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January 31, 2007

DC MediaMakers Happy Hour on Thursday

For those of you in the DC area interested in video blogging, our humble gathering of DC MediaMakers is having another happy hour this Thursday night starting at 6:30pm. It will take place at the Four Provinces at 3412 Connecticut Ave NW, not far from the Cleveland Park Metro. For those of you who haven't joined us yet, we get together every other Thursday, alternating between informal happy hours and more organized gatherings at a local library, where we demo video blogs and talk about techniques. We've started posted our schedule at Upcoming.org, so you can keep track of what's going on when. Hope you can join us! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:07 AM

January 27, 2007

United for Peace

Watch the video
Video I shot for Rocketboom from the January 27 anti-war rally in Washington DC, featuring interviews with Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters and Dennis Kucinich.

Posted by acarvin at 7:50 PM

Photos from the Protest


Veterans for Peace, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just uploaded a gallery of over 150 photos from today's United for Peace anti-war rally in Washington DC. This particular photo is of a Vietnam Vet protesting the Iraq War. I believe it might be David Cline, president of Veterans for Peace, but I'm not sure. Does anyone recognize him? -andy

Meanwhile, here's a slideshow of my photos:


Posted by acarvin at 7:38 PM

Carlos Arredondo


Carlos Arredondo, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Carlos Arredondo is an anti-war activist who lost his son in Iraq. In 2004, on his 44th birthday, representatives from the Marines notified him of his son's death. In his grief he tried to set their car on fire and accidentily burned himself over a quarter of his body.

Posted by acarvin at 7:36 PM

Back from the DC Anti-War Protests


Jesse Jackson in Winter, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just got back home a little while ago from the anti-war protests on the National Mall in Washington DC. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of protesters began gathering there early in the morning to march on Washington. Here's a picture I snapped of Rev. Jesse Jackson backstage as the rally was starting. I've got lots of video and tons of pictures, which I will upload soon. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:36 PM

January 26, 2007

Name That NPR Show!

As some of you may know, I've been working on a project at NPR called Rough Cuts, in which we're using a blog and podcast to invite the public to preview a new radio show that we're designing and help us develop it. So far the feedback has been tremendous, with over 400 comments posted to the site this month. Now we're asking for your help on a related matter: we need a name for this new show.


Michel Martin, the host of the unnamed show, describes it like this:

We don't have a name yet. We really want one. Just a little name. A name all our own. Is that too much to ask?

It's not like we haven't been trying. We have. But we haven't been able to come up with one that satisfies us, and perhaps more important, our legal department (it can't already belong to another radio show, for example). A group of us is having a meeting on Monday, when Marie and I return from Los Angeles, to brainstorm some more.

But then the obvious thought occurred. Why not ask you?

This is not really a contest because there is no prize -- but you can best believe that if we pick your name I will take you out to dinner if you get yourself to Washington. And we'll put your picture on the Web site. Fair enough?

Sounds like a pretty cool offer to me. But time is ticking away - we're having that naming meeting on Monday, so you have between now and then to suggest a name. One suggestion: be sure to listen to some of the podcasts first so you can get the gist of what we're doing, then maybe the name will write itself. We can only hope. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:28 PM

A New Twist on Email Fraud: Begging From a "Congresswoman"

Like the rest of you, I've received more than my fair share of email fraud from spammers all over the world, but this one made me chuckle. Rather than claiming to be from a former West African finance minister or the widow of a foreign dictator, this one claims to be from former US Representative Cynthia McKinney.


Dear friend,

As you read this, I want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday. My name is Mrs.Cynthia Mckinney I am 55-years old, US Representative,4th District Ga,also an oil merchants in Nottingham United kingdom I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer.

It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts. I have particularly lived my life so well, as I always cared for everyone, even myself and my business.

Though I am very rich, I was very Generous, I was always free to people and always focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared for that other people benefit from. Despite the fact that i dont have child before this age of myself after the death of my husband Christopher Mckinney But now I regret all this, as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world.

