According to an article in Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Health, by a Danish researcher group, their hypothezis was that at temperate latitudes, 1–5% of the population suffer from winter depression; during winter, mood difficulties tend to increase but may be alleviated by bright light therapy. Unlike indoor workers, outdoor workers are exposed to therapeutic levels of sunlight during winter. Outdoor work may protect against mood difficulties and depression. http://www.sjweh.fi/show_abstract.php?abstract_id=3155

 If this hypothezis turns out to be true, IT workers now have a good opportunity to use a laptop that is adapted for mobile, outdoor work. The new TCO Certified Edge award for Outdoor Readability in Notebooks  will highlight leading edge Notebooks that offer high luminance as well as superior eco-design and image performance. Read more about this in our blog from the 24 of March , written by Stephen Fuller.

According to a report from World Watch Institute, Green innovations are clearly leading Chinese business today. This should be compared to former competitive advantages, such as low wages and low price production.
The Chinese government wants to, according to their five year plan, develop Green Tech and will be leading in the Clean Tech rally. In fact, this has already started. China will be the world´s leader in green and clean products.
They want to, and will, be the biggest in everything green and clean, such as electric cars, sustainable construction and energy efficiency.

In comparision to Europe´s problem in trying to stock exchange green enterprices, China has already six huge energy environment companies on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and two more are on it´s way.

The fight for Chinese Green money has started!

“The essence of good design is communication. Our relationship with objects and systems is a measure of how well they communicate our needs and feed back information. Usability is all about widening the channels of information so that our tools are designed to function effectively over the widest possible lifespan. Distinguishing between short-term individual wants and long-term community needs is the intelligent alternative to the prevailing strategy of growth for its own sake. The alternative to usability is uselessness.”

Read more on the website of World Usability Day.

TCO Development contributed to the conference by a presentation of a study of how local governments can work with greening their IT, under the title ” Green IT strategies in Swedish local authorities can save up to 700 million Euro per year”. The presentation was based on a recent study of 35 out of 280 Swedish local authorities, performed by Exido, Sweden.

Read more about this interesting conference on www.dunkerque.org
Read about ICLEI on http://iclei.org/;
about Sustainable Cities and Towns Campaign on http://www.sustainable-cities.eu/
Read more about Exido`s work on greening IT in Local Authorities on  http://www.exido.se/GronIT/

According to facts the volcano does not emit any bigger amounts of CO2 itself. Probably it will even chill down the so far too high global temperature. Though how  will the damage from toxic emissions effect on humans and nature? Positive reactions are seen on the usage of video meetings instead of flying to each other on physical meetings.

Other tecnical innovations will prosper. So even if volcano eruptions are not typical examples, this one has clearly started product and service development towards virtual meetings.

Earth Hour will soon occur, on Saturday 27 of March from 8.30 pm, we are all recommended to shut down our lighting for one hour. A good recommendation is to practice an Earth Hour every day, during lunch or other convenient time. And do not forget also to switch off your computer.
Read how to activiate energy saving function on your computer.

What do you do while reading this text? Or looking up from the newspaper, watching the TV in the background?  Or reading with one eye a text message, just arrived in your cell phone? Or updating your Facebook status? Thinking quickly about an email you should have answered yesterday? Yes, you probably take  your time with a lot of little things as you are trying to focus on reading an article.

This is how our media and communications processes often look today. This form of “wandering attention”, that comes from the way we always are available, is called “continuous partial attention”,  by the American scientist and technology thinker Linda Stone. She is a writer and consultant who coined this phrase in 1998.  Stone also coined “email apnea” in 2008, showing that people tend to keep their breath while e-mailing, starting biochemical processes in the body, in the long run resulting in stress related illnesses.

But even if  the ever shared attention is stressful for us Linda Stone and other researchers have found that there are advantages in being  distracted or taking small breaks when we are focused on a task. Short breaks from job may give new energy and new ideas about how to solved tasks.  According to study results from researcher Michael Kane, University of North Carolina, our focus moves from what we are doing about one third of the time. It indicates that this behavior probably plays an important part  in our brains. Other studies also show that when we are daydreaming,  or allowing the mind to fly freely for a while,  brain regions associated with savings in long-term memory are activated, helping the brain to save information better. When the mind flaps away in non mental demanding breaks it activates the  parts of the brain that helps us to solve problems. So when we look out of the window thinking of nothing special or standing in the shower, where we are not connected, our brain  keeps doing advanced creative work. This is something completely different from continious partial attention!

 So think about  how you breathe when unopened e-mails fill the screen. And begin to see Facebook and looking out of the windows not as time wasters or signs of poor work ethic but as important parts of your job performance. For even though most of us cannot take a three-hour walk in the woods during working hours, maybe a bit wandering surfing through the  images from your friend’s bachelor party can make you a little more creative and efficient.

 I quote Linda  from her web: “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”

Read more at www.lindastone.net

If a picture is to conclude the 2000 century it will neither be the crasched twin towers, nor the forests of bragging skyscrapers in Shanghai or Dubai. No, the symbol is the empty search field. We meet it daily in Google, Wikipedia, Spotify, Eniro, the Pirate Bay and everywhere on the web where we are looking for something: the persistently pocking marker. “What do you search for” it asks. “What do you do here?” “What do you want“?

Instead of moving about in the city, chasing along streets and buildings with our eyes, we are seated at our keyboard, staring at the search field. Instead of groping about in countless stores chasing for a good laptop we search for it on the web, cross referring among search engines and sites for price comparisions.

Smart architects have realized that the city space is changing in its margins and thus design and build houses in two dimensions, on our web browsers!  Zaha Hadid has reached the most advanced solutions in his Google Earth-architecture – the buildings look better from above than in street level.

Whith a huge investment on smart phones they create a constant presence in the streets. The building The Cloud,  proposed at the Olympic arena in 2012, is an internet time observation platform. It takes the observer on a strange sky trip which is full of information noise. This is the empty search field in a physical shape.  Because, when climbing up its twisted, windling  stairs, blinking and lost, we ask ourself:  why are we not at home watching the olympic games in our web browser?

Welcome also to Earth Hour 2010 Conference, organized by WWF, World Wide Found for Nature, on 23 March at 1.00 pm – 5.30 pm, in the Golden Hall, Stockholm City Hall. The conference will present a series of pioneering examples of how business, politics and public sectors together can solve the global climate challenge.

If you can read Swedish,  more on WWF site

For more information check also the official website for Earth Hour