Cell phones usually contribute to urban noise pollution. But the folks at Paris’s Sony Computer Science Laboratory have created an app that lets any GPS-enabled phone help us understand the problem. Behold NoiseTube:

Serenity now!

…
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Cell phones usually contribute to urban noise pollution. But the folks at Paris’s Sony Computer Science Laboratory have created an app that lets any GPS-enabled phone help us understand the problem. Behold NoiseTube:

Serenity now!

…
Read & Discuss

Apparently very little. A Times reporter took one out for a test drive past its 40 mile battery range. What happens is that the gas-powered generator kicks in—silently—giving more battery power to the car. Its not as if you suddenly switch to a gas-powered engine; you’re still using electric power, just not stored electric power. Indeed, even while the generator is on, accelerating is silent, as you’re just putting more battery power into the engine, not…

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We’ve all heard that the music business is changing, and here, from The Times Online, is a chart to prove it. The red line at the top is the revenue from sales of recorded music. The light green line below that is the revenue from live music. The dark green line below that, “PRS revenue,” is the revenue from royalties.

Basically there’s more and more money being spent on live shows and, consequently, more money going…

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We’ve all heard that the music business is changing, and here, from The Times Online, is a chart to prove it. The red line at the top is the revenue from sales of recorded music. The light green line below that is the revenue from live music. The dark green line below that, “PRS revenue,” is the revenue from royalties.

Basically there’s more and more money being spent on live shows and, consequently, more money going…

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Designed by Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius from Lithuania, the Dancepants converts kinetic energy from running or dancing into electricity for your MP3 player.

More info here.

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It’s solving the world’s most important problems, of course. The Jaguar XT5, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. Researchers have already booked time with the machine for 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will use the Jaguar to make super specific predictions about climate change, and the University of Tennessee will use it to figure out how to make better ethanol from plant cells. Good news.

…
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It’s solving the world’s most important problems, of course. The Jaguar XT5, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. Researchers have already booked time with the machine for 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will use the Jaguar to make super specific predictions about climate change, and the University of Tennessee will use it to figure out how to make better ethanol from plant cells. Good news.

…
Read & Discuss

Why the shrinking cost of solar power may be enough to change our planet’s outlook—especially if it’s introduced first in the developing world.

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do, doesn’t mean it’s useless.” —Thomas Edison

In this second piece on identifying those green technologies that will make our civilization more sustainable, and separating them from those that won’t, the focus is on electric power generation, and the importance not only of reducing the…

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Leila Chirayath Janah, a friend of GOOD, recently launched a nonprofit venture called Samasource. Samasource aims to connect educated workers in disadvantaged communities in India and Africa with Silicon Valley companies that need people to do small, web-based tasks like data entry. Think of it as Kiva for work.

One of her first tests of this concept was in a refugee camp in Kenya. Boing Boing reports:

Shortly after launching Samasource, [Leila] read an Oxfam report that…

Read & Discuss

Cell phones usually contribute to urban noise pollution. But the folks at Paris’s Sony Computer Science Laboratory have created an app that lets any GPS-enabled phone help us understand the problem. Behold NoiseTube:

Serenity now!

…
Read & Discuss

Cell phones usually contribute to urban noise pollution. But the folks at Paris’s Sony Computer Science Laboratory have created an app that lets any GPS-enabled phone help us understand the problem. Behold NoiseTube:

Serenity now!

…
Read & Discuss

Apparently very little. A Times reporter took one out for a test drive past its 40 mile battery range. What happens is that the gas-powered generator kicks in—silently—giving more battery power to the car. Its not as if you suddenly switch to a gas-powered engine; you’re still using electric power, just not stored electric power. Indeed, even while the generator is on, accelerating is silent, as you’re just putting more battery power into the engine, not…

Read & Discuss

Designed by Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius from Lithuania, the Dancepants converts kinetic energy from running or dancing into electricity for your MP3 player.

More info here.