I believe when God gives me a second chance to come to this world I would live my life as the same way. I want God to be merciful to me and accept my soul so, I have decided to give alms to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth. So far, I have distributed money to some charity organizations in the U.A.E, Algeria and Malaysia.

Now that my health has deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this myself anymore. I need your help, Contact me via my email so that i can tell you more
cynthiamckinney2007@yahoo.com

Obviously, this email is totally bogus. The real Cynthia McKinney appears to have a blog on her campaign website; maybe she should post a note and let people know this email isn't from her. Even better, find a way to get the word out offline among her supporters, particularly those who aren't very Internet savvy. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:37 AM

January 25, 2007

In Memory of Ryszard Kapuscinski

KapuscinskiOne of my heroes died this week.

This evening, I read the sad news on Ethan Zuckerman's blog that Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski passed away on Tuesday at age 74. Ethan and Cyrus Farivar have already posted fitting tributes to him. No writer's work affected me more profoundly that his.

I first discovered Kapuscinski by accident in 1994, on a shelf of staff recommendations at Olsson's Books in DC. It was The Soccer War, his collection of essays exploring his decades as a war correspondent. Over a period of more than 30 years, he covered almost every major conflict in the world, from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba to the almost comical Central American war that gives this book its title.

Never before had I read a journalist who captured the absurdities of war as true literature. It was a style that I found thoroughly compelling and absorbing, and soon I was tracking down every English-language translation available of his books. He had a penchant for capturing the death throes of kingdoms and empires with a poeticism lacking among his peers. In The Emperor, he recounts the excesses of Haile Selaissie's regime as it fell to pieces. With Shah of Shahs, we enter a paranoid world in which people say one thing publicly because they know others are watching,

(then switch to a parenthetical whisper to speak the truth about their encounters with SAVAK as Mohammed Reza Pahlevi's regime crashes around him.)


Perhaps his most epic work, in English at least, was Imperium, which just came out around the time I'd started reading The Soccer War. Unlike his other works, which recounted his near-death experiences in so many exotic locales, Imperium hit closer to home for him, dissecting the social putrifaction that was the former Soviet Union in its moribund years. As a Polish reporter, Kapuscinski could never turn his observant eye on the Iron Curtain - at least not publicly, until the curtain came down and he could publish his travel memoirs without fear of retribution.

His last English work published prior to his death was Shadow of the Sun, which I rushed out to buy as a first edition five years ago. Another collection of stories from his travels in Africa, he captures the social stagnation seen in all too many parts of the continent, from AIDS victims in southern Africa to the jaundiced-eyed unemployed souls that haunted his neighborhood while living Nigeria. It was a shattering look at a continent in transition, hurdling towards the 21st century in a torrent of guns, plagues, corruption, youthful optimism and worldwide indifference.

For several years I had been awaiting his next book, which sadly will be published posthumously. I've occupied myself by re-reading his works every couple of years. About 18 months ago while spending part of the summer in Ghana, I would sit each night in the moldy verandah of my guesthouse in Accra reading the surreal, hysterical, horrifying short stories contained in The Soccer War - which were bookended, appropriately, by chapters of him sitting in a moldy verandah in Accra. The book helped me get through a rather traumatic experience of being exposed unexpectedly to images of a mutilated Liberian at a local refugee camp. That night, I spent hours writing a journal entry on my experience at the refugee camp, navigating back and forth between my computer and the book, interconnecting the afterimages of that murdered Liberian with Kapuscinski's own afterimages of war. He was my guide, my muse, my therapist, my rabbi that sleepless night.

For better or for worse, I have only had a handful of Kapuscinskian moments in my life: that day at the Liberian refugee camp; my visit to the killing fields of Cambodia; being assaulted by Turkish police in the Kurdish east; Yitzah Rabin's death during my first trip to the Middle East. During each and every one of those occasions, I turned to Kapuscinski for guidance for preserving the memory in print and online. During both good times and bad, I am profoundly affected by my travel experiences abroad, but in those times of stress, I have found myself with almost a compulsive need to express myself and bear witness.

The words of Ryszard Kapuscinski inspired me like no other, one part documentary and another part confessional. I am forever in his debt. -andy


Posted by acarvin at 8:47 PM

January 24, 2007

You Know You're a New Parent...


You Know You're a New Parent..., originally uploaded by andycarvin.

...when Amazon.com starts recommending rectal thermometers to you. Imagine what else is on the wish list. (Okay, don't.)

Like the recommendation says, "Get yourself a little something."

Posted by acarvin at 10:52 PM

January 23, 2007

Blog Writing: Just Go With The Flow

Wesley Fryer just posted a blog entry in which he described his personal blogging process. His post, in turn, was a response to a posts by Brian Grenier, Miguel Guhlin and Vicky Davis, who each described various aspects of their own blogging regimen. Wesley's now upping the ante, challenging a whole bunch of edtech bloggers, including myself, to pick up the baton and offer commentary on how we blog. So here's my contribution to the process.


Frankly, I've given little thought to how I write, because writing is such an essential part of who I am that I just accept that it's something I do a lot. But that doesn't mean I'm one of these obsessive bloggers who feels the compunction to post a dozen entries a day just to drive up traffic. In fact, I would guess that if I looked at my writing habits over the last couple of years, I'd notice a significant drop in terms of frequency and word count. This is probably due to three factors: new job, new baby and no international travel. When I was running the Digital Divide Network, I treated blogging as a part of my job, particularly when I was traveling overseas, where there was always something interesting to blog about. Even after a long day, jetlagged in some faraway place, I still found the energy to sit down and crank out 10,000 words of thoughts about the day. For me it was better than Melatonin. But now I'm traveling a lot less; 2006 was the first calendar year since 1994 in which I didn't leave the US. And considering I hit somewhere close to 30 countries in the last few years prior to that, it was quite a shift. At home, of course, there are still plenty of blogable subjects, but priorities shift, and that's just the way it is.

Nonetheless, it's not like I've taken a sabbatical from blogging - far from it. For the last eight months I've written my twice-a-week column for the PBS blog, learning.now, and I still contribute to my own blog when I can - though much of my efforts have focused more on video as of late. Here on this blog, I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 850,000 words since I first started my original Waste of Bandwidth back in 1994. And still, I haven't given much thought in terms of how I do it.

For one thing, I read a lot. There are innumerable sources of good ideas on the Internet, including news sources and other bloggers. I'm a self-described news junkie, and begin to go a little crazy if I haven't had my fill of CNN and Google News a few times during the day. You might assume that I have an RSS reader jammed with hundreds of feeds, but actually I don't. My RSS reader sticks to no more than a couple dozen sources that I really care about, then I make a point at visiting certain sources that act as summaries for topics that interest me. My morning coffee isn't complete without reading Techcrunch and Engadget, while I can't eat lunch at my desk without reading the Washington Post op-ed pages. And I always go out of my way to read anything that's been passed along to me from the WWWEDU list or DIGITALDIVIDE list.

Of course, I could probably find a dozen things a day to write about, but I can't. That's because I have a day job, and NPR probably won't look too kindly at me dropping my work just so I could blog about yet another wacky story I read about on BoingBoing. So I've gotten more selective in terms of what I write about. I tend to avoid stories that have gotten beaten to death in the blogosphere or mainstream media, and embrace topics that are important, yet hovering below the radar. Anything related to the digital divide, edtech, the media or tech culture in general is fair game, but I tend to select stuff that has social or policy implications, rather than just rehashing headlines. And I'm a sucker for off-kilter stories, like when Nepal's national airline did an ad campaign to promote the country using images from Machu Picchu - in Peru.

On most occasions, when I have something to say, I just write it. I don't think it through; I don't craft outlines or strategies. I just start typing. Sometimes I'll skip the opening paragraph and write the middle first, then go back to write the intro, since the intro needs to set the stage for the bulk of the story - and I don't always know what the story will be until I write it. On rare occasions I take a few notes prior to writing, but that only happens when I'm writing about a complex topic and I don't want to forget about a certain point I need to make.

