Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to relief agencies, with an additional minute of nightly news coverage increasing donations by 0.036 standard deviations from the mean, or 13.2 percent of the average daily donation for the typical [...]
Daring Fireball points out:
Today:
Saudi Arabia Friday rebuffed President Bush’s request to immediately pump more oil to lower record prices, saying it does not see enough demand to increase production.
Eight years ago:
Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by [...]
Dan Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) sees oil rising to $150 before policy, technology, and alternative fuels collectively put a halt to the run-up.
At the heart of the Break Point scenario is a slow pace of growth in liquids supply that reflects the range of aboveground risks. “Decision making to facilitate new development in [...]
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, managing partner at VC firm Founders Fund, and manager of Clarium Capital, is the author of a dense, academic article in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review on apocalypse and prospects for globalization. He ultimately espouses a case for optimism, arguing that the various China, technology, and hedge fund bubbles along [...]
Many of the critiques about ineffectuality and an unclear mission in this FP piece could be leveled at any number of development organizations.
Today, the Peace Corps remains a Peter Pan organization, afraid to grow up, yet also afraid to question the thinking of its founding fathers. The rush to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign [...]
Love this idea: Wildlife film-making outsourced to Indian…elephants? Nature documentary producer/director John Downer trained elephants in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh, India, to carry HD cameras while following tigers through the jungle. Looks like some pretty fascinating footage. The film, entitled Tiger - Spy in the Jungle, will be shown on BBC on March 30.
The [...]
[Image: via]
Either we do know all the varieties of beings which people our planet, or we do not. If we do not know them all -— if Nature has still secrets in the deeps for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes, or cetaceans of other kinds, or [...]
Wolverine outside of Truckee, California, 2008
The above photo has been making waves in the wildlife science and conservation communities, as it is the first confirmed sighting of a wolverine in the Sierra Nevada since 1922. Oregon State grad researcher Katie Moriarty set up the motion-sensor camera to track martens, another elusive and weasel-like species, but [...]
DARPA-funded quadruped robot BigDog has officially descended into the uncanny valley.
Congrats to DARPA for fifty years of disruptive technology development. The DARPA scientists I have met and worked with have to a person been fascinating individuals working on very tough problems. I don’t always support the military end goal that DARPA projects seek to [...]
In struggles of sovereignty, cartography is a weapon. I first saw the truth in this statement in the work of Bernard Nietschmann, a professor of mine at Berkeley who partnered with indigenous groups in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Australia to map their traditional territories and fishing areas. These maps became critical tools in the groups’ struggles [...]
