Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Monday Links: March 31, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on March 30, 2008
in Business, Energy, Environment, Monday Links, Philanthropy and Politics
. 4 Comments

Another weekend yields to Monday. Yikes. Jarred and I have been a little distracted and preoccupied with our alma mater’s storybook run to the Elite 8 of the NCAA tournament. While heartbreaking, a close loss to Kansas tonight means we’ll both be spending less time reading articles about how great the Wildcats are and spending more time on Tropophilia. That is, as soon as Jarred returns from Detroit. In any case, let’s start the week (as usual) with a few links:

“Algae is the best plant out there for converting sunlight to energy. It’s 100x better at creating usable energy per acre than corn [...] new and old companies are trying different strains of algae and different ways of growing them [as well as] using them to clean the flue gas coming out of power plants.”

  • My dad was a hobby beekeeper for a number of years when I was a kid, and I’ve always remembered our bee colonies (and beeswax candles) fondly. As you may have read, commercial bee colonies all across the country are experiencing mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) resulting in as high as 70% die-off rates. Beyond Philanthropy identified CCD as an emerging opportunity for philanthropic dollars to make an impact, due to the importance of bees on American agriculture. Now Beyond Philanthropy highlights similar trouble among bat populations. Since bats play a crucial role in insect control–particularly disease-carrying mosquitoes–we should find the loss of 90% of colonies in the North East US to be cause for concern and philanthropic initiative.
  • This may only be of interest to fellow North Carolinians, but BlueNC will be hosting a first-of-its-kind (in this state) online gubernatorial debate with the Democratic candidates. Regardless of your political persuasion, it’s good to see candidates engaging in good faith with online communities. Topics for this evening’s debate will include “Technology and its role in transforming government, including transparency and privacy issues,” as well as “The environmental economy, including water policy, energy policy and climate change.”
  • Stunning (though not altogether surprising) news that China plans to build 97 new airports by 2020.
  • For those of you who are now a year or more out of undergrad and are starting to realize just how poorly you fare in the kitchen, here’s a great site with lots of how-to videos to help you Start Cooking.

Thanks and check back this week for new material. And please keep those guest posts coming! We had a great submission from Christy last week, and we welcome your thoughts on change. Happy day of honesty before April Fools strikes tomorrow.

Going Nuclear?

Published
by
Taylor
on March 28, 2008
in Energy, Environment and Infrastructure
. 8 Comments

nuclear-power.jpgWhen the subject of energy comes up, I’ve heard a number of intelligent people defend nuclear power as a favorable alternative to coal-fired plants. In recent years, a smattering of environmentalists have even joined the pro-nuclear camp. Nuclear proponents argue that atomic energy produces zero emissions, gained an unfair bad reputation on safety thanks to disasters like Chernobyl, and is a no-brainer solution to energy needs in the face of climate change. A recent Los Angeles Times Editorial speaks to all of the “pros” in the pro-nuclear movement:

Safety:

“Nuclear waste remains highly toxic not for a few years but for millenniums; if the ancient Egyptians who built the Great Pyramid had also built nuclear plants, the waste would still be deadly. This material is being stored on-site at nuclear plants [...] As these plants age, the chance of a system failure increases.”

Continue reading ‘Going Nuclear?’

Note to Bravo: Add RSS Feeds!

Published
by
Taylor
on March 27, 2008
in Asides
. 0 Comments

If you’re as hooked on Top Chef as I am, then you’ll love the Bravo blogs dedicated to the show.  I just have one complaint: would it kill Bravo to add RSS feeds?? -T

Mashups and Conversational Media

Published
by
Jarred
on March 27, 2008
in Copyright, Culture, Music and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I wrote a little while ago about mashups, and defined them as “two or more sources of information on the web ‘mashed’ together to make a new, useful tool.”  As it turns out, mashups are actually much more encompassing than that.  The two or more sources of “information” do not necessarily have to create a “tool”; indeed, the sources don’t have to be “information” in the traditional sense at all.

For example, there are music mashups — entirely new creations that consist of clips and samples of tracks already in existence.  Remember The Grey Album, which spliced together Jay-Z and the Beatles?  Mashup.  There are also video mashups, which combine video and audio from different sources to make something completely new.  There are countless examples of these, but one hilarious illustration that I’ve just happened upon called There Will Be Vader mixes audio from There Will Be Blood with clips from Star Wars.

So just as “utility” mashups are useful remixes of several sources of information, “creative” mashups are expressive remixes of several sources of inspiration.  The tricky difference between the two is this: utility mashups generally make use of what are called APIs, or application programming interfaces, to obtain and manipulate data.  The easiest way to think of it as a sort of Rosetta Stone that a company provides to developers to allow them to access and interpret the information in their products.  For example, Google Maps and Twitter each have an API that, when correctly manipulated and designed by a developer, can become something like Twittervision.

Music and video, though, are not really the same.

Continue reading ‘Mashups and Conversational Media’

Published
by
Jarred
on March 27, 2008
in Asides
. 0 Comments

Brian Stelter of the NYT gets it: good links are distributed virally among friend networks.  Says one student: ”if the news is that important, it will find me.”  Bingo.  This is what fuels the power of Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. — J