On stimulating innovation in green energy

The quest for green energy seems strongly bound to the politics of global warming and climate change. I find that unfortunate.

The earth's climate has gotten warmer over the past two centuries. Abundant evidence exists, from scientific measurements to the visual impact of melting polar ice and receding glaciers. Where people can honestly disagree is to what extent human activity has caused it and whether a catastrophe awaits the entire human race if we don't fix it.

My reading indicates that the present climate change follows a long-established natural rhythm, that industrial activity has contributed only marginally to it, that suddenly going back to pre-industrial energy use would not stop it, and that it does not threaten a global catastrophe. We need green energy for other reasons. Those who think otherwise generally follow two basic strategies for dealing with it.

Many want to deal with the problem through collective, global action to reduce carbon emissions and give billions of dollars worth of clean technologies to developing countries. Others want to work on the national and local level to stimulate the market place to develop new and more efficient energy sources and of products and processes that require less of it.

Those of us who are skeptical about the prospect of a climate-induced disaster ought to make common cause with the second group, because, in fact, it doesn't matter who is right about climate. Our current energy usage cannot be sustained, especially as India and China struggle to catch up as industrial powers.

Global initiatives do not offer much hope. World leaders can agree on all kinds of high sounding theories, but not on actual mechanisms for working together. Then, when they leave the big, splashy conferences, like the recent one in Copenhagen, they cannot find a politically viable way of meeting their own targets.

Still, entrepreneurs and industry cannot by itself devise self-sustaining ways of green energy generation and usage. The federal government must be involved in the creation of a new energy model, with or without the cooperation of other countries. Making most efficient use of any foreseeable kind of green electricity, for example, will require massive investment in an upgraded power grid.

At some point, the government must regulate carbon emissions. It will have to find some way of calculating the cost of carbon emissions both in terms of their impact on pollution and the implications for energy independence. The kind of extensive infrastructure upgrades that we need require funding from some kind of carbon tax.

Development of renewable, minimally polluting, efficient energy sources that do not depend on imports is certainly worth the creation of a new tax. Green energy legislation will open the door to innovation, therefore startups of entirely new companies, and therefore the creation of jobs that cannot exist under current conditions.

How to find titles in an online library catalog

Some online library catalogs, trying to imitate Google, show only a single search box, which works as a general keyword search. If you want to look up a title, you need to switch to "advanced search," which is actually less frustrating to use.

Google is a search engine, and the library catalog is a database with multiple indexes. You need a screen that will let you choose which index to search.
The better-designed catalogs offer a choice between "title" and "title keyword" search boxes.

For "title," type the beginning of the title, omitting the initial article if any. In English, articles are "the," "a," and "an." If any of these are the first word, leave it out. Omit initial articles from all other languages, too.

If the item you want has a long title, you do not need to type it all so long as you put in enough to get to distinctive words. For example, if you want to locate The trumpet & trombone in graphic arts, 1500-1800, you need go no farther than the "gr" in "graphic." Simply searching "trumpet and trombone" will turn up more titles, but the one about graphic arts will still probably be on the first screen of results.

Don't worry about whether the title has "and" or "&." You can safely type "and" (or the equivalent in another language); a cataloger has (or should have) put the title in the record both ways. And don't bother with capitalization. Nothing but the first word (and German nouns) will be capitalized in the catalog. Search boxes, whether in Google or in an online library catalog, are not case sensitive.

"Title keyword" comes in handy for long titles where all the distinctive words are at the end or for when you don't remember the title exactly but remember several important words. Enter only keywords from the title and separate them with "and." For the title in the last paragraph, the search "trumpet and graphic" should suffice to get the record you want.

In my previous posts about finding names and subjects, I have had to explain the concept of controlled vocabulary. Generally speaking, titles are not controlled. If, for example, a book has one title on the title page, a different one on the cover, and something else again on the spine, the cataloger simply enters all of them in the record. Type in whatever you know, and if the library has the item, your search will turn it up.

But what if you want something that is available in more than one language? For example, English translations of Dostoyevsky's novels may be available with different English titles. In that case, librarians regard the original language as the preferred title, subject to vocabulary control so everyone always uses the same one . You will recognize a preferred title in a cataloging record because it is a hot link.

Suppose for example, you find his A raw youth. The record also shows the preferred title Podrostok. English. It has been translated into English at least three times; the other titles are The adolescent and An accidental family. If your library owns all three titles, you can choose which you want to read. If someone else has its only copy of A raw youth and you have no need of a particular translation, you know that the other titles translate the same book.

Record snow fall and climate change

Climate change? February 2010 has been one for the record books. Washington D. C. and the Mid-Atlantic states suffered monster blizzards on consecutive weekends that dumped five feet of snow. For a while, 49 of 50 states had snow on the ground. While no one has kept records, that certainly seems most unusual. Lot's of people say they would love to know where all that "global warming" is.

