Seventh annual Greenhouse Gas Report 3 main gases continuing to rise
Aletsch glacier, seen from the Jungfrau in August 2011; Swiss researchers are tracking Alpine permafrost changes (photo ©2011 Ellen Wallace)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Planet Earth’s three main greenhouse gases continue to rise significantly, says the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva.
It released the seventh annual World Greenhouse Bulletin Monday 21 November, showing that N2O, nitrous oxide, is now the third most important greenhouse gas, accounting for 6 percent of gases in the atmosphere. N2O plays an important role in the destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer which protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun,” according to the WMO.
It is increasing far more rapidly than carbon dioxide (CO2), which accounts for roughly 80 percent and methane, roughly 18 percent.
The Bulletin “reports on atmospheric concentrations, and not emissions, of greenhouse gases. Emissions represent what goes into the atmosphere. Concentrations represent what remains in the atmosphere after the complex system of interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere and the oceans.”
Measurements are made by a network of stations in more than 50 countries which make up the WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch Programme. The measurement data are quality controlled, archived and distributed by WMO’s World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases, hosted by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).
World’s growing use of fertilizers, including manure behind N2O rise
Nitrous oxide “is emitted into the atmosphere from natural and man-made sources, including the oceans, biomass burning, fertilizer use and various industrial processes,” the report states.
“The atmospheric burden of nitrous oxide in 2010 was 323.2 parts per billion – 20% higher than in the pre-industrial era. It has grown at an average of about 0.75 parts per billion over the past 10 years, mainly as a result of the use of nitrogen containing fertilizers, including manure, which has profoundly affected the global nitrogen cycle. Its impact on climate, over a 100 year period, is 298 times greater than equal emissions of carbon dioxide.”
Northern permafrost loss a concern as methane levels rise again
Scientists are also concerned about the rise again of methane, after a period of temporary relative stabilization from 1999 to 2006, according to the report. “Since 1750, it has increased 158%, mostly because of activities such as cattle-rearing, rice planting, fossil fuel exploitation and landfills. Human activities now account for 60% of methane emissions, with the remaining 40% being from natural sources such as wetlands.” Researchers are looking into the reasons for the new increase, “including the potential role of the thawing of the methane-rich Northern permafrost and increased emissions from tropical wetlands.”
Carbon dioxide remains largest contributor to “climate forcing”
(CO2) is the single most important man-made greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Monday’s report shows that it”
“contributes about 64% to total increase in climate forcing by greenhouse gases. Since the start of
the industrial era in 1750, its atmospheric abundance has increased by 39% to 389 parts per million
(number of molecules of the gas per million molecules of dry air). This is primarily because of
emissions from combustion of fossil fuels, deforestation and changes in land-use.
Between 2009 and 2010, its atmospheric abundance increased by 2.3 parts per million – higher than
the average for both the 1990s (1.5 parts per million) and the past decade (2.0 parts per million).
For about 10,000 years before the start of the industrial era in the mid-18th century, atmospheric
carbon dioxide remained almost constant at around 280 parts per million.”
Some improvement offset by other increases: CFCs
There is one bright spot in the report: some halocarbons are slowing decreasing, notably chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), widely used only a few years ago as refrigerants, propellants in spray cans and solvents but now widely banned. “However, concentrations of other gases such as HCFCs and HFCs, which are used to substitute CFCs because they are less damaging to the ozone layer, are increasing rapidly. These two classes of compounds are very potent greenhouse gases and last much longer in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A group of scientists with Italy’s Gran Sasso research centre say their measurements of neutrinos sent by the Cern labs in Geneva indicate colleagues are mistaken in thinking these have travelled faster than the speed of light. They published their findings Saturday 19 November.
Another group of Gran Sasso researchers, working south of Rome with the Opera programme at Cern in Geneva, claimed in September 2011 that they measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Their finding provoked a flurry of scientific debate, given the implications for physics of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Robert Evans of Reuters in Geneva reports that the second Gran Sasso group, working far below the ground, published a paper on the Cornell University Library site Saturday that refutes this: “Icarus, another experiment at Gran Sasso—which is deep under mountains and run by Italy’s National Institute of National Physics—now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.”
