CONTENTS
MEDIA TEAM
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WHAT IS INNOVATION FOR YOU?
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COMMITTEE COMICS
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HOW INNOVATIONS ARE MADE
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WHAT IF IT HAD NEVER BEEN INVENTED?
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COMMITTEE COMICS
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DATA X EYP
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BIGGEST INNOVATIONS OF ALL TIMES
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TRANSPORT IN OUR EUROPEAN LIVES
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COMMITTEE COMICS
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MEDIA TEAM
We are now half way through the session. You have delved into your topics and explored the discussions of other committees. You have learned more about innovation and technology, and no doubt made new friends along the way. You have had a chance to DISCOVER what Lausanne 2017 is. This second issue from the Media Team of Lausanne 2017 focuses on uncovering more about the session and its theme. We hope you enjoy recapping what you’ve learned so far, acquire a bit more knowledge, and keep on discovering long after the European Anthem singnals the end of the session at Closing Ceremoney.
Happy reading, Amber & Rose
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WHAT IS INNOVATION FOR YOU? INNOVATION IS: Mia van der Merwe (AGRI)
“Pushing the boundaries to the benefit of mankind.” Pieter van der Merwe, 53, Chemical Engineer
“Putting our habits and usual approaches into question in order to find new ways that will achieve a more sustainable society.” Matthias Masini, 20, Student
“Bringing a creative and beneficial to mankind concept to fruition.” Rebecca Steenkamp, 53, Buisness Coach
“When you disregard or overcome established standards and rules in creating something new and more useful.” Eleonora Spasojevic, 37, Teacher
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“Striving for progress to improve the future.” Jana Buehler, 18, University Student
“A creative and important development.” Luca Müller & Benjamin Fäh, 18, Students
A hamburger that doesn’t fall apart. Matthias Kaufmann, 19, Student
“Spending time to think a bit further to turn something good into something great.” Colette De Beer, 27, Software Engineer
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COMMITTEE COMICS LIBE I, LIBE II EMPL, CULT Jarne van der Poel (LIBE I)
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HOW INNOVATIONS ARE MADE Finja Strehmann (REGI I)
There are many inventions we use in our everyday lives, but who had the ideas for them, and how did they even get this idea? Here are 5 different inventions we now see as normal and the stories behind them. 1886 the American wife Josephine Cochrane received the first patent for a dishwasher. She was married to a businessman and was able to live the life she wanted. The Cochrane family was known for social events, dinner parties and soirees. For every party they used their expensive china porcelain and after every party the servants carelessly chipped some of the dishes. When Josephine found that out, she decided to from now on do the dishes on her own. As she didn’t want to actually have the work she decided to invent a mechanic dishwasher. Later, this invention prevented her from losing everything, because when her husband died early, he left her with a mound of dept. Also invented by a housewife was the coffee filter. Every day Melitta Bentz from Dresden, Germany cooked coffee for her husband every morning and as they couldn’t afford cloth coffee filters, she had to clean the wet coffee sludge from the bottom of the pot. It was a long and annoying work and Melitta really didn’t like to do this. One day she started a kitchen experiment: She took her old brass pot, punched holes in its bottom with a nail and then ripped a page out of her sons notebook. She cutted the shape of the pots bottom out
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“DISCOVERY IS SEEING WHAT EVERYBODY ELSE HAS SEEN, AND THINKING WHAT NOBODY ELSE HAS THOUGHT.”
of the paper and placed it in the pot. After that she filled it with coffee grounds and slowly poured boiling water over it. And it worked out. The coffee was good and filter was easily disposable. 1908 she was then patenting her innovation. Staying in the kitchen, here is how the microwave was invented by accident: Percy Spencer was an engineer working for Raytheon Manufacturing Company. During world war II his task was to solve any problems that came up. Back then the Company was focused on radar technology for their allied forces. 1946 Spencer was testing one of his magnetrons when he discovered, that the lunch, a peanut cluster bar he carried in his pocket had melted. This made him curious, so he tried to find out how and why that happened. He ran more tests with his magneton with eggs and corn and found out, that the magneton could heat them up very fast and easily – the microwave oven was born.
