Tag: Birmingham UK

Podnosh is based in Birmingham in the UK, so often we write about exciting things that are going on near us.

Crime Mapping from the British Government based on a West Midlands example

Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site.  Practical and political! Crime mapping has been useful tool in the US for a few years now, some of it inspired by tracking gun crime and is seeing growing use in the UK.

Facebook new design.

I like it. A lot. It puts our content and our relationships first. Can the design push the publicity desires of the app makers into the background without leaving them disillusioned? We’ll see.

Cquestrate: Can we crowdsource a carbon solution.

Cquestrate Intro Video from cquestrate on Vimeo.
Last week I met Tim Kruger. He’d asked me to do a little bit of work on a very bold plan that he hatched today.

Cquestrate is an organisation and a website which plans to crowdsource technical solutions to the huge problem of recapturing the CO2 pumped out since the industrial revolution began.

He’s working with some financial backing from Shell, but critically he has a legal agreement which means that all the ideas generated through cquestrate remain open source.

Why should Shell care? Well partly because he wants to use lime as a means of capturing CO2 by adding it to seawater. Producing huge quantities of lime could be a viable (money making) use for the energy wasted in oil/gas production.

For more information see the site. As cased puts it:

… well, the site explanation actually then continues onward by answering the very question about to drop from my smug yet woefully uneducated lips :

One of the questions I often get asked is: if this is so simple why hasn’t it been done before? The idea has been around for a number of years. It was first suggested by Haroon Kheshgi in 1995, but it was considered uneconomic as the process uses a large amount of energy. What we are interested in doing is using stranded energy to drive the process.

Aha- well, that explains it. Its all down to stranded energy.

Well, I think it sounds like a wonderful idea – a bit of open sourcey, crowdsourcey goodness… if only I knew more about stranded energy and limestone…. hm.

Thank goodness for scientists! Please forward on this post to people who know what stranded energy is!

Other mentions:
Neural Transmissions
UmLud
Physorg
Juno