HAMCAM

http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/hamcam/dailyMovies/cam1/HC1_daily.mpg

De Anza College :: ES :: Wildlife Corridor Project

Coyote Valley: Connecting People, Connecting Wildlife from Coyote Valley Landscape Inst. on Vimeo.

http://www.deanza.edu/es/wildlifecorrproj/

We're hoping to work with these folks

MAP ICONS

Vascular San Jose

A prototype imteractive map

Global warming increasing death rate of US trees, scientists warn Studies find wide range of tree species are dying with serious long-term effects fo

A black bear wanders through a meadow dotted with fallen trees on July 8, 2007 in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Photograph: Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images

By Alok Jha, green technology correspondent

"Trees in the western United States are dying twice as quickly as they did three decades ago and scientists think global warming is to blame.

In their surveys, ecologists found that a wide range of tree species were dying including pines, firs and hemlocks and at a variety of altitudes. The changes can have serious long-term effects including reducing biodiversity and turning western forests into a source of carbon dioxide as they die and decompose. That could lead to a runaway effect that speeds up climate change."

Link to article in Guardian

Cold Truth

At a recent celebration of the International Polar Year in New York, artists and scientists share work inspired by the shifting landscape of Antarctica.

by Catrinel Bartolomeu • Posted December 17, 2008 03:11 PM

"March 2009 will mark the end of the fourth ever International Polar Year (IPY), a scientific program that intensively studies the poles. In order to have full and equal coverage of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, a polar year actually spans two annual cycles. In the era of global warming and melting icecaps, polar research reaches beyond the scientific community, agitating politicians, celebrities, artists, musicians and implicating any person, really, who has experienced the weather. "

link

The Oxford Project

In the blink of an eye, children grow up and have children of their own. In the small town of Oxford, Iowa the transformations have all been caught on camera. Josh Landis reports in this clip from CBS Sunday Morning

link

Technology with personality / role playing?

The Huggable robot teddy developed by MIT Media Lab seeks to interact with user by using the characters (possibly in the future, but teddy bear for now) to overcome the coldness of technologies. The robot teddy is loaded with 1500 sensors on its skin, video cameras on its eyes, microphones in its ears, speaker in its mouth, and above all, an embedded PC with 802.11g wireless networking!!!

The suggested use for this robot teddy is for long distance communications between grandparents and kids, patients and doctors and so on - With its gears, the teddy is like a portal of intercommunication between two, and possibly some sort of role playing from one side to the other.. for example, the grandparents teaching a life lesson to their teenage grandsons or daughters can hide or transform their figure through the teddy -

This article reminds me the book Diamond Age, which I am reading right now and having great fun with. The story evolves around a piece of technology, the primer, which is a form of book that can interact with reader, usually little girls between age 4 to 8. The book tells the story customized based upon the reader's level of knowledge, environment and so on. On the other side of channel, there are people called Ractors (modern day actors, who embedded bunch of cells on their body to transform themselves into whatever characters in digital world), who reads the book for the kids as the script automatically updates from the reaction of the readers on the other side.

Here is the original article.
http://www.physorg.com/news148727070.html

New mammal species found at Blue Oak Ranch?

On November 11th, U.C. grad students reviewed a flagged image from one of the weather station web cameras, which automatically tripped when large moving objects were scene near the main barn. The researchers later identified that it was unfortunately not the next zoological discovery slated for the pages of Nature or Science, but simply the greenmeme team exploring Blue Oak Ranch with reserve director, Mike Hamilton.

Blue Oak Ranch Reserve
Alpha Node Weather Tower
November 10 2008

Greenmeme spent a weekend at the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve with Reserve Director, Mike Hamilton.

Link

Manifesta: Caring for Fungi and Pollution

Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.

Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect and theorist specialized in experimental forms of preservation. His contribution to Manifesta is The Ethics of Dust, an installation intended to preserve pollution and the dust that has to be swept away from the building during the renovation process. Pollution has negative connotation. Yet, it can tell fascinating stories about our social, cultural and industrial past.

we-make-money-not-art
By Regine
on August 30, 2008

link

Biodiversity Hotspots

Conservation International
Biodiversity Hotspots

"Life on Earth faces a crisis of historical and planetary proportions. Unsustainable consumption in many northern countries and crushing poverty in the tropics are destroying wild nature. Biodiversity is besieged."

