ASHDEN AWARDS 2007 for sustainable energy

About the Awards

At the heart of the Ashden Awards is an annual competition to identify and reward organisations which have carried out truly excellent, practical, yet innovative schemes, demonstrating sustainable energy in action at a local level.

Our winners include schemes covering solar, wind, hydro, biomass, biogas, fuel-efficient stoves and energy efficiency.

How the Awards make a difference

The Awards help transform the prospects of sustainable energy in several ways:

• By giving substantial cash prizes, we help winners take their work forward.
  
• By actively promoting the winners and publicising their work through a worldwide media campaign, we aim to inspire others to follow their example.
  
• By bringing them together with key decision-makers and opinion-formers, we aim to change thinking and policy among governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) alike.
  
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We carry out research into the potential of local sustainable energy to meet the world’s energy needs and tackle climate change. We examine ways of overcoming the barriers to its wider adoption.

At a time when the world is facing the often dispiriting challenges of climate change and energy insecurity, the Ashden Awards hold out powerful examples of hope and inspiration.

2007 Award Winners includes

SELCO INDIA ( Winner Of Outstanding Achievement Award 2007) for making Solar energy affordable yet commercially viable.

SELCO is a private business, based in Bangalore, which provides solar-home-systems (SHS) and other solar services to low-income households and institutions. Its network of local sales and service centres are set up where micro-finance organisations can provide loans to customers. All systems are sold on a commercial basis, but SELCO is committed to providing the highest quality services to poor people on financial terms they can afford.

BIOTECH – ASHDEN AWARD 2007 FOR FOOD SECURITY

BIOTECH has succeeded in tackling the problem of the dumping of food waste in the streets of Kerala through the installation of biogas plants that use the food waste to produce gas for cooking and, in some cases, electricity for lighting; the residue serves as a fertiliser. To date BIOTECH has built and installed an impressive 12,000 domestic plants (160 of which also use human waste from latrines to avoid contamination of ground water), 220 institutional plants and 17 municipal plants that use waste from markets to power generators. The disposal of food waste and the production of clean energy are not the only benefits of BIOTECH's scheme. The plants also replace the equivalent of about 3.7 tonnes/day of LPG and diesel which in turn results in the saving of about 3,700 tonnes/year of CO2, with further savings from the reduction in methane production as a result of the uncontrolled decomposition of waste, and from the transport of LPG.

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Man Booker Prize 2007

Anne Enright

The Winner of Man Booker Prize 2007

for



The Gathering

The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world's most important literary award and has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and even publishers.

Kiran Desai, who won the prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, has toured the world since winning. In 2005, John Banville's The Sea saw sales of over a quarter of a million and the publisher has reported a dramatic increase in Banville's backlist sales. In 2004, not only did Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty reach the bestseller lists, but previous winners Life of Pi (2002) and Vernon God Little (2003) were also amongst the bestselling books of the year.

Now in its thirty-ninth year, the prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country's finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize. The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.

Man Group is a leading global provider of alternative investment products and solutions. The Group employs over 1,500 people in 13 countries with key centres in London and Pfäffikon (Switzerland). Man Group was established over 200 years ago as a broking business founded by James Man and was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994. Man Group plc trades on the London Stock Exchange (EMG) and is classified within the "General Financials" sector and the "Asset Managers" sub-sector. Man Group plc is a member of the FTSE 100 Index.

The Gathering-Synopsis

The Gathering is a family epic. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations - starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman - showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Anne Enright - Biography

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She is married to the actor Martin Murphy. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007

Leonid Hurwicz
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN, USA
b. 1917
(in Moscow, Russia)

Eric S. Maskin
USA
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ, USA
b. 1950

Roger B. Myerson
USA
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
b. 1951

Optimizing Social Institutions

In the mid 20th century, economists found themselves in need of a new theoretical framework with which to tackle the comparison of fundamentally different types of economic organization, such as capitalist and socialist institutions. Discussions between the likes of Oskar Lange and Friedrich von Hayek led to the development of the idea that economic institutions could be viewed as communication mechanisms, and set the stage for Leonid Hurwicz to formulate a general mathematical framework for analyzing institutions implementing collective decision making. His 'Mechanism design theory', first introduced in 1960, has developed into a powerful and widely-applied tool.