The new paper comes just days after other reports came in that appeared to confirm the Opera group’s initial findings. The Cern team that announced its findings in September were careful to say they were not announcing a discovery, but rather the results of their tests, inviting speculation and debate over the implications of these.
Republished with permission from Geneva-based IP Watch
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – With protests against draft US legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act ongoing and the European Parliament voting on 17 November for a resolution to request that the United States should be “refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names,” politicians are talking a lot about technology for the internet domain name system. But at the same time, engineers are getting more political and are intensively discussing technology providing the tools for blocking – by governments and private parties.
For the community that cares for the functioning of the domain name system (DNS), it came as a shock when Paul Vixie, founder of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), said that the BIND software would allow the filtering out of sites with a bad “reputation” – like listed malware sites – and also the “rewriting” of DNS answers – manipulating what people get to see when asking for domain names.
Vixie is a guru of the DNS and one of the authors of the letter by well-known experts against DNS blocking in the Protect IP Act. But he is perhaps best-known for being the father of BIND, which has for a decade been the open source tool that makes the DNS work.
More Filter-Friendly DNS Software
Jim Reid, one of the chairs of the DNS working group at the Réseaux IP Europeéns, said during a recent debate about principles that he was “rather saddened” by ISC’s decision to allow the rewriting. “We’re giving the bad guys tools,” Reid warned.
The rewriting – which sends back a “lie” upon a request to the DNS from someone looking for a website – “also sends a rather nasty message saying it’s okay to do this kind of thing.” What is worse from the engineers’ standpoint with the rewriting is that it breaks new measures to secure the DNS, because the “lies” are detected and dropped without users knowing what happened.
The ‘lying” is currently happening for domains seized by the US government agency ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), some of them legal in their country of origin, like the Spanish RojaDirecta.com (a case discussed intensively by the experts). When typing RojaDirecta.com, users do not get to that site, but to a warning/blocking site by the ICE.
It is this kind of case that has stirred up debate in the European Parliament, pushed by the European Digital Right initiative (EDRi). Read more…
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) ended its 180-day 2011 proton run programme on the LHC (Large Hadron Collidor), Sunday evening 30 October. The proton-proton collisions have been providing data for research programmes.
The Geneva-based organization is now preparing the LHC for four weeks of lead-ion running, “but in a new development this year, the world’s largest particle accelerator will also attempt to demonstrate that large can also be agile by colliding protons with lead ions in two dedicated periods of machine development. If successful, these tests will lead to a new strand of LHC operation, using protons to probe the internal structure of the much more massive lead ions,” Cern says in a statement.
“This is important for the lead-ion programme, whose goal is to study quark-gluon plasma, the primordial soup of particles from which the ordinary matter of today’s visible universe evolved.
“‘Smashing lead ions together allows us to produce and study tiny pieces of primordial soup,’”said ALICE Spokesperson Paolo Giubellino, ‘but as any good cook will tell you, to understand a recipe fully, it’s vital to understand the ingredients, and in the case of quark-gluon plasma, this is what proton-lead ion collisions could bring.’”
The objective for the LHC at the start of 2011 was “to deliver a quantity of data known to physicists as one inverse femtobarn during the course of 2011.
The first inverse femtobarn came on 17 June, setting the experiments up well for the major physics conferences of the summer and requiring the 2011 data objective to be revised upwards to five inverse femtobarns. That milestone was passed by 18 October, with the grand total for the year being almost six inverse femtobarns delivered to each of the two general-purpose experiments Atlas and CMS.”
Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology, says, “The present data production rate is a factor of 4 million higher than in the first run in 2010 and a factor of 30 higher than at the beginning of 2011.”
