What a Week for Wind

Biglow Wind Farm I’ve begun blogging about environmental justice and the West for High Country News My first post went up July 30 and discussed growth, economics and justice.HCN has been kind enough to allow me to cross-post, so beginning with this week’s edition I’ll also be putting my posts up here at Lascher at Large.

On Tuesday, July 27, the Los Angeles Times reported the groundbreaking of the immense Alta Wind Energy Center near the Mojave Desert town of Tehachapi. The story described a facility “being called the largest wind power project in the country,” and its potential to generate three gigawatts of electricity for Southern California homes. Though light on opposing voices, the story did quoted the president of the nearby Old West Ranch Property Owners Association, who object to the project. A day later, Tehachapi – and particularly the Old West Ranch – again made national headlines, albeit for quite different reasons. The afternoon of the groundbreaking a fire broke out on the Old West Ranch. NPR carried the story in its morning news update the next day. Firefighters already strained by a blaze in the nearby Sequoia National Forest struggled to keep up with the inferno. Dozens of homes at Old West Ranch were lost. Despite initial worries, wind turbines were left unscathed. The news brought a glimpse of what life was actually like at Old West Ranch, where residents lived off the grid and as self-sufficiently as possible. This fact was barely, if at all, acknowledged by media outlets that seemed to have difficulty reconciling the ultra-modern prospect of a $1.2 billion project that could power 600,000 homes with an inwardly-focused community interested in sustainability on a very small scale. While on one hand the wildfires spared a project that could begin to significantly shift energy usage in California, they ravaged an example of an older, quieter, less shiny approach to environmentalism. It was almost as if the fire itself declared that there are acceptable, and unacceptable, approaches to sustainable living – one best left in the ashes of the past, the other glimmering in the future.

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All Things Not Considered in NPR's Oil Drilling Coverage

Yesterday afternoon President Obama shocked the country when he announced plans to open parts of the Atlantic and Alaskan coasts to oil drilling. Though the Pacific Coast was left untouched, the move could open up huge expanses of ocean elsewhere.

Many environmentalists treated the news as a betrayal and yet another delay in the move away from a fossil fuel economy. Business leaders were generally heartened by the news. Some Republicans expressed cautious optimism about the President’s willingness to compromise, though others saw the move as thinly-veiled politics.

News organizations, meanwhile, treated the news as the surprise it was, with banner headlines and lead stories on broadcasts. You can read about the decision many places on the Web. I’d like to discuss, instead, how the news has been covered, particularly by National Public Radio. I believe NPR missed a chance to thoroughly cover the story. Listeners who first learned about the decision during their commutes home yesterday afternoon and on their way to work today, thus, missed a chance to fully understand a decision whose implications may reverberate for decades.

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Extreme Measures

Geomicrobiologists look to harsh environments for organisms “disobeying” traditional chemistry teaching.
(This story was originally written and reported in October, 2008 at the University of Southern California).

Petri dishes might not be replacing AA batteries at Radio Shack any time soon, but a growing body of research shows it may soon be possible to create fuel cells made up of bacteria cultured to digest sewage or other substances.

Such wastewater remediation is but one application of the field of geomicrobiology, which has evolved rapidly since 1966. That year, Tom Brock first shook the field with the discovery of organisms thriving in the cauldron of Yellowstone National Park’s geothermal geysers. Before then, general wisdom held nothing could survive in such high temperatures.

“There’s nothing more fun than finding something that disobeyed what your chemistry teacher told you 35 years ago,” says Ken Nealson, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California and a teacher of Orianna Bretschger and Yuri Gorby, two microbiologists working at San Diego’s J. Craig Venter Institute on projects connected to wastewater remediation and biological fuel cells. Nealson is a Venter Institute board member.

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Blurring the lines: Virtual human research promises real-world impacts

Halfway through my interview with Louis-Philippe Morency I suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious.

Every nod, every movement of pen to paper, every glance in his eyes made me wonder what I might have been saying without saying anything. Would he catch my eyes straying to his bookshelves or the traffic on the street below and notice my (rare) moments of boredom and feel insulted? Would he detect a hurried, enthusiastic nod and hammer a point home to me? Would he latch onto my fascination to try to spin me?

Nonverbal cues drive human conversation. They signal a speaker to come to a point with an expectant glance or urge a listener to grasp the significance of a message with a well-timed raise of the eyebrows. Beneath the surface of our words we steep our conversations in texture and fill our discussions with broader meaning when we move our hands to the rhythm of our voices, shift our weight nervously, affix our gaze on listeners and alter the pitch of our voice with excitement or trepidation. These “backchannels” direct the flow of social interactions, but they aren’t universal.

