There is little controversy when discussing the need for more renewable energy sources in the United States’ energy mix, with emphasis on solar and wind power. The controversy begins when it comes to deciding where the physical infrastructure for these energy sources will be placed.
This has led to the (somewhat derogatory) term “NIMBY,” which stands for “Not in my Back Yard.” It describes people who may be enthusiastic about the prospect of the renewable energy industry but do not want its associated physical infrastructure in a place where it will affect the appearance of their properties.
An unfortunate consequence of renewable energy developers being pushed to put more and more wind farms on the grid is that they have become a bit overzealous. Plans and permits are issued quickly and residents who will live nearby these windmill farms ultimately complain. Not all complain, just a few.
This makes it extremely important to get feedback from residents who live near proposed wind and solar farms before beginning any planning on the placement of windmills or solar panels begins. Since we are installing infrastructure that will likely be in place for decades, these windmills and solar power plants will not just be infrastructure – they will be neighbors. It is important to get along with your neighbors, especially when you are trying to improve the public perception of renewable energy nationwide.
If a windmill needs to take a slight performance hit in order to not make a serious impact on the appearance of the landscape, then that is a fair compromise. Saving an unnecessary fight with local residents in exchange for a slight drop in efficiency is not really a drop in efficiency.
Having comprehensive public participation would probably be of more importance in the northeastern states, where population density is much higher than in areas such as the midwest and the southwest. More people would be affected by a new windmill in rural Vermont than in rural Illinois simply because the states are smaller and there is a higher overall population density in Vermont.
If you ever find yourself faced with a “NIMBY,” get them all together and tell them where to put the windmill. They will figure it out.
I realize that this bit of sage wisdom a little late in coming from me, but it must be said. If there is something you do not want others to know or see, do not put it on the internet. It is especially risky to put personal information and incriminating media on a site owned and operated by an “amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur,” as Jason Calacanis described him.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, has developed a reputation as of late for not caring about others’ privacy. Examples would be Facebook’s new, cryptic privacy settings that automatically expose all of your information to the world or attempting to screw over its number-one game developer, Zynga, the creator of Farmville.
If there is one lesson to be learned by end users from all of this, it is to always watch what you put on the web, regardless of how secure or sophisticated the service in question might seem. There are certain details of your life that you would not want to get out into the open and the best way to ensure your private information remains to private is to never share it on the web.
For example, I am comfortable sharing the location where I live. There are nearly 2 million people living in the Indianapolis metropolitan area and it is unlikely that anyone could find me and threaten my personal safety. I imagine it will give someone reading it an idea about my background and who I am, which is a primary goal of social media. I do not share my AIM screen name, mailing address, email address, or phone number anywhere, as these are pieces of personal information that I would not feel comfortable strangers having. Also, Facebook’s ads hook into profile information and target ads appropriately. I do not like to think about who else sees that data. Therefore, I do not share anything vital.
There will always be people like Mark Zuckerberg out there and it is important to guard what you share online very carefully. It can be very easy and satisfying to fill out all those fields, but it could come around to bite you in the end. Show restraint and do not share too much about yourself on the web.
There is a debate growing over the rights of Internet users and network neutrality. Users, on one hand, are demanding that the Internet be completely free and open, without any regulation or traffic throttling. Internet service providers (ISPs), on the other hand, contend that the web has never been totally free and that a certain amount of interference is necessary to ensure all users get a decent web experience.
The reason that this issue has become more important is that more and more of the Internet’s traffic is being shifted to cellular data networks, which are much less robust. European cellular carrier Vodaphone routinely shapes Internet traffic in response to users using too much bandwidth on its network.
The director of Spanish carrier Telefónica’s European regulatory policy, Robert Mourik insists that they are not looking at content when they restrict traffic. Mourik stressed that they are only trying to manage network traffic so that everyone gets a good web experience and not censor anyone.
If I were to throw in my own opinion, I would say that this is an excellent reason for cellular carriers to build out their physical infrastructure so that it can handle the rapidly increasing amount of mobile data traffic. With better hardware and more towers, it may become less necessary to modify Internet traffic in this way.