Cern triggered a heated and ongoing scientific debate when it announced in September that its Opera project had measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, a finding that if confirmed upsets one of the tenets of physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Ed. note: Irish musicians who sang for US President Barack Obama at his inauguration in 2008 are now releasing a new song, taking the mickey out of Albert Einstein and Cern. Ger Corrigan, the band’s lead singer, says “for the moment we are backing Albert and his theory, I’m no Einstein but he was.”
This editorial has been moved to the Editor’s Notepad blog, where it was originally intended to sit (apologies for the early morning confusion).
Parliament's few Italian speakers would like to see the government using Italian regularly, but too few Swiss politicians understand the language well
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Federal Council agreed Tuesday 11 October to allow SSR, Switzerland’s public broadcast corporation, to start broadcasting in French in the country’s German-speaking regions. Programmes picked up from TSR and RSR, in French, will be sub-titled for German language audiences.
Italian-language programmes from Radiotelevisione Svizzera (RSI) are also covered by the revised licensing agreement, which goes into effect 1 November.
The change was made as part of efforts to improve multilingualism in Switzerland.
screen shots, new "my weather" worldwide service (source: Apple iTunes)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Hong Kong Observatory launched a new mobile app, “my weather”, Monday 10 October, designed to help travellers quickly find the official weather report for their area, anywhere in the world.
The new app features the World Weather Information Service (WWIS) and is the world’s first-ever location-specific weather service providing official city weather forecasts around the world for people on the move, says Geneva-based WMO.
The free app has location-based technology that detects the user’s location and it automatically displays the latest official weather forecasts and climatological information of the city nearest to the user.
“It provides a quick search function that allows users to obtain the latest official weather information from over 1,400 cities around the world. The application also enables users to create bookmarks for easy access to weather forecasts for cities of their choice in the future,” according to WMO.
The new app can be downloaded at http://itunes.apple.com/
Ed. note: I just downloaded and used it – up came Swiss, Italian and German cities, since it uses cities in a 200km range. Weather forecast is equally gloomy in all areas.
©2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday, age 56. The news was announced by Apple in a brief tribute on the company’s home page: “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Jobs died of a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He had been ill for months and in August he resigned as CEO of the company he started with Steve Wozniak in 1976. His up-and-down relationship with the company he founded turned around in 1997 when he re-joined the company after 12 years away, and turned it into one of the most valuable companies in US business.
Tributes to Jobs, the man who turned Apple into the world’s largest technology company, are appearing in media around the world, but the most overwhelming public praise has come from China, where more than 35 million tributes were posted online in just hours early Thursday.
Links to other sites: Economic Times, India, Gizmodo Australia, Hindustan Times, PC World, Reuters Canada, the Wirecutter (on Gizmodo’s theft of iPhone 4 and relationship with Jobs), Xinhuanet
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – “Here comes the Cloud” might not be a tune the Beatles wrote, but Apple is doing a pretty good job with the silver-lining idea, announcing widely 4 October that the new cloud technology is available for its fans 12 October.
It “stores your music, photos, apps, contacts, calendars, documents, and more, keeping them up to date across all your devices, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated automatically and wirelessly,” the company said Tuesday. The set of cloud services is free and includes iTunes in the Cloud, Photo Stream, and Documents in the Cloud. Detail: you need to upgrade to iOS5.
The latest version of the industry standard iPhone was also released, but to little excitement, with the new iPhone 4S. Gizmodo languidly notes that “Apple’s new iPhone 4S is just last year’s design loaded with a new brain and more memory. It will run your apps faster and Apple’s new iOS5′s Assistant, an artificial intelligence program that listens and interprets your orders, and a new camera.” Writer Jesus Diaz waxes a little more enthusiastic as he details some of the new features.
Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Faster than a speeding bullet, faster even than the speed of light, neutrinos flying in beams sent through the Earth’s crust the 730km between Cern in Geneva and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy are astonishing the world scientific community. Initial measurements of the neutrinos have given scientists startling results, showing them to travel at 20 parts per million above “the world’s cosmic speed limit”, the speed of light.
Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral.
The Opera project, which has thus far measured some 15,000 neutrino events, has prompted Cern to open access to other scientists to better understand the results, the Geneva group says in a statement Friday, linked to a seminar on the results. The surprising results, which fly in the face of accepted science, must be independently verified, says Cern. Checks for faulty equipment and methodology have turned up nothing.
“The Opera measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature, though science frequently progresses by overthrowing the established paradigms,” Cern notes in its Friday statement. “For this reason, many searches have been made for deviations from Einstein’s theory of relativity, so far not finding any such evidence. The strong constraints arising from these observations makes an interpretation of the Opera measurement in terms of modification of Einstein’s theory unlikely, and give further strong reason to seek new independent measurements.”
“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said Opera spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While Opera researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
“When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no artefact of the measurement to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny, and this is exactly what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific practice,” says Cern’s research director Sergio Bertolucci.
WWF shines a light on the new bulbs, with old ones disappearing next year
Photo: WWF
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – The WWF conservation group is giving us a helping hand four months before the shock sets in of discovering you can’t just replace your old light bulb with the same thing. Switzerland in the autumn of 2012 will bury its incandescent lights and replace them with LED ones that consume seven times less energy for the same amount of luminosity and other energy-efficient products.
Only 5 percent of the energy transformed by traditional incandescent lights goes into light. The rest simply dissipates as heat.
The Swiss consume 8.2 billion kilowatt hours a year and, says WWF, this could be cut in half “and thus avoiding the need for the Muehleberg nuclear power plant”.
WWF is publishing a guide this week to the pros and cons of the new lighting technology, called “Lumière” in French (available in French and German). It evaluates lighting products already on the market and compares their energy efficiency, using a visual stop-and-go system of red to green.
The group’s recommendations:
- buy LED, fluorescent or energy efficient lights, keeping in mind that while the latter are more expensive than today’s incandescent lights, their lifespan of 30,000 hours is twice that of our old bulbs
- when buying lighting systems, buy only systems that use the new lightbulbs/tubes (TopTen is a consumer product comparison site)
- avoid classic spots and halogen lamps, which are barely more efficient than incandescent lighting
- eco-halogen as well is lighting that makes little real improvement.
The brochure is available online and can also be consulted while shopping, via smartphone (“Guide WWF”)
Download French version of Factsheet on lights and lighting
GenevaLunch apologizes for the inconvenience but due to a cut cable we lost our Internet connection for a couple hours. Stories written earlier today will now start appearing, along with the latest news.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The official Swiss mapping system is now available for smart phones, iPhones and iPads, at mobile.map.geo.admin.ch. The wealth of information that uses highly detailed maps as a starting point is free of charge (except for your Internet connection), requires no additional software and is ad-free.
The Mapviewer system has been available online for a year and now has 10,000 users a day. It runs in five languages, including English; select Beta mobile version in the menu for smartphones.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The EPFL polytechnic institute in Lausanne and Aimago, a spinoff startup company, have been awarded CHF10,000 and given the top prize of the CTI (federal innovation and technology commission) Medtech Award. Aimago, which makes microcirculation cameras, has developed a camera that measures dermal blood flow. Its main application is likely to be for burns, to more rapidly and accurately determine the degree of burns.
CTI describes how the camera works:
“The Doppler effect allows the measurement of light reflected by red blood cells using a laser beam, to determine the quality of the blood flow. The precise measurement of dermal blood flow offers many advantages, not only for burns injuries, but also for plastic surgery, wound healing, diabetes, rheumatology and neurosurgery. The numerous areas of application provide the ambitious new company from Lausanne with promising business potential.”
The company placed first out of a field of 44 companies that applied for the award. The CTI Medtech Initiative was launched in 1997 and has since supported around 300 projects, says the federal office. Its 2010 budget of CHF10.2 million funded 33 projects; other partners provided an additional CHF14.4m.
