I had a short break over the weekend just and read this article in the Sydney Morning Heald and it made me sit up and think.  I had just driven about 200KM to an lovely beach side town north of Sydney called Shoal Bay at Port Stephens.  Just think if I had used ethanol in the car it would have taken 240 kilograms of corn to produce 100 liters of ethanol, enough for my weekend or away, or that 240 kiolgrams of corn could have feed a person for a year.   Interesting choice.   Fuel for the car or food in someone's mouth.

Shoal Bay about 200KM north of Sydney.  If I had used ethanol to travel here from Sydney and return the amout of crops needed to produce 100 L of ethanol could have feed someone for a year.

As we see the shift in the grain harvest, especially in North America into ethanol the line "we drive, they starve" is very scarey as is the title of this article "we fill our tanks while they carn't fill their stomachs."

I think the question needs to be asked.  Is biofuels the answer?  I think not.   Converting food crops to make fuel is a short term solution to a long term problem with massive global consquences especially for developing countries.  I think the solution has to be hybrid cars and electric cars.

Is biofuels the answer? 

People that blog for a living are in a race against time to be the first with a post in order to drive interest in their blog and hence visits which can then lead to more revenue from advertising, but is it worth it.  

There have been a number of recent reports of bloggers suffering fatal heart attacks and the pressure of producing news and information for the always-on internet must affect peoples health and family life.  Yes some bloggers are very successful and make a lot of money from blogging, but you would have to ask at what cost.  

I was on a train in Sydney earlier today Monday travelling to the city from the Sun Gordon office to a meeting in the city and I was reading the New York Times on my cell phone though avantgo when this article really struck me and made me sit up and think.  Firstly here I was sitting on a train reading the NYT on my cell phone and yet there are three billion people in the world who don't even own a cell phone.  Just think how previlaged we are in the develpoed world to have access to such modern technology. We just seem to take things like the use of a cell phone for grated.

This is a a fascinating article.  The key theme is that through access to telecommunciations you have access to a maket and if you have access to a market you on the hard road out of poverty.    I like the idea of even access to a phone in a village can create a market and once you have a market you are generating economic acticvity and with economic acticity comes income and wealth.   The numbers are complelling.   A London Business School study concluded that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country's GDP rises by 0.5%.

What is encouraging is that we are seeing rapid growth in access to mobile phone networks in developing countries.   By the end of 2006, 68% of the worlds mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.   The beauty of cell phones is that they by pass government regulated networks and allows much cheaper access and effective communciation by for example using SMS.

SELLING TO THE OTHER THREE BILLION A cellphone shop in Accra, Ghana, which carries and repairs a variety of handsets.

You can help by recycling your old  handset.   Many countries have handset recycling programs.  Here a link to handset recycling program in Australia.  Mobile-Muster

I think that "Micro-Blogging" is set to the be the next big thing. As people are increasingly prepared to share their lives with the rest of the world and the ease as which people can access the internet through mobile devices increases so does the scope for "Micro-Blogging." 

Micro-Blogging is where people fire off terse missives about what they are doing at any given moment.   I have read some micro-blogs and they appear to be rather random and more an up-to-date on-line diary together with random thoughts.

In Australia through the Telstra 3G phone network you can update your blog over the handset.    

More on micro-blogging here.
 

An example of a Micro-Blog