Source: NY Times
For those have not seen the Symphony of Science videos yet, I highly recommend you go watch all of them. There are five so far and a new one is added every few months.
In the most recent one, “The Poetry of Reality,” I have found that a few of the scientists in the video think that is “great not knowing”. I understand that all of the phrases and audio clips are taken completely out of context. Even so, I feel that these statements are poorly worded. Surely, Richard Feynman was not advocating ignorance as an alternative to absolute certainty and knowledge. Neither of these are logically tenable positions to try to maintain. Also, both tend to be associated with organized religion.
Absolute certainty means holding a very specific position on a topic and not wavering from it, even in the face of new evidence. An opinion can seem perfectly reasonable at one time, but then will appear more and more absurd to others as time goes on.
Absolute certainty breeds a terrible type of ignorance, willful ignorance. When one is willfully ignorant of reality, they will do everything in their power to avoid newer, uncomfortable evidence. In extreme cases, they will become immune to reason and become a risk to themselves and others.
In order to become inquisitive, one must first admit ignorance where no publicly verifiable evidence exists. Ignorance is not the equivalent of stupidity and it is easy to solve the problem of ignorance. Even if you do not have access to the internet or a library, you can still become a rational, thinking human being.
Also realize that whatever you hold to be true is not invulnerable to new evidence. Be ready to accept that new evidence and incorporate it into your over-arching world view.
Then again, that’s just me. I could be wrong.
Update: If you would like some additional reading, consider Bob Carroll’s “Becoming a Critical Thinker.” It’s a good introductory book to logic and reason applied in the real world.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cd36WJ79z4]
On Justin.tv, and countless other sites, there is advertising. This is nothing new. Since almost the beginning of the web’s use by the common public, advertising has had a presence and has faithfully generated revenue for those sites so that they can stay up. This has created something of a meritocracy, where the sites with more traffic earn for money.
However, there is a phenomenon that has reared its ugly head and that is offering for-pay, premium accounts that lack advertising. Initially, I simply justified this as the site’s owners getting their income from another source, the user, rather than another organization buying space. On a recent episode of MacBreak Weekly, Merlin Mann stated that he felt paid, advertising free accounts were an abuse of the users and the advertisers. This was such a revelation to me that I felt it was worthy of a blog post.
Essentially, a site with advertising regards ads as a nuisance and a means to get money out of their regular users. They therefore are deliberately trying to annoy their users in order to elicit money from them. This has the added effect of treating advertisers as not partners, but tools for creating annoying, useless content. It also makes users despise ads and click through them, rather than pay attention to them.
Justin.tv does this and it is an abhorrent web design practice. It disrespects users and advertisers who choose to support the site in question. Any site that charges users money to make ads go away deserves neither money nor users. Speak up about this practice to any site admin that does this.
That title might seem awfully petty. This whole post might be petty. However, there is a particular habit that some of my online friends have made that irks me and brings up my own perceptions of how social media should work. This nasty habit is having your various social media accounts sync with one another while not paying attention to each of the networks where that content goes.
A simple example of this would be a Facebook update being posted to Twitter, but the user does not check on feedback from Twitter.
The whole idea of social media is to be social. One does not simply shout into the ether and not listen for a response back. The reason that you are on a social network is to keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. They may want to respond to whatever it is you said and their message may fall on deaf ears because you simply could not be bothered to check on your Twitter account.
I understand that people are often fickle with social networks. Look at Friendster. That was the social network to be on. Now it has faded into the mists of time. However, if you are going to give people the impression that you are active on a particular social network, then you really should make at effort to talk back to the people who try to communicate with you in those places.
There is my rant. I realize that this is very petty, but it irritates me to no end when people act like they are listening to me when they cannot even hear me.
I love school. I cannot imagine not being in school, a reality that I will likely be faced with. To myself and some other people, there is no better place to be than in an educational institution. Why not stay there forever?