Atlas detector, Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The elusive Higgs-Boson particle is proving to be ghost-like, says Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Results from Cern’s Atlas and CMS projects were presented at the biannual Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India 22 August.
Results of these collaborative projects using the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) “show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide. Proving or disproving the existence the Higgs-Boson, which was postulated in the 1960s as part of a mechanism that would confer mass on fundamental particles, is among the main goals of the LHC scientific programme,” the group says in a press release.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – McAfee, the computer security firm, has issued a startling report showing what it calls a “historically unprecedented transfer of wealth” through hacking, with signs that the party behind the attacks is more interested in information than econonic gain. Among the 72 identified victims of attacks that quietly occurred from 2006-2011: the United Nations in Geneva, whose system was infiltrated for two years and the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, infiltrated for just one month. National Olympic Committees were also infiltrated, as were a number of multinational companies, non-profit political groups and more.
McAfee says it is naming some of the victims because “after painstaking analysis of the logs, even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators. Although we will refrain from explicitly identifying most of the victims, describing only their general industry, we feel that naming names is warranted in certain cases, not with the goal of attracting attention to a specific victim organization, but to reinforce the fact that virtually everyone is falling prey to these intrusions, regardless of whether they are the United Nations, a multinational Fortune 100 company, a small non-profit think-tank, a national Olympic team, or even an unfortunate computer security firm.”
Minitel, circa 1982
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The impending death of the Minitel in France has been announced: France Telecom will end its services 30 June 2012, despite a reported 10 million terminals still in use, according to Telecom TV, and daily use of the system by some 25 million people in France, about 42 percent of the total population.
Thirty years ago when the French government, which then owned the national telecommunications system, introduced the Minitel, well in advance of the Internet, the screen and keyboard solution to France’s telephone needs enjoyed almost instant popularity. The terminals were offered for free and services were cheap and seemed very avant-garde at the time, but the Internet has gradually eroded its success.
Emys, a robot developed as part of the Lirec (Living with robots and interactive companions) project funded by the EC (photo, ©2011 LIREC)
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – The European Commission 20 July agreed to commit €7 billion to research and development, in what it says is its “biggest ever European Commission funding package”, designed to create some 174,000 jobs in the short term and another 450,000 in the long term and to stimulate nearly €80 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) growth within the next 15 years.
Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn says the package will be used for stimulating European innovation through research funding.
The funding will take the form of grants to 16,000 recipients in European universities and research organizations and to industry specialists, with “a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises”.
“A common problem is bridging the gap between research and the market, and this funding can help demonstrate the commercial potential of a new technology, for example, or that a new idea can work on a sufficiently large scale to be industrially viable,” the EC notes on Cordis, its news site.
“Challenges like climate change, energy and food security, health and an aging population can be better managed if public sector intervention is used effectively to stimulate the private sector and remove bottlenecks stopping the best and brightest ideas from reaching the market, due to problems such as a lack of finance or fragmentation in research.”
How the money will be spent
The EC details how the funds will be distributed. Key points include:
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – A Zurich start-up, CloudBroker, and researchers from ETH Zurich’s Institute of Molecular Systems Biology have partnered with IBM in a break-through medical research project that shows the huge potential of computing clouds to do far more than make our daily digital lives easier. The cutting-edge research project promises to shed light on antimicrobial pathogens in an effort to more rapidly develop antibiotics to fight disease.
There is a growing urgency to find new antibiotic solutions. IBM, in its press release about the project, says that
“according to the World Health Organization, the number of antimicrobial resistant pathogens is increasing dramatically, threatening treatments to tuberculosis, malaria and other now common illnesses caused by various bacteria. The study of bacterial proteins has become increasingly important as understanding the complex elements of bacteria can play a vital role in determining risks and determining drugs that can fight resistant strands.”
