The electricity provider EKZ in the canton of Zürich will build the largest photovoltaic solar power plant in Swetzerland with a projected 9 MW output.
Source: NZZ.ch
The Pirates are entering Berlin politics
For the first time has a Pirate Party entered the political arena for real. With nine percent of the votes in the election in Berlin, the German Piratenpartei managed to get a good bit above the threshold limit and enters the Berlin Abgeordnetehaus where it will have 15 of the 152 seats in the parliament.
Is this the beginning of a new political movement getting a foothold in German and European politics, much like the green parties once started their road to become a serious part of the European political landscape, or is it only a temporary fad and more of a protest against the established parties? It is yet a little too early to tell. There certainly are signs that the issues that the pirate parties count as their core areas – personal integrity, data protection, net freedom and the likes – are growing in importance, much like during the 1970s and 1980s the environment got in focus. The question is if this new set has the momentum needed to foster a new political alignment. That the Pirate Party get their first real success in Berlin is in itself not all that surprising. The city has a relatively large number of people with alternative lifestyle views and on top of that a booming creative and internet-focused culture. Even so it still must be seen as somewhat surprising that almost one tenth of the voters chose to give their vote to this yet untested party. The future will tell if the Pirates manage to repeat their electorial success in other, more traditional parts of Germany or not.
An article about one of Paris’ “hidden” attractions
Among Paris’ many attractions there are also a lot that aren’t as well-known as the main ones. Like a journey on the old partially underground canals in the Bastille area of the city. It’s blogged about in NZZ.ch.
When you can’t expand sideways, expand downwards
Singapore aims to become a transport hub for petroleum, but that means an expansion of the petroleum handling facilities which isn’t all that easy to accomplish in a city state where land is a scarce commodity. The solution? To expand downwards.
Source: BBC News
Otto von Habsburg – the end of an epoch
Otto von Habsburg, once crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, has died aged 98 and must be said to have had a remarkable life that spanned almost the entire 20th century. He can be said to have carried both the heritage of the old Europe, the visions of a new Europe, and the history of a century that put so many marks on the world.
The start of the Anthropocene?
The Nobel laureate in chemistry professor Paul Crutzen’s proposal of a new geological age is discussed.
Source: BBC News
German Greens’ success in BW
From what it looks, the German Greens have won their first government premier position in the state elections of Baden-Württemberg. With 24.2 percent of the votes the Green Party managed to become bigger than their traditional ally SPD with 23.1 percent. This by all likelyhood means that the next premier in Baden-Württemberg will be the Greens’ Winfried Kretchmann in a Green-SPD minority coalition government. The Christian Democratic CDU which are traditionally strong in the region got 39.0 percent of the vote and are now losing their grip over the state government for the first time since 1953.
Even if the circumstances can be said to be unusually in favour of the Greens’ politics, with the local debate over Stuttgart 21 – the big rebuilding of the railway station in Stuttgart – as the main focus and the nuclear disaster in Japan as a backdrop, it could also very well be seen as a possible bigger shift in political preferences, especially in Germany where the Greens have gone on to becoming a big, established party besides the traditional left and right parties SPD and CDU/CSU and catering to voters that want something else than the traditional parties.
“Betrayed by our own data”
Die Zeit has a very interesting article – in English even – showing exactly how much you can do with data collection from today’s mobile phones.
For a technology-interested geographer like me, it’s both very intriguing and a bit scary at the same time.
The problems with nuclear power
As if the earthquake and the following tsunami were not enough, Japan got into another nightmare with its damaged and apparently out-of-control Fukushima nuclear power plant.
It can of course be argued over the logic in the reasoning to construct nuclear plants in a region that is on the absolute top of the list when it comes to earthquake risks. Japan have naturally not been unaware of the risks involved, but have apparently deemed that in order to provide the electrical energy needed to power the world’s second largest economy the risks were worth taking. It now seems that the safeguards even in such a hightech country have not been sufficient.
It is not the first time the safety of Japan’s nuclear programme has been questioned, or even the first time incidents have cast a shadow on the policies. But this is by far the worst such incident.
Horribly devastating Japanese earthquake
The earthquake with its epicentre outside the northeastern coast of the Japanese main island of Honshu seems to have been an unusually bad one even by Japanese standards. By being an 8 on the Richter scale it is one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, and even if it struck the most earthquake-prepared country in the world, the devastation is massive.
Even if the actual earthquake itself most likely made for a not insignificant amount of damage, the really horrible part is without doubt the giant tsunami that it produced. With waves of up to ten metres, there simply cannot have been much in the way of disaster preparation that have withstood the destructive forces of the water.
One question that draws to mind is if this was the great earthquake that is expected to strike the Kanto region anytime now and to be compared to the destructive 1923 Kanto earthquake. According to the seismologists it maybe was not. Which provides for an equally horrible disaster scenario if that is the case. Because even if this current one struck further north than Tokyo it definitely to some degree affected the city as well, and we can only try to imagine if an earthquake of equal power would strike even closer to the Tokyo metropolitan region, considering the extreme destruction made by this current earthquake and tsunami on a less populated region than Kanto.
In either case, what is unfolding is a tragedy and unfortunately a very harsh reminder of how small we humans are compared to nature’s powers.
Huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan
There has been a very big earthquake in the sea outside the Japanese east coast. The earthquake apparently measured 8.8 on the Richter scale and has also produced a tsunami which hit part of the northeastern coast of Japan with waves up to ten metres in height. The city of Sendai and the Miyagi prefecture seem to be severely hit while large parts of eastern Honshu, including Tokyo, have been affected to different degrees.
Twitter subpoenas: Highlighting the problem with globalized data
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Althing – the parliament of Iceland – and a former Wikileaks supporter has apparently been informed by Twitter that the US Department of Justice has demanded that Twitter turns over the stored Twitter data they have regarding her account. This includes all actual tweets as well as some personal information about her. Not surprisingly, she is regarding the subpoena as a breach of privacy since she is not suspected of any crime. While Twitter have chosen to actually inform the targeted person of the existence of the subpoena, there seem to be a rising suspicion that other companies such as Google and Facebook are not as open toward their users. Which of course makes it an even worse privacy break since the persons are not even aware of that their personal information are eventually turned over to a third party, no matter that the third party happens to be a US governmental body.
The main problem here is not only the fact that personal user data aren’t as protected as the users in most case presume it to be, but also the fact that personal data belonging to persons not even in the legal jurisdiction of a country can be submitted to that country’s views of legality when it comes to data protection. In one way, if the process described in this case is deemed legal by US courts, it is perfectly legal. A sovereign state has the full right to have a bad legal protection when it comes to data – so long as it doesn’t go against any potential international treaties and agreement said state has signed of course. The problem however takes on a diffent dimension when personal data given up by persons not residing in or in any way having a connection to said state end up getting their personal information ceded to the authories in that state.
Now, of course there most likely is a clause in the user agreements for both Twitter, Facebook and Google that states something like that the user agrees to having their personal data stored and handled in the USA, and as such being under the jurisdiction of the US legal system. But the real question is how many of the millions of international users who are actually aware of this fact. Data protection and safety are tricky things, since they are so elusive in their geographical attachment.
Sources: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/08/us-twitter-hand-icelandic-wikileaks-messages, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jan/08/wikileaks-calls-google-facebook-us-subpoenas?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487