Morency completed his Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined a team at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technology studying how virtual humans — artificially created but independent characters residing in a computer environment and meant to look, move, behave and communicate like real humans — can be taught to interact more plausibly with real humans and even each other using both vocal language and these nonverbal backchannels. Since coming on board at ICT Morency — along with colleagues at ICT — has won a series of awards and other recognition for research in how computers make sense of the visual data they collect.

Backchannels evolve through time, and they are differentiated by culture. They frame our words. But while these backchannels come to us almost as easily as breathing and are as much a product of thousands of years of history as art and music and religion, they’re foreign to computers. Scientists could program the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary and countless combinations of “heuristics” — or problem solving formulas — for proper grammar and machines would still have trouble learning this natural language.

The notion that virtual humans might have unscripted conversations with humans and one another may seem like science fiction. Real humans themselves often struggle to communicate with one another; whether we’re participating in complex international negotiations or wooing a mate we weave a quilt of words and body language meant to express our needs and desires. Computers communicate in strings of ones and zeros, a vocabulary of closed and open circuits determining how they “decide” to run programs. They have no other culture, no thousands of years of history to determine their identity.

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Mt. Wilson Observed

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Will Going Green be the Next Way We Go Bust?

“Wheel is going green,” blared a television announcer during a Spring broadcast of TV’s popular game show “Jeopardy.” The wheel in question? “Jeopardy”’s sister show, the equally well-known “Wheel of Fortune.”

Pat Sajak and Vanna White — icons for decades of American dreams of easy money — became the latest public figures to urge mainstream Americans to pay attention to their impact on the environment. The television personalities told viewers how they could find recycling programs in their neighborhoods and offered simple suggestions to conserve, such as taking shorter showers.. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures — which produces the show — convinced sponsors to offer prizes related to the green theme, such as $500 worth of environmentally-friendly cleaning products from 7th Generation or a hybrid Honda Civic. The promotion was an offshoot of Sony’s “Take Back” recycling program, and each episode included information about how the electronics giant’s employees and customers could stop trashing their stereos and TVs.

But how sincere – or environmentally-responsible – are such appeals?

Whether or not green is the new black, more and more Americans are reaching for ecologically-shaded opportunities as they try to spin their fortunes out of the red. With enthusiasm echoing the early days of the dot-com boom and the heady days of sub prime loans and home flipping, would-be entrepreneurs are starting to gamble that the solution to their economic puzzles is spelled e-n-v-i-r-o-n-m-e-n-t. But are they kidding themselves? Will a wind turbine manufacturer or biofuel harvester generate stock prices beyond everyone’s wildest expectations, only to tumble like the next Enron? Will green investment lead to gold, or more empty pockets?

Sony’s own investment was small. It already produced the show, and it could get sponsors to pay for the special prizes. The company didn’t gamble on a green week just because Vanna started to spend less time under the faucet and reuse her plastic bags, or because Pat changed his stripes from well-documented doubts about anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change (An April 6 post about “Wheel’s” eco-friendly campaign from the Treehugger blog cited columns expressing these doubts and written by Sajak for a conservative Web site). Instead, the effort was the calculated outgrowth of a pre-existing Sony public relations campaign.

About a week after “Wheel” went green, another spin was taking shape during a workshop in a nearly-empty Downtown Los Angeles library auditorium.

I would like to make this something for you, to help propel you into that green economy,” Alan Tratner, a green-tongued pitchman told his sparse audience, “If you’re interested in getting some great ideas, making a difference in the world and making some wealth for yourself, then please get involved with us.”

Us, in this case, meant Green2Gold, a green “incubator” that mentors and nourishes budding inventors and entrepreneurs trying to turn eco-friendly brainstorms to lucrative, marketable products. Tratner founded and directs the Santa Barbara-based Green2Gold, which is an offshoot of his nonprofit, the Environmental Education Group.

If you do this right there’s money out there to fund you,” Tratner said,pacing about the stage and beaming. A natural presenter, he took the stage like a T.V. Pitchman. Clad in a green polo shirt and jeans, both made from organic cotton, as well as eco-friendly shoes, Tratner resembled the love child of a three-way between your neighborhood Amway salesman, the woman down the street constantly giving tours of her solar panels and low-flow toilets, and the man around the corner always tinkering in his garage. At any point during the presentation, it seemed Tratner was moments away from declaring “It slices! It dices! It … saves our planet!”

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