Libtech in LibrarianLand

Identifying the value of bioplastics : Intl Herald Tribune

mickiegirlca — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:34:20 +0000

Beyond labels: Identifying the value of bioplastics / Erica Gies. — IHT : July 7, 2008

Biodegradable plastic products offer the possibility of relieving consumers of guilt and manufacturers of the responsibilities associated with growing landfills and garbage-choked oceans.

In addition, consumers have recently become more aware of how many products are oil-based, said Steve Davies, marketing director of NatureWorks, a company that makes a bioplastic from plants. With oil prices up sharply, ”it’s now obvious to just about everybody that our overdependence on oil is bad for our environment, bad for our economy.”

The term bioplastics actually has two meanings: sometimes it is used to refer to plastics that contain a percentage of renewable materials; and sometimes to plastics that are both made from renewable materials and are biodegradable.

…

Robert Reed, public relations manager for Norcal Waste Systems, a solid-waste company based in San Francisco, agreed. Norcal, which runs comprehensive recycling and composting programs, employs workers to sort and separate different materials. Germany, Switzerland and Sweden require manufacturers to prominently mark products that are compostable, and U.S. manufacturers should do the same, Reed said.

If manufacturers do not take responsibility for easy sorting, the problem is just pushed to someone further down the line, he said. ”If you’re going to take a step, take a step. Don’t take a half-step.”

Platt said her institute wanted pilot studies on products in closed venues, where end-of-life solutions can be developed under controlled conditions and then scaled up.

But ultimately, she said, bioplastics are part of an ”intermediate economy.” When consumers finally recognize the value of materials, they will reject throw-away solutions in favor of more durable and reusable products, she said. Read the whole article

RWW : Is Email in Danger ?

mickiegirlca — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:59:48 +0000

Is Email In Danger?

Written by Alex Iskold / July 1, 2008 11:13 PM / 49 Comments

Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention of electronic mail (email) changed two things. It became cheap to send mail, and delivery was instant. Email became favored for both corporate and personal communication.

But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what’s happening and assess if email is in danger.

The Twitter Problem

Twitter was invented because there was a gap in public broadcast communication. Doing Twitter over email would be clunky, if not impossible. The ability to post your personal statuses, decoupled from the ability to subscribe to people you’re interested in, put Twitter on the map. People are sending direct messages via Twitter instead of sending an email.

Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.

The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we’re presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.

The Outlook Problem

Email is a workhorse. Microsoft realised that business people want one tool to do it all, so email was enhanced with calendar, to do lists and other features.

The problem: all this was slammed on top of email, which became the entry point into a black hole known as My Inbox. Short and long messages, business and personal emails, tasks, events - all stacked on top of each other.

Outlook is a powerful piece of software that lets you organise and sort, but you have to drive it. For many, email is hard work and a mess that needs to be dealt with.

Simpler email clients, like Gmail, focus on how to be a better email client instead of being a hammer for all problems. An innovation like aggregating conversations has huge impact on productivity.

In the years Microsoft was adding more buttons to the toolbar, they should have invested more on the core innovation around email and productivity. Wiring in NLP and semantics to extract things like People, Events and Places would be a good start. Designing emails around use cases like “this is a meeting, this is a project, this is a friend” would go a long way towards helping avoid the Inbox clutter.

Breaking Down Email

Since email was the first killer app for the web, it’s used for everything. We’re now observing a fragmentation cycle where we’re discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it’s still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there’s a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it’s likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they’re integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they’re aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we’re in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

Corporate Safe Haven?

Even if consumers shift away from email, it is difficult to see how enterprises could. Microsoft has done a wonderful job winning that market and ensuring companies would not function without an Exchange server. A typical proprietary bloatware, Exchange and Outlook handle it all. It doesn’t seem feasible for companies to shift away from email anytime soon.

Likely we will see two trends. Google will continue to champion its solution, which, if successful, will bring much needed simplicity to email.

The second trend is simpler project management tools to reduce the functions needing to be done with email. The challenge is that they need to be seamlessly integrated with the email, ideally leveraging its content and automatically generating tasks, events, contacts, etc.

Conclusion

Email has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn’t have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.

