Inhabitat has a great writeup on a new power chord that will show you (in pretty shiny colors) when and how much energy you’re using. A great application that steps into other senses, and great reporting as well.
i get excited by pretty renewable materials and manpowered gear. of late there has been some information floating around about bike frames made with an interesting assortment of renewables:
beautiful wood frames (Cell is my fav)
Biomega’s biolove (though for the life of me I can’t find it on biomega’s site)
sandwich bikes the idea is you buy one, they export one to folks in need
Brano Meres homemade bamboo bike frame too hot!
Calfee Design’s bamboo bike pricey, but pretty. nothing like a bike that has to be wiped down with furniture polish.
Yup, you heard me. Sexy electric cars. An interesting environmental alternative sports car for folks who have an awful lot of money.
Electric cars can go really fast, and probably help you pick up chicks. If you live in CA and have lots of money and like sports cars, I hope you think about getting one.
So… I found out about this through a blog apparently promoting more controversy on the climate change issue, and I must say that it frustrated me in a profound way, and my rapid run through statistics this summer is not fast or in depth enough to really make me feel comfortable evaluating the conclusions.
This is where you all come in. I am becoming more versatile in statistics, but I was wondering if anyone could look at this with more knowledge of the statistical language going on here than I have. I’ll quote the findings and give you a link to the whole 4 page summary (though i would much rather find something more than the executive summary… I want to see the math that they’re complaining about).
“Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”
This was taken from the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s website (where you can find the PDF of the summary of Wegmen’s findings).
It’s under the “Assessing Global Warming” section, and this is the press release for the hearing from this week.
This got no news coverage, and being something very in-committee, I find the whole thing very worrisome because while public opinion may be waking up, or paying more attention, policy is on its way to getting gutted.
any graduate student learns the skills of finding free food. Heck, this is a skill most undergrads also manage to hone.
Of course, this is a skill we don’t think of much outside of the poor student sector, but one worth considering, because an awful lot of perfectly good food gets thrown away, either from fast food joints, bakeries, restaurants, and supermarkets. Think about how much food there is out there, if not for the social taboo of finding it in dumpsters. Better than think about it, watch the Current TV piece about it.
Two items today struck me as particularly noteworthy. First off, treehugger has a great post on a couple of Al Gore videos, talking about making An Inconvenient Truth, and how to effectively get a message on climate change out and about in the public’s eye.
Oh, I hear Leonardo DiCaprio was on Oprah this week, and he talked about climate change as well. If you’re interested in his short online films on the topic, you can find those at leonardodicaprio.org.
The second item of interest to me is an article about a house made using materials leftover from Boston’s Big Dig. The recently completed 4,300-square-foot home in Lexington, Massachusetts incorporates 600,000 pounds of recycled materials.
Here are some stories that have piqued my interest of late. Wired had an article about breweries and sustainability. MIT has a piece on using algae as stack scrubbers to reduce carbon dioxide pollution. Ceres has made a 2006 report on companies making the biggest strides with climate change strategies. All of these are rather hopeful bits of information, a nice change from the gloom and doom I get in class. Mind you, bird flu may kill us all this next migration season and then we’ll have a lot less to worry about.
I finished reading Cradle to Cradle this morning, and this is definitely a book to read if you have concerns about the environment, the things we use, and making the world a healthier place.
Cradle to cradle is not about getting rid of everything we have, it’s not about throwing out all our technical progress, it’s about taking a different but possible approach. It’s well thought out, and they guys who wrote it practice the stuff they talk about. It’s a pleasant change. It’s interesting to look at many of their complaints about recycling, since what we recycle now can’t be reused at the same quality level, it has to be used as something at a lower level, so it’s not really recycling, it’s downcycling.
It’s really fascinating since I only know about efficient and effective sewage treatment. This is similar to that, but in other ways seems a whole 20 steps ahead.
Here are a couple of people (and a design firm) who have managed to make inroads to companies in different parts of the world showing them that they can save money doing things smarter. They did design for a cloth factory in europe (making cloth for wheelchairs) where the fabric is biodegradable, and the factory has no hazardous wastes… their effluent is cleaner than the water they take in, so the factory prefers their own waste water to the river water. I mean… damn. that’s pretty neat.
Maybe we aren’t going to kill ourselves off so easily after all…. I hope.
Worldchanging is a clean looking journal looking at things that are improving the world. For me, who reads the news and wants to give up even though I am active about a lot of things, this makes me feel like I’m not alone and there are many people out there doing amazing things. I like to know about stuff like this in a world where failures make bigger headlines.
I really liked this piece on the pot-in-pot design for a low-tech fridge that is helping people in Nigeria. Glad to see that Mohammed Bah Abba was rewarded with a Rolex award.
I used to play with pill bugs all the time as a kid, and that was the name I was taught to call them. Course, I floated around to Hinterlands and saw the biggest pillbugs I’ve ever seen.
Things I learned: