On your bike?

One student fights back with a design for rail commuters

Robert Dumaresq nabs the gold in the Australian Design Award - James Dyson Award for his foldable "switch commuter bike". Photo: John Woudstra

Daniella Miletic

May 30, 2009

ABOUT the time Robert Dumaresq was choosing his project for the final year of his industrial design degree, Melbourne commuters were being banned from carrying bikes on trains during rush hours.

The controversial ban was reversed but the issue inspired the then 22-year-old Monash University student to create what he now calls the "switch commuter bike" — a high-performance bike that folds into the footprint of just one wheel.

"The trains are there for everyone and to just kick bikes off I thought was a bit unfair," said Mr Dumaresq, now 23.

He said it was clear to him that carrying bikes on transport would continue to be a problem as the city's train network got busier and more people started to use a train and bike combination to get to work. This, plus the glares he received from travellers when he took his bike on crowded trains, meant he quickly set about making a bike that would fold and be easy to handle on board.

"There was nothing on the market that fulfilled what I wanted," he said. "I wanted to try and avoid relying on a big block that can be a weak part of the frame and also having to take parts off the bike to actually fold it."

First, Mr Dumaresq used a full-size cardboard cut-out to work through the initial stages of his design. Later, he started "body storming" — brainstorming with bike pieces.

"Then I started developing it through sketching and 3D modelling and prototyping to a point at the end of first semester where I had a rough mock-up to prove the concept."

Mr Dumaresq was last night awarded the coveted 2009 gold Australian Design Award — James Dyson Award for his prototype. "I am still blown away by people's reactions to it and the amount of attention it has got," he said. "It's something I have been so close to for a long time now that it is really satisfying that people can get into it and see the demand out there for it."

Mr Dumaresq, of Armadale, and the 12 other finalists will be entered into the James Dyson Award international competition, where they will vie with students from more than 20 countries for a $20,000 prize.

Mr Dumaresq said he always wanted to design and showed early signs of having a technical mind. He loved Lego as a child and said he can think "a lot better three-dimensionally".

It is his dream to design for the cycling industry, a combination of two passions. He is looking for an investor for his bike and for a full-time job. "We are trying to encourage a greener lifestyle and get more people using environmentally friendly transport — and cycling is the best way," he said. "The more we can do to encourage people to cycle, the better."

Google wave is coming to swamp you

Look out Outlook, Google's Wave is coming to swamp you

Google engineer Lars Rasmussen.Photo: Tamara Voninski
Stephen Hutcheon in San Francisco May 29, 2009 - 6:01AM

A team of Google engineers from Australia has unveiled a prototype replacement for standard email that abandons the reliance on the chronological sorting and stacking of messages which has been the hallmark of one of the internet's first and still most popular applications.
Christened Google Wave, the new feature was given its first public viewing in San Francisco earlier this morning Australian time at Google's annual developers' conference.
"I think you will see a form of interaction that you would not have previously imagined," Google co-found Sergey Brin told a post-launch press conference.
Wave - which began life as a project codenamed Walkabout - is a combination of email and instant messaging and document-, maps- image- and video-sharing all housed under one roof.
Much like a conference call, it also allows for conversations between more than two people to happen simultaneous.
And because it all happens inside a web browser, there is no special software to download or plug-in - which means it can be used from any computer or internet-enabled mobile phone.
"Our communication space is very fragmented today. We have a million different tools for different things with lots of different kinds of overlaps," said Lars Rassmussen, a senior software engineer with Google Australia
"The most natural way to try and solve that problem is to take all those different tools and try to make them smaller and fit into a single package and maybe integrate them across the boundaries."
Wave is being released so that the developers - independent software creators - can help iron out the remaining bugs and cook-up a swag of new uses for the service and the platform upon which it is based ahead of a public release later this year.
But Wave is more than just another of Google's ubiquitous free web services. It's also a protocol - meaning that it is going after email's mantle as the predominant internet communications tool.
And despite the recent growth of web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail, most of the world's email runs through Microsoft's Outlook client.
And to encourage organisations to catch the Wave, Google is offering it up as an open source protocol, meaning that anyone - even a competitor - can box it up and host it on their servers.
Wave is the creation of Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who together with Australian Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma - founded and later sold what became known as Google Maps to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2005.
Lars has worked for Google and lived in Australia since the sale and enticed Jens to leave Google's headquarters near join him in 2007.
The pair and the Wave team - who have been given the full backing of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page - have been working on the project out of Google's offices in Sydney.
Stephen Hutcheon is attending the San Francisco conference as a guest of Google.

