The theme of the weekend was the next generation of sustainability leaders. Tom Friedman led off with an excellent op-ed on the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search. Meanwhile, I got a look even farther into the future at the Alcott School Science Fair, here in Concord, MA. With three kids, I’ve been to my share of elementary school science fairs. They are always fun and the kids seem to have a great time.

Bloom Energy’s recent announcement of their fuel cell-based “energy server” drew lots of attention from the press, and for good reason. It set some nice marks for performance, and, if successful, will likely be the first of a new market category of energy products. At Sun we looked at this technology a couple of years back. The use case was as the backup for a datacenter, and to switch to it as primary power when grid power was more expensive (e.

Yesterday I went looking for a simple tool to do expense tracking while I travel around, and found a great fit in Xpenser. You can post expenses over IM, SMS, email and through the web. When using email you can even attach a photo of the receipt, presumably taken with your phone. All it expects is a text stream of the form “{activity} {amount} {tags}", such as “Dinner with Jim 46.

Over the holidays USA Today had an article talking about the sudden rise of green-oriented minor and major programs at universities. According to Paul Rowland, Executive Director of Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, two factors are driving the surge: students want the courses, and employers want the trained students. When I give talks on our book “Citizen Engineer” at universities this topic always comes up. In specific, we discuss what employers are looking for in these students.

Steve McIntyre reports that “the UK Met Office has released a large tranche of station data, together with code”. Notes: The Met Office says that this is not a complete set of data, but it is unclear what is missing. This is the processed data - the raw data is claimed to have been deleted. Over at The Air Vent, Jeff Id discusses some of the details. In my recent discussions (1, 2) of open climate science, I have stressed the importance of understanding licensing terms when discussing specific code or data.

In my last post, I used lessons from the open source software community and the Creative Commons effort explore what we mean by “open climate science”. In this post I’m going to take the next step and propose a specification for open climate science. Finally, in the next installments I will look at the how to implement this specification using our current intellectual property legal framework. Before I dive in, it is worth reiterating that I am not a scientist (and, by logical extension, not a climate scientist).

The events that have transpired (physically) at University of East Anglia and (virtually) around the globe have raised the important question of whether climate science is open and transparent enough. This has led, naturally, for a call for “open source” science. Personally, this discussion links two amateur passions of mine, climate science and open source. Coincidentally these are central themes of Greg Papadopoulos’ and my book, “Citizen Engineer”, not because we miraculously anticipated this particular point in time, but because we saw these as the two largest knowledge gaps in today’s engineers.

Tom Fuller at Examiner.com ran a survey on various aspects of climate change and policy for the last few days (sorry, the survey is now closed, but Tom says he’ll be writing up the results soon). At the end he asked for any questions that he might have missed. Usually by that point in a survey I’ve lost interest, but this one was pretty well designed, so I submitted the two key questions I thought that he’d missed:

(note: this is reposted from my Sun blog ) Two different news items recently led me into the same train of thought: we are all increasingly in the business of judging Goodness, and of being so judged. I purposefully capitalized Goodness here, because I mean it in the highest sense of the word. This probably sounds vague, so let me use the examples to explain. The first item is from the NYTimes, and discusses the conundrum caused by a proposed solar plant in Nevada.

Two different news items recently led me into the same train of thought: we are all increasingly in the business of judging Goodness, and of being so judged. I purposefully capitalized Goodness here, because I mean in it in the highest sense of the word. This probably sounds vague, so let me use the examples to explain. The first item is from the NYTimes, and discusses the conundrum caused by a proposed solar plant in Nevada.