Versatile Amphibian

I've been asked to contribute of a debate on 'green telecoms', specifically how the telecoms industry can enable other industries as they seek to reduce carbon emissions. A couple of thoughts I've had on the subject: First , should the telecoms industry contribute to the industrial commons by making certain data available to all, in the same way that GPS signals are open to anyone with a receiver? Tom Tom's HD Traffic service is one service that makes use of data on handset movement to route traffic. Could this data benefit everyone, reducing jams and hence emissions? Second , is there a benefit to a short range car-to-car communications system, a kind of automotive social networking that enables ECUs to communicate with each other? Besides the obvious benefits around collision avoidance, could such ad-hoc networking help manage traffic flow and even enable the sharing of services such as GPS routing and even in-car entertainment? Sounds interesting conceptually - ...

Yesterday I had a chat with a colleague who's looking at transformative ways of reducing the cost of sending parcels to China. We came up with the following thought experiment, which was quite fun - I thought it was worth sharing. We started out with the assumption there is a fixed cost of cargo planes along the route from the UK to China and a very much lower cost of sorting a parcel, which varies based on the labour cost in the territory the plane lands in. The main determining factor on the cost per parcel is the utilisation ("degree of fullness") of the cargo space in any given plane, the secondary factor being the number of times it is sorted. A parcel takes a pre-determined route through the system, with a fixed number of interchanges, independent of the utilisation of the planes that carry the parcel at each stage. It occured to me that this is analagous to the switched telephone network; our thought experiment was to imagine that the international parcel post work...