Month: August 2007

Cable to Research the Depths

- Adam Clare

While I’m in Vancouver, British Columbia, I want to find more good news coming from the west side of North America (I live in Toronto). To get the ball rolling, here’s a news report on how they are wiring the oceans to learn more about the depths of the seas. Some scientists are going to drop a huge cable to monitor ocean life via the internet.

“They are so important to our understanding of our planet and the understanding of the consequences of changes in our planet for our everyday lives.”

Taylor Neptune stands for North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments. Eventually the B.C. cable loop, which can support up to 700 sensors, will be joined by, and to, another loop in U.S waters, for a total of 3,000 kilometres of cabling covering most of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, the smallest of the major plates that make up the surface of the planet.

This Magazine

- Adam Clare

This Magazine is an excellent Canadian publication that simply states that “everything is political” which is something that I entirely agree with. They recently added Things Are Good to their blogroll, so I thought it was perfect opportunity to draw attention to this great Canadian magazine (sorry all you non-canucks, you can skip this post).

The This Magazine Blog is a must read if you’re at all interested in Canada. They cover almost everything from “media navel-gazing” to human rights.

Keep up the good work all those working at This Magazine!

Games as Outbreak Simulations

- Adam Clare

Two years ago a disease ravaged the country sides of the World of Warcraft, an online virtual world in which players have to interact with one another to solve problems. The virtual disease effectively ‘killed’ the players and now researchers are thinking that they can examine these virtual outbreaks and compare them to real-world scenarios because in both cases the outbreak is treated as real by the humans involved.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

“The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”

She acknowledged that a virtual setting might encourage riskier behaviour, but said this could be estimated and allowed for when drawing conclusions.

Green Companies Will Prosper

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

There’s an alright post over at CopyBrighter from a little ways back that looks at the growing demand for green companies and how we need to cater to that demand and look towards the future. Essentially green companies will prosper because it’ll be the only option in due time, so why not be green now and profit from it?

It’s not that green companies should run as a hedge fund to profit from crisis… but rather, they should not underestimate the potential demand for what they are developing now. We must be prepared to leverage the imminent explosion of mass desire and honorably fulfill it.

Plane Explodes, Everyone OK

- Adam Clare

whoa
A plane exploded in Japan and it sounds like it was from an action movie or a comic book because nobody died. The speed of the evacuation was phenomenal!

All 157 passengers – including two small children- fled the Boeing 737-800 unhurt on inflated emergency slides just minutes before the plane burst into a fireball, Transport Ministry official Akihiko Tamura told reporters.

I’m flying to Vancouver tomorrow, hopefully my plane won’t explode. It’s good to know that planes can be evacuated fast. Also, I think this is the only time an explosion as been used as an image on Things Are Good.

Scroll To Top