It's also common for me to write about something in response to what other people are saying online. This is particularly true on my PBS blog. On these occasions, I go out and review a sampling of sources covering whatever happens to be the topic at hand, then select quotes from a representative group of them, cutting and pasting them into my word processor before crafting my commentary around them.

Above all, I'm an ardent believer in flow. This is the word used by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MEE-high CHICK-saint-mee-high) to describe the state of mind in which you are totally immersed within an idea, with new thoughts flowing out of you, almost as fast as you can process them. Some people describe flow in jazz-like terms, being caught up in the rhythm, in the groove, riffing and improvising effortlessly. Csikszentmihalyi himself described it like this in an interview he did 10 years ago with Wired Magazine:

Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

Guitarist Pete Townshend has used similar language to describe the act of performing on stage, equating it with a Sufi-like ecstatic experience. (I'm a big fan of the late Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who was the personification of on-stage creative ecstasy.) While I won't go so far as to say that I get my jollies from writing a good blog entry, I understand what Townshend and Csikszentmihalyi are getting at. Particularly when I'm travel blogging, breaking a story that hasn't been covered by the blogosphere yet, or editing a video I'm passionate about, I lose track of time and get totally absorbed in the process. Writing - or perhaps I should say creativity, since I feel this way about video production as well - is a cathartic process for me, akin to a form of meditation. When I've written something I feel strongly about, I feel energized while composing it, relaxed upon completing it.

Usually I can tell instinctively whether or not a topic will get me jazzed and in flow. Before the new job and the birth of Kayleigh, I had a higher tolerance for writing about stuff that was mildly interesting, just to keep my blog from going silent for long periods of time. Now I feel less of a need to do that. If I don't have anything interesting to write on my personal blog for a week, so be it. Since I'm not relying on advertising dollars, I can afford to have my visitor rates fluctuate. And now I feel like I can blog about the things I care about without it becoming consumed by it. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:07 PM

January 22, 2007

DOPA's First Hatchling Begins to Crack Its Shell

It didn't take long for at least one member of Congress to reintroduce legislation aimed at further restricting Internet access at schools and libraries. As reported by ZDNet and Linda Braun of the ALA, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has introduced what they describe as "identical language" to DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. If DOPA had become law, it would have forced schools and libraries receiving E-Rate subsidies to block access to commercial interactive services, including online social networks and blogging tools. But the bill expired when the Dems took over Congress.

Stevens re-introduced the bill the first day of the new session, and he added some new twists to it, according to ZDNet:

Stevens didn't stop there, packaging his reincarnation of DOPA with another failed proposal that would require all sexually explicit sites to be labeled as such, according to a copy of the bill obtained by CNET News.com. Although it has encountered opposition from civil libertarians, the idea gained bipartisan support within Congress, passing unanimously as an amendment to a massive communications bill that ultimately died.

From what I can tell, DOPA Jr. doesn't have a title yet, nor any cosponsors, though it's referenced as Senate Bill 49, or S. 49. The Library of Congress hasn't posted the text of the bill yet, but it has this brief summary:

Title: A bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prevent the carriage of child pornography by video service providers, to protect children from online predators, and to restrict the sale or purchase of children's personal information in interstate commerce.

I'll blog about it as soon as I hear more. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:31 PM

January 18, 2007

The Autocomplete Personality Test

Steve Garfield recently posted the results of what he called his Autocomplete Personality Test. It's a simple idea: you go to your Web browser and work your way through the alphabet, typing each letter to see what URL pops up. Assuming your browser is set to autocomplete the URL, it'll give you a sense of some of the sites you visit (or at least those sites you've visited since you cleared your browser cache).

Here are the results of my test.


Read into it what you will. -andy

UPDATE: I thought it would be interesting to compare my office computer (above) with my computer at home. Here are the home results:

Posted by acarvin at 4:26 PM

January 17, 2007

New Report Dissects Impact of Web 2.0 on Election 2006

The good folks at the Pew Internet Project have come out with a report analyzing how the public used the Internet and other media during the 2006 election cycle. While the percentage of Americans relying on newspapers and magazines for political coverage declined dramatically over the last decade - from 60% to 34% for newspapers and from 11% to 2% for magazines - the percentage of Americans relying on the Internet grew from 3% to 15%. (Radio remained stable, hovering at around 17%.)