DR. ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI
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Illustrations by
Finja Strehmann
From hot to cold: The invention of the ice lolly is also quite an interesting story, it wasn’t found by a cook or a chef, but by an elven year old boy. 1905 Frank Epperson, a boy who lived in California, one night accidently left a glass filled with water and a mix of soda powder outside overnight, but it wasn’t just the glass. He also had a wooden stick in it for stirring. When the boy found the glass in the morning, his drink was frozen. He put the glass under hot water to remove the ice from the glass and used the stick as a handle. He licked on the ice lolly and it tasted good, so he decided on make them for his friends as well and as he grew adult, also for his own children. Eighteen years after his discovery, he filed for a patent for this invention. Now many children, but also adults enjoy this refreshment during summer. 11
In summer 1928, another innovation was found. This time it has nothing to do with kitchenware or food, it is about medicine. Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish researcher was experimenting with the influenza virus in a laboratory in London when he left for vacation. He forgot to close the window and so a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated culture plate. When he tried to get rid of the fungus, he realised, that it prevented the growth of the staphylococci culture. As the so called penicillin helped against many diseases, it was soon used as antibiotic. The medical use was developed by Howard Flory and Ernst Chain in Oxford. Fleming ones said: “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for� and this is how innovations are made. You mustn’t be a super-brain, Josephine Cochrane and Melitta Bentz for example were just housewives and Frank Epperson was just a boy, but they were curious and interested in what was going on in the world. This is what empowers everyone of us to be innovative and who knows, maybe one of us will be a famous inventor in the future?
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WHAT IF IT HAD NEVER BEEN INVENTED? Catarina Bustorff (AFET II)
Dishwasher I use my dishwasher enormously and even several times throughout the day. As soon as we wake up, we have breakfast, we drink coffee and hop! the dirty dishes are put in the dishwasher. So, even if it is not working immediately, it is still the tank where all the dishes, plates and kitchen utensils that are not immediately washed are kept. That is not too bad, a lumber room. So, it saves you from several chores notably not having to wash all the dishes immediately. And when you think about it, it is not that much about the fact of having to wash it but it’s when we have dirty dishes without owning a dishwasher, that is the tank and hiding place for dirty dishes, well you must wash everything immediately otherwise it starts smelling, there is no more room for anything else. It is also a very useful tool amongst our family because it allows, if it is well managed, to take part in the division of domestic chores. If we had to wash the dishes ourselves, it would normally only be one person’s task and so what happens with the dishwasher, is that every family member participates and puts its own dirty dishes in there. I am realising this is incredibly useful because it democratises the division of domestic chores in the household and reduces the burden of those chores. If it didn’t exist, it would create governance problems, the functioning of the family would be damaged.
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Illustrations by
Finja Strehmann
If you ask me to reflect on what would happen if it had never been invented nor imagined, then I would say that it would be once again the woman that would be in charge of this task, because she supposedly has more gentle gestures, she wouldn’t break the plates, it is her responsibility to take care of the family and the food, it is her field etc. so it would be the woman, and it would be tragic. Sofia, 46 years old, mother of 2 and university teacher Coffee filters I usually use the coffee filter every day in the morning when I’m having breakfast. If paper filters didn’t exist, I would probably use the traditional cloth filters or a little net. I think that it would be obvious. By the way, in Alentejo [southern rural region of Portugal], at my cousins’ place, they never stopped using those filters. I think that paper filters are a good invention, but the other filters are nowadays easily washed. So, on the one hand,
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I think it is useful but on the other hand, I dislike the fact of having to throw away a paper filter every day, especially since it can not be recycled. Honestly, I don’t believe my life would change radically if there were no paper filters for making coffee, perhaps I would be more sustainable. I recognise that I use it every day and that it is handy but if there were no paper filters, there would probably be others, of cloth or with a very slim net, and that it wouldn’t change my habits that much. If there were no filters at all, I guess we would still making coffee like the Turks. We would grind the coffee beans and then you would let it settle. Nowadays there are still many people that make coffee like that and most probably the first times coffee was drank, it was in that same way. I’m convinced it’s only a question of adapting our behaviour. It is basically the same thing as the coffee filter. It is handy, it simplifies but it doesn’t seem to me that it is so essential in our lives. I believe there are more important things. Daniel, 46 years old, works every day from 9 to 5 (translated from Portuguese) Microwave It would be catastrophic, my dear. It is so convenient, to warm up food, even to prepare some simple and quick meals, it is essential for me. And I personally use it a lot because I don’t cook that much anymore, I’ve forgotten how to do it. So, my daughter brings me food almost every day. And it would be much more complicated if I had to warm up these meals with the stove. Do you imagine? All the dirty dishes, I think I would not eat it that way anymore. I would 17
start cooking my own meals again and I would eat it immediately. Yvette, 76 years old, grandmother of four (translated from French) Ice lolly That is a terribly dumb question because I would just eat Cornetto’s. Well if none of those exist, I would probably be the one to invent the frozen yoghurt with a little stick in it, completely different from the ice lolly. Now why do I like ice lollies? Because they are the best snack you can have in the summer, and my life would be hell of heat if I hadn’t these refreshing and tasty snacks. Perhaps I would do like my cat and lick people when they get out of the shower and are still wet. Afonso, 9 years old, elementary school pupil (translated from Portuguese) Penicillin