The Slap gets nod for small screen

Nicole BradyMay 28, 2009


Latest related coverage
'Blown away' Tsiolkas takes prize
CHRISTOS Tsiolkas' acclaimed novel The Slap is to be made into a television series.
Matchbox Pictures yesterday announced that after a competitive bidding process it had purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of the novel, which is set in Melbourne.
Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, said he hoped the series would be able to unfold over eight episodes just as the novel was told through eight chapters, each from the perspective of a different character.
"We'd like to honour that in terms of our realisation," Mr Ayres said. "We're very keen for Christos to be involved in the making of the show."
Matchbox is now talking to local television networks about investing in the series. The program seems a likely fit for the ABC, which in the recent federal budget received a $70 million funding increase for local drama production.
ABC TV's head of arts and entertainment, Courtney Gibson, could not be reached for comment. The ABC has won good ratings for its screenings of BBC adaptations of tales by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Alan Hollinghurst.
The Slap is mostly set in Northcote and Fitzroy, where Mr Ayres said the series would be shot. Script development was likely to begin soon with production starting early next year, meaning the earliest the series could go to air would be the second half of 2010.
Mr Ayres said the book lent itself to television rather than film.
"The Slap is about intimate human relationships and television is such a fantastic medium for that," he said.
"There is a breadth to the way television drama can cover a topic and bring you intimacy and connection to a whole world, which is much harder to do in a feature film in 90 minutes."
In making the series, Mr Ayres said he would be drawing inspiration from top-shelf American productions such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men.
"People are talking about television in the way they used to talk about movies and books, it's what seems to be the cultural capital of our age," he said.
Matchbox Pictures is currently filming a feature film Lou, starring John Hurt. Its production Saved recently screened on SBS.
The Slap will be produced by Mr Ayres, Helen Bowden and Michael McMahon, with Penny Chapman as executive producer.

How to (responsibly) dump your old TV

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

Louisa Hearn
May 25, 2009

Carrying a poisonous cargo of almost 2kgs of lead and other heavy metals, millions of old televisions are finding their way into Australian landfills each year, rather than being recycled.

Around three million new televisions hit our shores last year as the popularity of flat screen technology and the looming 2010 switchover from analogue to digital drove a blistering pace of consumption.

With two million old TVs estimated to be offloaded annually to make room for these, how can the proud owner of a new plasma display ensure their old CRT doesn't join the toxic swamp at the local tip?

In the absence of a unified television recycling program, options for conscientious consumers are little more than a patchwork of local government initiatives, says Fraser Brindley, production and consumption campaigner at Environment Victoria.

"I get so many calls per week from people saying 'I have got all these TVs to get rid of'. If there does happen to be a recycling collection point near them they generally have to pay to offload them".

On Friday, Australia's state and federal environment ministers agreed to set up a national electronic waste recycling scheme.

Details of the scheme won't be in place for another six months but it is expected to involved a levy of about $35 on new TVs to help pay for the cost of collecting and recycling the old ones.

Product Stewardship Australia, an organisation representing TV manufacturers, has been working with Government to develop the framework for such a scheme since 2006.

Executive officer John Gertsakis, says: "Australia is a laggard in the area of television recycling.

"In spite of the whole switch over to digital there seems to be this resistance and indifference to deal with a recycling scheme that would support it".

Instead of the cost of recycling falling to the television manufacturers as it does in other countries, the financial and logistical burden rests largely on local governments who must either transport the thousands of discarded or dumped televisions to landfill or, in rare cases, take matters into their own hands by establishing expensive recycling schemes.

Melbourne's Boroondara council has recycled 19 tonnes of electronic waste for local residents since establishing a central drop-off point, and a spokesman says residents now demand the service.

The City of Sydney council recently set up its own quarterly e-waste collection day where 95-98 per cent of the raw material in electronic items are recovered and reused in manufacturing.

But such initiatives are still thin on the ground, especially in regional areas where there are no electronics recycling companies nearby to deal with collected waste.

"There are only a handful of councils running recycling programs and it is a hell of an operation for any individual organisation to get up and going. What we need is a Federal scheme that funds local collection points across the country or at the point of sale," says Mr Brindley.

