General Colin Powell on Purpose

General Colin Powell | City Arts & Lectures. On 2012 August 12 KQED broadcast a 2012 June 7 City Arts & Lectures conversation with General Colin Powell in part discussing his new book It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership. It was an engrossing conversation which unfortunately is not available as a podcast or…

Crop Solutions

Bayer to buy biopesticide maker AgraQuest for $425 million. – 2012 July 6 Perhaps Bayer CropScience represents the supply-side of the middle ground for agriculture: green greens.

My Parks

Penelope Gordon’s My Parks Pinterest board I encourage everyone to create a ‘My Parks’ list – whether on a social media site such as Pinterest or Facebook or on a piece of paper – and to share that list.  Include those parks which you look forward to visiting – your parks ‘bucket list’. This is…

IBM and CSR

Giving Time, Talent and Expertise | Citizen IBM Blog. – 2012 July 2 Teasers and highlight video for IBM’s 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report.  Also includes an introduction video by Stanley S. Litow.  Are sustainability considerations given equal weight with values of short-term shareholders, or are IBM’s CSR activities merely a patina?

Data Center Localization

2012 Sep 25 InfoWorld article connecting big data centers to big pollution.  Per the article most data centers waste 90% or more of the energy that they consume, and that their big generators are a big source of air pollution in locations such as Silicon Valley.  I think that this bolsters the case for community…

Big Data Centers

EBay’s New Data Center Will Be Powered 100 Percent by Fuel Cells – Green Retail Decisions. – 2012 June 28 EBay is building a new data center in South Jordan, Utah that will be off-grid (with a backup connection to the local grid).  The power source will be 30 natural-gas based fuel cells manufactured by…

Pollution Spin

China to US embassy: Stop telling people how bad the air is in Beijing. – CSMonitor.com. – June 18, 2012 First, a tangent: This article provides another cautionary tale of coding less than professional error messages or parameters: the Chinese did not appreciate the US Embassy’s describing Beijing air quality as ‘crazy bad’ on 2010…