Whether one considers auctions, elections or the taxes we pay, our lives are governed by mechanisms which make collective decisions while attempting to take account of individual preferences. Such mechanisms are designed to deliver the greatest social good despite that fact that individual participants may act for their own gain, rather than for the general well-being of society. Studying such mechanisms is the goal of mechanism design theory, and mechanism design can be described as the art of producing institutions that align individual incentives with overall social goals.

Mechanism design theory is a branch of game theory (which psychologists refer to as the theory of social situations), and extends the application of game theory to ask about the consequence of applying different types of rules to a given problem. As a method of demonstrating which mechanism, out of all conceivable allocation mechanisms, gives the optimal result, mechanism design theory can be applied to problems as diverse as the auctioning of radio frequencies to mobile phone companies to the building of social welfare systems. Mechanism design theory lies at the heart of many organizations whose operation we now take for granted.

Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson were classmates at Harvard University, both graduating with doctorates in advanced mathematics in the same year. Their work has been instrumental in expanding the applicability of mechanism design theory to a wider variety of situations. At 90 years old, Leonid Hurwicz is the oldest person ever to be made a Laureate, the previous holder of that record being Raymond Davis Jr., who was almost 88 when he became a Physics Laureate in 2002.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

USA

b. 1948

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Geneva, Switzerland

Founded in 1988

The Risk of Climate Change

For the third successive year, but for only the sixth time since it was initiated in 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize has been divided equally between an institution and an individual. In awarding the Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global body responsible for scientific assessment of climate change, and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore, the phenomenon's most renowned campaigner, the Norwegian Nobel Committee are highlighting the link they see between the risk of accelerating climate change and the risk of violent conflict and wars.

The IPCC was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with neutral summaries of the latest information related to human-induced (or anthropogenic) climate change. Run from offices in Geneva, but open to any of the nearly 200 member states belonging to the UN or WMO, the IPCC functions through its working groups. There are currently 3 working groups, focusing on the science, impact and mitigation of climate change, and one task force charged with developing greenhouse gas inventories. The findings of the IPCC are presented as 'Assessment reports', synthesizing the views of the working groups, which are produced approximately every 5 years. The fourth and next report is due at the end of 2007.

The working groups have already published their individual contributions to the forthcoming fourth report. A quote from the Science Working Group's report states "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations". A quote from Working Group II, which looks at impact, states "Much more evidence has accumulated over the past five years to indicate that changes in many physical and biological systems are linked to anthropogenic warming". They go on to say that "Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt".

Al Gore is the leading public advocate of the need to take immediate action to reduce anthropogenic climate change. His campaigning takes many forms, including the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth and a book of the same name. He is also the founder and Chairman of the Alliance for Climate Change, an organization dedicated to persuading people of the urgency of responding to what it calls the 'climate crisis'.

The Nobel Prize 2007 in Literature

Doris Lessing United Kingdom b. 1919
(in Kermanshah, then Persia)

Exposing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Doris Lessing's career, like that of Mario Capecchi, another 2007 Nobel Laureate, shows that a strict pattern of formal schooling is not the only way to success. Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran), to British parents, but her family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in hope of a better future. However, that future never really materialized and Lessing's childhood was difficult. She ended formal schooling at fourteen, largely educating herself through voracious reading, and left home at fifteen. A lifelong critic of colonialism and racism, she eventually moved to London in 1949.

Given that Lessing has many points of origin, it is perhaps not surprising that she can create such an intense sense of place in her writing. She has written over fifty books, starting with The Grass is Singing, set in Africa, and her output includes novels, short stories, a graphic novel, plays, non-fiction, and two operas with Philip Glass. Possible starting points for readers unfamiliar with her work might be the Martha Quest-series of novels and Time Bites, a collection of essays published in 2004. In the 1980s, she published two novels under the pseudonym, Jane Somers, to prove just how difficult it is for an unknown name to get their work published. Both novels were rejected by Lessing's usual publisher!

Lessing has said that writing enables her to take something that is raw and unexamined and give it general significance. Her writing is clearly in the tradition of Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the writers she read as a teenager, with its strong ethical focus and engagement with society. Indeed, perhaps her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, a dissection of a woman's psyche which is torn between emotional, social and creative demands, has been very influential on feminism.