To lessen the burden on the environment, the City of Sydney recommends looking at other options before throwing equipment away such as passing it on to friends or family, or hosting a garage sale.

"There are also a range of reuse organisations such as The Bower Bird and Reverse Garbage and charity organisations who accept second hand goods," a spokesman says.

Both the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul say they will accept used televisions which are working and meet certain criteria, and a number of websites such as freecycle.org and ozrecycle.com have also sprung up in recent years for passing unwanted household items to others who desire them.

Consumers also have the option of taking old equipment to e-waste recycling operations such as SIMS and MRI, however these centres are only based in larger metropolitan areas, and will charge a small fee for recycling old CRT televisions.

What you can do:

:: Pass on old equipment on to family or friends, or even strangers through an online recycling group such as http://www.freecycle.org.

:: Give old equipment to a charity shop or host a garage sale.

:: Check out whether your local council is running an e-waste recycling program at: http://www.recyclingnearyou.com.au/

:: Take your computer directly to an e-waste recycling depot such as SIMS, MRI or TIC Group for a small fee

:: Ask the Federal Government to set up a national TV recycling scheme at http://www.reborn.org.au

You tube gets 20 hours of video added per minute

Twenty hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.Illustration: Jo Gay
May 22, 2009 - 3:30PM
YouTube just keeps getting bigger.
The Google-owned video-sharing site said in a blog post that 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube every minute.
It said that in mid-2007, six hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. It grew to 15 hours in January of this year and now stands at 20 hours a minute, YouTube said.
"Let's see if we can get to 24 hours - a full day's worth of video uploaded every minute," wrote Ryan Junee, a YouTube product manager.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $US1.65 billion but the California-based internet search and advertising giant has not yet managed to turn a profit with the site despite its massive global popularity.
YouTube has been gradually adding professional content such as full-length television shows and movies to its vast trove of amateur video offerings in a bid to attract advertisers.
It recently announced partnerships with Sony Pictures and other Hollywood studios and rolled out new platforms for watching television shows and movies.

Mozilla'd out

So, working under stress here, using w's laptop as since a Mozilla /Firefox update last week on webwillys pc it has spat the dummy,crashing continually and not being user friendly @ all. So the IT help desk, W, has copied all my stuff, to 4 discs, my life reduced to 4 discs and is wiping the slate clean, formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling xp, watch this space.

Newspapers online a fast track to history

The National Library of Australia aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.


Louisa HearnMay 21, 2009 - 10:08AM


The Hawkesbury river boatmen who ferried wheat into Sydney in the early 1800s hold a unique place in Australian history.
Complaints of their "vexacious conduct" which caused untold damage to grain stocks leads the front page of Australia's first newspaper, and is now among millions of articles from our pioneering past available at the click of a button.
The National Library of Australia is the driver of this ambitious project, which aims to collate 4 million regional and metropolitan newspaper pages into a single searchable internet portal by 2011.
With 3.5 million news stories already live in the system, historians are hailing the Australian Newspapers beta search service as a fast track into our heritage.
"Newspapers were not inaccessible before but often you would have to travel from state to state for newspapers from capital city or rural areas," said Richard Waterhouse, professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney.
"This is not only going to make sources more accessible to academic historians but also for family historians who will be able to flesh out the story of their own family by finding references in local newspapers."
The process of transferring news from old-world library microfilm into digital format was no simple undertaking, said Cathy Pilgrim, NLA's director of Australian Newspapers Digitisation.
Firstly, the microfilm had to be scanned and sent overseas where optical character recognition software converted the image to text - essential for enabling keyword searches, she said.
With the NLA's core focus on material that is out of copyright, newspaper print quality can vary dramatically, often yielding less-than accurate results from character recognition software.
To complete the editing process, Ms Pilgrim said the NLA had leaned heavily on public goodwill, with users of its digital newspaper service already correcting more than 2 million lines of text in more than 100,000 articles and adding tens of thousands of tags.
"The human eye is much better than a machine and some of our correctors have been doing an amazing amount of work. Some find the work addictive or compulsive, and they are enhancing and enriching the service for future users," she said.
The public is also proving integral to search and rescue campaigns to find newspaper issues missing from the national archives. The NLA makes regular appeals to the public to check under their floor boards or sift through their attics for issues of newspapers missing from collections in libraries around the country.
Ms Pilgrim said that a user of the beta search service recently found reference in the Brisbane Courier to a newspaper called the Braidwood Liberal that was not even previously known to exist.
As it continues to grapple with the challenge of capturing the past, the NLA is also looking into the future in a separate project called Pandora, which seeks to capture a permanent record of significant digital publications and websites that are no longer publicly available.
"More publishing is being done online and less in traditional hard copy so the National Library really wants to be preserving online publishing as well. It's important to be storing and maintaining it so we can provide access to it in the future.
"The Sydney 2000 Olympics website was decommissioned a few weeks after the Games and is no longer available publicly, but through Pandora we managed to archive it," she said.

