Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Page 3 of 7

Questioning Things: Vol. VII

Published by Jarred on May 16, 2008 in Questioning Things. View Comments

Thank the stars, it’s Friday. Taylor and I are headed to Davidson this weekend, celebrating our one-year anniversary of academic furlough by watching this year’s grads walk across the stage. But you know we love you, and wouldn’t leave you without a little sumin’ sumin’ to think about over the weekend.

These are random questions, but will hopefully generate some interesting responses.

  1. Our world is plagued with problems: war, AIDS, natural disasters, injustice, poverty, hunger, etc. If you had a magic “fix it” button you could press, but you could choose one – and only one – problem to solve, what would it be?
  2. What is one job you’d do literally until the day you died, but for which you would receive no pay? Assume you would be provided with food and housing similar to a college meal plan and dorm, be given unlimited quantities of the wardrobe you currently own, and have unlimited free health care.
  3. If the next President called you and gave you the task of completely rewriting the Pledge of Allegiance, what would you submit? The current pledge is about thirty words, but I’ll give you fifty.

Proceed.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Dom Dada.

More Than Greenwashing: The Advantages of LEED

Published by Taylor on May 15, 2008 in Design, Environment and Sustainability. View Comments

I’ve been fortunate enough to tour two LEED-certified facilities (one Gold Certified, the other Platinum) in the past two weeks. Being in these spaces has helped solidify in my mind that green building–done well–creates living and working environments with advantages that are obvious and attractive to even the biggest green skeptics.

First I visited Warren Wilson College. This small liberal arts school in the rural mountain outskirts of Asheville, NC merits its own post (or several) on the sustainability efforts on campus. The tight-knit community at the college is committed to sustainable practices for all the right reasons and everyone really lives out that commitment, whether by working on the campus farm, recycling and reusing to admirable extremes, or helping to build (as a group of students did) a Gold LEED-Certified campus building.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=rhrVYPV7cnA">http://youtube.com/watch?v=rhrVYPV7cnA</a>

When I was shown around the Orr Cottage (video tour above), what stuck out most was the simple elegance of many of the green building techniques embodied in the construction. These are, for the most part, not incredibly new ideas, particularly technological, or even all that complicated. But together they create a work and study environment that’s impossible not to envy. Some highlights:

  • Green materials: carpeting that, as Stan (a professor at WWC) says in the video, is “100% recyclable and 100% recycled.” Material for desks–”wheat board”–that’s made from grain waste. Re-purposed wood and salvaged doors.
  • Refreshing air: incredible air quality, due to sincere diligence avoiding volatile organic compounds whenever possible in glues, paints, sealants, etc as well as the fact that fresh air is continuously cycled through the building
  • Passive solar: the building is oriented to maximize sun exposure (genius…and yet, why so rare?) to help heat the building with winter sun.
  • Bright sunlight: but what about summer? Shades over windows at just the right angle block out the high summer sun while allowing bright light to enter above employees’ heads and computer screens. Say goodbye to headache-inducing fluorescent lighting, except on particularly dreary days.
  • Natural landscaping: outside the cottage, beautiful native grasses and wildflowers in place of the typical collegiate lawn. The native grasses and flowers require once a year maintenance (a controlled burn), and no extra water (they act as a storm water run-off filter for the building
  • Character: recycled antique doors for each office inside, giving each bright, plant-filled (another benefit of great sunshine) office its own unique style

As luck would have it, the week after my trip to Warren Wilson, I was in Maryland to see the headquarters of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, just outside of Annapolis. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is a nonprofit group working to restore and protect the massive Chesapeake Bay watershed. Some highlights from the Merrill Center–at the time of its construction, the first Platinum LEED-certified building in the country–after the jump… Continue reading ‘More Than Greenwashing: The Advantages of LEED’

Competition Needed Among “Climate Ready” Crops [Guest Post]

Published by a Guest on May 13, 2008 in Agriculture, Business, Environment and Science. View Comments

It’s a pleasure for us to publish this thoughtful guest post written by “Marriott” — good friend, good neighbor, and good ol’ fashioned lover of Freedom.

What if I said that you could plant corn any time of year, in any climate condition, and still harvest the same succulent vegetable that many of us grew up eating every summer? What if you could do this for any vegetable? During my morning commute I read an article in the Washington Post that discussed how this may be a possibility for the future of farming. (I urge you to read the Post article)

Although there are many issues to discuss with this idea, my focus will deal with the corporate side of things and the future of this potentially lucrative industry. Feel free to debate the usage of these seeds, their methods, or anything else that hits a nerve with this issue.

Geneticists and scientists working for major bio-tech and agricultural development firms have been working on developing “Climate Ready” crops. The basic idea is that through genetically altered seeds, these scientists can create crops that are drought, heat, flooding resistant. They are basically “Global-Warming Proofing” our crops. And with the recent sticker shock at grocery stores throughout the country, this appears as a welcome opportunity to help the impending food crisis.

The problem with this recent technology is patent monopolization. From the article:

Three companies – BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto of St. Louis – have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide.

The nature of these patents is even more troubling as corporations are able to eliminate competition. In one such case a corporation is applying for a patent to use one gene, and in the language of the patent the corporation effectively bans other corporations from using the same gene in any other “Climate Ready” seed.

Continue reading ‘Competition Needed Among “Climate Ready” Crops [Guest Post]‘

Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots

Published by Jarred on May 12, 2008 in Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s baby step into the social networking game, when it announced it was testing social features in its branded start-page, iGoogle. In an attempt to be a blogger rock star (hah!), I coined the term “scaled automation” to describe the web giant’s approach to this arena. In a nutshell, it combines Google’s penchant for automatically interpreting your social graph (“automation”) with its “long-tail” philosophy of breaking down barriers to the flow of information across the entire web (“scaled”).

To its credit, Facebook — the reigning champion of social networking — picked up on the “scaled” trend and announced Facebook Connect last week. This new feature will serve as a gateway to Facebook’s so-called “walled garden” of social graphs. Websites external to Facebook will be able to offer users the option of logging in using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, users can port some of their social graph data (friend connections, photos, etc.) to those external websites. From the Facebook Developers’ Blog:

Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. [...] As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:

The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. [...] Now it is working to connect people to other people.

Google is basically launching the same initiative as Facebook, but the spirit behind the implementation is different. Google wants to connect you everywhere, just like Facebook; however, Google also wants to connect you to everyone.

Continue reading ‘Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots’

Monday Links: May 12, 2008

Published by Taylor on May 11, 2008 in Apple, Energy, Environment, Facebook, Monday Links, Politics, Social Networks and Sustainability. View Comments

Since I was so focused on philanthropy blogging last week, I have a backlog of environmental and web 2.0 news to share. This could be a long list of links, but it should keep you busy for a while.

Social networking? Despite all of the attention paid to it in (occasionally breathless) media coverage . . . Facebook, MySpace, et al have not proven to be terribly effective tools for campaigns. Does anyone really think that the fact that Obama has five times as many Facebook friends as Hillary Clinton has turned out to be significant? Demographically interesting and revealing, sure, but actually relevant to how the Democratic primary process has gone so far?

  • Treehugger highlights a really simple, useful, accurate biofuels comparison chart from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I don’t mean to be a constant cheerleader for algae but…geewillikers, Batman, switch grass and algae look like the best possibilities in that graphic.

[Obama's] response to Clinton’s gas tax proposal was to reject it as a Washington gimmick that would . . . do nothing to address long-term energy issues. That rejection was coupled with a principled energy platform that would address those issues.

Why not try the same thing in WV and KY? Start by telling the truth: as president, he would stop the expansion of dirty coal. [...]

Of course, it’s crucial to couple this with a positive message . . . that means “green jobs,” but more than just that. It means stimulating the development of other industries and revenue sources by spending on infrastructure, education, public works programs, and a decent social safety net. An Obama administration will try to pay these areas back for the sacrifices they’ve made in the name of providing the country with cheap electricity.

It probably wouldn’t help him win WV or KY . . . [but] [m]aybe he could defy conventional wisdom by treating rural white voters like adults, helping them plan a real path to economic health and sustainability rather than telling them fairy tales about the continuing viability of earth’s dirtiest fuel.

  • The Library of Congress has a Flickr account. From what I can tell, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the photos (relatively modest in number) that they post. Case in point, “Auto Polo.” Like polo only using early automobiles in place of horses…Jesus.

    • auto polo

After the auto polo photo, I don’t really have anything else to say. Happy Monday.