Archive for the ‘Science & Tech’ Category
America’s first offshore windfarm gains approval
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar yesterday gave the go-ahead to the country’s first offshore windfarm, off the coast of Cape Cod. The expansion of alternative energy sources, such as wind power, should be welcomed. The Cape Wind farm, as the Nantucket Sound project is known, has been under review and debated for the past nine years. Opposition has had […]
Google’s 20% time for innovation
In this video, Anjali Joshi, Director of Product Management at Google, discusses the Company’s policy of allowing employees to devote 20 percent of their workweek to pursuing innovative ideas. As Joshi mentions, it is not a strict policy of time-keeping, but more of an informal policy that signals to employees that it is ok to […]
Replace Earth Day with Human Achievement Day
I’m against Earth Day, because it elevates nature over humanity; I think it should be the other way around. Some writers who are skeptical of environmentalism have suggested alternative insights into Earth Day. John Tierney in the New York Times offers seven lessons from the 40 years of experience since the first Earth Day: It’s the climate, […]
Anti-modernists want volcano air delays to continue
It was bad enough that an Icelandic volcano eruption sent ash into the sky to interrupt European flight travel. The situation was made worse by the risk-averse European aviation authorities who were reluctant to lift the ban, on the basis of “precautionary” or worst-case thinking, as Frank Furedi noted. And now, to add insult to injury, […]
In defence of science and progress
In this TED talk video clip, Michael Specter, a New Yorker journalist who writes about health and science, passionately argues against those who adopt anti-scientific stances: those who, despite the evidence, reject vaccines, consider GM foods “Frankenfoods”, believe there is a link between MMR and autism, embrace alternative health, and so on. Specter argues that this is a fear-driven response […]
Obama’s NASA plan: an “elaborate wake” for human spaceflight
Last month, President Obama announced proposals for restructuring the NASA space program, and a key plank of his new approach was to rely much more on commercial companies. As I noted earlier, this sounds more like the outsourcing of leadership. And as an article in today’s New York Times today finds, it turns out the private aerospace industry that is supposed […]
The Chinese are coming! (maybe)
A couple of articles this week indicate that the Chinese economic presence in the US may be increasing in the near future. First, an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal reported that “Chinese companies are increasingly looking to invest in the US, and state and local governments are scrambling to win a share of the […]
Misanthropic greens call for “no kids”
In the environmental website Grist (“we’re making lemonade out of looming climate apocalypse”), Lisa Hymas espouses her GINK Manifesto – Green Inclinations, No Kids: I am thoroughly delighted by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all. Making the green choice too often feels like […]
Google: don’t be holier-than-thou
Google has been applauded for its anti-censorship stand against China. But it’s not the role of companies to take moral or political stands, and we shouldn’t praise them when they do In January Google announced that it would no longer self-censor its search engine in China, referencing attacks from hackers to access Chinese political activists’ emails. This past […]
Battle over humanism at the science museum
The New York Times published an excellent article by Edward Rothstein last week on the science museum. He visited science museums in the US and internationally, and discovered a variety of conflicting approaches, which he speculates may be “a sign of the science museum’s struggle to define itself.” One of Rothstein’s most interesting findings […]