Altogether, nearly half of all Internet users, or 31% of the general population, say they went online to gather political information and exchange it via email. This group, which Pew refers to "campaign Internet users," adds up to 60 million Americans. Nearly one-quarter of these campaign Internet users (23%), appear to be forming "a new online political elite." By this, Pew means these Internet users were actively engaged in online political discourse, including publishing their own political commentary online, sharing someone else's commentary, creating political audio/video, or sharing other people's audio/video. So if you blogged about politics, created a political YouTube video or circulated a political video you found on blip.tv, mazel tov - you're among this new online politirati. Granted, only one percent of these folks posted original audio or video online, but this is the first political cycle in which these tools were readily available to a broad public. But that one percent managed to bring us the Macaca Moment and Conrad Burns imitating a narcoleptic - and this probably contributed to the Dems regaining the Senate. So if you thought YouTube was influential this time around, imagine what'll be like in '08.

In case you're wondering if Democrats and Republicans consume political media differently, it appears they do, but not by much. The Pew data shows no difference among Dems and Repubs when it came to the Internet or newspapers. Democrats were more likely to rely on newspapers as a source, along with CNN and MSNBC. Republicans, on the other hand, were more likely to watch Fox News and listen to the radio. Take note, my NPR brethren! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:13 PM

January 12, 2007

Nuon Chea Says There Was No Cambodian Genocide

In an interview with the Phnom Penh Post, former Khmer Rouge henchman Nuon Chea discounted the deaths of Cambodians during their reign in the 1970s. "Why should we have killed our own people? I do not see a reason," he said. "We wanted a clean, illuminating and peaceful regime."

In response, I would like to offer the following rebuttals:

Approximately 1.7 million other rebuttals available upon request. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:10 AM

January 11, 2007

Geography Illiteracy Leads to International Incident


Llama Over Machu Picchu, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Geography lesson for the day: This is Peru, not Nepal. And that is a llama, not a water buffalo, nor a yeti. If you don't know this, for the love of God, don't try to get a job with Royal Nepal Airlines.

Unfortunately, someone else already made this mistake, because they used a similar picture of Peru's Machu Picchu to promote Nepal tourism. According to a Reuters story, a Peruvian man paid a visit to a Royal Nepal Airlines ticket office in New Delhi and spotted a picture of Machu Picchu. The picture, it turns out, was a promotional poster for the Himalayan kingdom. "Have you seen Nepal?" asked the large text on the poster. Apparently none of the Nepalis who worked for the airline had seen Peru, or bothered to notice that the famous Machu Picchu vista wasn't a product of their own country.

Needless to say, the Peruvian at the airline office wasn't pleased. He contacted his government, which filed a complaint with Nepali officials. According to a statement they released on the subject, "The airline ... offered apologies to Peru for using the picture of the Machu Picchu Sanctuary on a poster to promote their country and assured that the lamentable error has been corrected.... As a consequence, the Nepalese airline fired an employee in the rank of a manager ... It is concluded that it was an isolated error."

Posted by acarvin at 9:47 AM

January 10, 2007

Brits Propose Bridging Home-School Digital Divide

At the British Education Technology Show today, UK schools minister Jim Knight announced a new goverment goal of bringing Internet access to all students who don't already have it at home. Outlining a series of education technology initiatives, Knight stated he was launching a multi-stakeholder taskforce to develop a sustainable strategy for bridging this home-school digital divide.

Quoting from Knight's speech:

The so-called digital divide cannot be allowed to create and reinforce social and academic divisions.... With more than 800,000 children and young people still restricted to access at school, we run the risk that they could be isolated and left behind. There is no sense in asking every school to provide a learning platform to support children at home if some - likely to be the ones who might most benefit - are cut off from that platform.