erwise it multiplies itself. When I came back from my Interrail trip, I had a bladder infection and with the antibiotic, it was treated in a couple of hours. If I hadn’t take the antibiotic, I wouldn’t be moving now. I don’t exactly know how to explain this in a biological way nor tell you about the dosage and the composition because I haven’t started my pharmacology classes yet. But most antibiotics have penicillin in them. But some treatments require broad-spectrum antibiotics. For example, in my case, as the doctor didn’t make go through a test to know exactly what type of infection I had, she gave me oxytocin, an antibiotic that can treat many diseases. As I told you, if antibiotics didn’t exist, I don’t know how they would treat any infection. People would die. Matilde, 18 years old, first year nursing student (translated from Portuguese)
If you have a microbial or bacterial infection, you must kill the little germ oth18
COMMITTEE COMICS AFCO, AFET I AGRI, REGI I Finja Strehmann (REGI I)
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DATA X EYP WHAT DATA ANALYSIS CAN TELL US ABOUT OURSELVES Lucius Miller (AFET I)
Bursting the bubble EYP surrounds you with can be difficult. Every social group, even such a diverse one as the EYP, can very quickly become self-reinforcing in its member’s media consumption, views and attitudes. While stepping outside outside of this “filter bubble“ and reporting on things without direct EYP connections is an important task this Media Team project series has given itself, it doesn’t represent the only way to burst the EYP bubble. Self-reflection and self-awareness can be just as important in recognizing biases. Lausanne 2017’s theme of innovation combined with this series’s goal represent an ideal chance to use novel approaches to reach this aim. Data mining, data analysis, Big Data, terms such as these have become synonymous with high-tech, highly innovative approaches towards traditional problems. Behind these buzzwords, anything between using graphs to visualize information and complex systems that govern our daily life, such as Google’s or Facebook’s algorithms, can be hidden. Now, what more fitting idea for innovation in Lausanne 2017, than trying to bring data-based approaches to EYP. To perform data analysis, very little more than a bit of programming knowledge, a dataset on what one is trying to research, and some ideas on visualizing the information one has gathered.
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Luckily, an excellent dataset on EYP already exists in the form of the EYP statistics database. The statistics database exists to power stats.eyp.org, the tool that has enriched many GAs since its full establishment almost exactly two years ago. It contains information on over 160 sessions, encompassing committee topics, voting information, vote results, session type, and much more, collected in a format ready for processing. A first, very simple insight can be gleamed from looking at word occurences in committee topics. An easy way ot make these visible is a word cloud. The following word cloud displays the 100 most frequent words in a committee topic, with frequency determining size.
Besides the rather obvious conclusion that lots of topics mention “European Member States” and “Europe”, there are much more subtle trends in the information that can be seen. Evidently, topics such as “energy”, “economy”, “rights”, “security”, and “health” seem to be at the forefront of the topics we occupy ourselves with as an organization. Additionally, “union”, “citizens”, “people”, and “integration” could point towards a large striving for social solutions and broad approaches towards solving problems. It is easy however to try to interpret too much into such simple visualizations, as the large frequency of the word *”light”* doesn’t actually seem to be caused by some preoccupation with providing illumination, but by the wide-spread use of the phrase “In the light of” to begin a topic.
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But analyses can go much deeper with the available data than taking stabs at understanding word frequencies. This complicated looking graph is a visualization of the percentage of votes for resolutions in relation to all votes cast (not counting abstentions or absences), calculated for each resolution individually. The graph is split up by type of session (“OE” represents various sessions that don’t fit the “traditional” EYP session categories). The broad bar in the centre of each box represents the average percentage of votes for a resolution, while the white box around it represents the 50% of vote results closest to it. The range indicated by the black lines finally represents the *maximal spread* of all the results in the database, excluding faulty results shown as dots, as they are missing some votes due to connection issues at the session. Although, or maybe because this graph is more difficult to read than the previous word cloud, it contains much more information that can be quantified more accurately. For example, it is immediately clear that the large majority of all resolutions at all sessions pass, although there are differences between the different types. Expectably, resolutions at both International Sessions and Forums pass more often than at National or Regional Session, which is probably owed to the larger preparation and work that goes into them. Surprisingly, resolutions at National Sessions are the likeliest to be rejected, with almost exactly 25% of resolutions being voted against, which is still a clear minority. The reason for this can probably be found in the more competitive mindset at National Sessions due to the presence of a jury, and the selection process in general. Innovative ideas don’t always have to be extremely complex or off-
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the-wall inventive, they can also be about bringing new approaches to an old environment. EYP has become a large hobby and time sink for many of us, but we rarely stop to reflect so deeply about the organization we are a part of. In this article, we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible in extracting information from the data available on EYP. There is a lot more to be found, but that might have to wait until another time.