Read & Discuss

It’s solving the world’s most important problems, of course. The Jaguar XT5, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. Researchers have already booked time with the machine for 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will use the Jaguar to make super specific predictions about climate change, and the University of Tennessee will use it to figure out how to make better ethanol from plant cells. Good news.

…
Read & Discuss

It’s solving the world’s most important problems, of course. The Jaguar XT5, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. Researchers have already booked time with the machine for 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will use the Jaguar to make super specific predictions about climate change, and the University of Tennessee will use it to figure out how to make better ethanol from plant cells. Good news.

…
Read & Discuss

Why the shrinking cost of solar power may be enough to change our planet’s outlook—especially if it’s introduced first in the developing world.

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do, doesn’t mean it’s useless.” —Thomas Edison

In this second piece on identifying those green technologies that will make our civilization more sustainable, and separating them from those that won’t, the focus is on electric power generation, and the importance not only of reducing the…

Read & Discuss

Leila Chirayath Janah, a friend of GOOD, recently launched a nonprofit venture called Samasource. Samasource aims to connect educated workers in disadvantaged communities in India and Africa with Silicon Valley companies that need people to do small, web-based tasks like data entry. Think of it as Kiva for work.

One of her first tests of this concept was in a refugee camp in Kenya. Boing Boing reports:

Shortly after launching Samasource, [Leila] read an Oxfam report that…

Read & Discuss

Leila Chirayath Janah, a friend of GOOD, recently launched a nonprofit venture called Samasource. Samasource aims to connect educated workers in disadvantaged communities in India and Africa with Silicon Valley companies that need people to do small, web-based tasks like data entry. Think of it as Kiva for work.

One of her first tests of this concept was in a refugee camp in Kenya. Boing Boing reports:

Shortly after launching Samasource, [Leila] read an Oxfam report that…

Read & Discuss

Superhuman intelligence and the technological singularity.

Part one in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Living to 1,000? Superhuman robots? Matrix-style virtual reality? These staples of science-fiction may become a reality when (or, perhaps, if) the “singularity” happens.

The phrase “technological singularity” was coined by the mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1982. He proposed that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence would…

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The digital ethnographer Michael Wesch on the dark side of social media, what we learned from Iran, and why the future of the web depends on human interests—not market interests.

As a graduate student in Papua New Guinea, Michael Wesch studied how the introduction of books and literacy changed government and society. Now, as a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch examines how digital media is changing human interaction. His YouTube video “Web 2.0…

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Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Natalia Morari.

On the 6th of April of this year, 15,000 Moldovans rallied in the streets the day after their national election to protest the Communist Party’s rigged victory. It might have looked like any post-election protest in an emerging democracy but there was an important difference: This protest was organized entirely through new media—Twitter, email and text messages, and social networking sites. The number of peaceful protesters continued…

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Portland vs. San Francisco

Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco seem locked in an ongoing battle to become the left coast’s left-most city. To stoke the competition, the blog Gas2.0 has launched a website to track each city’s progress toward building an infrastructure for electric cars. We asked the mayors of both cities to explain what they’re doing to win:

Mayor Gavin Newsom on why the Bay Area will win:

Bay Area consumers have been the early adopters of green…

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Interviews from the Alliance of Youth Movements summit: Roots of Hope.

From Obama’s campaign fundraising to the election protests in Iran, we’ve all heard that Twitter and Facebook are rewriting the rules of public engagement. Guest blogger Erin Mazursky talked to participants at the Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City to find out how the nonprofit leaders of tomorrow are using technology.

Verónica Nur Valdéz and Felice Gorordo, ages 25 and 26 respectively, are the co-founders…

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Here Comes the (Chinese) Sun: How Chinese innovation is going to revolutionize solar power for the rest of the world

Residents of the city of Rizhao claim to be the first Chinese to greet the sun each day as it rises from the Yellow Sea. In fact, the city’s name is a condensed form of the Chinese phrase ri qu shien zhao, which literally means “first to get sunshine.” They also make some of the best use…

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A Case Study

In New York, the Solar One education center—the city’s only stand-alone solar building—and its I Heart PV campaign are working proof that the sun can help power our cities.

