“The tubing (or heat exchanger) is filled with a liquid refrigerant material. The reflective panel focuses light and heat energy from the sun onto the piping which vaporizes the refrigerant. So far, no ice. When the sun goes down however the vapor goes through massive heat loss due to pressure differences and roughly 14 pounds of ice are produced depending on the design.
The refrigerant rapidly cools once it hits 104 degrees Fahrenheit, due to its unique properties making, it perfect for typical temperature ranges in warm climates.
Businesses create and distribute goods and services that enhance our quality of life, promote growth, and generate prosperity. They spur innovation, reward entrepreneurial effort, provide a return on investment and constantly improve their performance responding to market feedbacks. They draw on the skills, effort and ingenuity of individual workers, and share with them the economic value created by the enterprise.
Non-profit organizations give us ways to celebrate, build and protect the many human values that give rise to healthy, thriving communities. They have worked to ensure that all people have adequate necessities of life, including clean air, water, food and shelter; an equitable share of wealth and resources; and opportunity to develop their full physical, mental and spiritual potential. They create spaces to celebrate the joy of culture and artistic expression, and reveal opportunities for generosity. They have helped protect the environment, working to ensure that human capacities, technologies and organizations sustain and support, not systemically alter, degrade or destroy, the Earth, its diversity of life or the ecological systems that support life. They remind us that many species share this planet and depend on each other, and that humanity must not only care for itself, but must steward an entire world.
This brings me to the Qatar (Foundation) Computing Research Institute (QCRI), which was almost called the al-Khwārizmī Computing Research Institute. I joined QCRI exactly two weeks ago as Director of Social Innovation. My first impression? QCRI is Doha's “House of Whizzkids”. The team is young, dynamic, international and super smart. I'm already working on several exploratory research and development (R&D) projects that could potentially lead to initial prototypes by the end of the year. These have to do with the application of social computing and big data analysis for humanitarian response. So I've been in touch with several colleagues at the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to bounce these early ideas off and am thrilled that all responses thus far have been very positive.
My QCRI colleagues and I are also looking into collaborative platforms for “smart microtasking” which may be useful for the Digital Humanitarian Network. In addition, we're just starting to explore potential solutions for quantifying veracity in social media, a rather non-trivial problem as Dr. Prossinger would often say with a sly smile vis-a-vis NP-hard problems. In terms of partnership building, I will be in New York, DC and Boston next month for official meetings with the UN, World Bank and MIT to explore possible collaborations on specific projects. The team in Doha is particularly strong on data analytics, social computing, data cleaning, machine learning and translation. In fact, most of the whizzkids here come from very impressive track records with Microsoft, Yahoo, Ivy Leagues, etc. So I'm excited by the potential.
. Consumers had a tool to tell quickly and easily tell, at the time of purchase, if the product or production methods resulted in significant adverse environmental or social impact?
. The complex information of this impact could be presented by as a scoring based personalized set of preferences?
. People finally had an economic tool which through purchase would compel corporate practices toward sustainability not just profit?
This website contains a recently patented tool called the Universal Ecolabel which can perform all these functions and more. It even allows the individual consumer to monitor his total personal/family environmental footprint over time.
In coming months interactive website activities are envisioned that will provide consumers the opportunity to educate themselves and others as well as contribute to a growing body of sustainability knowledge
Writing from: Aspen, CO. I’m speaking/attending the National Geographic Environmental Conference (focus of the conference: adapting to climate change).
I had the good fortune of sitting on a conference panel with Mayor Fetterman of Braddock, PA.
He’s a great bear of a guy (he makes me, at 6′ 1″ and well built, look small in comparison), but despite his size, he looked like he was slowly being crushed by the weight of the world when he showed up at the panel.
His story explained why. He’s spent the last decade trying to save a storied American town, crushed by global economic and financial forces. Forces that gutted a prosperous steel town of 18,000 with some historical treasures (e.g. the first Carnegie Library) and a thriving retail sector.
When Fetterman arrived in Braddock, the town was already in shambles. The population had fallen to below 3,000 and gang crime was rampant. In fact, the landscape of the town was so bleak, the town was used as a setting for the darkest apocalypse movie I’ve ever seen, “The Road“