Writing, Lessing says, also gives her freedom – a freedom revealed in her willingness to probe conventions, to give voice to the repressed, dismissed, and inarticulate, but also displayed in her willingness to experiment. She has mixed high literature with more popular forms, like science fiction, and has daringly employed strange combinations of time-schemes, perspective, allegory, and naturalism in an attempt to access what she sees as the deeper reality of mysticism, dreams and even madness. Describing her perspective on her own life as constantly changing, Lessing always remains open to new ideas and possibilities.

Visit Lessing's Website

Nobel Prize 2007 in Physiology or Medicine

Sir Martin J. Evans

United Kingdom

Cardiff University Cardiff, United Kingdom

b. 1941

Oliver Smithies

USA

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA

b. 1925 (in United Kingdom)

Mario R. Capecchi

USA

University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

b. 1937 (in Italy)

Making Model Mice

The elevation of the humble mouse to become many scientists' experimental animal of choice has been one of the scientific phenomena of the last two decades. Today, genetically-altered mice are an essential component of the experimental toolkit, with thousands of varieties contributing to research in laboratories around the world. Their existence stems from discoveries made in the 1980's by this year's Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine.

Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies were both seeking ways of specifically altering the mammalian genome, Capecchi with a view to inserting new genes into cells and Smithies in the hope of correcting genetic defects that lead to disease. Working against a background of skepticism, they independently discovered that they could use a natural mechanism, revealed decades before by Joshua Lederberg in bacteria, to introduce short sequences of manipulated DNA into the chromosomes of mammalian cells growing in the laboratory. The technique allowed them to target individual genes with exquisite precision, producing the genetic alterations they sought, but only at the cellular level. Happily, the embryonic stem cell cultures that Martin Evans was then developing provided the necessary vehicle for taking such gene manipulations from the Petri dish into the whole animal. Combining the two, by modifying genes in embryonic stem cells and then injecting those cells into fertilized mouse eggs, made it possible to rear mice with discrete genetic modifications that would be inherited between generations. The so-called 'Knock-out mouse' was born.

Knock-out (and knock-in) mice, the workhorses of many a laboratory today, allow researchers to study the effects of removing (or inserting) a single gene. Genetically-modified mice have therefore frequently helped to reveal a gene's function and, since mice and humans share a remarkable genetic similarity, they also serve as models of many human diseases.

Nobel Prize 2007 for Physics

Peter Grünberg

Germany

Forschungszentrum Jülich
Jülich, Germany

b. 1939

Albert Fert

France

Université Paris-Sud; Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES
Orsay, France

b. 1938

The Giant within Small Devices

Lying at the heart of the computer which you are using to read this article is a memory retrieval system based on the discoveries for which the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg. They discovered, quite independently, a new way of using magnetism to control the flow of electrical current through sandwiches of metals built at the nanotechnology scale.

150 years ago, William Thomson observed very small changes in the electrical properties of metals when they were placed in a magnetic field, a phenomenon he named 'Magnetoresistance'. In due course, his finding found application, magnetically-induced current fluctuations becoming the underlying principle for reading computer memories. Then, in 1988, Fert and Grünberg, working with specially-constructed stacks made from alternating layers of very thinly-spread iron and chromium, unexpectedly discovered that they could use magnetic fields to evoke much greater increases in electrical resistance than Thomson, or anyone since, had observed. Recognizing the novelty of the effect, Fert named it 'Giant magnetoresistance', and it was only a few years before the improvements, and the miniaturization, it offered led to its adoption in favour of classical magnetoresistance.

Giant magnetoresistance is essentially a quantum mechanical effect depending on the property of electron spin. Using an applied magnetic field to cause the electrons belonging to atoms in alternate metal layers to adopt opposite spins results in a reduction in the passage of electric current, in a similar fashion to the way that crossed polarizing filters block the passage of sunlight. When, however, magnetic fields are used to align the electron spins in different layers, current passes more easily, just as light passes through polarizers aligned in the same direction.

The application of this discovery has been rapid and wide-ranging, dramatically improving information storage capacity in many devices, from computers to car brakes. And while quietly pervading the technology behind our daily lives, the principles of giant magnetoresistance are now being used to tackle problems in wider fields, for instance in the selective separation of genetic material.

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