spur to new forms of innovation. Extracting revenues from the hundreds of millions in the emerging middle classes of China and India doesn’t work using business models imported from developed markets—the built-in costs are just too high. So flexible local entrepreneurs are creating new models that bake in low-income levels. ICICI Bank is a good example. Making intensive use of technology, it has created a banking model with capital outlays that are one-tenth those of banks in the developed world. ICICI reaches deeply into India’s rural areas using mobile ATMs and simplified Internet banking. It runs a booming and profitable business in remittances at fee levels that undercut Western Union by 70 percent. Health Management Research Institute (HMRI), meanwhile, uses technology to revolutionize medical services. Paramedics rove through rural areas in vans coordinated by GPS. Routine ailments can be efficiently diagnosed with the help of algorithms; more difficult diagnoses can be provided by remote medical experts via a video kiosk in each van. HMRI can already serve over 50 million patients.
Activist government policies give a boost to innovators as well. China selects and invests in what it believes are next-generation sectors—biotechnology, electric vehicles, and clean energy. These are markets where China’s domestic demand could lead the world. The government’s goal is to accelerate the market’s development and nurture national champions. In telecom, where the Chinese market is already one of the world’s largest, the government is encouraging national standards that it hopes will eventually define the global industry. Chinese entrepreneurs have set up a range of mobile services, including a homegrown GPS network and a digital TV service with enough heft to begin competing in European and US markets.
At present, neither India nor China has strong safeguards on intellectual property, though as the ranks of technology entrepreneurs grow, there are signs of improvement. Again, this apparent deficiency has been something of a plus, as it has skewed innovation toward business models that are protected through superior, faster execution rather than patents and licensing fees. The Chinese company Alibaba, for example, combines technology with cheap labor to help its customers—local midsize enterprises—tap international clients. Alibaba moved fast and early to build online services that have kept it ahead of international competitors.
There are lessons here for multinationals. These innovations are by no means limited to Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs and markets. Outsiders can study these models and transform their own innovation efforts. That’s a good reason to set up a “second home” in China or India. And these innovations won’t remain confined to those countries—many are applicable to the developed world, where there is plenty of demand for cheaper products and services.
Can India and China sustain this pace and eventually move to the next level of technological innovation? Absolutely. The talent is there, as are capital and effective government encouragement. With stronger protection and rewards for intellectual property—a likely development as international companies begin to license technology from Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs—the stage will be set for the next step forward.
Another day, another high-profile TwitterTwitter reviews
account gets hacked. This time, it’s one of (many) New York Times’ Twitter accounts, The Moment, which brings news from their fashion blog of the same name.
Well, as noticed by the folks over at Valleywag, at one point a suspicious, spammy tweet showed up on that account. Sure enough, a couple of hours later the NYTimes admitted they were hacked, and apologized to the public.
So, no big damage done, and the issue seems to have been quickly resolved, but it’s another warning for all you tweeple: keep your computers clean and your Twitter passwords safe.
How do you launch a wine label when there are so many different ones out there already?
How do you launch a wine label when there are so many big ones out there already that are well established and with some big money & big marketing behind them?
Fiasco Wines can tell you how.
Fiasco are a family run winery located in Marlborough. They started making wine under their own label in 2008 and are engaging their customers through social media to market their wine.
How are they using social media to market their wine?
Fiasco run a daily blog where they post content about how they make their wine and what they’re doing. They write entries, upload photos and share video content through youtube. They provide interesting and engaging content for people interested in wine.
They are connecting and engaging with people on twitter under the @fiascowines account. They have conversations with people, are genuinely nice, funny and helpful.
They used twitter to launch their Black Pearl Pinot Noir. They offered the wine at a discount to twitter users under the agreement that they’d all try the wine at the same time and tweet about it. A quick search on twitter for #tweetbunchnz will show you how it went (it went well).
Microblogging has been the latest trend among the Internet users. I learned about twitter from an article in some tech magazine. I wasn’t really planning to use it when I joined. Now it has become a habit rather than a hobby. For those who have not yet entered this world, microblogging is rather like the status message in your IM client. As twitter puts it, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. You can see the updates of people whom you follow and vice versa.
Then I came to know about identica from the tweets of @anivar which seemed to come “from identica”. “Identi.ca is a microblogging service brought to you by Control Yourself, Inc.. It runs the Laconica microblogging software, version 0.7.3, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.” You can integrate your twitter account with your identica account so that your tweets also come “from identica”.
USA TODAY, the nation’s top-selling newspaper and a leading online destination, today announced the availability of a USA TODAY application on Android Market.
iGoogler is an Adobe AIR application that lets you access iGoogle, or your personalized Google home page, from the desktop.
Nothing fancy here as the app will only create a shortcut icon to the iGoogle website on your desktop and when you double click this icon, the iGoogle website opens up in a standalone browser.
Such a feature is available by default in Chrome (see #7 - website shortcuts) while Firefox users can create shortcuts to any web page through Prism. For everyone else, iGoogler might be worth trying.
If you are already using iGoogle, click here to follow this blog inside iGoogle. If you are new here, check this animated video tour of iGoogle.