Are Data Control and Social Networking Irreconcilable Ideas ?

mickiegirlca — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:29:38 +0000

Data Control and Social Networking: Irreconcilable Ideas?
Source: Law and the Future of Data Control (via SSRN)

The future of both law and technology will require reconciling users’ desire to self-disclose information with their simultaneous desire that this information be protected. Security of personal information and user privacy are potentially irreconcilable with the conflicting set of user preferences regarding information sharing behaviours and the convenience of using technology to do so. Social networking sites (SNSs) provide the latest and perhaps most complicated case study to date of these technologies where consumers’ desire for data security and control conflict with their desire to self-disclose. Although the law may provide some data control protections, aspects of the code itself provide equally important means of achieving a delicate balance between users’ expectations of data security and privacy and their desire to share information.

Several options available for retrieval of full text (PDF; 267 KB).

World Trade Indicators (WTI) tool launched

mickiegirlca — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:24:45 +0000

World Trade Indicators 2008
Source: World Bank

Welcome to the World Trade Indicators (WTI), an interactive tool designed to benchmark a country’s trade policy and institutions and help policy makers, advisors, and analysts’ identify the main border and behind-the border constraints to trade integration.

The WTI 2008 database is organized in five thematic categories, namely Trade Policy, External Environment, Institutional Environment, Trade Facilitation and Trade Outcome. Each category contains a main indicator and other reference indicators. Countries’ trade performance can be examined individually as well as in relation to other countries or country groupings, including by membership (Word) of trade agreements. To capture the key insights from both the indicators and country-level trade-related analytical work, Country Briefs and Trade at-a-Glance (TAAG) tables are also are provided.

An overview report (PDF; 3.4 MB) summarizes global patterns in trade policy and trade outcomes revealed by the database focusing mainly on regional and income level variations. The User Guide provides descriptions for the 299 indicators in the database, including data sources.

Long and Short Tail of Search

mickiegirlca — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:21:57 +0000

A new article by search expert Avi Rappaport.

From the summary:

Avi writes:

I’ve just posted an article on the Long Tail, Short Head and Search. Every site, intranet and enterprise search log I’ve analyzed fits the model of the Long Tail, with a very few very popular search terms, then tailing off very quickly to unique queries (the Long Tail), creating a Zipf curve.

The Short Head — the few most frequently used search terms — is the best place to start in analyzing search engine usage. My article also gives some suggestions for taking the information and using it to improve a search engine.

Source: SearchTools.com

RAND Corporation : Impacts on U.S. energy expenditures & GHG of increasing renewable energy use

mickiegirlca — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:24:51 +0000

Impacts on U.S. Energy Expenditures and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions of Increasing Renewable-Energy Use
Source: RAND Corporation

The penetration of renewable energy into the marketplace has been small, held back principally by their higher cost relative to fossil energy. RAND assessed the potential impacts on U.S. consumer energy expenditures and national CO2 emissions of producing 25 percent of U.S. electric power and motor-vehicle transportation fuels from renewable resources by the year 2025. The baseline for the comparisons was expenditures and CO2 emissions in 2025 as drawn from the reference-case tables of the Energy Information Administration’s 2006 Annual Energy Outlook. The report shows that increasing renewables use can reduce CO2 emissions and enhance energy security by lowering the cost of imported petroleum. However, a large, inexpensive, easily converted biomass supply is necessary for significantly increased renewable-energy use to have a relatively low impact on consumer energy expenditures. Rapid progress also is needed in the technologies converting biomass feedstock into transportation fuels, and producing power at marginal wind sites. Without progress in these areas, the renewable-energy requirement could substantially increase consumer energy expenditures. Technical advances in provision of economically and environmentally sound biomass energy and wind power generation at lower-quality sites should be top priorities for increasing affordable supplies of renewable energy. The report replaces an earlier version withdrawn in 2006 to correct errors in modeling discovered by RAND post-publication.

+ Summary (PDF; 157 KB)
+ Full Document (PDF; 965 KB)
+ Appendix A (PDF; 306 KB)
+ Appendix B (PDF; 168 KB)

EIA: World energy consumption to grow by 50 percent between 2005 and 2030

mickiegirlca — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:03:16 +0000

International Energy Outlook 2008 - Highlights
Source: Energy Information Administration
From press release:

World marketed energy consumption is projected to grow by 50 percent between 2005 and 2030, driven by robust economic growth and expanding populations in the world’s developing countries, according to the reference case projection from the International Energy Outlook 2008 ( IEO2008 ) released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Average world oil prices in every year since 2003 have been higher than the average for the previous year and prices in 2007 were nearly double the 2003 prices in real terms. The IEO2008 uses oil price cases originally developed in the summer of 2007 for use in the Annual Energy Outlook 2008, which focuses on the U.S. energy outlook. These prices do not reflect the substantial runup in prices that has occurred since that time. Nonetheless, although liquid fuels are expected to remain the largest single source of energy through 2030, the liquids share of marketed world energy consumption declines from 37 percent in 2005 to 33 percent in 2030 in the IEO2008 reference case.