Today, I not only want to reinforce that commitment, but to talk further about our aspiration for universal home access and how that might be made a reality. The way to achieve this is by thinking both innovatively and practically, and to use the wisdom of those who really know what they are talking about. That's why we are relying on industry to help with this - and many thanks to Intel, RM and Dell who already doing just that. We need to come up with a sustainable solution which will work for future generations as well as this one, building on existing good practice rather than looking for a quick fix....

I am setting up a Home Access Taskforce which I will personally chair. I want this to bring together key industry players, the voluntary sector, and education representatives to look at the issues. Because ICT at every child's fingertips is not the be-all and end-all of our ambitions. We need to make sure that schools and teachers can take full advantage, and parents too can play a significant role.

So classroom practice will have to adapt to the knowledge that children can access resources at home. It will also mean advice to parents so that they can help their children get the most out of their resources. Let's not forget that the extended family too will benefit....

To conclude, I am committed to ensuring that we will be far-sighted enough to shape the strategic context through policies that make sense for schools and the industry. That we will be proactive in seizing the opportunities technologies offers rather than being overwhelmed by the pace of change. That we will support our workforce to ensure that those opportunities are understood and accepted in the classroom. And most importantly, I am committed to ensuring that we get it right for all learners.

It's a bold idea, but so far is lacking much detail. For example, I can't tell if they're considering some sort of universal service fund akin to the US e-rate program, tax credits for low-income households or some other strategy. Either way, I'd love to be a fly on the wall of those taskforce meetings to see if they can work it out. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:53 PM

January 8, 2007

Understanding the Meaning of "The First 100 Hours"

When the Democrats took over Congress last Thursday at noon local time, I had assumed that this would be the beginning of the so-called "First 100 Hours" in which Democrats would push through a range of bills they'd promised during the fall campaign. Little did I realize that the meaning of "first" was open to interpretation. That, and the meaning of "100 hours."

If you'd treated the First 100 Hours as literally beginning at noon on Thursday, we would have reached the 100 hour mark about 30 minutes ago - 4pm today. Do the math: four days at 24 hours each, plus another four hours, and there you go.

Alas, I should have never assumed that the First 100 Hours actually began at the very first hour they took controll of Congress. No, there were too many press conferences and parties scheduled, so they decided to make a long weekend out of it. This would suggest that the First 100 Hours would have begun sometime this morning, right? Wrong. At least they offered a good excuse for delaying it for another day: tonight's Florida-Ohio State game.

"There is a very important event happening Monday night, particularly for those who live in Ohio and Florida," said House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer.

Some Republicans disagreed. "We all know the big national championship game is on Monday night," retorted Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price. "But taking an entire day to watch the game isn't what we should spend part of our five-day work week doing."

(Full disclosure: I'm proudly wearing orange and blue today in support of the Gators.)

Then there's the tricky issue of what "100 Hours" means. Again, if taken at face value, assuming the hours started ticking away at 10am tomorrow - let's give them some time to get to the office - they'd have until 2pm on Saturday to pass their legislation. Right? Wrong again. Turns out they meant business hours, according to Hoyer:

We said to the American people, 'if you elect us, if you put us in charge, this is what we are going to do and we are going to do it in the first 100 hours,' which is essentially two weeks if you have a 40-hour working week, and that is what we are going to do.

So, if my math is correct, they've got until 2pm on Thursday, January 25th to wrap up their First 100 Hours. So what if it's literally 506 hours after the start of the congressional session? I mean, what's 400 or so extra hours among friends? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:35 PM

Second Life, Meet James Cameron. James Cameron, Second Life.

