Smart Energy

Dan o’ Xark! has an interesting piece on narrative journalism and its evolution. I’ve commented on Dan’s thinking before and admire his intellectual creativity and restlessness.

What he’s up to in this piece is arguing for an end (or at least an alternative) to long-form narrative journalism in favor of…. something else.

Journalism schools have taught view-from-nowhere, AP Style-compliant, mass-media-voice long-form feature writing for decades, and readers just aren’t interested. Educating another generation of students to file 75-inch profiles of local United Way executives, written for the annual press contest judges who determine next-year’s promotions, just isn’t much of an answer to the market-side questions that demand our attention.

True enough. But the really interesting point he makes comes a bit further down:

Classic narrative follows a subject through a conflict to a resolution. And if our primary means of understanding something as complex as global warming is just a series of narratives about conflict, then we’re not going to make much progress. This is one reason why American mainstream news organizations kept emphasizing critics of global warming, even though the most credible peer-reviewed studies favored the anthropogenic warming theory championed by Al Gore…. We didn’t need better narrative journalism about global warming, we needed less of it. We needed a way of communicating that encouraged the evaluation of facts instead of the balancing of rhetoric. It’s a shift that requires a radically different theory of the press.

It’s difficult to see how a “different theory of the press” is going to change something that has nothing, really, to do with the press and everything to do with cognition. You can present things in ways that encourage an evaluation of facts (e.g., charts and graphs or, as Dan suggests by way of example, box scores), but we’re still going to contextualize those facts by way of a conflict-driven narrative.

If the facts don’t move us, we don’t care. And in order to be moved, in order for facts to move, they must in some way, an engine-like way, face resistance. We need to at least imagine counterfactuals: I’m not here, I’m there, in that person’s shoes.

So Dan’s example of the critics of global warming getting face time in the media makes sense. If you want to do something about it, start by reporting from the critics’ point of view: the climate isn’t changing, you report, and then give many column inches to the critics of that view.

Dan argues that, without box scores,

how many at-bats would never have been recorded for future historians because they didn’t fit into the narrative the writer picked as he hammered out a story on deadline?

Fair enough. But those historians will do nothing with that information without first recontextualizing it as conflict-driven narrative. Indeed, lovers of baseball routinely recontextualize box scores, mentally pitting pitcher against batter and so on.

It’s not journalism that needs to evolve to address your concerns, Dan; it’s the human brain that must change.

I just noticed that all the links on an old post are broken. The post promos an album by Atman that features a remix I recorded of one of their tunes (actually several, if you want to get technical about it). So here’s the tune, Luminous Bliss, since it’s apparently no longer available commercially.

Rippling across the tech blogs this week is the news that whitehouse.gov switched from a proprietary content management system to Drupal, and open source system. The news came out via an Associated Press news release.

The online-savvy administration on Saturday switched to open-source code for http://www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit.

White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure — and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.

“Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it’s deployed and after,” said Terri Molini of Open Source for America, an interest group that has pushed for more such programs.

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it’s just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.

There’s been lots of comments, both pros and cons. One of the most common was that Drupal, being a popular CMS, when coupled with the highly visible domain of the White House, would be highly prone to hack attacks. Obviously, yes, and whitehouse.gov has been attached regularly for years.

I’m delighted at the switch. Personally, I don’t like Drupal. I’ve considered it for projects, looked at the documentation and implementation requirements and run away. I’m a WordPress man (perhaps obviously). But lots of folks seem to think it’s the cat’s PJs, so great. The main thing is that the WH switched to open source.

My question, and the one I posted to Boing Boing, is, what was the WH using before? So far, no one seems to know. The only hint we get is that it was “proprietary.” That could mean any number of things, from custom code written anew from the ground up to a (my hunch, considering the stupidity of the Bush regime) a SharePoint-based system. If any one knows, do tell!

A new report from McGraw-Hill Construction says that the by-value retrofit-renovation market share for green building will grow to 20-30 percent by 2014. The report synopsis on Environmental Leader says that the current value of the retrofit-renovation market is between $2 and $4 billion and that that should grow to to $10-$15 billion in the next five years. Here’s a couple of snips with details:

The report also reveals that owners and tenants with green retrofit experience are likely to do more green retrofit projects. Seventy percent of owners who have engaged in green retrofit or renovation activities are planning to continue to do so for over 15 percent of future projects and 24 percent will do so on over 60 percent of projects, according to the report.

