Category: Worth A Look

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Worth a Look: Ushandi Open Source Crowd-Sourcing

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Technologies, Threats, Worth A Look
Ushandi Home Page
Ushandi Home Page

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

Usahndi Visual Concept
Usahndi Visual Concept

This is a huge development, one that could lead to a more rapid creation of the World Brain with embedded EarthGame as a means of connecting all human minds with all information in all languages all the time.

See our briefing given in Denmark to think about how this might apply to the global harmonization of gifts from the one billion rich to needs of the five billion poor at the household and item level.

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Worth a Look: EcoInvent Life Cycle Inventory Data

Earth Intelligence, Worth A Look

EcoInvent Home Page
EcoInvent Home Page

Created in 1997, the ecoinvent Centre (originally called the Swiss Centre for Life Cycle Inventories) is a Competence Centre of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zurich), the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa), and the Swiss Federal Research Station Agroscope Reckenholz-Tänikon (ART).

Our core product is the database ecoinvent data in its current version v2.1 – the world’s leading database with consistent and transparent, up-to-date Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data. With more than 4’000 LCI datasets in the areas of agriculture, energy supply, transport, biofuels and biomaterials, bulk and speciality chemicals, construction materials, packaging materials, basic and precious metals, metals processing, ICT and electronics as well as waste treatment, we offer one of the most comprehensive international LCI databases.

On the technical level, the ecoinvent Centre is trusting since the year 2000 in the technical knowledge and the savoir-faire of the German company ifu Hamburg GmbH, under the lead of Jan Hedemann – company that developed and is operating the ecoinvent software.

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Worth a Look: Earthster Ecological Supply Chain Innovations and Life-Cycle Evaluations (LCA)

Earth Intelligence, Worth A Look
Earthster Home Page
Earthster Home Page

This project, an initiative of New Earth, aims to give life cycle evaluation and publishing power to all companies, along with other ways to document and market their environmental and social performance. And it equally aims to enable buyers around the world to evaluate and identify the products and producers that meet their environmental and social goals. This website is the home of a new system that is web-based, free, and open source (non-proprietary).

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Worth a Look: Books on Real Wealth Economy

Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Worth A Look
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. It's like treating cancer with a bandage. Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating “wealth” without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth. Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Books on Real Wealth Economy”

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Worth a Look: Various Recommended Articles

Worth A Look

Obama as LBJ: Domestic Politics, Escalation and the Descent Into Chaos

There have been many comparisons of the Afghan escalation question to its equivalent question in Vietnam 45 years ago, but I think the most ominous similarity lies in the way each escalation debate devolved into intellectual incoherence and confusion, mutating into an exhausted disorder, bordering on a paralysis of the decision maker's critical faculties, and finally caving in to domestic political pressures.

The New War against Reason

Mythical Jobs    The Environmental Inquisition    Politically Correct Blindness

Retired admiral says Russia losing its navy

Russia's once-mighty navy faces further dramatic decline after 2015, when most Soviet-built ships will have to be mothballed, a retired admiral was quoted as saying Friday.  The warning follows comments by Russian officials they were planning to buy a French amphibious assault warship able to carry at least a dozen helicopters or to land forces. Russia currently has no big ship with the power to anchor off coast and deploy troops onto land.

DRDO pitches for Netra for anti-insurgency operations

It is called ‘Netra’. It’s a small eye zooming in the sky to gather real time intelligence on the ground. This unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), shaped like a spider and weighing less than 1.5 kg, is only a speck when flying at a height of 50 km but it can give real time inputs to the team that is controlling it on the ground.