The Lausanne area continues to turn up interesting young companies and ventures, one of which is Bookapp, a joint venture between Frederic Kaplan who founded  Ozwé and Laurent Bolli, co-founder of Bread and Butter. People in Lausanne are forever climbing hills, which probably leads them to look for convenient shortcuts. Bookapp has developed a simple to use e-book search engine, a beta programme, which turned out to be useful in helping me find an e-book quickly. It’s called u.ki and through it I was able to get information about my own early-days print and e-book, China on the Ground.

The e-book business was still suffering growing pains on the production side in 2005, and I let the book more or less disappear because I wasn’t happy with the end product, the fault of no one in particular but rather of the state of the art at the time. The idea was to do an e-book with photos to accompany the print-on-demand paperback version since, at the time, these could not be printed with photos. The world wasn’t really ready for that. I couldn’t bear to let slide those 1985 photos, hard-earned as I dragged a Nikon with three lenses around on my bike in those pre-digital days.

As a result of ignoring the book, I was having trouble finding who has it. Now I know.

I then looked up a couple rather obscure travel writers and their book appeared promptly. Isabella Bird and her travels to Sichuan, Tibet, Hawaii and more. Peter Fleming, writerly brother of Ian, prolific fellow and good writer. Google has 40 references to him but Kindle none, tsk tsk.

A great little tool, this!

Now for some raw self-promotion (the China book, that is)

In case you want to know more about my travels for 10 weeks in China in 1985, crossing the country on a bicycle with one companion, most of the time in areas closed to foreigners (no one asked for papers so we cycled on), just write me for a copy of the pocket-size paperback, now on special offer here for CHF8, including postage if you’re in Switzerland, CHF7 plus postage if you’re elsewhere. I’ll provide the Paypal link or e-banking details. It’s designed to be read on the flight to China.

Here’s the description I re-found, thanks to u.ki: “China, on the Ground is a seasoned reporter’s personal notes on China today, in seven cities in one month (July 2005), compared to the country as she saw it 19 years earlier. It is an open letter to other travellers, primarily business people, who want a deeper understanding of the country than guidebooks offer, but who don’t have the time or interest at the moment for treatises on the subject. Ellen Wallace uses a light touch to compare China’s shift to a market economy country, viewed from the ground today, to the barrage of reports in the press. Most of these take the measure of China as it flies at high speed into the future, without pausing long to observe the Chinese as they move about their daily lives…”

The funniest part, for me, is rereading this, about my China travel companion in 2004, my son: “But the China of the future belongs to a new generation. In January 2004 Liam Bates, age 16, British, American and soon-to-be Swiss citizen, decided that he wanted to study Chinese in order to better learn wushu, often known (and misunderstood) in the West under the name “kung fu.” This was despite, and not because of, his parents’ trip to the fabled Middle Kingdom during the dark era before his birth.”

Today that boy is a TV star in China. Who could have predicted that in 1985?

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Melissa Fleming, head of communications at the UNHCR, the refugee organization, has been given some just praise for her active approach to using social media, by Devex, an international development news site. The Geneva-based group is one of the easiest for journalists to work with because of the ease with which they can find photos and videos, thanks to Fleming’s support for using flickr and YouTube. She also tweets and is working with local UNHCR offices to encourage greater use of social media.

Devex focuses, in its interview, on how Fleming and her team use social media. For other organizations grappling with the issues, this is a great starting point. Having 100,000 “likes” on Facebook is no small feat and says much about the organization’s effective approach to social media.

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Brian Ferris recently joined Google in Zurich but before he did he left a legacy that remains popular with public transport users in Seattle. Ferris, as a PhD student at the University of Washington, designed a handy little set of smart phone apps called One Bus Away, which allows people to see when buses are expected to arrive at their stops.

The Seattle Times reports that bus riders continue to use it, to the tune of 50,000 a week, and the university and public transit authorities are now working out a plan to keep it alive and up to date.

GeekWire reports that Ferris was hoping to develop more realtime transit services for Google once in Zurich; the company has rolled out testing for some similar programmes in a handful of cities in Europe and the US.

De Caferacer, The Netherlands: green school buses that use push-power are just one variety of group pedal powered vehicles (photo, De Caferacer)

De Cafe Racer from The Netherlands has taken the tandem bike to new heights, or at least lengths and widths, making group-powered bicycles that are used mainly for events.

Now they’re putting kids to work pedalling bikes not just for fun, but to fuel their own “green” school buses. Springwise writes that the buses hold 10 children plus an adult who has the option to add electric power, presumably to avoid slowing down as the children near school and lose power.

A bike-pooling bus clearly makes more sense health-wise than car-pooling.

