Quite a few chickens are going to come home to roost in 2009. Many of these chickens have been stored up by the Republican administration in America as presents for the new administration, but some of them simply Are. Let’s do a quick review of the situation and look at some implications. The Modeling Crisis [...]
Read more →Here’s what we’re trying to win the USAID Development 2.0 challenge prize with: Our project focuses on the development of the Water Technology Assistant (WTA). The WTA is a cell-phone based application that provides an enhanced and localized interface to the world’s water technology resources in a format that field workers and villagers can use. [...]
Read more →100,000 pages * 80 languages == 8,000,000 pages. Plus versioning. We have enough cognitive surplus to do this kind of work. Appropedia or Where There Is No Doctor could provide the seed content. What’s needed is tools for mass translation – billions of translation events, quality reviewing, translation of versioned texts so that it’s easy [...]
Read more →The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations, and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund [...]
Read more →I think one thing that’s being missed here is that Mormons feel exactly this way about polygamy in many cases. If a man loves a woman, and another woman, and another woman, why are they not free to marry? If it is about love… I really do understand the practical problems with polygamy in a [...]
Read more →Links to the paper, the Drupal implementation, and so on.
Read more →These maps of county-by-county shifts are really amazing. The interesting conclusion – the south moved significantly to the Republican end, even in 2008. That should worry people.
Read more →In a lot of ways, the new year begins now. With a McCain / Palin presidency, the general atmosphere right now would be panic, horror, fleeing – a draft, total loss of faith in America and possibly in democracy (it would have taken massive fraud, for starters) and so on. Right now, the people feel [...]
Read more →Dear President Elect Obama, People are being held for life without charges under US authority. Please, President Obama, fix Guantanamo Bay. Restore America’s honor. America’s national recovery from 9/11 is defined by closing the gaps in the Constitution – indeed, in the very rule of law itself – which the Bush administration opened in response [...]
Read more →They’re financing this on a community supported model – we send them our money and they do the work that the Government should be funding. I really want to stress that: this is work that should be government funded, the most natural channel being university research funding. But universities have narrow cultural mandates, do not [...]
Read more →