conservation

Tabbed Internet browsing is a great tool for browsing different sites without cluttering your desktop with individual windows. Unfortunately, having a lot of tabs open will often slow down your browser or even your entire machine. Follow these steps so you can have all of the convenience of tabbed browsing in Chrome or Firefox without sacrificing performance.

First you will need to download, install, and configure TooManyTabs for Chrome or Firefox. Note that you may be required to restart your browser before the add-on's functions become available.

Step 1: Click on the TooManyTabs icon to the right … Read more

There's a growing conflict stemming from the push for more renewable energy and the environmental impact of large-scale wind and solar plants. But an analysis from the Nature Conservancy finds that a big boost in wind doesn't have to negatively impact wildlife.

The conservation group today released a study that argues for a policy to prioritize wind power development on "disturbed land" to avoid threatening wildlife and still ramp up wind generation significantly.

Looking at land-use data across the lower 48 states shows that there is sufficient land in locations to meet the Department of Energy'… Read more

Conserval Engineering is testing a new product with the U.S. Army based on its original solar thermal wall panels that could help cool a building in addition to helping heat it up, the company announced today.

The company is best known for its SolarWall corrugated galvanized-steel solar collectors that can be used to heat a building's HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) system as a way to save energy and bring down heating costs. It's used mainly on commercial, industrial, or large apartment buildings with vast wall space. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, for example, installed a … Read more

Scientific Conservation, a company that specializes in energy consumption forecasting, has received $15.65 million in Series B funding, the start-up announced Tuesday.

The company is just one example of the way traditional IT is now intersecting with green tech.

Scientific Conservation offers software as a service (SaaS) that allows the company to monitor a building's energy consumption in real-time, apply that data to energy management diagnostics and analytics, and then use that created knowledge to predict the building's energy consumption in the future.

The result is a customized energy plan for a building that is always being … Read more

Just in time for the midterm elections, app developer Handmark has launched two new political news apps, one aimed at liberals and the other at conservatives. PolitiCaster Left and Politicaster Right popped up in the Android Marketplace today and can be downloaded for free as both are ad-supported.

Each app compiles national and local political news from hundreds of sources in a single, tabbed interface, offering content customized for the opposing viewpoints. As the names suggest, PolitiCaster Left pulls a feed from liberal sites and blogs, such as Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Think Progress. Similarly, PolitiCaster Right features commentary … Read more

Consider yourself warned. You've probably heard of traffic cameras that capture photo evidence of cheeky drivers blowing through red lights at intersections. You may have been one of the hundreds of thousands of people who received such a ticket in the mail each year.

But you may not realize that Redflex, the company that helped pioneer the photo cop industry, has also expanded into stop sign cameras.

In California's Santa Monica Mountains parks are are seven stop sign cameras that the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) use to help it govern the roadways of its 60,0000 … Read more

IBM is tapping into its own network of PC owners to help figure out how to clean up drinking water.

Big Blue announced Monday a series of high-tech projects related to creating safer drinking water, which IBM notes is a rare resource for at least 1.2 billion people worldwide.

To drive the initiatives, the company is calling on its World Community Grid, a network of PC owners who pitch in computing time to help scientists tackle global problems. People who volunteer for the Grid allow their idle computers to be used by IBM to collectively run simulations and other … Read more

Are conservatives gaming Digg? Probably, but there are two sides to any story.

A report by liberal news organization AlterNet claimed on Thursday that conservatives are "burying" stories on the news aggregator. "A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives."

Conservatives--in this case, "Digg Patriots"--"cheat" by voting down Digg submissions with a liberal bent, AlterNet claims. "This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction."

I'm not going to argue with the basics of the report because this sort of thing goes on with both conservative and liberal groups. (AlterNet could have easily expanded the scope of "certain groups" to include liberals but chose not to.) I am going to take issue, however, with its tenor and balance, as it was implied by some blogs that the AlterNet findings were coming from a neutral source.

Specifically, when AlterNet inserts a paragraph listing all of the things Digg Patriots allegedly hate, then claims generally in the last sentence that Digg Patriots "just love to hate," Alternet forfeits any claim to balance--and possibly veracity.

I visit Digg's front door often, and what I usually find is hardly proof that conservative groups are succeeding in any way. Here's a very unscientific sampling of what I've found as some of the most-dugg (top 10) submissions as I randomly visited the Digg front door during the last few days. "Fox News is shockingly old" and "Conservapedia:E=mc2 Is A Liberal Conspiracy and "Liberals Start F*** Tea Party Campaign." (I've omitted the last ink because the original headline uses three letters of a four-letter expletive.)

A September 2008 report from PBS titled "Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias" says:… Read more

Water is not only the next big environmental issue, but also the next savings opportunity, according to several companies.

A survey conducted by research analyst Ethical Corporation in May 2010 found that 99 percent of corporate sustainability managers saw water becoming a top priority for businesses in the next 5 to 10 years. The report "Unlocking the Profit in Water Savings" found that 52 percent of sustainability managers ranked "water stewardship" within the top five most important issues they now deal with.

But more interesting is the hard data supporting the trend. Companies have found that … Read more