Newsletter for the Rotary Club of Subiaco - Issue No.: 162 Issue Date: 2 Sep, 2010

Our guest speaker this week was Michelle Kent, who spoke to us about two conferences, with an engineering background, which she attended in Melbourne recently. Our Club sponsored her to attend these. The first one was attended by about 250 people at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre. This has a 6 star environment rating, the only one in Australia. Michelle attended talks about Sustainable Futures, and, in particular, whether building new roads is actually the benefit it appears to be. There was also discussions about the development of the electric car. She also attended a talk about sanitation and health in Bangladesh. After a break during which she saw some of the region and a lonely koala, she then attended the Engineers Without Borders conference. Again, there were around 250 delegates at this. One of the sessions looked at the number of non profit agencies in the world and questioned whether these were actually effective – a controversial but thought provoking talk. As an interesting sideline to the conference, during the week before 11,000 people took it in turns to pedal 10 bicycles at a time; the stored energy that these bikes generated was enough to power a three hour concert.