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The EPN Consulting Newsletter - 074 - October 2016
Editorial
Dear Colleague,

The other day at 6:30pm I was at the Green Park Tube station in London where three lines (Victoria, Piccadilly, Jubilee) stop at different levels. This means there are two sets of three flows of people that move from one line to catch an another one.

I arrived at one underground cross-corridors point where some flows merge and I found hundreds of people clogged forming long queues in each respective corridor. Fortunately I am not claustrophobic otherwise I could have felt very bad.

During the afternoon peak time, the Victoria line offer an excellent service (a train every 40"/60", yes, seconds) and the other two offer -   each - a train about every other minute with the result that a lot of (too many?) people walk in these tunnels to reach their requested platform.

Currently the Sustainable Transport Experts aim to achieve the ambitious goal of shifting people (travellers, commuters...) from private cars to public transport. But, as just described, in some cases public transport is not able to carry more passengers that it already does.

This is a clear evidence something should change in our theories: not only encouraging the use of public transport, which is good, but also updating the way we work: more hot spot offices should be created in external areas of our cities to avoid that a great majority of commuters have to go to city centres. This would relieve the city transport systems and would improve our quality of life as professionals could travel less (time & space) to reach an operative desk while students and other employees (e.g. teachers, shops assistants, bankers, etc.) - that cannot move their working place - could find a more accessible, safe & secure transport system.
As a matter of fact, high-speed Internet, Voice-over-IP software (e.g. Skype) and Cloud Storage already today allow us to work remotely when we travel outside our cities or countries.

Why don't adopt this working style also during our regular working days?


EPN Consulting Ltd.
Founder, CEO


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EU
Horizon 2020 & other calls close to deadline


10 Jan 2017 -  Deadline to submit proposals to the H2020-JTI-IMI2-2016-09-TWO-STAGE calls (Innovative Medicines Initiative - Stage 2)
More deadlines of the H2020 2017 calls, published a few weeks ago, will be soon available on our website.
Using Big Data to map a City's "Heartbeat"  

12 Sept 2016 - It's long been said that a city's transport network is like its blood supply, circulating people and goods around the central 'organs', and onward to where they need to go.

This biological analogy was recently brought to life in a data visualization called Tube Heartbeat, which was produced by Oliver O'Brien, a Senior Research Associate at University College London (UCL). It shows the pulse of London's famous underground rail network, which manages up to 4.8 million passengers every day.

Tube Heartbeat is incredibly data-rich - it displays "...in fifteen-minute intervals throughout a weekday, the volume of tube passengers moving between every adjacent pair of stations on the entire tube network - 762 links across the 11 lines. It also includes numbers entering, exiting and transferring within each of the 268 tube stations".
The circles on the map represent stations, and the arrows show the dominant direction of travel.

Are Solar Roadways on the road to Reality?

19 Sept 2016 -  It's been called the "Mother Road and the Main Street of America", but soon Route 66 will become the testing ground for an experiment that developers hope may change our roadways. After some delays, Solar Roadways' hexagonal glass panels will be laid over a sidewalk near a rest stop in Conway, Missouri, once a waystation for motorists on the famous highway that helped bring Americans west.

This small test, according to staff at the Missouri Department of Transportation, will start by early December 2016 and be the first public trial of the Solar Roadways technology by a U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

Solar Roadways, (better known as Solar "Freakin" Rodaways via their wildly popular fundraising video), the glass-covered solar panels that could turn roads into power plants, was developed by a husband-and-wife team Scott and Julie Brusaw in Idaho. They received a two-year, $750,000 (£615,000, EUR 675,000) Small Business Innovative Research contract by the U.S. DOT to conduct tests in 2011, and a few years later, they captured the public's attention with an Indiegogo campaign that helped them raise more than $2.2 million through crowdfunding.