"To qualify as a hotspot, a region must meet two strict criteria: it must contain at least 1,500 species of vascular plants (> 0.5 percent of the world’s total) as endemics, and it has to have lost at least 70 percent of its original habitat."

Video games waste energy and contribute to global warming

Scientific American
Larry Greenemeier

link

"Game consoles (40 percent of U.S. homes have at least one) consume an estimated 16 billion kilowatt hours per year—roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego. This energy usage isn't going to drop anytime soon: Between 2002 and 2007 more than 62 million video game consoles were sold in the U.S. (Wii was the No. 1 seller, followed by PlayStation and the Xbox). The Washington Post reports that the National Institute on Media and the Family found that 92 percent of kids, ages two to 17, play video games regularly."

Greenhouse gases will heat up planet 'for ever'

The Independent
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment
Sunday, 30 November 2008

But one of the main researchers – Professor David Archer of Chicago University – warns that "the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, far longer than the age of human civilisation so far. Ultimate recovery takes place on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, a geologic longevity typically associated in public perceptions with nuclear waste."

link

Rainwater Harvesting Proposal

This posting is originally found from Pruned. For Parque del Lago idea competition, architectural firm, Paisajes Emergentes proposes open amphitheater as a rainwater collection system. As the water level rises, the amphitheater turns into a water pool, and as the water dries up, the amphitheater reveals. Simple and compelling...

Original Posting
Paisajes Emergentes

The fuel tank of future

This article talks about the new innovation to store hydrogen in the material - mainly carbon nano tubes and graphne - The fascinating part of this article for me is the generative structures formed from carbon nano tubes - wondering if the form has to do with the capacity to hold hydrogen inside of the material, which has to be 6% of all.

More about this article

Media Lab creates Center for Future Storytelling

David Kirkpatrick (left), Chairman of Plymouth Rock Studios, Cynthia Breazeal, co-director of Media Lab's Center for Future Storytelling, and Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab, with Nexi, a mobile, dexterous social robot developed by Breazeal's Personal Robots research group. Photo / Sam Ogden


"Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human," said Frank Moss, Media Lab director and holder of the Jerome Wiesner Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences. "It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future. But how we tell our stories depends on another uniquely human characteristic -- our ability to invent and harness technology. From the printing press to the Internet, technology has given people new ways to tell their stories, allowing them to reach new levels of creativity and personal fulfillment. The shared vision of the MIT Media Lab and Plymouth Rock Studios allows us to take the next quantum leap in storytelling, empowering ordinary people to connect in extraordinary ways."

link

Movable Sclupture + Projection = perceptual experience

Guerrila gardner from london

London's guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds proposes the hands on grassroot movement to change the ecology of the urban area.

Originally from http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/04/minidocumentary-of-l.html

ARTSPEAK

The arts community is responding to climate change, and changing the conversation in the process.

by Natalie Jeremijenko •

Seed magazine

link

The point is that the artists' view is invaluable precisely because they are not experts and do not have the authority granted by science. They are only as persuasive as their images. As nonexperts—though interested and knowledgeable—they stand in for the view of the everyman. This reflects the nature of urban and natural systems. They transcend boundaries; they transcend borders, disciplines, issues, and expertise. With art, the viewer knows that she has a license to interpret, to critically evaluate the work, that her opinion matters. The same can't be said of science. Scientific arguments are presented in the public imagination as fait accompli. When definitive terms like "discovered" and "understood" are the norm, science is often a one-way conversation. The creativity on display in these exhibitions plays into the public imagination differently than the computational model, the quantitative risk analysis, or other summative representations used by environmental agencies to inform public decision-making. The art invites interpretation without oversimplification or unnecessary precision. And by combining legibility with a diverse viewership the works of art provide the opportunity for evidence-driven discussion. They invite skepticism (who trusts an artist?) and critical engagement. They incite participation, not passive consumption of facts. In a participatory democracy, strategies that raise the standards of evidence used in public debate and that engage diverse publics are worth attention. And as much as climate change is a phenomenon of the environmental commons—we are all subject to it, layperson or expert—it necessitates, and deserves, a response from the commons.