Diigo Bookmarks 05/02/2008 (p.m.)

The House That Twitters Its Energy Use, by Katie Fehrenbach « Earth2Tech

Among other things: “The Twitter stream is an exercise in using the data from home automation feeds, and the hope is that, by making energy usage data transparent and easy to digest, it will change consumer behavior and reduce energy consumption.” As I noted in bookmarking the related Wired Magazine piece, this relates to Wired Mag’s earlier article on Peak Water, too, where we learn that many London homes don’t even have water meters. Actually, it’s the same here in Victoria & Oak Bay. Not good.

tags: twitter, earth2tech, andy_house, energy, consumption, infrastructure

Comparing hard and soft infrastructure | Linux Journal – Annotated

This is the 2nd in what looks to be a series. As the title indicates, Doc Searls compares infrastructures — what we’d traditionally consider infrastructure (the “hard” infrastructure of roads, sewers, etc.) and Linux/ the Net — programming — the “soft” infrastructure that pervades our existence today.

tags: infrastructure, linux, doc_searls

Home Tweet Home: Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter | Wired Science from Wired.com – Annotated

Wired Magazine article by Alexis Madrigal on “wired” homes, including andy_house, by IBM “master inventor” Andy Stanford-Clark who “rigged up his home to twitter its energy use.” See The House That Twitters Its Energy Use by Katie Fehrenbacher (also listed in this batch, below).

Compare to Wired Mag‘s recent Peak Water article, which (among other things) pointed out that many London households aren’t even on water meters, making consumption monitoring impossible.

In addition, consider too the New Scientist article, City road networks grow like biological systems (4/23/08).

All this relates to infrastructure — and to how we’re just beginning to understand it from new angles. (See also Doc Searls’ continuing investigation of infrastructure in Linux Journal.)

tags: twitter, infrastructure, data, architecture, housing, consumption, energy, wired_magazine

London crime statistics sculpture – data visualization & visual design – information aesthetics

Room-sized installation — a landscape/mountainscape terrain “generated by datasets relating to the frequency & position of urban crimes.” Not sure over how long a period of time the stats were compiled, though, and how they cumulatively (literally) added up to create the “Mountain Fear” model. Interesting attempt at data visualization, at any rate.

tags: sculpture, aesthetics, statistics, data_visualization, london, crime, art

“How to Foster Tech Entrepreneurship” by Vivek Wadhwa (Business Week) – Annotated

Report on research by Vivek Wadhwa, “a former tech entrepreneur, …Wertheim Fellow at the Harvard Law School and an executive-in-residence at Duke University.” Turns out that the idea that tech entrepreneurs are predominantly Mark Zuckerberg’s age are exaggerrated/ wrong.

Another interesting finding is that lack of health insurance holds many older potential entrepreneurs back. (Yet Canada has affordable universal health insurance, but the US easily overtakes it in the entrepreneurship category.)

Additional insights also re. education and training.

tags: entrepreneurship, business_week, demographics, startups