Tom Raftery - Issue #5

Welcome to Issue 5 of my weekly newsletter. Feedback to the newsletter has been extremely positive - thanks to everyone who reached out

I came across more fantastic stories this week - I hope you enjoy them too

Finally, if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please feel free to get in touch with me anytime on [email protected]

Now, on with the show…

The Internet of Things (IoT)

This week's Internet of Things stories focus on the built environment - making cities better to live in. The first looks at IoT's possible role in traffic management, while the second looks at making cities better to live using with intelligent lighting

US tests using the Internet of things (IoT) for traffic management — tech.firstpost.com Arizona University researches test an IoT platform to allow cars and street furniture to communicate with each other

How The Internet Of Things Can Make Cities More Sustainable — www.psfk.com A lighting network powered by Vodafone and Philips integrates devices to help cities cut costs

Energy

The Tesla Model 3 launch is still creating ripples with the company announcing this week that it has received over 400,000 pre-orders, and our first story digs into the implications of this launch, while the second story looks at the success of solar in the UK (yes, the UK!), versus coal's decline there (yay!)

Why Tesla’s Model 3 Could Be the New Model T — www.greentechmedia.com It is poised to go down in history as a game-changer.

Solar power sets new British record by beating coal for a day | Environment | The Guardian — www.theguardian.com Coal’s decline continues as figures show homes and businesses got more power from the sun for an entire 24 hours last weekend

CleanTech/Misc

Two cool stories in this section. The first is very straightforward - wordpress has enabled encryption by default on all sites hosted on its platform. This makes the sites more secure, and gives them a boost in Google search rankings. This means my own blog at TomRaftery.com is now https, so I'm delighted with this move :)

Bots are coming thick and fast now, so someone has launched a Bot store, as outlined in our next article 

Botlist is an app store for bots — techcrunch.com A new site launching today wants to be the app store for bots. Botlist, as it's called, is a third-party database that's a catalog a lot of the bots currently..

Climate

Finally, some bad news, and good news in our climate section. The bad news explains how ice is melting at unprecedented rates, and earlier than ever before this year, while in good news, it turns out that planting trees can significantly help in reducing damage from floods, as well as you know, being beautiful to look at

Greenland sees record-smashing early ice sheet melt — www.theguardian.com Scientists ‘incredulous’ at abnormally high numbers for April, with melting across nearly 12% of ice sheet, reports Climate Home

£500,000 tree-planting project helped Yorkshire town miss winter floods | Environment | The Guardian — www.theguardian.com Slowing the Flow scheme, which saw 40,000 trees planted, reduced peak river flow by 20%, after 50mm of rain fell in 36 hours

In conclusion

Thanks for taking the time to read this newsletter. I hope you found it useful

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HTTPS Everywhere: Encryption for All WordPress.com Sites — en.blog.wordpress.com Create a free website or easily build a blog on WordPress.com. Hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes. Free hosting and support.