./emilychang eBot

How does a democracy work without “in-depth” news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either - it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function.

The recent snow and ice storms in the northeast left hundreds of thousands of residents without power. In Harvard, Massachusetts, however, one Prius owner found a way to keep the lights and electricity going by using his hybrid as a backup generator.

John Sweeney ran his fridge, freezer, wood stove fan and even his television and lights using his Prius for three days while the power was out in his town. By using an inverter to convert the car’s DC power supply into household AC, Sweeney was able to generate 120 volts

The New York Times wrote about this a year ago. The battery in the Prius is able to provide an uninterrupted power supply as long as the engine turns on and off periodically to recharge it. Any car battery can be used this way, but only hybrids start automatically when they need to recharge their battery. As long as the Prius has enough fuel, it can produce three kilowatts of continuous power. That’s enough to maintain the basic household electrical needs.

After three days, Mr. Sweeney’s Prius used up a mere five gallons of gas to power the electricity in the Sweeney household - a bargain and a real smart grid solution.

"their knack for engineering and social coordination can be downright spooky-particularly because none of the individual ants is actually in ‘charge’ of the overall operation”

“it’s this connection between micro and macro organisation that got deborah gordon into ants in the first place. ‘i was interested in systems where individuals who are unable to assess the global situation still work together in a coordiniated way,’ she says now. ‘and they manage to do it using only local information’..."the individual agents in the system pay attention to their immediate neighbours rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behaviour” Social networks and presence updates are like this, we constantly think out loud and others can tune in-publish/subscribe(connect/convere) enables an ambient awareness

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software http://snipurl.com/8y9zb

Generally speaking, the filings depict a 3D interface by which side walls, a top, and a floor all protrude from a back surface that resembles today’s two-dimensional Mac OS X desktop. A few examples also suggest a radical departure from traditional interface design by which the Mac OS X menubar would be removed from the top of the screen and thrown into a stack or floating element. 

Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network.

The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence. 

VC funding will probably dry up somewhat during the present recession, like it usually does in bad times. But this time the result may be different. This time the number of new startups may not decrease. And that could be dangerous for VCs.

In the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama first distinguished himself in the area of foreign policy; criticizing an atrophied approach to international affairs in both parties, he promised a new approach to diplomacy and national security. As the country waits impatiently for inauguration day, his appointments in those areas indicate that change is indeed on the agenda: In a major adjustment for the realms of foreign policy and national security, his new approach will be led by women.

I seem to spend a lot of time convincing people not to raise money. The #1 culprit is not The Downturn or a lack of good ideas. The real problem is that people are trying to raise money too early when things are still half-baked. Here is my top 10 list of tough questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves before trying to raise money.

Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start.

For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear-research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs-we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.

The iPhone is now not only the second most popular smartphone in the world but has saved the smartphone industry from a decline this past summer, according to a research note by Needham analyst Charlie Wolf. Apple’s handset has represented about 16.6 percent of the entire smartphone market worldwide for the quarter ended in September and is now second only to Nokia.