Even if you are not a teacher, you still get to shape the educational system in some way. If you are an academic advisor, you get to help students plan their academic, and possibly professional, careers. If you are a software developer or systems administrator within a university, you might be creating or supporting information systems that allow for efficient comunications between students and their instructors.
There are dozens of different positions within a major university that might involve never setting foot inside a classroom. However, being there would allow you to continue your own education for years, even decades with relative ease. Go to work, go to class, go home. You could do that for years. I know I would love to have that opportunity.
I do not see myself leaving the education system happily and would love to stay here and work. It is really the best place to be to shape the future of our society and to help ensure its continuity, before the young minds here become too old and stubborn to stray from their stupidity.
An email sent out by the IU School of Informatics Executive Associate Dean, Anthony Faiola, made the announcement that the School at IUPUI will be removing the computers from IT355 and IT 257 and making it mandatory for Informatics students to own their own laptops.
On the surface, this seems like a bad idea and would discriminate against students who cannot afford a laptop. If you are an Informatics or Media Arts & Sciences student however, you will need a computer at some point and it will probably be freshman year, at the latest. A modern, powerful computer simply is not an option in the fields that School of Informatics graduates are likely to enter post graduation. With laptop computers becoming as powerful as comparable desktops and battery life moving past six hours per charge, it would seem a natural choice to buy a computer that could be easily transported between home, work, school, and wherever else a New Media or Informatics undergraduate student would go.
As for the cost, this can be covered by financial aid. Again, this is still a worthy investment for any technology-related major to make. The financial aid is simply there to help cover some of the expense, just like with tuition.
The rationale stated for this change on the School of Informatics Laptop Initiative page is that this will allow the school to better maintain specialty, high-end equipment in a few Informatics computer classrooms. Whether there is some other explanation or reason for this change that has not been announced officially is the subject of speculation only. However, since the iMacs that will be removed were installed and purchased in 2008, it is possible that there are other reasons for this change.
It will be interesting to see how this program goes over. Students may also attend one of two open student forums scheduled on January 28th from 5:30-7 PM in the Faculty/Staff Lounge on the 1st floor of the IT building, and on January 29th from 2-3 PM in IT 252.
I recently watched “The Hills Have Eyes” and noticed a couple messages in its sick, gruesome plot. Essentially, it is a story about a middle-class family that is attacked by mutants. It is a cheesy story, one that has been done to death, so to speak and not that interesting until one starts to consider the secondary messages imbedded in the film.
The obvious message, if this film was ever meant to have one beyond senseless violence and cannibalism, is that of environmental neglect, which led to the mutation of otherwise normal people. This leads to my main point, that the attackers are lower class people and the attackees are middle class. Essentially, there is a small class war between two social classes in which almost everyone involved are largely destroyed.
This is one of the main reasons I do not enjoy horror movies. They do not just leave me unsettled. They guilt-trip me.
If you are reading this, then you are on a computer or smartphone. Either of these devices will need software to be useful hardware. Do not ever take for granted the community of developers that creates software for the hardware platforms that you use on a daily basis.
I understand that there is a group of people who jailbreak their iPhones and iPod touches simply so they can put stolen iPhone applications on them. This makes me want to hit each of them in the face with a hammer. If someone charges a price for their software, then it is usually a fair price. Most of the paid iPhone apps are 99 cents. What exactly is the mechanism in your mind that would make you think that you simply cannot part with a dollar after spending at least $200 on the device it will run on?
Software developers should not be taken advantage of. They, like the rest of humanity, need to eat and live indoors. In order to do this, they require a steady flow of income from people who purchase and use their software. If they can no longer afford to do this, they will simply stop developing cool, useful software and everyone will suffer.
Much of the convenience we take for granted in our daily lives is built on the backs of people staring at glowing rectangles, spooling out reams and reams of code. They provide a vital service. If you steal indie-produced software, you are not stealing from some bi, faceless corporation. You are most likely stealing from the developer himself.
Don’t be a prick. Don’t steal software.
Patrick Proctor was here 