The researchers were able, in just two weeks, to rapidly handle massive amounts of data to identify nearly 250 potential “virulence factors”: proteins of a harmful streptococcus bacterium and to then model nearly 2.3 million three-dimensional structures.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Solar Impulse made it home safely from Paris, warmed not only by the sun but by its success in the French capital, with more than 350,000 visitors during the Le Bourget airshow. The plane made three journeys for a total of about 1,500km during its maiden European flights sojourn.
“The feedback from our European flight campaign is encouraging,” says Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse founder and president. “The welcome we received from political and industrial circles in Brussels and Paris shows that Solar Impulse is pioneering a new way of thinking in terms of renewable energy and energy saving.”
The plane on its three trips was sailing through the air at about 50kph on sunny days: it’s easy for observers on the ground to forget how sensitive the giant solar bird really is and that these maiden flights are test flights. Solar Impulse could have landed earlier than 19:45 in Payerne, but thermal bubbles created over the autoroutes, rail lines and towns can de-stabilize it.
The information and experience gathered during the flights will now be put to work in planning the next stage of the solar airplane adventure, possibly a flight to Morocco, pilot Andre Borschberg said during his Sunday flight.
Solar Impulse at Le Bourget airport in Paris, during the solar airplane's first European trip
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Solar Impulse, flying with only solar power, is en route to Switzerland from Paris. The plane left Le Bourget airport in France at 07:11 Sunday 3 July and is expected to arrive in Payerne at 19:00 this evening.
You can follow the flight live on www.solarimpulse.com and via the Smartphone app “Solar Impulse Inventing the Future”, available free on Appstore and Androïd Market.
On Twitter: @andreborschberg and @solarimpulse and on Facebook.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Solar Impulse’s return flight to Switzerland from Paris will not take place Friday as planned, the solar airplane’s team said lat Thursday 30 June. “Air traffic restrictions and weather conditions in the Jura region and in Paris would prevent Solar Impulse from returning back its take-off location in case of a technical problem,” the group said in a statement.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland moved up three places from its 2010 position to take the top spot in the Global Innovation Index (GII), followed by Sweden and Singapore. The index is designed to encourage public-private dialogue on innovation as a key driver for economic growth. Switzerland was in 7th place in 2009. Its first place rank is due to a combination of factors that rate its enabling environment for innovation as well as its actual performance.
French business school Insead produces the GII in partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and Geneva-based Wipo (World Intellectual Property Organization).
Shumeet Banerji, chief executive officer of Booz & Company says, “The ability to innovate is the great equalizer in the global economy. In the industrial era, nations relied on their natural resources to compete. Today, any country can advance with carefully focused investments in talent and R&D. The performance of some emerging economies in this year’s GII shows what nations can accomplish with a focus on building 21st century economies.”
How the index is computed
The Global Innovation Index, Insead and Wipo say in a joint statement about this year’s winners, “is computed as an average of the scores across inputs pillars (describing the enabling environment for innovation) and output pillars (measuring actual achievements in innovation). Five pillars constitute the Innovation Input Sub-Index: ‘Institutions,’ ‘Human capital and research,’ ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Market sophistication’ and ‘Business sophistication’. The Innovation Output Sub-Index is composed of two pillars: ‘Scientific outputs’ and ‘Creative outputs’. The Innovation Efficiency Index, calculated as the ratio of the two Sub-Indices, examines how economies leverage their enabling environments to stimulate innovation results.”
Strong political environment, weaker in terms of human capital
Switzerland performed well in the index in terms of its political environment, and relatively well for business and market sophistication as well as scientific outputs, but it was weaker on human capital and research, infrastructure and creative outputs.
The index includes a long series of tables, where Switzerland’s performance is uneven, showing its expenditure on education, for example, as lagging, but its research institutes second only to Israel in the world. Israel is the only country that produces more scientific and technical journal articles. Its industry/university collaboration on R&D is second only to that of the US. Switzerland spends more on computer software as a percentage of DGP, than any other country.