De Caferacer, in Dutch

(With thanks to Bernino Lind, who pointed me to this)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Las Vegas is one crazy town any time, but possibly even more so when the world’s hackers hit the Strip. Mehdi Atmani, longtime journalist at Le Temps, is taking a week to cover two world hackers’ conventions, Defcon and Black Hat for a blog (in French). His first night in Vegas starts out well, but by morning his e-mail has been broken into and by the next day he’s being taken for a ride, the financial kind, by a 12-year-old.

You have to be a brave journalist to cover this story, I’m thinking, or ready to take on a new identity when you return home.

The recruitment office at UBC (University of British Columbia) in Canada apparently had nothing to do with the making of one of the most amazingly energetic short films of the year, but they must be pleased as punch. UBC LipDub has had close to half a million hits in the three days it’s been on YouTube: this is what people mean when they talk about viral.

The magic formula: take a talented group of young filmmakers with decent equipment and training, add a cast of a thousand or so volunteers, a hot musician, turn up the music and let loose. Add in a charity clause. In this case, for every view, some organizations will donate a sum of money to the Make a Wish Foundation. The training: UBC has one of the top film schools in North America. The musician: Marianas Trench.

By the end you’ll be wishing you were 18 or 20, if you aren’t, and able to head to school in Vancouver.

This is pure fun, and bravo to everyone who took part. And if you’re new to LipDub, read all about it on the UBC “what’s this” page.

But hats off to you anglophones who can spot the spelling errors! French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Facebook page was hacked Sunday night, 23 January, but the main interest it has generated appears to be over the spelling mistakes the hackers made. They left a message saying sorry, folks, I won’t be running in the next election because of the mess this country is in (rought translation). The president said he’s learned a lesson, about how nothing is invincible, but he sure hadn’t learned how to spell from them.

Here’s the French; now do  your homework.

“Chers Compatriotes, compte tenu des circonstances exceptionnelles que connaît notre pays, j’ai décidé en mon âme et conscience de ne pas me représenter à l’issue de mon premier mandat en 2012. Pour vous expliquer ce geste, je vous convie tous d’ores et déjà à ce grand événement populaire.”

"Packed", Zurich design students' project, cardboard circles dome, in Shangha

Three Zurich polytechnic (ETH) design students have created a remarkably airy and graceful dome from cardboard circles, called Packed. The project was displayed in November in Shanghai, China, as part of the 3D paperArt exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Arts and Crafts.

It is suddenly coming to life again on the web, on a number of design sites that have picked up the story, among them Dezeen, which regularly features beautiful student design work.

The Zurich threesome, Min‐Chieh Chen, Dominik Zausinger and Michele Leidi, created a “digitally designed pavilion [that is] is made up of 409 cylinders of different diameters and thicknesses, connected together with ties to create a dome-shaped grid of circles,” writes DeZeen, but the most remarkable part is that “for all steps, from design, production, logistics and packing in Zurich to shipping and assembly in Shanghai, the process was implemented and optimized by means of self‐made computer programs. By intelligently nesting and packing the cones the amount of material used, the production time and the shipping volume were significantly reduced.”

The movie, recently posted by the trio, is wonderful fun and the end result simply very impressive, even if it isn’t an all-weather pavilion, or maybe all the more so because it makes us long for days with sunshine and glorious loopy shadows at our feet.

I really dislike being around bats, but I love them from a safe distance, such as on my side of a natural history museum exhibit, or when watching a video of them. The grace and elegance of a fruit bat when it flies is something wonderful to behold and in the first video below you’ll see that they can be quite cute. Reuters reports 1 November that researchers at Brown University are working with the US military, which would like to develop planes based on the way the bats fly. A detailed Brown paper on the kinetics of slow turn maneuvering in bat flight might offer more information than you want, but it does have offer some fascinating details: bats maintain a mostly constant speed when turning and “in a typical turn, bats gained altitude during the first half of the turn and then maintained their height after turning, thereby increasing their net altitude during the turn.”

But you don’t have to be an engineer to follow the Reuters video where the Brown team are using wind tunnels to study bats in flight. The National Science Foundation also recently published a video on the work of professor Kenny Breuer and his team.

National Science Foundation:
Reuters:

Ivy Bean, age 104, has died, and Twitter is the worse for it. Bean, from Bradford, England, has been called the world’s oldest Twitter user. Whether or not she really was, the daily cup of cheer she poured, from someone who was, let’s face it, old, prompted thousands and thousands of people to follow her. I’ll leave CNN to tell you her story, but my two bits is this: she doesn’t seem to have been too concerned with who she was, just with staying in touch with the world. In the world of social media, where the who-I-want-to-be and who-I-am often don’t match, that kind of simplicity was a breath of fresh air.

More power to her! Bye-bye, Ivy Bean, and may your example live on.