Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Coders, hackers and designers came together at the Wired for Food 24-hour hackathon at the University of Bristol Campus on 21-22 September 2012 to help transform the way we produce and consume food. The event was organised by Forum for the Future , with support from the Cabot Institute and the Ordnance Survey. It is part of the Forum for the Future's Wired for Change series, designed to inspire and engage the digital communities in the global problems we face. The idea of a hackathon is to build networks, spread the word about interesting challenges and help demonstrate what technology can do through simple prototypes. The prototypes are not answers in themselves but rather signs of what is possible. The winning prototypes from Wired for Food are described below. Joint winner – Best solution to real problem Solution: Hatchtag (DEMO) - finding local eggs with Twilio and Cart Challenge: How do small scale growers make their produce visible without having ...

Paul F Hoffman of Harvard On the 24th and 25th of September, Professor Paul F Hoffman of Harvard University (USA) kindly offered to visit the University of Bristol for two days. Fresh from fieldwork in Namibia, Paul agreed to give two talks: one upon Cryogenian glaciations and another upon the interaction of climate scientists and geologists. Snowball Earth - Image from COSMOS Paul is perhaps most well known for his part in the development of the Snowball Earth theory, suggesting that during the Cryogenian (850 to 635 million years ago) ice covered the entire globe, from the poles to the tropics. This theory is based upon multiple strands of evidence including palaeomagnetics, sedimentology, isotopic analysis and numerical modelling. Paul succinctly summarised these ideas while also discussing some new results published in Science two years ago. The authors of this paper suggest that during the breakup of Rodinia, a proterozoic supercontinent, the eruption of ...

A meeting of the Cabot Press Gang started off the week.   It’s good to know we will have some interesting new Cabot-related stories coming out from the faculties over the next couple weeks. I have now posted the videos from the AXA Volcanoes and Society Research Day which was held back in May.   You can view videos on our brand new YouTube channel with videos of presentations by the amazing Kathy Cashman, Katsu Goda, Caroline Williams, Paul Valdes, Susanna Jenkins, Jonathan Rougier, and David Pyle.   I have also added the videos to the main Volcanoes and Society page on the website where you can also download the powerpoint presentations. The magazine mock-ups came through from Dirty Design.   We have three different designs to choose from which has been extremely contentious!   I have taken the magazine to several different groups of people to gauge opinion.   The press gang, press office, geography admin office, myself...

Don't you hate it when you know something but you can't say anything.  All I can say is we have a few AMAZING things up our sleeves which will be revealed in the coming weeks.  I can't even hint at what it is...so stay tuned to our Twitter feed where you will hear our announcements first!   This week we have mainly been – busy!   Both Philippa and myself have been working hard to get the magazine ready for publication.   The boring things have been done, like sourcing hi-res images, establishing an editor for the magazine to ensure continuity and deciding on what paper to print it on (don’t worry we went for the most environmentally friendly option!).   We are quite excited to see the magazine, although it won’t be ready until October.   We will have an electronic copy put on Issuu and will share it with you as soon as we get our hands on the finished article. Finally...did you know you can now read what we’re reading on Delicious . ...

Neville Gabie Poor Neville Gabie , our Artist in Residence, has had a bad week with technology with his laptop and video camera breaking down.   Neville is currently recording and editing interviews of Cabot members for his project Common Room.   If you would like to get involved (Neville has a replacement camera now!), please contact cabot-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk or take a look at Neville’s web page . Dave Kilbey We have been working on the first edition of our new annual magazine this week.   We met with Dirty Design who are designing the layout of the magazine.   There is a lot of work to do between now and getting it printed in October so the next few weeks will be pretty hectic in the Cabot Office. On Tuesday we met with Dave Kilbey who is project manager in IT Services.   He has developed a new mobile app called Nature Tracker to record invasive species in the UK.     Check it out . Our top Cabot news stories i...