Have a go @ Wolfram and get addicted

Is Google afraid of the big, bad Wolfram?
Conrad Walters
May 18, 2009
HOW long would it take an auctioneer to speak 6000 words? What was the weather in Beijing on the day Kevin Rudd was born? How many Americans are named Andrew?
Google and Wikipedia flounder with such questions, but an ambitious new search engine called Wolfram Alpha has the tech world abuzz with the promise of being able to do more than link to countless web pages or canvass a broad topic.
Named after its creator, British physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram, the free site went public over the weekend and officially launches tonight amid high expectations.
What separates it from everything else is an ability to interpret complex questions in everyday language and then answer those questions by consulting disparate pieces of information.
For example, Google can identify the nearest place for pizza; Wolfram Alpha is designed to tell you where to get the best pizza, explains Sydney technology author and futurist Mark Pesce.
While it may be some time before wolframalpha.com tackles culinary debates, the example does reflect the site's ability to interpret data from unrelated sources.
"It's going to have enough natural language guts to be able to look at a whole bunch of articles and judge them," Mr Pesce said.
The fledgling site is heavily biased towards the sciences, but its ability to infer conclusions from its data is where the potential lies.
For the record, Wolfram Alpha's answers to the questions posed above are: 24 minutes; 21 degrees and clear skies; and 1.06 million Americans.

Electronic Wizardry

How to recover data from a corrupt hard drive

Dave Thompson
May 13, 2009 - 12:19PM

Although all seems lost, there is a chance that data on a corrupt hard drive can be recovered.

Barely a day goes by without someone accosting me and demanding (with menaces) that I divulge everything I know about the black arts of data recovery.

To save me the hassle of explaining that, as an Aikido instructor, I can probably run much faster than they can, I will instead use this forum to share what I know about the subject.

Joking aside, data recovery is a serious and fast-growing global industry; besides the obvious emotional attachment we have with our data, it raises the age-old riddle of what monetary value we put on it.

In the past, data recovery houses have charged pretty much what they liked because people knew so little about it.

Most of us assume that once a drive dies, our data dies with it, although this is only partly true; those in the know can, with equal amounts of skill, good fortune, theatrics and jiggery-pokery, pull the virtual rabbit out of the hat and recover the seemingly unrecoverable.

To know more about data recovery, we need to know how a computer stores information at a raw level and how binary file collaboration results in sector variations of the allocation tables and subsequent cone and cylinder manipulation and fghtyuijnfdmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Oops! Sorry, I nodded off there; the fact is we don't need to know that stuff to grasp how data recovery works.

We can get by knowing a few simpler facts.

Data is stored on our drives using a seemingly old-fangled system involving magnetism and a machine language called binary.

Before you crack open a cup of hemlock, binary is simply a way so- called analogue information can be digitised by using groups of zeros (0) and ones (1). For example, how2 in binary is written 01101000011011110111011100110010.

Hard drives contain one or more highly polished metallic disks called platters, over which passes a "head".

Picture an old-style record player; instead of a plastic disk we use metal and instead of a needle, an electro- magnetic head that reads and writes magnetically polarised 1s and 0s.

When data is written to the disk, the head skips very closely over the spinning disk surface, altering the magnetic state under any given area (called sectors) of the drive.

This data remains there until overwritten by other data, wiped or the platter is physically damaged - as happens when a drive develops "bad sectors", which can be likened to a terminal cancer; once affected, the drive will become increasingly unstable and develop more bad sectors until it fails completely with the loss of any data written to the affected sectors.

As you can see, drives are sensitive and fragile devices; mishandling (dropping) them or bumping them while working is courting disaster.

