David Perner's Page

This idea is a little rough, so please be kind, haha.



For World Water Day 2020, I am imagining having a costume contest. In each participating city, preferably near a public waterfront of some kind, people come dressed as their favorite water-borne pathogen. The contest could have several categories, such as "best overall costume", "best protozoa", etc. I would imagine this would be a good but not too serious way to educate people as to just how many water-borne diseases are out there… Continue

For my ACT4 post, I decided to write about Grameen-Veolia Water Ltd., a joint venture between Grameen's health and hygiene subsidiary and Veolia Water, a French company. Operated as a social business venture (similar to the joint venture between Grameen and Danone I would imagine) the water purification plant provides water to the area at a nominal cost, which helps to maintain the facility and plan expansion into… Continue

While generally I don't like the idea of water desalination (I'm a fan of learning how to make the most of what's available instead of forcing the system to work for you) I recognize that at least in the short term it may become a necessary part of life around the world. To that end, why not try to make this process as benign as possible?



I found a company, Water Standard, who is trying to do exactly that. Their idea is to get a tanker-type… Continue

While I don't actually celebrate Christmas, I do enjoy the lights and all the festive decorations around my neighborhood. It has been some time since virtually all Christmas lights phased to LED bulbs, but even with the massive reduction in power consumption, when a couple million people decide to string out hundreds if not thousands of lights a piece, you have to get more energy from somewhere.



With the short days, solar isn't really an option. Fortunately, the winter season… Continue