In addition, the share of conventional oil in the overall liquids supply is declines with expanded use of unconventional oil, biofuels, and other unconventional liquids. High oil prices lead many consumers to switch to other fuels when feasible; fuel-switching and efficiency gains, for instance, slow the growth of oil use in the industrial sector. Those trends are even stronger in the IEO2008 high price case, which reflects oil prices that are closer to those being paid in mid-2008, as this report is being issued.

4+ Ways to Quickly Create Excellent Presentations Online

mickiegirlca — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:50:35 +0000

ReadWriteWeb presents 4+ Ways to Quickly Create Excellent Presentations Online in which they offer an annotated list of free Web-based presentation software - 7 in all including:

StatsCan: Food prices a boon for producers, a buffer for consumers

mickiegirlca — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:07:03 +0000

Canada is uniquely positioned to weather the storm of sharply-rising prices for grains and rice, and is even poised to profit from the current surge, according to a study released June 12, 2008 in the Canadian Economic Observer.

Overall, consumer prices for food consumed at home in Canada have risen only 1.2% in the 12 months ending in April 2008. Food prices increased 7.1% in the European Union and 5.9% in the United States during the same period. Countries in Asia with rice-based diets are experiencing the fastest increase in food costs, as the price of rice doubled early in 2008.

While consumers in Canada face higher prices for bread and cereal products, they have been insulated at the checkout counter from higher overall grocery bills by stable or falling prices for most other products, the study found.

The absence of price increases for these other food products reflects factors such as the lower cost of food imports in the wake of the rising Canadian dollar, and the relatively small role that commodities play in what consumers buy.

For most food products, services contribute the bulk of the value-added for food that consumers buy. As well, sharp relative price shifts give consumers ample room to adapt by substituting lower-priced foods.

From a broader perspective, Canada overall stands to gain from the agricultural price shock, the study found. Canada ran a surplus of $9.0 billion in its trade in agricultural and fish products in 2007.

In the first quarter of 2008, the surplus was on track to break that all-time high, running at an annual rate of $11.2 billion as wheat prices rose.

Moreover, farmers have stepped up their planting this year, especially of higher-priced crops. Besides directly increasing the value of agricultural output and the trade surplus, the boom down on the farm will indirectly benefit a wide range of suppliers, from machinery to transportation, financial and business services. Read the entire article (pdf)

Globe-NET : Ruining the world’s water supply

mickiegirlca — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:58:23 +0000

Via: Globe-NET

29 May 2008 - Agricultural run-offs containing fertilizers, animal wastes and pesticides are infecting rivers and water courses with blue-green algal blooms and toxic chemicals. While the problem is particularly evident in developing countries - Canada, Australia and the United States contain some of the world’s most polluted rivers, and poor agricultural practices are the root cause.

Almost one-fifth of the world’s population lacks consistent access to clean water says the United Nations Environment Program, and the problem is being made worse by the improper farming practices - particularly in developing countries where excessive use of fertilizers are needed to feed rapidly expanding populations.

…

Canada has a large number of river systems that are highly polluted in part due to agriculture. On the West coast, pollution in both Alberta and BC is affecting Chinook salmon populations, a commercial species. In Eastern Canada Quebec is home to 13 of the nation’s most polluted rivers each of which run through the heart of the province’s agricultural region.

According to Monique Boily, a biology professor and environmental toxicologist at the Université du Québec à Montréal, long-term pollution has made the water unfit for consumption.

“We are talking about an extremely stressed environment … in the case of some of the tributaries, we use the term ‘river’ out of habit or convenience, in some cases it’s more like an open sewer,” said Boily of the Yamaska watershed, the most polluted river system in Canada.

What are the solutions?

Many agricultural experts are suggesting new farming techniques to help limit the amount of agricultural run-off entering river systems, such as the ‘no-till’ technique. According to research conducted by the Thomas Jefferson Institute, ‘no-till’ farming, a process that eliminates the churning of soil, reduces the movement of silt into watersheds by an estimated 95%. Because no-till doesn’t disturb the soil surface, phosphorous and nitrogen fertilizers, which reside within the top six inches of the soil, are not washed into streams and rivers. Read the rest of the article