Author: Jonny Hankins

Jonathan's Author Bio: Co Editor of the International Handbook on Responsible Innovation, and author of Responsible Innovation, A Narrative Approach, Jonny works for the Bassetti Foundation in Milan publishing articles on innovation and responsibility on their website and in academic and trade journals and also blogging about his interests. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Responsible Innovation and member of the the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation

My First Year as a Technology Blogger

7 Replies Jonny Hankins

Last week was my blogger birthday, on Friday I was one year old. Once I had decided to start writing I had to look for a place to publish. As always I started with Google.

I wanted to write about innovation and technology but from the particular point of view of ethics and responsibility, so I chose my list of search terms. Technology had to be in there, as did blog or blogger, maybe science too, so in they all went.

Several blogs came out, Technology Blogs being the first, followed by Technology Bloggers, a relatively new website in those days. I had a look at the content and the rules of engagement and decided that I should try with them.

And here was my first lesson. I found this blog because of its name. I had never even been on a blog let alone post a comment, so Tech Crunch, Technocrati and the others were not in my vocabulary, nor my search terms. If you want people to find your blog you should choose the name well.

Author Jonny Hankins

Here I am (without make-up)

As I said I was new to the business, I had never used WordPress and never posted anything. Although I had published on the net I had never done it myself, the Foundation that employs me has a Webmaster so I was never allowed to touch the controls myself.

This factor was not a problem in my first posts. I managed to get the body of the text uploaded and Christopher from Admin did the rest. After a couple of months the very same Christopher asked me if I would like to apply for author status. What this means to the uninitiated is you get your hands on the controls.

It took several attempts I might add to get a grasp of them. One problem is the language, norms and technicalities. Tags, links in the piece, correctly titled and opening in new windows, pictures with the right links, excerpts and categories to decide and formulate.

Fortunately Christopher is a patient and gallant man, so one error at a time and over a period of a couple of months I made less and less mistakes, and now I can do it myself.

I really enjoyed my first posts, I started with the problems created by improvements in prosthetic limb technology, they might actually be better than the natural version.

A rather ironic post followed about US immigration and then I got down to some serious and regular writing.

4 months after my first post Christopher suggested the possibility of writing a series, so I opted for a 6 week long series about the health of the planet. At this point I began to triangulate my blog writing with my work and include links to several articles that were posted on my work site. I also produced an Issuu booklet using both my work and the Technology Bloggers logos.

I have continued to link my different communication forms together as it seems advantageous to all concerned. My work website benefits from readers that follow the links here and likewise in reverse. I have also written a few articles for an innovation blog called Innovation Excellence, and although the topics are different they are related enough to allow links to the other portals, and again all benefit.

The series took a lot of work, but once it was finished I did not want to fall out of the weekly routine so I continued to write every week. My posts have in general got shorter, partly through necessity but also through choice. I can cover a lot of different subject matter and ask questions in a few hundred words that I would have wound into much more complex pieces a few months ago.

Comments are the thing that make blogging so interesting a pastime. I always try to reply to as many as possible. Sometimes though I write something that receives very few comments and this disappoints me. They are often posts that refer to complex debates however and not easy to comment on, given the format of the comment system.

This is my 39th article for technology Bloggers, a fair body of work if put together and an enjoyable project. If anyone reading this is thinking or has ever thought about writing I would personally urge you on. It is very satisfying when someone takes the time to read your production and comment upon it.

Roll on another year and thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read and comment, and to Christopher for the patience, encouragement and expertise.

A Miracle Material?

13 Replies Jonny Hankins

Plastic and its use on mass causes many problems as we all know. It is not biodegradable, made from oil, difficult to recycle and can be found almost everywhere floating in the sea or buried on land. What we need is something to replace it.

Over the last year researchers at the MMC in Paris have been working on a new material. What they have developed is something that might change the future of manufacturing.

See this short article for a more complete description.

Their material is called a vitrimer, it is organic, strong, lightweight and looks to bridge the gap between thermoplastics and thermoset products.

Will vitrimer replace plastic?

Could this be the future of manufacturing?

What this actually means to you and me is a material that is solid but workable across a wide temperature range, so doesn’t melt like plastic, break like glass, can be shaped after production (unlike plastic or other polymers) and easily recycled.

The material can be sculptured without the need for extreme heat, so can be liquefied and moulded and then bent once finished. This makes it an incredibly versatile substance for use in electronics, car manufacturing and many different fields of engineering.

Advantages include the possibility of not using moulds for large structures that produce shapes that cannot be adjusted. If necessary the form required can be made in-situ and manipulated to fit, something that is not possible with steel for example.

The constitution of the materials determines its rigidity, so you can make it like thick rubber with flexibility at room temperature or much more rigid, but it is not brittle and so will not snap.

Given the many problems associated with plastics and the weight issues of using steel, this material looks to offer the promise of a more versatile, easily recyclable, reusable and less polluting alternative, and certain sectors of the scientific community are calling it a wonder material.

One to watch I would say.

Has Geo-engineering Moved On?

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

Last year I wrote a series on this blog about the environment entitled ‘Can We Improve the Health of the Planet?’ Read all of the posts and report on the series here through the Bassetti Foundation website. The posts received a lot of comments, and one of the most commented was a post about geo engineering called ‘Engineering a Solution to Global Warming’.

To summarize the argument we are talking about ways of cooling the planet using technological intervention.

One of the modes put forward and that I addressed in the post is to remove carbon from the atmosphere in an attempt to minimize the problem of global warming due to heat retention.

This week in Nature magazine a short article appeared that described an experiment that according to the researchers that conducted it seems to be the first time large amounts of carbon have been removed from the atmosphere and stored.

In the case in question scientists have used iron sulphate and the ocean. The iron is dropped into the water which causes a chain if events that pulls the carbon from the atmosphere, hopefully for good.

Ocean Fertilization Technique

The iron in powder form stimulates the growth of algae that lives for about 3 to 4 weeks. Their growth relies on carbon from the air, drawn through photosynthesis. When the algae dies or is eaten and excreted it sinks to the bottom taking all of the carbon with it.

One of the scientists involved in the experiments states that a single atom of iron draws 13000 atoms of carbon from the air, a large proportion of which finds its way to the ocean floor.

Many scientists are skeptical however. The amount of carbon removed is quite literally a drop in the ocean compared to that produced, and critics argue that this insignificant result could open the gates for other geo-engineering experiments, some of which (as my previous post outlined) seem rather unwise.