Read more
The History of Human Space Exploration in one eye-catching map

30 Sept 2016 -  Space exploration has come a long way since Sputnik blasted into orbit back in 1957.

From the Rosetta probe's final descent on comet 67P to NASA's upcoming mission to the Sun, the furthest reaches of our solar system are no longer a cosmic mystery.

With around 100 missions to date, and more awaiting launch, a new map by PopChartLab shows us every space probe, lander and rover that has been launched over the past 57 years.
What is striking is how few probes head out into deep space, with most of them orbiting our own planet.  Nevertheless, the many flight paths looping around our neighbouring planets create a visual testament to scientific progress

Read more
Computer glitch may have doomed Mars lander

25 Oct 2016 -  The events of 19 October may be painful for ESA scientists to recall, but they will now have to relive them over and over again in computer simulations.

The lander, called Schiaparelli, was part of ESA's ExoMars mission, which is being conducted jointly with the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos. It was a prelude to a planned 2020 mission, when researchers aim to land a much larger scientific station and rover on Mars, which will drill up to 2-metres down to look for signs of ancient life in the planet's soil.

Figuring out Schiaparelli's faults and rectifying them is a priority, says Jorge Vago, project scientist for ExoMars. "That's super important. I think it's on everybody's mind".

Read more 
EPN Consulting Limited

EPN Consulting News  




Last 26-27 Sept 2016 in Central London EPN Consulting organised the 2nd S.T.R.E.E.T. Project Meeting.

The project, co-funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ scheme and coordinated by ENGIM Piemonte (Italy), boasts a consortium that includes the Municipality of Bled (Slovenia), Transpadana (Italy), the Alpine Pearls Network (Austria) and of course EPN Consulting.

The project aims at designing and implementing a training programme addressed to young unemployed or underemployed persons available on the labour market, with an academic (e.g. architecture, engineering, etc.) or high school degree, post-school diploma, and/or VET post-degree and/or having previous experiences in alternative mobility or sustainable tourism fields. They will be provided with cross-cutting and transversal competences, ranging from Sustainable Mobility Management, related to the preservation of natural and ecological estates, to effective tourist flows attraction, fostering accessibility and services.

The 3rd project meeting will be organised by Alpine Pearls in Werfenweng (Austria) in April 2017.


Last 11-12 Oct 2016 in Brussels EPN Consulting attended several workshops within the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC 2016) on Sustainable Transport, Circular Economy and more. Excellent opportunity to learn through the experience of proactive actors of the European scenario.
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Upcoming Professional Events in Europe

01 Nov 2016 - Manchester (UK) -  BIZ+FIN+TEC  -  TECH INVEST MANCHESTER 2016
01-03 Nov 2016 - Copenhagen (DK) -  ITS+TRA -  SMART METRO
02-03 Nov 2016 - Manchester (UK) -  INN -  INNOVATE 2016
02-03 Nov 2016 - Edinburgh (UK) -  TRA -  ROAD EXPO SCOTLAND 2016
07-18 Nov 2016 - Marrakesh (Morocco) -  ENV -  COP22 - UN Climate Change Conference 2016
09-10 Nov 2016 - Antwerp (BE) -  ENV+TEC -  16th BALLAST WATER MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE
14-15 Nov 2016 - Marrakesh (Morocco) -  ENV -  SIF 2016 - 7th Annual Sustainable Innovation Forum
The Website of the Month:
COP22  

This year the Conference of Parties (COP) will be held in Marrakesh (Morocco) from 7 to 18 Nov 2016.

COP is the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), opened for signature in 1992 during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and later entered into force in 1994.
Through this instrument, the United Nations has equipped itself with an action framework to fight global warming.

The main objective of the Framework Convention and its related legal instruments are to stabilize the concentration of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The term "anthropogenic" refers to the effects caused by human activity.
The Convention stipulates:" Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities".

As of today there are 197 Parties to the Convention (196 States and the European Union) including Palestine who joined in March 2016.

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