Author Archives: Alison Kidd
Living with Bert-the-Battery for 5 months
We’ve now had our Wattstor 6 kW battery (‘Bert’) for 5 months. The first chart shows our daily kWh averages and how they are changing as summer tails off into autumn. Our daily average demand (red) has remained relatively consistent … Continue reading
Is playing golf on a Friday afternoon such a bad thing?
Liam Fox recently told an audience of Tory activists that it’s the “duty” of our business leaders “to contribute to the prosperity of our country”. Instead, Fox complained, they are letting us down by choosing to play golf on Friday … Continue reading
Simply touching money makes us less helpful
I’m working on a project with the artist group, Larks and Ravens, on the topic of money – what is it?, where did it come from? what’s it doing? And how on earth did we get to a point where … Continue reading
Electric vehicles as storage – a psychologist’s view
“LONDON (UK) 10th May 2016: Automotive industry leader Nissan and multinational power company Enel, today confirmed plans to launch a major vehicle-to-grid (V2G) trial – the first ever carried out in the UK. The trial will work by installing and … Continue reading
What does it mean “to know by heart”?
There’s an intriguing recent study showing that people’s sense of whether faces are familiar to them or not is affected by physiological signals from the heart. The experimental subjects were wired up to a heart monitor and during the facial … Continue reading
Maybe we’re the ‘weird lunatics’ not them
Challenging article by Slavoj Zizek in the New Statesman about why we, as Europeans, feel so threatened by the migrant refugee crisis. We feel threatened by the strangeness of the other instead of seeing the strangeness in ourselves through other … Continue reading
Talk to the humans….
If you are an academic and/or a scientist, read this recent lecture by Daniel Gilbert. It’s worth it. Ouch. Click to access SPSP2016.pdf
Domestic Energy Storage
We are thinking of buying a domestic storage battery to better exploit our PV panels. They already generate more electricity than we use over the course of a year (see graph below), but that doesn’t mean we have sustainable electricity … Continue reading
Growth and Waist
UK grocery sales in decline for first time in 20 years. … was the shocking headline in the Guardian in November 2014. At a time of very low inflation, UK shoppers failed to buy more from supermarkets than they had … Continue reading
An Experimental Mix of Birds, Psychology and Art
Background For the past year, I’ve been a member of the ‘Larks and Ravens‘, an experimental group of two artists and a psychologist. We’re exploring how to create visual contexts which trigger people into seeing their world differently for a … Continue reading
The Prospectory 