Drives consist of several separate- but-interconnected systems.

One is the electronically controlled brushless motor that spins the platters.

Then we have some memory (RAM) and other electronic wizardry that controls both the position of the head and when and where data is written by it. On the platters is the file system, which is the specific way data is structured on the drive.

Most file systems utilise an index at the start of the drive denoting where any given file dwells on the platters.

Finally we have a boot sector, which contains information needed for the hardware to find and load our Operating System.

When one, (or more), of these systems gets corrupted or fails, our drive "dies".

If the motor stops, or the bearings seize, the platters won't turn. If the electronics fizzle, then the platters may still spin but the head won't move properly.

If the file system or boot sector gets scrambled, the electronics don't know where anything is.

Either way, the result is that our computer won't boot and we get nasty error messages.

However, unless the platter is physically damaged, by bad sectors, a fire or by having a pickaxe driven through it, the data is still tantalisingly present and, with the right kung-fu, recovery is often possible.

The issue is that many computer "repair" people aren't up with data recovery and file this sort of thing in the "too hard" basket.

They either arbitrarily replace the drive or wipe the contents and start again, claiming recovery is impossible.

My advice, if you are very attached to the "lost" data, is do nothing with the drive and seek a second opinion, preferably from someone who advertises "data recovery" services.

Ask about methods used and go for those who sound like they know what they are doing.

Avoid running the drive as this can make things worse, and resist the temptation to "have a go" yourself; data recovery is a specialist field and the best option is to let them work their mojo. You'll find many operate a no data/no charge policy and really, by that stage what have you got to lose?

Twitter - ing from space

One giant leap: astronaut tweets from space

• Saved

May 13, 2009 - 10:32AM

Astronauts are giving a behind the scenes look at the space shuttle Atlantis's high-risk mission to service the Hubble telescope, thanks to micro-blogging sensation Twitter.

Mike Massimino, 47, blasted off into space this week with six other crew members. But thanks to Twitter, the space veteran is keeping his promise to stay posted, even from space.

"Next stop, Earth Orbit!!" Massimino - whose Twitter account is Astro_Mike - wrote in his most recent tweet, posted just hours before takeoff.

Massimino, one of the mission's specialists, already has 221,119 followers and had given Twitter updates during training in April in Houston.

The current mission, STS-125, is Massimino's second space flight. He had previously participated in a Hubble maintenance mission in 2002 (STS-109) during which he performed two spacewalks.

The other Atlantis crew members are commander Scott Altman, pilot Gregory Johnson and mission specialists Andrew Feustel, Michael Good, John Grunsfeld and Megan McArthur.

Mark Polansky, who will be the commander of the next planned space shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS), is giving updates on Twitter about his training for the scheduled June launch.

He has invited his followers, who currently number 6,051 on Twitter, to submit questions on video website YouTube that he will answer from orbit, according to NASA.

Polansky's Twitter account is Astro_127.

The Hubble mission is the fifth and last maintenance operation to the telescope before the shuttle fleet is retired. If successful, NASA has said the fix-up would extend the stargazer's already lengthy life by another five years or longer.

Atlantis is due to arrive at Hubble, 563 kilometers (360 miles) above Earth, on Wednesday afternoon.

World of Warcraft goes down the toilet

• Saved

The WoW Pod and, inset, the schematics.

Latest related coverage

View Inside the WoW Pod
Photos: This self-contained hut includes a computer, toilet and kitchen for the 24/7 gamer.

Asher Moses, The Age
May 11, 2009 - 10:01AM

It's every game addict's dream and mum and dad's worst nightmare - a self-contained World of Warcraft pod that includes a computer, toilet and kitchen for the 24/7 gamer.

Created by boffins at Massachusetts University of Technology (MIT), the contraption is described as "an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WoW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs".

World of Warcraft - or WoW as it is affectionately known by its millions of fans - is notoriously addictive.

The role playing game's long quests encourage players to slog it out for hours at a time, and when playing in groups, one player leaving for a toilet break can throw off the rhythm for everyone.

Enter the WoW pod, which is entirely self-contained and is designed to resemble a hut featured in the game. Inside, the throne doubles as a toilet, while next to the computer sits a cooking pot and automated stove top.

Within reach is water and pre-packaged food with names such as "Crunchy Spider Surprise" and "Beer Basted Ribs". All the player has to do is select a food item and a seasoning pack.

