The system works like this: run to the local drugstore or newsstand and purchase a smart card, which, like a long-distance telephone card, is programmed for a certain number of credits. Back home, punch the card’s code into the mini-keyboard on a modest-looking microprocessor and push the load key. Automatically, the water manager sends a signal to the Tocantins sanitation company to pump more water into your well. Run out of credits? Just push the loan key, and, like a hydraulic IMF, the water authority will pump you a bridge loan to carry you until you can run out and purchase another card.
Ironically, the water miser was not dreamed up to save water. Delinquent water bills were the real target; one of every five customers pays late or not at all. “People would blithely run their taps and then fight with us over the bill at the end of the month,” says Jose Alberto de Sousa, commercial-project director of Saneatins, the water company that helped develop the system. But officials soon realized they had stumbled on an ideal conservation tool. “Households using the water manager saved 40 percent on their water bills,” Sousa says. Now “we are getting calls from all over the country.”
Cyberseating All Web, all the time. That should be the motto for sleepy Bury St. Edmunds, England, owners of the first Web-wired park bench. Strollers in the garden of the town’s 11th-century abbey can plug their laptops into specially designed sockets, laze in the sun and surf. “A beautiful park is the ideal place for it this summer,” said town Mayor Brian Bagnall, officially opening the bench and sending the first e-mail earlier this month. Sadly, we feel compelled to remind Mr. Bagnall that this may not be the most promising of ventures. This is Britain he’s talking about, after all, where summer is short–and it usually rains nonstop.
