Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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SmartPlanet: Biomimicry as Meta-Design Inspiration

Design, Earth Intelligence

smartplanet logoLook to nature for lessons in building resiliency

| July 18, 2013

The Earth is changing at a climatic level, and we humans, in the wake of a growing list of extreme weather events and years-long trends, are scrambling to react. Within the built environment (which includes everything from utility grids to residential homes), designers and architects are turning the focus toward what is emerging as a buzzword: resiliency.

New York Mayor Bloomberg last month announced that the city will spend $20 billion on a program to make its infrastructure more capable of surviving Sandy-like superstorms in the future, which could cost the city upwards of $90 billion by 2050, as sea levels continue an upward march. One research group says the global “climate adaptation services” industry is already worth $2 billion. The U.S. Green Building Council is also considering a plan to give builders Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) points for constructing weather- and natural disaster-resilient buildings, because a green building is one that doesn’t need to be rebuilt when disaster hits.

This begs the question: how do we make the built environment more resilient?

For the architecture and engineering firm HOK, the pathway is found in nature. HOK formed an alliance in 2007 with Biomimicry 3.8, a non-profit that helps organizations and educators find design inspiration in biology, and it has been integrating biomimetic principles into projects such as a Haitian orphanage.

Full story below the line.

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Robin Good: Exploring Curation as a Core Competency in Digital and Media Literacy Education

Culture, Design, Education, Innovation
Robin Good
Robin Good

How can content curation be used in education to support and enhance the development of new media literacy skills?  Paul Mihailidis from the Department of Marketing Communication at Emerson College in tandem with James N Cohen from the School of Communication at Hofstra University, have outlined six different ways in which content curation can be utilized as a key methodology to develop critical thinking, analysis and communication skills.  Their analysis is based on the actual use of Storify, a content curation tool, for specific educational objectives.  Useful as a reference framework for introducing content curation within pedagogical programmes. 8/10

Abstract: In today's hypermedia landscape, youth and young adults are increasingly using social media platforms, online aggregators and mobile applications for daily information use. Communication educators, armed with a host of free, easy-to-use online tools, have the ability to create dynamic approaches to teaching and learning about information and communication flow online. In this paper we explore the concept of curation as a student- and creation-driven pedagogical tool to enhance digital and media literacy education. We present a theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online. We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.

Teaching Points (expanded upon in cited work):

Teaching point #1 – Where top down and bottom up meet

Teaching point #2 – Integrating mediums, messages, platforms

Teaching point #3 – Sources, voices, and credibility online

Teaching point #4 – Framing, bias, agenda and perspective

Teaching point #5 – Appreciating diversity

Teaching point #6 – Empowering civic values and civic voices

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Patrick Meier: Disaster Response Plugin for Online Games

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Disaster Response Plugin for Online Games

The Internet Response League (IRL) was recently launched for online gamers to participate in supporting disaster response operations. A quick introduction to IRL is available here. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly turning to online volunteers to filter through social media reports (e.g. tweets, Instagram photos) posted during disasters. Online gamers already spend millions of hours online every day and could easily volunteer some of their time to process crisis information without ever having to leave the games they’re playing.

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Click on Image to Enlarge

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SmartPlanet: The world peaked in 1978

03 Economy, 06 Family, 11 Society, SmartPlanet

smartplanet logoThe world peaked in 1978

A new study of global wealth says prosperity peaked around 1978, and we’ve been heading downhill ever since. New Scientist reports.

Governments have tended to build economic policies around gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of all monetary transactions in an economy. GDP has risen fairly steadily — and often dramatically — since the second world war, implying the world has become more prosperous. Critics point out, however, that GDP only tells part of the story.

For a more comprehensive measure — one that accounts for social factors and environmental costs — economists started using the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It adjusts expenditure in 26 ways to account for costs like pollution, crime and inequality, and for beneficial activities where no money changes hands, such as housework and volunteering.

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Patrick Meier: Social Media = Resilience [Sub-Text Demands Free Cell Phones for Five Billion Poorest]

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Using Social Media to Predict Disaster Resilience

Social media is used to monitor and predict all kinds of social, economic, political and health-related behaviors these days. Could social media also help identify more disaster resilient communities? Recent empirical research reveals that social capital is the most important driver of disaster resilience; more so than economic and material resources. To this end, might a community’s social media footprint indicate how resilience it is to disasters? After all, “when extreme events at the scale of Hurricane Sandy happen, they leave an unquestionable mark on social media activity” (1). Could that mark be one of resilience?

Read full article.  Core graphic below.

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Stephen E. Arnold: Open Source HTTP Crawler (Norconex)

Software
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Norconex Offers Open Source HTTP Crawler

Most commercial enterprise search vendors offer their own HTTP crawler, and several are open-source. One new entry to the field stands out, though, for its odd blend of web and enterprise search functionality. In the post, “Norconex Gives Back to Open-Source,” Norconex describes their crawler and associated libraries:

“The Norconex HTTP Collector is an HTTP Crawler meant to give the greatest flexibility possible for developers and integrators. It makes it easy for Java developers to add custom features, so no one will get stuck again when dealing with odd requirements, difficult websites, or close-source crawler limitations. . . . The HTTP collector can be used stand-alone or embedded as a library in your own software.

“Norconex may release other collectors for various data sources in the future. In the meantime, we have encapsulated the document parsing process and sending of parsed data to your target search engine or repository into two separate libraries. We are releasing them as Norconex Importer and Norconex Committer.”

Norconex tells us that they focused on a simple configuration, as well as providing features that cannot be found in some existing crawlers. The enterprise search firm was founded in 2007 and is based in Ottawa, Canada.

Cynthia Murrell, July 16, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext