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In an age of expanding awareness about the dangers our environment is facing, its startling to see stories like this, which point out how relentless our search for fossil fuels has become.

Food for thought. Here’s an excerpt:

There as elsewhere in the Appalachian coal country that stretches through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, coal is produced by what’s self-descriptively known as mountaintop-removal mining.

Mining companies clear forests from mountaintops, dynamite the peaks, excavate buried coal, and dump the waste into nearby valleys. It’s cheaper and more efficient than old-fashioned mining, but the effects of mountaintop removal — or MTR — are devastating.

In just two decades, hundreds of mountaintops, more than a thousand miles of stream, and hundreds of square miles of forests have been obliterated by the practice. Opponents say the pollution is also dangerous to people who live in the region.

Here’s the link to the Wired.com story:

Link to Blowing the Top off Mountaintop Mining

I’ve been working out of a home office for a few years now and while I far prefer it to the many hours of commuting that I used to do, there are some things that I miss.

The biggest is simply the face-to-face “hallway meetings” that pop up all the time at the office. The kind that happen when someone pops their head into someone’s office and says “Got a minute?”

Those little slices of life are what keeps businesses moving along. They’re important but unfortunately, they aren’t easy to replicate in a virtual office.

Sure, those of us that work this way all the time are able to compensate. We can get a lot out of a phone call, or an email message. Sometimes we use audio or video conferencing to try to simulate the “you’re here with us” sensation, but in truth, it’s not the same.

That doesn’t mean that teleworking isn’t important, or useful. I’m not even saying that there are things that can’t be done remotely. What I’m saying is, wouldn’t it be great if we could recreate those little opportunities to mingle and be creative in short bursts?

So I was intrigued by the latest post from Robert Cringely, called The Next Killer App. He says it’s going to be telepresence.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about telepresence and video conferencing:

Rather than traveling great distances, in order to have a face-face meeting, it is now possible to teleconference instead, using a multiway video phone. Each member of the meeting, or each party, can see every other member on a screen or screens, and can talk to them as if they were in the same room. This brings enormous time and cost benefits, as well as a reduced impact on the environment from air travel. A good telepresence strategy puts the human factors first, focusing on visual collaboration solutions that closely replicate the brain’s innate preferences for interpersonal communications, separating from the unnatural “talking heads” experience of traditional videoconferencing. These cues include life–size participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones and the appearance of true eye contact. This is already a well-established technology, used by many businesses today. The chief executive officer of Cisco Systems, John Chambers in June 2006 at the Networkers Conference compared telepresence to teleporting from Star Trek, and said that he saw the technology as a potential billion dollar market for Cisco.

Cringely makes a compelling case for why these systems could soon move into the home market. And what an intriguing possibility that is.

What’s more, he makes a good argument for why Apply might be the first PC maker to turn that dream into a reality.

…Imagine one of the new aluminum and glass iMacs only instead of a 24-inch screen make it 42 inches. The familiar iSight camera will be there in the bezel. but this time the camera will have HD resolution. This hang-it-on-the-wall iMac would establish yet another category of computers, which is what Apple loves to do. They’ll sell a million units to the faithful and all it will take is putting an active telepresence system in every Apple store connected to every other Apple store for prospective users to play with. This gets Apple into the big screen TV business with a system that has higher margins simply because it isn’t just a TV but is also a Mac. Look for all this after Christmas along with refreshed Macs featuring the H.264 encoder chip I pre-announced a number of months ago. Look for Apple to also facilitate telepresence by turning it into a service as it has more and more wanted to do. Then imagine that system connected to a 3G iPhone.

I like his thinking. And I’m looking forward to the next phase of this particular story.

(Via I, Cringely . The Pulpit.)

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Apple TV, productivity

Hi all. I’m back in Victoria after an extended hiatus at the cottage in Buena Vista. Time to hunker down and get this business back on track.

While I’m doing that, I thought you might be interested in watching this clip from the 1984 Apple Shareholders’ meeting. This is the kind of video that was very, very high tech back then. I don’t know for sure whether this was a video or a multi-projector slide show, but either way, it’s pretty high quality.

Compare that video, which probably cost tens of thousands of dollars to what’s available today right on your computer. Just go to the Apple website, for example, and check out this demo for the new iLife software (which comes with every Mac.)

It’s been a fascinating evolution. It’s changed the way we entertain ourselves and how we do business. And it’s certainly not over yet.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a good story that looks at the unique case of the only journalist known to be in custody at Guatanamo Bay. His name is Sami al-Haj and he used to work for Al Jazeera.

It’s a balanced piece that asks some hard questions about what’s going on in Cuba without taking sides. But it’s a disturbing story and one that can’t help be leave you wondering what’s happening. And as with so many of these stories, it seems that the families are the ones who really end up struggling to cope.

On December 15, 2001, early in the morning on the last day of Ramadan, a reporter and a cameraman from Al Jazeera arrived at the Pakistani town of Charman on the Afghanistan border, on their way to cover the American military operation. The reporter, Abdelhaq Sadah, was replacing a colleague, but the cameraman, a Sudanese national named Sami al-Haj, had been on such an assignment before, and had crossed the border without incident. This time, however, an immigration official stopped him. He seemed angry. The official told Sadah that he could go, but “your friend is a wanted man and will stay here.”

In Sadah’s recollection, the official produced a letter from Pakistani intelligence—written, curiously, in English. It said that al-Haj had Al Qaeda ties and should be apprehended. Al-Haj noticed that the passport number in the letter didn’t correspond to the one in his current passport, but instead to an old passport he had lost several years ago in Sudan and had reported missing. Despite his protests, the official insisted on detaining him overnight. The next morning, Sadah returned to the border post just in time to see a Pakistani military officer lead al-Haj to a car and drive him away.

He hasn’t been seen since.

Here’s the link.

Today’s the day that we’ve all been waiting for. Well, actually, it’s tomorrow at one minute past midnight…we finally find out what happens to Harry Potter.

Of course, some meddlings muggles have spoiled things by posting spoilers on the Internet and in some American newspapers, but the true believers won’t be put off by that kind of nonsense.

Actually, I’m not really that excited about the release of the last book in this series, but I’m enjoying watching the way it’s all playing out. My daughter Kelly (who is living with us this summer) is beside herself with anticipation.

“You know, I think I just might throw up,” she told me this morning, listening to a local bookseller talking on the radio about the upcoming launch. Then it got worse, as she sat down to read a review about the book in the local paper, and learned that up to half a dozen characters get killed off in the final book. “I’m going to start crying right now!”

Tomorrow, it will all be past. Kelly’s copy of the book will be arriving via a special Canada Post delivery first thing in the morning thanks to a deal that Chapters offered. Once she’s finished, then I get to read it, which I’m looking forward to.

So in the spirit of enjoying the Potter mania sweeping around the world today, I present the latest installment of the Potter Puppet Pals in The Mysterious Ticking Noise. Just click on the video below to watch.

And if you like that one, there’s a bunch more on YouTube. Just search under Potter Puppet Pals.

Wonderful use of storytelling in a video

Dan York at Disruptive Conversations points us to a great video, which won a gold medal at the Cannes Lions event.

Click here to see Dan’s original post, or watch the video below.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags:
Friday fun

I”ve been playing around with social media lately. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, LinkedIn, MyRagan and probably some others that I’ve forgotten about. I’ve also got a Flickr account, one at Picasa, this blog, my own (out-of-date) website and a bunch of accounts at sites that have either gone out of business or stopped being of any interest. Oh, and I’ve also got instant messaging accounts with IChat, Messenger and Google. And speaking of Google, I use a lot of their on-line apps, as well as Gmail. And I’ve got a Skype account too.

To tell the truth, I’m getting kind of confused about what I’m supposed to be doing with all this stuff. I’ve started playing around with applications that pull a lot of it together, like Adium, which groups all my IM clients into one beautiful interface. So far, I haven’t found anything similar for all these social media sites, with the need to add friends (I don’t really seem to have that many) to all of them and follow along with what everyone is doing.

Which of these new tools are you using? Have you found they’re helping you be productive? Or do they just give us another excuse to avoid getting to some of the tasks that are filling up our to-do lists? Maybe we should start a group somewhere to talk about this…

One app that’s had a lot of press recently is Twitter, which I’ve signed on to without really understanding what it does. But a couple of weeks ago, Wired Magazine had a story by Clive Thompson that did a good job of explaining some of the complexities. I missed it when it first ran, but a blog post by Neville Hobson pointed me to it. Ironically, Neville heard about it through a “Tweet” from one of his friends.

Here’s the link. Let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags:
New Media, Social Media, productivity