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 [...]
Fittingly, the same week that TimeOut Mumbai covers the rise of hip hop in Bombay, Kanye West discovers one of Bombay’s newest clubs. Let me be the first to say: Kanye at MMRDA in six months.
Big ups to Blue Frog architect Kapil Gupta of Serie
The cover of the Economist this week asks “What’s Holding India Back?” This account of the challenges facing governmental reform is one of the standout pieces, a character study of one of India’s elite public servants that conveys the Herculean nature of the task of running this country.
A four-year veteran of the elite Indian Administrative [...]
You can always count on Kevin Kelly to sense the emerging dynamics of a system and crystallize his insight into a simple and compelling idea that he freely shares with everyone. Then this idea spreads into collective understanding such that it is hard to imagine how one actually viewed the issue beforehand. It’s almost uncanny [...]
OK, I admit I just wanted to write that. But the movie actually looks pretty good! Here’s hoping for a film festival showing in Mumbai…or a torrent.
Urban Typhoon is a participatory urban planning workshop on the future of the Koliwada region of Dharavi, Mumbai’s staggeringly large and impossibly dense million-resident slum.
The objective is to produce creative alternatives for the future of a neighborhood threatened by a redevelopment plan of the government as well as a multimedia testimony to the unique [...]
Shai Agassi is an entrepreneur who has struck a multi-million dollar deal with Renault/Nissan and the Israeli government to bring electric cars to Israel (and eventually the world…) through his startup Better Place.
Pete Leyden from the New Politics Institute outlines Agassi’s transformative vision and announces that Agassi will be speaking at an upcoming NPI [...]
February 13, 2008 – 12:17 am
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, has an article in Science that builds on an idea which biologist Dan Janzen outlined several years ago in a Long Now talk entitled “It’s All Gardening.” Janzen’s talk centered on the unusefulness of the concept of wilderness as geography free of human influence and argued for [...]