"By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time," wrote one of the creators, MIT researcher Cati Vaucelle.

"The virtual character then jubilantly announces the status of the meal to both the gamer and the other individuals playing online: 'Vorcon's meal is about to be done!"'

The pod, which has a wooden frame and skin and fur inside, is so well integrated with the game that when the player resumes playing after eating, their character is affected by the food.

Ms Vaucelle, a self-confessed "hardcore gamer", developed the WoW Pod as part of her research into the design of "hybrid physical/digital objects for play, performance and psycho-physiotherapy.

There are no plans to commercialise the product as yet but Ms Vaucelle said the device had practical uses and was well received by hardcore WoW players.

"If you've got to wait every 10 minutes for someone to heat up their microwave dinner, the whole group falls apart," she said.

A commercial version of the pod would undoubtedly raise the ire of health experts and family groups, who have already sounded the alarm over the negative effects of what they term "video game addiction".

In 2005, a South Korean man died after playing Starcraft, similar to WoW, for 50 hours straight at an internet cafe with no sleep and few breaks.

The little green car that pays for itself

• Alan Gray
• May 8, 2009

The efforts of households to cut carbon emissions should not let big polluters off the hook.

RECHARGING an electric car in Victoria would produce about as much carbon dioxide as running a small petrol hatchback — so there would be no benefit. That's been the message in recent media items.

My family have been driving a four-door, fully electric hatchback for more than a year now and we're yet to burn a single gram of carbon dioxide.

Our converted Hyundai Getz, the "Electron" produced by Blade Electric Vehicles in Castlemaine, goes at least 120 km/h, and has all the zip and acceleration of a petrol car, without any of the noise or pollution.

It's an urban runabout, designed for the 75 per cent of the world's daily car journeys that are 70 kilometres or less. The car has a range of 120 kilometres between recharges, which we do by plugging the car into an ordinary power point in our carport each night.

And because it's a company car with associated tax deductions, it should pay for its $43,000 purchase price, thanks to fuel and service savings, in five years.

Is there any other car that will "pay for itself" on any time frame, long or short?

We are yet to encounter a single problem with this car after 12,000 kilometres of intensive, everyday driving. The car is so impressive that the New Zealand Environment Minister, Nick Smith, now drives one as his ministerial vehicle, and Hyundai NZ are planning to import 200 in the next year.

So how do we avoid producing any carbon dioxide when recharging? Our household, and office, subscribe to GreenPower, so our electricity retailer is audited each year to produce the same amount of electricity from new renewable sources, such as wind farms or solar parks.

More than 900,000 Australian businesses and households now subscribe to GreenPower. The scheme has been a superb success — even though many politicians and journalists (particularly motoring journalists in my experience) have never heard of it. Virtually every electricity retailer in Australia now offers GreenPower. It's an instant and positive way that householders can start to reduce their carbon footprint.

Of course, you don't receive the actual green electrons down your wire, but if your household consumes an average of, say, 6700 kilowatt hours per year of electricity, once you sign up to GreenPower your electricity retailer is required to source that equivalent number of kilowatt hours from renewable sources.

Usually I have to fight my wife, Judith, for a drive of "Little Miss Sunshine" because she loves it so much. We often have two adults in the front, two large children in the back, and the boot full of shopping; and even with the solar or wind-powered air-conditioning blasting on a hot day, the car zips up any hills as happily as a smelly 20th-century car.

Does all this sound too good to be true? Of course it does, and it may be if Prime Minister Kevin Rudd doesn't amend his proposed emissions trading scheme legislation to properly count voluntary carbon reductions by individuals and households.

As the draft legislation stands, none of the contributions made to date by householders by paying for GreenPower will count towards reducing Australia's carbon cap. All these existing voluntary reductions will simply ease the pressure on big polluters — they will have to cut less because we have all cut more. Stinks like a tip full of methane, if you ask me. And experts, like Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute, predict that the GreenPower scheme will die overnight if the legislation is not amended. Why should householders reward the shareholders of giant electricity companies by making the cuts the companies should make?

The new Australian Carbon Trust announced by Rudd on Monday is a bureaucratic Band-Aid made to look like the Government is dealing with this issue. The trust is a poor response to this problem because it would force households or businesses to pay twice: once when they make the carbon reductions, and again when donating to the trust.

Contrast this with large polluters who won't even pay once because of their massive "compensation payments", or corporate welfare.

Please, Prime Minister, don't kill off our 100 per cent renewable car and home power charging sources. Change your legislation to properly account for voluntary carbon reductions, and ask your department heads to buy fleets of this brilliant, Australian-invented, all-electric car. That will drive down the unit cost and make this world-beating car available to even more families.

Alan Gray is editor of Earth Garden magazine and Green Power Today.

Think before you upload

Social site warning for teenagers

A still from the animated clip, Think Before You Upload.

Selma Milovanovic, The Age
May 6, 2009

TEENAGERS should think twice before posting personal information and photos on the internet, as they might come back to haunt them, privacy experts warn.

Young people risked losing jobs or being embarrassed by teachers and relatives viewing party pictures or sexually explicit images uploaded on social networking websites, Victoria's Privacy Commissioner Helen Versey said.

Ms Versey and privacy commissioners from the Asia-Pacific region and Canada will today launch "Think before you upload", an animated, online video warning young people of the dangers of documenting their life on the internet.

"Young people and others send information to social networking sites, but don't think where that information might end up," Ms Versey said. "When you put information online, do you really want some people, like employers, future employers or even relatives, to see it?"

She said that while privacy laws required Australian companies operating social networking sites to protect personal information, people could not sue for breach of privacy if someone forwarded or viewed items on their sites.

"It's everyone's responsibility to protect their own privacy in cyberspace," she said.

Internet safety expert Robyn Treyvaud said even though sites such as MySpace and Facebook allowed users to permit only their friends to view their personal content or chat online, not even that information always remained private. It could be copied and forwarded to other people, she said.

Party photos and videos hastily posted online left teenagers particularly exposed, as they could be immediately copied to YouTube, allowing millions of people worldwide to view them. The images could also be viewed years later.

Employers frequently search for a prospective employee's name through Google and Facebook, rejecting those with seemingly inappropriate cyber profiles, which might not be a true reflection of the person's skills and personality.

Ms Treyvaud said: "People used to say, 'You are what you eat.' Now, it is: 'You are what you upload.' "

In the US, there have been several cases of high school students rejected from entry to college based on their profiles in cyberspace. One US teenager committed suicide after her boyfriend circulated on the internet an explicit picture she had sent him.

"We are not saying to kids, don't go online," Ms Treyvaud said. "Do it, but be very mindful about what you share, that it's there forever, because nothing is ever deleted from the internet. The minute you hit 'send', you have lost control of your piece of data."

http://www.privacy.vic.gov.au

Public bicycles a green way to get around town

Bike hire trial hoped to be template for wider scheme

• Kate Lahey, The Age
• May 4, 2009

PUBLIC bicycles will be available in the inner-city from this week under a project aimed at creating a uniquely Melbourne model for the scheme.

The Common Bike public bike hire system is separate to the one the State Government is to promise $5 million for in tomorrow's budget, although its organisers hope it will help shape the larger, official model due to start next year.

The three-week trial, offering 30 bikes from five sites, is being run by RMIT industrial design students under visiting professor Ronald Haverman and tutor Ben Landau. Mr Haverman helped establish a similar not-for-profit scheme in the Netherlands, OV-fiets, which he says now operates at 180 rail stations and caters for about 60,000 members.

Roads Minister Tim Pallas will call for tenders for the larger scheme this week and has said the Government wants an organisation that has run a similar scheme successfully in a comparable city.

Other overseas schemes have attracted large advertising firms, such as JCDecaux in Paris.

Mr Landau said the RMIT public bike scheme, which starts on Wednesday, would show how such a system could work in Melbourne as a community program by returning profits to local businesses, such as bike shops willing to act as hire stations.

Membership is $5 and each trip after the first requires a gold coin donation. The RMIT group does not plan to bid for the tender but will hold a forum on its results in June.

Mr Haverman said public bike hire would be good for Melbourne: "I think it's good for the very spread-out suburbs, the low-density areas, you need bike stations almost everywhere."

The sites chosen for the pilot are Rentabike@Fedsquare, Abbotsford Cycles, Lentil As Anything in Abbotsford, Crumpler in Fitzroy and Commuter Cycles in Brunswick. Helmets will be provided with each bike.

Other great rides here like around the bay in a day