Complete Global Innovation Index, downloadable PDF available
Heading home: Solar Impulse could be back in its hangar in Payerne by Friday night, after its big European flights trip, weather permitting
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Solar Impulse appears to have a window of opportunity Friday 1 July to fly home from the Le Bourget airshow in Paris, where it has been a centre of attention after making its first international flights using only solar power. The weather promises to be fine and sunny for the Paris-Payerne run but the flight director could decide at the last minute to make a change to the departure date or the flight plan.
The plane will take off in the morning from Paris-le Bourget and climb to a cruising altitude of 3,500 meters. The plane’s team has released the following details:
“The plane will fly east towards Troyes, will continue to Pontarlier and land at Payerne airfield at the end of the day.
Alpine plants could play a role in mountain areas' sustainable development
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland is host to the world’s first symposium on medicinal and herbal mountain plants, in Saas Fee, canton Valais, starting 5 July. Experts from around the world will be presenting 120 papers on the value-added potential of alpine plants for cosmetics, food and medicine, part of the exploration of the possible role of these plants in sustainable development in mountain areas. Prof. Hostettmann of the University of Geneva will open the conference with his paper on this theme.
High altitudes plants have long been known for their special qualities, such as the powerful antioxidant features of edelweiss.
The conference is jointly hosted by Switzerland’s agricultural research stations and the International Society for Horticultural Sciences.
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Swissinfo, SSR’s foreign language online news service and the largest web-based provider of news in English about Switzerland, will undergo major staffing cuts in the next 18 months, saving CHF9 million a year from its CHF26m annual budget. The savings will be split equally between SSR, Switzerland’s public broadcast company, and the Swiss federal government, which has mandated Swissinfo’s work.
The rationale appears to be to ensure the longer-term feasibility of Swissinfo in an online world that has changed radically since it was created 10 years ago, a phoenix rising from the ashes of the old Swiss International Radio. Swissinfo’s target audience is primarily foreigners interested in knowing more about Switzerland and the Swiss abroad. Its mandate has been, since the beginning, to provide in-depth information to foreigners on political, economic cultural and social aspects of Switzerland.
The site had traffic in 2009 of 23.7 million visits and about three times as many pages viewed. Its Facebook page is one of the most successful of any European media, with more than 100,000 fans, a figure that climbs to 200,000 if other social media platforms are taken into account.
Swissinfo was recently given a mandate by the government to add a tenth language, Russian.
Two-thirds of the staffing cuts will be technical and support staff, some of whom will be reassigned to SSR, and one-third will be editorial staff, mainly in Switzerland’s national languages with the three languages (French, German, Italian) regrouped as one editorial unit.
Two-thirds of the jobs lost will be through retirement or early retirement or reassignment, leaving 12-13 posts to be cut.
Swissinfo publishes in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and soon Russian.
Note to our readers: the server database at our hosting company was down part of Friday afternoon, which caused problems for some of our visitors: please accept our apologies. It also meant we couldn’t post some stories as planned, so we’ll be catching up today. Thanks for your patience. – Ellen Wallace, editor
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GENEVALUNCH – The race is on at Cern, the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva, to complete results on a number of experiments in time for the physics world’s major summer conferences, and Friday 17 June a landmark was reached that is encouraging researchers.
“Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments Atlas and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments’ quest for new physics,” Cern says in a statement. “The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million (70×1012) collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run. That it has been achieved just three months after the first beams of 2011 is testimony to how well the LHC is running.”
The Higgs mechanism and supersymmetry are among the new physics sought by the experiments.
“The Higgs mechanism, and its associated particle, is the last missing ingredient of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics that explains the behaviour and interactions of the fundamental particles that make up the ordinary matter from which we and everything around us are made. The Higgs mechanism gives rise to the masses of certain particles.”
“Ordinary matter, however, appears to be only around 4% of what the Universe is made of. Supersymmetry is a theory that goes beyond the Standard Model. It is a more elegant theory of ordinary matter, and could also explain the mysterious dark matter that makes up about a quarter of the universe. With one inverse femtobarn there’s a real chance that, if these theories are correct, they will start to manifest themselves in the data.”
