Monday Morning Links: January 14th, 2008

Hey folks, welcome to week 2 of Tropophilia. Let’s start things off with a bang…or at least a few links for your Monday haze:

• Always reliable for intriguing and downright cool stuff, EcoGeek does not disappoint with this gem on a thirty floor vertical farm planned for completion in 2010 in Las Vegas. Imagine, urban agriculture that provides fresh produce (year round!) for hotel and restaurant kitchens all over the city that never sleeps. I would love to see some sort of breakdown in terms of carbon inputs–creating a tropical climate indoors in Las Vegas year round can’t come without pretty powerful lamps–but I’d offer a rough guess that this would be a gain (though certainly not ideal if powered by coal, for instance) over Peruvian asparagus and Dutch bell peppers in wintertime. Here’s a doozy of a quote from the article EcoGeek refrences; it should pique your interest to read the whole thing:

“Although the project initial cost is high at $200 million, with annual revenue of $25 million from [selling] produce and another $15 million from tourists the 30 story vertical farm would be about as profitable as a casino with operating expenses only being about $6 million a year.”

• This is a predictably optimistic review of the ways much of Europe far surpasses the US in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The author interns at a corporate sustainability consulting firm, so she has reason to view the European situation favorably. BUT, I think it’s an interesting think piece in terms of considering what she leaves out. I’m not an expert on Europe (I defer to le Jarred, senor Dan and ye ould Joel), but I’d be interested to hear about some downsides to the regulations mentioned in the article. I’m hopeful to see more CSR reporting and regulation here in the US, but I think we need to be honest about the tradeoffs and learn from any mistakes made across the pond.

• Fast Company offers a neat interview with Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child initiative. He (like the project) has taken a lot of flak over the last year, and I enjoyed hearing his rejoinder.

• Following up on our political theme of last week, techPresident offers this provocative tidbit based on Yahoo data: are measures of online interest in candidates (searches for a candidate’s name, visits to a candidate’s site, etc) better predictors of votes than polls? The data is parsed out in a very unscientific fashion, and it might only be compelling based on coincidental correlation with the New Hampshire results that predicted Hillary’s advantage over Obama contrary to polls. Still, worth a ponder.

• It’s easy to forget as we live our fast-paced and technology-laced lives, but sometimes a handwritten thank you note is still the best way to make a good impression. lifehacker offers guidance.

That’s all for now. Please keep coming back, and we’ll keep the hits coming. If you’re intrigued by this whole “RSS thing” but don’t know where to start, email us [tropophilia (at) gmail (dot) com] and we’ll help you get started.