How to Solve Global Warming

March 17, 2008

litter

If we could teach kids to keep their schools free of litter we would solve global warming in a generation.

Global warming seems to be such an insolvable problem but getting a group of children to keep their school free of litter seems to be, albeit not easy, at least possible if we paid it enough attention.

But in fact a solution to litter in schools would need to involve all members of the community, it would need activists and belief, compassion and non aggression, making of rules and policing them sensitively, collaboration at a local, national and international level. All these characteristics are essential components of a solution to global warming.

Try solving the simple problems first. By empowering our communities to do something possible, we might just be able to tackle something that at the moment seems impossible.

image: creative commons licence – http://flickr.com/photos/mbrownstone/2043006071/


Tweaking Wifi for communities

January 21, 2005

Interesting that the mainstream Economist Magazine is tracking this

..Take, for example, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), in Illinois. This group is trying to create a so-called meshed Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi is a wireless technology that allows broadband internet communication over a range of about 50 metres. That range could, however, be extended if the devices in an area were configured to act as �platforms� that both receive and transmit signals. Messages would then hop from one platform to another until they got to their destination. That would allow such things as neighbourhood mobile-phone companies and a plethora of radio and TV stations, and all for almost no cost . But to make such goodies work, CUWiN needs to tweak the underlying capabilities of Wi-Fi chips in special ways.

bold added by me
Economist.com | Wireless broadband


The Tyranny of the Industrial Hub & Spoke Paradigm

January 21, 2005

Here’s a neat way of looking at it.

[T]he Industrial era’s fundamental value propositions.

1] The hub and spoke, or centralized broadcast, organizing principle;

2] Control of the Distribution channel;

3] Citizen as one-dimensional consumers;

The rest of the post refers to why bandwidth is so expensive.
Greater Democracy.org


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