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Matas Petronis (ECON)
BIGGEST INNOVATIONS OF ALL TIMES
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TRANSPORT IN OUR EUROPEAN LIVES James Keaveney Jimenez (TRAN)
Have you ever thought about how amazing transport is? Without modern transport, we wouldn’t have the opportunities we have in our lives today. Without modern transport, Lausanne 2017 would be impossible. In total, the media team will travel 29,033km to experience this session with you. This distance is the equivalent to 72% of the earth’s circumference. In the late 16th century, a voyage of 3555km would last twenty days, we are travelling over eight times that distance in a day or two. The only way we can travel this enormous distance in such short time is due to the innovative means of transport we have at our disposal. Many of us are traveling by plane, originally invented as an “airship” in 1852 but converted into the commercial airline we know today a hundred years later in 1952. In 2016, over 3.6 billion people took to the skies. Planes have allowed people to achieve many things; pursue work opportunities, enjoy new experiences in a foreign land or revisit old places which they have fond memories of. Trains will also facilitate our arrival to the session. Locomotives have come a long way since their steam engine origins and now we have trains that can achieve a speed of over 431km/h and link countries
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together. Although these large, powerful trains are very impressive, there is also a lot to say about the metro systems we see in almost every big city. The interweaving routes of these underground trains link a city together like veins and arteries enveloping a living organ. This system allows commuters to travel from one part of a city to the other very quickly and inexpensively. Although trains are the most used form of transport in the world, cars are a close second place. This is an area of constant research and development with electric cars and other hybrids leading the way. Currently plans are underway to eliminate petrol and diesel cars from our roads by 2040 but there needs to be a substitute capable of delivering the punch of petrol and diesel cars without harming the environment. With companies like Nissan spending $5.6 Billion on electric cars, we can expect amazing creations to come out onto the market soon. So how does Transport affect our day to day life? Many of us need to travel to attend school, work or university. The food industry is dependant on refrigerated vehicles and exportation to foreign countries. Other industries like tourism also rely heavily on transport. For example, in 2013 tourists in Spain spent an astonishing €59.08 Billion while visiting the country. Without modern transport, this figure would diminish drastically. In our lives today we need to be able to move around with ease. Transport has also helped us as humans to develop. Every generation is getting to see more of the world and experience other cultures, something which should in time reduce bigotry as we better understand other people and their customs. Take this statistic; “In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbour; today the figure is 1 percent.” Although it’s safe to say that this improvement in attitude is not due to advances in transport alone, we can say that it has aided it. People are aware now more than ever of all the different types of people that live on this planet and that aspects of a person such as skin colour has no bearing on what type of person they are. We have a long way to go, the one
“IN 1958, 44 PERCENT OF WHITES SAID THEY WOULD MOVE IF A BLACK FAMILY BECAME THEIR NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR; TODAY THE FIGURE IS 1 PERCENT.”
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percent should be zero percent for example but with constant development of transport and education amongst other things, we are continuously getting closer to eradicating one of the greatest problems on earth; ignorance. Thinking about the EU, take Interrailing. Without the EU’s ease of passage of people, such a system would not be possible. Passport controls and Visas would be required, wasting time and money at each border. Although it might not revolutionise your view on the world, people do come back home with a deeper understanding of what other nations are like. Most aspects of travel are positive but there are issues we need to tackle. Pollution is still a large problem. Electric cars and hybrids are either expensive, impractical, power lacking or a combination of many of those factors. We have also seen how terrorism has employed transportation to cause destruction, something which we must try to eliminate as quickly and as effectively as possible. We have come a long way in the past few centuries but we have a long road ahead before we perfect transport. It is up to you as the next generation to make a lasting difference.
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Travel paths for media team member of Lausanne 17
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COMMITTEE COMICS AFET II, TRAN REGI II, ECON Catarina Bustorff (AFET ll)
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