Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
ANGELA CHEN, - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephan: This is a very interesting and revealing trend. The one part of the U.S. education system that still works properly is college instruction. It accomplishes so much for so little.
Mo Li, a Chinese postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, wrote to a Yale University philosophy professor last year with a strange request. Li had never met the professor, Shelly Kagan, nor had he ever attended Yale.
But while working on a doctorate in developmental biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, Li and his girlfriend had watched free online college course lectures of Kagan’s philosophy course ‘Death
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Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
Stephan: Here is another potentially revolutionary development in more efficient energy storage.
Batteries are terrible. Compared to many other methods of storing energy, especially fossil fuels, batteries aren’t very energy dense-that is, a 1-pound battery stores far less energy than is contained in a pound of gasoline. That wouldn’t be so bad if the energy in a battery were easy to replenish-your Tesla might still go only a couple hundred miles on a single charge, but if you could fully recharge it in five minutes rather than several hours, the low capacity wouldn’t bother you as much.
Scientists have spent decades trying to create the perfect battery-a battery with great energy density or, at least, one that doesn’t take so long to charge. If we could somehow make this perfect battery, pretty much every gadget you use, from your phone to your laptop to your future electric car, would be amazing, or just less annoying than they are today. The perfect battery might also help with some other important stuff: climate change, oil wars, pollution, etc.
One approach for improving the battery is to forget about the battery and instead improve capacitors. A capacitor, like a battery, is a device that stores electrical energy. But capacitors charge and discharge their energy an order of […]
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Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
ALEXANDER REED KELLY, - Truthdig
Stephan: This is a fascinating new trend that you may already know about. If not you might find it worthwhile to explore it. The implications are profound
Click through to see the video.
It’s a virtual currency that travels beyond the reach of banks and centralized regulatory institutions and allows you to transfer money to anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere at any time.
‘Bitcoin is to banks what email was to postal offices,
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Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
, - The State of Vermont - Office of the Speaker of the House
Stephan: In contrast to Texas, Vermont is choosing a very different path. It is for this reason that I see both the Texas story and this one about Vermont as being, in addition to the overt point of the story, an example of the growing Great Schism Trend, as I wrote about it in yesterday's edition.
MONTPELIER, VERMONT — Today the House of Representatives passed H.520 – An act relating to reducing energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. This bill will help Vermonters insulate their homes, save money on their heating bills and cut down on their carbon emissions.
‘Vermonters are now spending twice what they were ten years ago to heat their homes and businesses, and that spending has contributed nothing to the local economy,
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Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Rick Perry's willful ignorance is condemning Texas to self-inflicted misery. Yet it is not just Perry. It is also the state legislators, and the people of Texas, who voted this buffoon into office.
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Two top environmental officials in the state of Texas told Raw Story this week that not only is the state ill-prepared to face a summer this year even hotter than the record-breaking drought of 2011, it has largely neglected to begin planning for the unprecedented drought conditions forecast for the next several decades by the U.S. government’s 2013 National Climate Assessment.
The situation is so dire that if fundamental changes are not made to how water is conserved in Texas, the clashing trends of climate change and population growth threaten to utterly strangle the Texas economy over the coming 20-30 years as water costs soar, and activists warn that Gov. Rick Perry (R) is doing nothing but making the problem worse.
‘Because the folks on the Texas water board are appointed by Rick Perry, they tend to fall in line with what Rick Perry believes when it comes to climate change,
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