Eco Village & Eco-Tourism

Tribe Wanted -- Sierra Leone

In October 2010, a new group of visitors will arrive on Sierra Leone’s John Obey Beach, 20 miles south of the capital, Freetown, and begin to build a new life alongside the local fishing community.

Tribewanted Sierra Leone has formed a partnership with the government, landowners and the local John Obey community in Sierra Leone to create an eco village community over the coming years to support sustainable development in the area.

For the visiting tribe members it will be a unique opportunity to experience a peaceful, beautiful and vibrant country seeking a new beginning a decade after being ravaged by civil war.

Tribewanted Sierra Leone is a local organisation and its non profit partner, Shine On Sierra Leone , has been working in the region successfully for five years, sponsoring 6 schools and computer centres around the country as well as providing microfinance to over 5.700 women across the country.

Tribe members will have the opportunity of joining in with the development of the new village alongside the local team and community. The project will be pioneering a new building technique called ‘Superadobe” developed at Cal Earth , a technique that uses only local earth and material.

All profits generated from Tribewanted Sierra Leone will be re-invested in the local John Obey community, in education and microfinance through Shine On Sierra Leone.

Tribe members will be able to book their visit to John Obey online at a cost of $450 / £295 a week. This will cover their stay, all meals and a contribution to the community development. Members will need to cover flight costs and local transport, from airport by boat, to the beach.

A maximum of 30 tribe members will spend a minimum of 1 week at a time living alongside a local team and the community immersed in the day to day running and development of the village. The project will run from October to June annually, closing for the rainy season.

Company Behind WeatherBug Launches First For-Profit Greenhouse Gas Measurement Network

Greenhouse gas emission caps are useful in theory, but there's a problem: Emissions calculations are made based on the raw materials that go into power plants and factories using a technique known as "predictive modeling", and not on the actual greenhouse gases released in energy production or manufacturing. Enter Earth Networks (formerly AWS Convergence Technologies), a company that plans to move beyond static emissions measurements by building the world's first commercial greenhouse gas measurement network.

Earth Networks--the company behind the popular WeatherBug application--is teaming up with the Scripps Institute of Technology to build the network, which will see 100 emissions-measuring instruments installed worldwide over the next year and a half. The company will use a technique called "inverse modeling," which combines real-time weather data with atmospheric data from the sensors, to figure out where carbon dioxide and methane gases are coming from and where they are headed.

Earth Networks is investing $25 million over the next half decade to build out the network and establish the Earth Networks Center for Climate Research at the Scripps Institution. Earth Networks anticipates moving beyond just CO2 and methane to other gases in the future.

de Beer's mystical video "The Ghosts"

White Paint, Chocolate, and Postmodern Ghosts

By RANDY KENNEDY

SURVEYING the row of door buzzers outside the hulking Brooklyn building where the artist Sue de Beer works, it somehow seems fitting to find a lone occupant listed on the building’s top floor, with no further explanation: “GOD.”

From Creative Exchange Lab

“I don’t know who that is or what they do,” Ms. de Beer said, breaking into a laugh when a reporter pointed out the small handwritten label next to the buzzer. “I’ve never really been up to that floor.”

But given the nature of her work and especially her most recent creation — a lush, frankly mystical video piece called “The Ghosts” that will have its debut Thursday in an unlikely place, one of the stately period rooms at the Park Avenue Armory — it is tempting to imagine the Holy Ghost himself at work up there in an old warehouse on the Red Hook flatlands, not far from a dingy bus depot, an Ikea and a discount store called 99 Cent Dreams.

From Creative Exchange Lab

To continue reading this article from the New York Times, click here.

The Internet Kill Switch (Egyptian style)

[from a blog post from David Strom's Web Informant]

My first car had what is called a kill switch that I put in shortly after I had bought it. I was living in LA at the time, the capital of car thefts, and I even though it wasn’t all that fancy a vehicle I wanted to make sure that it was somewhat protected. It was a simple thing: you had to turn the headlights on before you started the car. I thought I was in good shape until I found out how many valets could figure out the sequence (in LA you have to leave your car with valets a lot). This is a good analogy for the same process when it comes time to turn off Internet access to an entire country, whether it is for cybersecurity or censorship. Someone clever will always figure out a way around the blockade.

Click here to read more . . .

EcoCycle Stores Bikes Underground

Cities across the country are seeing a dramatic rise in the number of bike riders on their streets (28% in New York City last year, for example). But with that good news comes the unfortunate fact of a corresponding rise in bicycle theft. Lacking the art and pathos of Italy's cinematic classic, The Bicycle Thief, the experience of getting one's wheels stolen is not only expensive, it's utterly depressing . . . .