MISSION “To inspire New Yorkers to become environmentally responsible residents through environmental education, access to sustainable arts performances, and energy conservation using its own solar building as a prototype.” I Heart PV is its “citizen-led, grassroots advocacy campaign that seeks to drive legislative and regulatory support for…

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Here’s a conundrum: If solar power is still prohibitively expensive even in the richest nations on the planet, how will it ever spread to the parts of the world that need cheap, clean, and reliable energy the most? Inspired by the belief that clean energy is a fundamental human right, the Solar Electric Light Fund is delivering solar power and wireless communications to villages in more than 15 developing nations. With funding coming from private- and public-sector…

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Healthy Competition

The X Prize Foundation, which creates competitions to encourage technological development, already succeeded in inspiring the creation of a spaceship—dubbed SpaceShipOne—that could be launched into orbit twice in one week. While the competition offers prizes, its real success is offering a framework and impetus for technological advancement; the winner of the first prize spent far more on development than the prize was worth. After that success, the X Prize’s horizons have broadened, spawning other competitions…

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Even Less Evil

Fact: Google is a Really Important Company. Sure, it boasts massive profits, and it fights with Microsoft, and there is still debate over whether it is staying true to its do-no-evil mantra. All that aside, however, Google is also taking on several projects that, if successful, will certainly help tip the “not evil” side of the scale. Here are three of them:

GOOGLE POWERMETER  Imagine if checking your electricity meter were part of your daily…

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Free Knowledge 101

As tuition costs for higher education continue to rise toward utter out-of-handedness, the open-courseware movement offers something revolutionary: free class materials, readings, and journals made available online for anyone who wants to use them.

Heralded as the most democratizing education innovation since the advent of the printing press, the movement has some standout examples of groups helping people overcome the social and economic barriers to higher education. Here are a few:

MIT OPENCOURSEWARE

The Massachusetts Institute of…

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The ability to locate a shooting quickly can help police catch bad guys and save lives. In Richmond, California, acoustic gunfire detection is doing just that. With acoustic sensors distributed around the city, dispatchers can use the sound of gunfire to pinpoint where a shooting happened, the number of shots fired, and even the kind of gun that was used.

…
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The ability to locate a shooting quickly can help police catch bad guys and save lives. In Richmond, California, acoustic gunfire detection is doing just that. With acoustic sensors distributed around the city, dispatchers can use the sound of gunfire to pinpoint where a shooting happened, the number of shots fired, and even the kind of gun that was used.

…
Read & Discuss

Technological developments have enabled the evolution of warfare from cavemen bludgeoning each other with blunt objects to career soldiers detonating explosives from miles away. What’s next on the battlefields of the future? Military robots are rolling, flying, and swimming into conflict zones, aiding and protecting their human counterparts. We take a closer look at these robo-warriors in our new series, “Military Robots.”

Continued in Part 2, “Soldiers and Their Bots.”

…
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Seasonal allergy sufferers, rejoice! Japanese scientists have deployed an army of anthropomorphic pollen sensors across the country in an effort to aid the 15 million Japanese allergic to pollen. These Pollen Bots’ eyes change color depending on the pollen count so allergy sufferers can plan their outdoor activities accordingly. For those of us with hay fever, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

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There are more than 3,000 satellites orbiting earth. While we go about our daily lives, these contraptions are hard at work in our stratosphere, beaming the latest episodes of American Idol, snapping photos of black holes, and enabling governments to spy on obscure regions of Afghanistan. Leroy Chiao,..
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Scientists in Denmark have developed a plant that turns red when it comes into contact with trace amounts of TNT. If sowed over an area contaminated by landmines, these plants would form a botanical, color-coded map that would keep civilians out of harm’s way.

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If the transition from 386 to 486 resonates loudly in your heart strings, then you have some idea of how far we’ve come the past fifteen years or so. Of course, the seemingly exponential acceleration of tech improvements presents a fair share of problems--problems that extend beyond your feelings of..
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Who’s got ‘em? How many? What would one do to New York City? An original GOOD Video.

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