Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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SmartPlanet: Solar power produced 100% of new energy on U.S. grid in March

SmartPlanet

smartplanet logoSolar power produced 100% of new energy on U.S. grid in March

Solar power added twice as much to the grid in the first quarter of 2013 as it did in all of 2012.

Solar power accounted for 100 percent of new energy on the U.S.’ power grid in March 2013 – an energy matrix that includes coal, natural gas, oil, and a variety of other renewable sources of energy.

Notably, the 44 megawatts added by solar power were virtually the only source of new energy in a month that did not see any other sources provide new energy to the grid, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

But, as shown in the chart below, March was hardly a fluke for solar power. In the first three months of the year, solar accounted for 537 megawatts of new generation, second only to wind power’s 958 megawatts.

Moreover, the first quarter of 2013 saw twice as much solar capacity added to the U.S. power grid as in all of 2012. And the 264 megawatts of solar power added to the grid in 2012 represented more than the previous three years combined.

As SmartPlanet recently reported, solar power has moved from being “an immaterial job creator to an economic driver.”

“Since 2008, the amount of solar energy powering U.S. homes, businesses and military bases has grown by more than 600 percent according to the Solar Energy Industries Association,” according to U.S. News and World Report, “underscoring projections that solar will be the nation’s largest new source of energy over the next four years.”

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Boston Bombing Unaswered Questions Remain

Crowd-Sourcing
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

7 biggest unanswered questions over Boston Marathon bombings

Bombing Suspect Called Mom Moments Before Deadly Shootout

Another friend, Zach Bettencourt, even asked Tsarnaev about the bombings.

“I talked to him in the gym about the bombing and he was like, ‘Yeah man, tragedies happen all the time,'” Bettencourt said.

The night after the bombing, Tsarnaev tweeted, “I'm a stress free kind of guy.”

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US official: 2 more explosives found at marathon

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Continue reading “Boston Bombing Unaswered Questions Remain”

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Stephen E. Arnold: The Honk

Access
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

EXTRACT:

The Times does mention that reputable organizations including the Huffington Post, The Atlantic and Business Insider all use branded content. (In fact The Atlantic apologized for one instance of sponsored content from the Church of Scientology in January). The Times suggests the reason for this shift in advertising technique below,

“Publishers are largely being driven to support the use of sponsored content because of fewer people clicking on banner ads, the abundance of advertising space and other factors make it more difficult to make money from traditional online advertising. As advertising technology becomes more sophisticated, ads can be bought and sold at cheaper rates across the Web. Often they are ignored by the very customers advertisers are trying to reach.”

The Honk is available by free subscription; it is not posted online.  Visit  http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/ and send an email to thehonk@yandex.com.

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Patrick Meier: Data Science for Social Good

Cloud, Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Data Science for Social Good and Humanitarian Action

My (new) colleagues at the University of Chicago recently launched a new and exciting program called “Data Science for Social Good”. The program, which launches this summer, will bring together dozens top-notch data scientists, computer scientists an social scientists to address major social challenges. Advisors for this initiative include Eric Schmidt (Google), Raed Ghani (Obama Administration) and my very likable colleague Jake Porway (DataKind). Think of “Data Science for Social Good” as a “Code for America” but broader in scope and application. I’m excited to announce that QCRI is partnering with this important new program given the strong overlap with our Social Innovation Vision, Strategy and Projects.

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Dolphin: Intelligent Life on West Coast — Citizen Comment Slays Corporate Media

Corruption, Crowd-Sourcing, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Media
YARC YARC
YARC YARC

Noticed today as comment on Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

GlassKeys at 6:02 AM April 20, 2013 Perhaps this is a giant blinking neon sign that says “we longer trust corporate news”.You have all done such a bang up job: A) Exposing the lies that led us to the Gulf War B) Holding government officials' feet to the fire when torture becomes official policy. C) Ignoring the “Occupy” movement for months until it was impossible to do so, then failing to report why no bankers go to jail for defrauding the public. D) Totally failing to hold President Obama accountible for extending the Patriot Act, not closing Guantanamo, using signing statements when he promised not to. IE all campain promises he has broken . E) Ignoring massive abuses of civil liberties and wastes of money by the TSA and the DHS. F) Ignoring the politicians that back increasing H1B visas, whilst millions are still unemployed.I could go on, but you have to cover important news like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga's new meat dress.

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Jean Lievins: Bioengineers Build Open Source Language for Programming Cells

Science
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Bioengineers Build Open Source Language for Programming Cells

Drew Endy wants to build a programming language for the body.

Endy is the co-director of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology — BIOFAB, for short — where he’s part of a team that’s developing a language that will use genetic data to actually program biological cells. That may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the project is already underway, and the team intends to open source the language, so that other scientists can use it and modify it and perfect it.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

The effort is part of a sweeping movement to grab hold of our genetic data and directly improve the way our bodies behave — a process known as bioengineering. With the Supreme Court exploring whether genes can be patented, the bioengineering world is at crossroads, but scientists like Endy continue to push this technology forward.

Genes contain information that defines the way our cells function, and some parts of the genome express themselves in much the same way across different types of cells and organisms. This would allow Endy and his team to build a language scientists could use to carefully engineer gene expression – what they call “the layer between the genome and all the dynamic processes of life.”

According to Ziv Bar-Joseph, a computational biologist at Carnegie Mellon University, gene expression isn’t that different from the way computing systems talk to each other. You see the same behavior in system after system. “That’s also very common in computing,” he says. Indeed, since the ’60s, computers have been built to operate much like cells and other biologically systems. They’re self-contained operations with standard ways of trading information with each other.

The BIOFAB project is still in the early stages. Endy and the team are creating the most basic of building blocks — the “grammar” for the language. Their latest achievement, recently reported in the journal Science, has been to create a way of controlling and amplifying the signals sent from the genome to the cell. Endy compares this process to an old fashioned telegraph.

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