earth day
Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Apr 22, 2010
Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a global celebration that raises awareness about the enivronment. To do our part to celebrate this day, we’ve put together a look at some of the mobile tools and organizations we’ve covered recently that are doing their part to help the Earth. If you have any suggestions about tools or organizations that are doing great environmental work with mobiles, please leave a comment and let us know – and have a good Earth Day!
Water Quality
We recently covered the Water Quality Reporter, a program in South Africa that uses mobiles to test the health of water supplies. The program allows field workers to use mobile forms or SMSs to cheaply and effectively transfer data about water quality to a centralized database, while receiving feedback about how to handle local water problems.
Posted by KatrinVerclas on Apr 21, 2009
If 2009 is the year of the mobile phone for social impact, then Earth Day should mark a special occasion in this regard. More and more organizations and people are discovering how mobile phones can be used for social impact, including how to use mobile tech for environmental protection, sensing, and to leverage just-in-time information to make our movements and actions more environmentally friendly.
An emerging field of research, for example, uses mobiles for "urban sensing," allowing phones to collect scientific data in new and innovative ways. By affixing a sensory device to a mobile phone, mobile sensing provides the opportunity to track dynamic information about environmental impacts and develop maps and understand patterns of human movement, traffic, and air pollution.
A leader in this field is the University of California Los Angeles CENS Lab.
Posted by CorinneRamey on Apr 22, 2008
In the United States, a used mobile phone is likely to end up in the trash can, or more likely, in the back of a desk drawer for several years, collecting dust. But in the rest of the world, this just isn't the case. Mobile phones -- or even parts of mobile phones -- are reused, recycled, and refurbished.
Jan Chipchase, a phone anthropologist for Nokia, has seen the way that old mobile phones transform into new ones while traveling for Nokia around the world. According to this CNET News article, Chipchase and his team (MobileActive wrote about Younghee Jung, an anthropologist who works with Chipchase, here) have found that refurbishing phones is a booming market in developing countries, with small businesses springing up that sell phone parts, repair manuals, and pirated versions of the newest software.
