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A future in saltwater: ways to adapt to a world with dwindling freshwater

The primary issue I set out to discuss was the state of RDF vocabularies for microformats. Why is this important? A growing number of tools exist that convert microformats into RDF but in case everyone chooses different representations it will be significantly more difficult to interoperate. So in a small group we set out to document what we believe are the best practice mappings from microformats to RDF.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), a clean, renewable energy source that has the potential to free many economies from their dependence on oil.

Reduced to its essence, China and other developing nations want infusions of both capital and technology from the developed world to help them cut emissions.

ScienceBloggers discuss the advantages of open science and debate the necessity of the current peer-review system.

I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It's a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It's also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It's an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It's a discussion that doesn't just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It's collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

The Stream replaces the homepage you see when you sign in, and shows what's happening in your circle of groups and individuals: new bookmarks, groups joined, and new people followed will be the first actions shown. You'll also see Thanks given to you from other members. More actions will be added, as will aggregate views to avoid telling you over and over that the same page was bookmarked or the same group joined.

The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn't here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund its budget with contributions by member-countries on a sliding scale with unindustrialized countries paying less.

According to T. Boone Pickens, it is not possible for America to "drill itself" out of the energy crisis.

The focus of this month's issue moves from the individual to the community. Sustainable development requires communities in which people consciously and continuously attempt to balance individual self-interest with the common good. Surely, this is not the kind of ethos that induced the current financial crisis that, starting in New York, has already spread to all regions of the world. It is a financial pandemic, fueled by a greed virus that makes governments willing to sink trillions of dollars into failed financial institutions at the expense of millions of human beings that lack the resources to meet the most basic human needs.

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

Computers and common sense

The Bibliographic Ontology has just been published.

So here's the real trick: cloud computing is real. Everything is moving into the cloud, in whole or in part. The utility layer of cloud computing will be just that, a utility, without outsized profits. But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we've identified as "Web 2.0", the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What's uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, o