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Radio documentary on elections and America’s energy future: The Power of One, with Alex Chadwick

BURN: An Energy Journal, the radio documentary series hosted by former NPR journalist Alex Chadwick, has a 2-hour election special out. It’s the most powerful piece of radio journalism I’ve listened to since—well, since the last episode they put out. You really must do yourself a favor and set aside some time this weekend to listen to “The Power of One.”

Energy policy, defining how we use energy to power our economy and our lives, is among the most pressing issues for the next four years. In this special two-hour edition of BURN, stories about the power of one: how, in this election season, a single person, place, policy or idea can — with a boost from science — affect the nation’s search for greater energy independence.

The documentary examines how “individuals, new scientific ideas, grassroots initiatives and potentially game-changing inventions are informing the energy debate in this Presidential Election year, and redefining America’s quest for greater energy independence.” It was completed and hit the air before Hurricane Sandy, but the energy issues illuminated by that disaster (blackouts, gas shortage, grid failure, backup power failure at hospitals) further underscore the urgency.

Chadwick and a team of reporters do this through a series of “intimate, human-scale stories,” traveling to the energy frontier of the Arctic Ocean, to Pennsylvania’s natural gas-rich “Marcellus Shale” region where the national “fracking” controversy runs deep, and a university lab in Colorado where a female scientist is building a battery that aspires to be the “Holy Grail of green technology.”

“Energy and climate are such big stories – there is a reason that both campaigns often talk about the economy, jobs and energy all tied together,” says Alex. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed by how big these topics are. What BURN tries to do is tell smaller stories that provide insight into how people’s lives are changed by the energy choices they and others around them make. ‘The Power of One’ is about how individuals can make a difference, even in something so globally immense as energy.”

The website for the series is here, and includes all sorts of compelling side stories, like this photo-essay about a mobile home community torn apart by a shale gas project: the Riverdale mobile home park, which once sat on the banks of the Susquehanna River in north-central Pennsylvani…

Sandy and Geoengineering: A Parachute for an Irresponsible World : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/sandy-and-geoengineering.html

(via Instapaper)

To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice …and drove it absolutely crazy | Thomas Frank | The Baffler
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station

(via Instapaper)

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Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child presentation at the MIT Tech Review EmTech conference recounted an inspiring experiment in which illiterate Ethiopian village-kids were given solar-charging laptops in sealed boxes, and quickly taught themselves how to operate, then master, then hack, these devices, acquiring basic literacy and technological literacy at the same time.

MIT Technology Review‘s David Talbot reports in a piece reprinted on Mashable.com:

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”

In an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start.”

Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves

(via Reddit)