The Whole Truth

A car of today weighs roughly 20 times the weight of its driver, of course depending on the size of the driver! This takes up valuable space in today’s cities. A car is designed to go 100MPH, whilst its driver often only needs a quarter of the speed available.

Wise and perhaps slightly obvious words adapted from MIT’s Ryan Chin a man who is currently creating “The Car of the Future”

Take for example New York City. In its hustle and bustle around 40% of the petrol used by either visitors or residents is used trying desperately to find a parking space. Be that for shopping or for parking before you arrive home from a long day in the office. Ryan Chin spoke at TED in Boston on the issue of Transportation and using highly tailored rental vehicles in a large city to ease congestion. Chin as I mentioned earlier is part of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Members of the MIT faculty included famed political and social activist Noam Chomsky. As part of this team he is designing a renewable energy fueled rental vehicle which will include: Independent steering, power and locomotion in each wheel, thus allowing the vehicle’s wheel to turn a 180 degrees, so that the car can turn on its own axis and move sideways.

Firstly Chin in his talk looked at several possibly remedies to solve fuel consumption and congestion in large cities: Highly individualised transit and Mass transit. . Looking at Taipei as the example of the former.

In Taipei scooters are extremely popular and a cheap and effective way of congregating and travelling in the City. Of course however if everyone owns a scooter they form a “sea” of scooters which of course is cumbersome and really does not solve any problems. As a product of ‘highly individualised transit, the scooter on a small scale is a perfect example of how it can be done. However, when it comes to the price of a Scooter, which is generally not very expensive, more and more people can own one and the problem becomes exacerbated.

Mass transportation is on the other hand does not cover the whole of a city, such as what a scooter or personal/individual vehicle can. Of course its inconvenient and inflexible and by my own experience, rarely on time. One of the many reasons a person does not choose to use public transport is generally down to the “First Mile, Last Mile” problem: How does one get to and from public transport.

A Thing of the Past?

Chin believes that the problem is able to be solved by the vehicle that he and his team are currently creating. An electrified car hire vehicle, which runs of renewable energy sources and has the ability to “sell” back to the National Grid any unused energy not dispensed whilst in transit. Using a variable pricing structure, which would be determined based on the number of people waiting to use a rental vehicle, the number of parking spaces nearby and the users proximity to other local rental hubs.

The aim is to encourage people not own a vehicle and thus rent a car when absolutely necessary, at a cheap appropriate price, which helps to bring down fuel emissions and halt the negative effects that climate change, due in part to fuel consumption brings….

An excellent idea I think.

For more information visit the MIT website which is available here

Perhaps one of the most interesting videos I have watched in a while. Nigeria’s first Female finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (click for bio) and her efforts to return stolen money to her Homeland. Corruption as she puts it is one of the first thing many think of when it comes to Africa. In her frankly right view she believes this is a negative stereotype and is working together with the World Bank to secure the Billions of dollars stolen by corrupt officials and transferred into high interest savings accounts in Europe.

One of the interesting points she makes during the video is that recovering the stolen assets has significance far beyond the actually money involved.**

The World Bank estimates that the cross border flow of global proceeds from criminal activities (such in the case of former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha) such as corruption, fraud, and tax evasion is between $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion. Another interesting point is that 25% of the GDP of African states such as Nigeria is lost to corruption every year at a cost of around $148 billion.

**For some bizarre reason the Stop button has disappeared…

The Ipod “Touch” for many its a cheaper alternative to actually owning an Iphone, it does the same kind of things, obviously minus the Phone functionality and the Internet.

After chatting with a few friends over the weekend, I personally have come to the conclusion that without an active internet connection, the Ipod Touch is simply just an Ipod with a fancy screen and perhaps a few extra features. What really makes the Ipod Touch come ‘alive’ is having an active internet connection, such as MiFi (please check my Page “Product Reviews” for some more information on MiFi.

Using an active Mobile Broadband/WiFi connection with an Ipod Touch brings out the best that the device has to offer. For any Iphone users below is a very handy tip, should you be using a Wifi connection as opposed to the standard “3G” connection that the phone comes with as standard.

Skype Mobile is becoming an increasingly good way of making telephone and text calls. With certain Mobile Broadband products, namely Mifi you can use this connection to ‘patch’ over to the Iphone to take advantage of the free calls that you have with certain package providers, for example if you are using a free SIM card that comes with free ‘friend to friend’ calls on Skype, its worth changing your active connection from 3G to a Mobile Broadband signal, which effectively means any usage of the Telephone feature in Skype using the VoIP feature will be free, in accordance to the plan that your SIM card comes with.

Of course this tip comes with a slightly irritating problem; you have to change SIM card over everytime you want to make a Skype call. Obviously if someone is prepared to do this they can look forward to the benefits which come. If not, well, you need not look forward. A SIM card is tiny, you can definitely carry it around in your Wallet of Purse. Until the point when people become more au fait with the latest developments and savings that can be offered, they will continue to lose money for the sake of it.