Another finding shows that the downturn is encouraging the adoption of energy- and water-efficient practices in renovation projects. Sixty-two percent of owners expect to recoup their investments for energy-efficiency improvements within 10 years.

The complete report is $189 and is available here.

A former Rolls Royce engineer has come up with a wind turbine design sure to silence NIMBYs, Inhabitat writes.  That’s been a big deal around here, as Whitman County tries to get its alt energy act together and NIMBYs protest that wind turbines are noisy.

From this week’s Harper’s Weekly:

Chicago rats fed a diet of sausage, pound cake, bacon, cheesecake, and Ho Hos began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, consuming increasing amounts of food to feel satisfied and continuing to eat even when to do so meant that electric shocks were delivered to their tiny paws. When switched to healthful food (“the salad option”) the rats, which had become obese, their brains numbed by junk, simply refused to eat. A man in Iowa punched another man, who was ordering Mexican food, for being a zombie. Researchers from Oregon determined that ancient beavers did not eat trees, and a firm in New Jersey was distributing vaginal mints.

Subscribe to said Weekly by visiting this link.

The study on junk food addition in rats was reported recently in ScienceNews: “This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

Post-Kartrina and the Trailer Trash debacle, interest among designers in green pre-fab housing units has soared. (We wrote about a very expensive and, to us, not very plausible design a few weeks ago.) The Atlantic has an interesting piece in the December issue about New Orleans housing activism and green building. Some snips:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life…. if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it’s the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process.

Scrolling through Scientific American’s news-notes section called Sustainability in Daily Life, I found this mention of Trash Menagerie, an exhibit of art “created from things most of us simply throw away.”

This playful and poignant exhibition challenges visitors to think differently about the creative potential lurking in everyday objects. From an iridescent trout made from beach refuse to a flock of cheery birds made from tin cans, Trash Menagerie explores animals imaginatively made from recycled rubbish.

And that puts me in mind of local artist Jayme Jacobson’s Eclectons, likewise made form recycled materials. Lately, Jacobson has been working with a writer to unfold (so to speak) a soap-operaesque tale of Eclecton treachery and liberation. You can find the short slideshows she’s made of the first two chapters here and here. And here’s Wand Baneesh, a delightful creature made of paper.

And in case you’ve wondered what to do with those self-replicating clothes hangers cluttering up the closets of your life, you might want to consider something like these Hangeliers.

When Steve Hillage made the surprise announcement that he was getting his old band back together to perform at the Gong Unconvention, he hadn’t performed in this particular configuration since December 1979. In the interviews that follow the DVD’s concert program, Hillage confesses that he and his mates had to relearn all their old parts. “Do you remember how to finger that bit?” They had to listen to their old recordings slowed down and over and over again to learn to play their own songs.

Dude! Cool. Proof, once again, of what the Hawai’ian red dirt shirts claim: Old Guys Rock.

The concert is marvelous, in part because, as Hillage says in the interview, he had decided to play the Unconvention a year or so before announcing the fact and spent that time practicing the 25-year-old songs. The hardest part, and alas, the weakest bit of the 2006 Gong Family Unconvention performance, was the vocals. Then again, Hillage’s voice was never more than a utilitarian herald’s tool. You could hear him loud and clear at his peak in the late 1970s, and you can hear him just fine in 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

A story in today’s Science News reports that

Women who lived in villages sprayed with DDT to reduce malaria gave birth to 33 per cent more baby boys with urogenital birth defects (UGBD) between 2004 and 2006 than women in unsprayed villages, according to research published online by the UK-based urology journal BJUI.

A lot of folks don’t realize that Big Ag Chem is still peddling the banned pesticide in the Third World. But, yeah, DDT is still in widespread use; Rachel Carson is still frequently blamed for millions of deaths (they don’t call it junk science for nothing); and chemistry is the path to better living, at least according to a 2006 report from WHO.

And women who stayed at home in sprayed villages, rather than being a student or working, had 41 per cent more baby boys with UGBDs, such as missing testicles or problems with their urethra or penis.

The authors suggest that this is because they spent more time in homes where domestic DDT-based sprays are still commonly used to kill the mosquitos that cause malaria, even in areas where organised mass spraying no longer takes place.