The same day that Hollywood director James Cameron announces that he's starting work on a $200 film that will be shot in an immersive virtual reality environment, Second Life reveals that they're releasing their immersive VR environment as open source. Coincidence? You decide. Either way, Iooking forward to seeing Cameron plug the two together so Second Life avatars can serve as movie extras. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:56 PM

January 4, 2007

Introducing NPR Rough Cuts

Over the holidays, NPR launched a new blog and podcast called NPR Rough Cuts. The idea behind Rough Cuts is to open up the radio program development process to the public, giving them a chance to help craft the goals of the show, critique dress rehearsal segments, suggest topics and guests, etc. The first show going through this "open piloting" process is a yet-unamed show to be hosted by veteran journalist Michel Martin, and is slated to go on air later this spring. Please check it out and help us craft this new program! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:00 PM

Renewable Energy My Grandmother Would Love

I remember when I was younger, I was rummaging through my grandparents' refrigerator for a snack and stumbled upon a Tupperware container full of some of the foulest gelatinous goop I'd ever smelled. My grandmother must have heard me utter some visceral response, because she turned around and said, "It's schmaltz."

Schmaltz, of course, is the Yiddish word for rendered chicken fat. Back in the day when Jews in the ghetto couldn't procure vegetable oil and wouldn't use unkosher lard, they made their own product for frying food by trimming the fat off of chickens and simmering it with onions to make schmaltz. All those classic Jewish recipes that would give you a coronary relied on schmaltz as its fat of choice.

And now, it seems, we may soon see schmaltz become a weapon in the war on foreign oil dependence.

I'm not kidding. Yesterday's Washington Post ran a story on how an increasing number of major food producers like Tyson and Perdue are getting into the energy business by converting chicken fat into biofuel. Soybean oil, which is often used for biofuel, is getting too expensive, and animal fats are becoming an attractive alternative.

The shift to animal fat as a fuel stock could be key to making the budding biodiesel industry a reliable fuel source for U.S. trucking fleets, said Vernon Eidman, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota who has studied the biofuels industry extensively.

Eidman estimates that within five years the United States will produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel and that half of it will be made from animal fat. By that time, soybean-based biodiesel will account for about 20 percent of the total, he said.

For fuel refiners like Bagby, the allure of animal fat is clear. Soybean oil costs 33 cents a pound, while chicken fat costs 19 cents. He plans to include soybean oil in his blend only because it adds necessary lubrication for engine parts.

"Soybean oil is more expensive than other products, so we just use enough of it to make the system run clean," Bagby said, gesturing toward a row of pipes and vats being installed in his new refinery.

It's a marvelous idea, of course. But oy, the smell.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:32 AM

January 3, 2007

A Little Methanol Goes a Long Way with Laptop Fuel Cell

Over the holidays, TopTechNews.com and MobileCrunch reported on a new fuel cell technology by Samsung that might have a direct impact on the digital divide.

Essentially, what they've done is created a docking station for their laptops that is powered by methanol, which is both cheap and easy to produce. (So easy, in fact, that people often die from methanol-tainted homebrew alcohol.) The docking station gives a laptop to stay charged 40 hours a week for four weeks. That's an astonishingly long time, given how my current laptop battery won't even let me get through a single DVD movie. They expect to ship the docking station before the end of the year. Meanwhile, they're also working on a pint-sized version, quite literally - a miniature power source that requires the equivalent of a coffee cup's worth of methanol to power a laptop for a week.

Most of the news coverage I've seen so far about fuel cells has been in relationship to cars and foreign oil dependency, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear about Samsung's announcement. There's no mention how much the fuel sells will cost, but if they can get the price point down, it'll be interesting to see how it penetrates developing nations and other places with large communities of people who don't have access to reliable energy sources. Methanol fuel cells would help people who are off the grid to power their digital tools more reliably, and this could impact the adoption of mobile and portable Internet devices.

Meanwhile, the only by-product of the fuel cell is water. Now if Samsung could ensure that this water is safe to drink, talk about killing two birds with one stone.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:51 PM

January 2, 2007

21 Gun Salute: The Gerald Ford Funeral

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Video footage from the funeral procession for President Gerald Ford across from the US Capitol.

Posted by acarvin at 8:56 PM

January 1, 2007

Panda Time Rag

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The rollicking pratfalls of Tai Shan the baby panda captured in one minute of ludicrous video cuteness.

Posted by acarvin at 9:55 PM

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