10/20/07 Links of the BiMonthly… ish
1. A Win in the Water War
“Stockton, Calif., residents have stopped one multinational company from taking over their water system, but other localities remain threatened.”
2. Using Flickr to Get Around Internet Censorship.
Flickr has “proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that contain words that get blocked by keyword filters - a simple tool allows a photo of Einstein at a blackboard to be annotated with arbitrary text that won’t be blocked by the Chinese firewall.”
3. Hot Squirrel Tails Deter Snakes.
“The ground squirrel heats up its tail then waves it in the snake’s face - a form of harassment that confuses the rattler, which has an infrared sensing organ for detecting small mammals…. This defensive tactic remained invisible to biologists until they looked at the animals through an infrared video camera. Now they believe that many other animals might be using infrared weaponry to ward off potential predators.” Awesome.
4. Visualizing Your Energy Use.
“How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The design firm DIY Kyoto recently began selling a device called the Wattson, which not only shows your energy usage but can also transmit the data to a Web site, letting you compare yourself with other Wattson users worldwide.”
5. Microlending: Is it Really About Surviving Seasonal Income Variation.
This blogger points to a paper which argues that “the world’s poorest often are less badly hurting for food/medicine than they are for the most basic support networks and mechanisms we use to manage our lives. If your income is seasonal and you’ve got no bank, forget about starting a business - you can’t even plan for the next week. In this context, giving loans isn’t about creating and expanding ventures, it’s about meeting a basic need that might be as vital as the classic food, water, and shelter: the ability to manage risk and plan for changes.”