Jokes aside, and politics aside, climate and weather are not the same thing. The weather changes from day to day. Over a period of decades, any given day has its normal temperature, but the actual temperature may be twenty degrees higher or lower than normal. Climate does not vary from day to day. Climate change occurs more slowly and over a much longer time than weather.

In recent years, we have seen glaciers retreating. We have seen a lessening of ice at both poles. We have seen plant and animal life disappear from where we have been used to seeing it and appear somewhere else where it has never been before. The Northwest Passage, which Henry Hudson sought in vain in the frozen Arctic Ocean four hundred years ago, has become a reality, at least part of the year.

No one who bothers to differentiate between climate and weather can deny that the earth is becoming warmer. As we look back at climate changes over the last few thousand years, we can see that it has always fluctuated. Whatever legitimate controversy there is centers on whether today's climate change represents a continuation of age-old patterns or whether modern industrial technology has caused or contributed to it.

Those who, for scientific or political reasons, believe that climate change is at least partly man-made advocate making some wrenching changes in our industry. Others, for scientific or political reasons, hotly deny that human activity contributes to climate change.

In fact, it doesn't really matter who's right about that argument.

You read right. It doesn't matter whether human activity has caused climate change or not. We simply cannot sustain our current energy sources, energy usage, agriculture, transportation, solid waste, and much more--regardless of whether it's changing the climate or not.

Economic and geopolitical considerations--not to mention simple self interest--will eventually either dictate making changes or cause some kind of social collapse. Generally speaking, whatever changes man-made climate change may dictate need to happen for other reasons as well. Let's stop confusing climate with weather and figure out how to deal with the challenges that confront us

Writing for eHow

Of the content sites that I write for, eHow imposes the strictest format limitations. All of the titles begin with "How to." The article itself must consist of an introduction, a list of items needed, an indication of how easy or challenging the project is, numbered steps, tips, warnings, and key words.

The template offers a chance to link to other, related eHow articles, as well as off-site resources. eHow has a system of categorization that enables writers to select a broad subject area and two levels of sub-headings.

Whatever you choose to write about, other people have probably written something similar. You must devise a unique title, which may be tricky for popular topics. The number of different perspectives on the same topic certainly benefits the readers.

Like other content sites, eHow functions as a community of writers. Writers seek out each other as friends, comment on each others' articles, recommend each other, and participate in various discussion groups and forums.

Like Factoidz, eHow pays authors (via PayPal) a portion of the money it earns from Google's AdSense. The dashboard makes it easy to see the number of times each article has been read, both recently and in total, and the cumulative amount of money each has earned.

Its formula is proprietary, so authors cannot know how their pay is computed. eHow credits authors' PayPal accounts only if they have accrued at least $10; lesser earnings are carried over from one month to the next.

Recently, eHow deleted a number of old articles. Since it had so many poorly written, even spammy articles, it needed to get rid of them in order to enhance its credibility. Unfortunately, it offered no warning to authors or any clear guidelines.

Many authors lost articles that were earning them money and that they could have rewritten given the chance. The sweeps of old articles caused a great deal of controversy. Many long-term writers have lost trust in eHow's management.

Perhaps because the eHow template has so many steps and pulldown menus (four pages in all), it often does not work properly. Generally speaking, authors for any site should compose their articles on a word processor rather than directly with the site's authoring tools.

It is especially important for eHow, considering how frequently its buggy software frustrates attempts to publish anything. I suggest writing and saving a template of your own, with the various parts of the eHow format listed in order. It should also begin with the warning not to include any HTML in your prose; eHow does not permit even italics or bold face.

When you want to write something, open your template, save it as the subject of your article, write your article, and then copy and paste from there to the site.

Once you finish writing your article and successfully fill out the template, you submit it for publication. It does not appear on the site until after an editorial review. That's usually by the next day, but longer delays have occurred. No one likes having an article rejected or having to rewrite one in order to satisfy the editors, but in the end, the quality control helps everyone.

Compared to Factoidz, eHow seems to have less traffic, but pays a little more. The key to earning a payout every month is both submitting a high volume of traffic and being a member for a long time. It will likely take months (or a high rate of publication). The first articles you write should continue to earn money months or even years later.

Oil: an unsustainable addiction

"America is addicted to oil," said George W. Bush. That was a startling admission from a President who used to be in the oil business. Another oil man, T. Boone Pickens, launched a plan for energy independence that involves substituting wind power for natural gas to generate electricity and using natural gas instead of oil to run our cars.

We are indeed in the midst of an oil crisis on many fronts. In fact, Bush understated the problem. The entire world suffers from the same addiction. India and China, trying to catch up with the United States and Europe as industrial powers, are driving up the world-wide price of oil. As long as oil is the fuel of choice, it puts economic development, or even self-sufficiency, out of reach of poorer countries.

Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has more money than it knows how to spend wisely, so it diligently exports the anti-technology, anti-modern Wahabi sect of Islam to other countries.

The influence of that sect directly discourages education (especially for girls and women) and economic development. Indirectly, it discourages jobs and the people who need them. Whether on the Arab street or among the starving masses all over Africa or anywhere else, discouragement and discontent lead to violence.

I have nothing to say about global warming or climate change. Polar ice caps are melting, and the Northwest Passage that Henry Hudson couldn't find is becoming a reality. As to the argument over how much modern industry contributes to it, it really doesn't matter.

We--not just Americans or Europeans, but everyone else as well--have ample other reasons to find less expensive and more equitable sources of energy. Most of the ones under discussion now also seem to be cleaner and less damaging to the air and groundwater.

Both economically, environmentally, and geopolitically, the world cannot sustain its current energy usage. I, for one, would welcome development of enough viable alternatives to oil that we could stop using it entirely, or at least use less than we can produce ourselves.

Beyond information seeking: ways the library meets some other needs.

In earlier posts to this blog, and other places around the Internet, I have written about how to ask reference librarians questions, how to use a library catalog, and some of the differences between libraries and other ways of finding information. All of these articles have assumed some kind of information-seeking, or at least literature seeking. That is, if you want something in particular, I have given pointers for how to find it. Today, I will look at a random sample of a few other good reasons to visit the library.

1. Libraries are cool in the summer (in case your air-conditioning is not working), a warm place in the winter, a dry place in the rain, a quiet place away from the noise of traffic or the hustle and bustle of working or shopping. There are lots of things you can do in this peaceful and comfortable refuge.

2. Libraries are a great place to browse. They subscribe to more newspapers and magazines than you'll find anywhere else--and not just current or recent issues, either. Only libraries offer the relaxing pleasure of leafing through fifty-year-old issues of Life or some other magazine. Think of the library as a vast StumbleUpon, where you can choose exactly what you want to browse.

3. With a library card, you can see an unlimited number of movies with no rental fee--and very likely find things that the video store, or the Red Box, or Netflix doesn't have. (Plus, if you still have a VCR and no DVD player, the library probably still has cassettes!)

4. Even though libraries offer peace and quiet, the days of, "Shhhhh" are long over. The library is a good place to meet with friends. More and more libraries (academic libraries, at least) hold game nights from time to time. Just think, you can socialize without having to make arrangements for anyone else.

5. Libraries offer other public programming, too: concerts, lectures, public discussions, rooms for meetings, all kinds of things. And while the web is no particular place--basically the same sites are available to users anywhere in the world--the library caters to its own community. Programs reflect the interests of local people. You're local in your own home town, aren't you?

Writing for Factoidz

As Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Even when writing free for academic journals, I have always expected some kind of payoff in terms of getting a good job, getting merit raises, or generating book sales. Now, in addition to my blogs, I write for five article sites, including Factoidz. It's a lot of work keeping up with all of that, but over time, I should be preparing some good passive income.

No one should expect to get rich, or even make a living entirely from writing on the Internet, although I understand some people, by sheer volume of writing, very careful selection of hot topics, and relentless marketing, come pretty close to the latter.

Factoidz accepts three kinds of article (called a factoid): how to do something, facts about something, or lists of something. It does not accept opinion pieces or promotional links to sell products or services. Basically, though, "something" can be virtually anything. Factoidz has 32 broad categories from beauty tips to job searching to hobbies to science. Each of them is further subdivided.

Factoids should be at least 400 words. For each one, you will need to select a category and subcategory, provide a title rich in key words, write a short summary good for search engine optimization (SEO), and list 10-15 key words. Don't worry if you don't know as much as you'd like about SEO; Factoidz authors have already provided plenty of information about it for you to study.

Like every similar site I have ever seen, Factoidz works as a community of writers. The best way to gain readership is to read and comment on other articles on the site. Members can also vote up each other's articles and nominate other authors as experts in various categories. Each member's profile includes the number of votes their articles have received, how many followers they have, and their expertise scores and rankings.

Factoidz has a user forum, and a list of suggested topics. Your dashboard as a member includes statistics on "your most recently published Factoids;" your most viewed Factoids today;" the number of views today, yesterday, and all time; and, of course, your earnings for the month.

Some sites will not actually pay earnings until they reach some minimum threshold. Factoidz pays (via PayPal) even as little as a dollar or two after every month. Significant earnings build slowly and require quality of writing, quantity of writing, and time elapsed since publishing your first article.

That first article, after all, will continue to pay something months or even years later. No one article will pay much in a given month, so you will need lots of articles that people want to read, each earning a little bit every month, to add up to a significant payout. In addition, the time spent reading and commenting on others' articles really increases readership, as well as providing advice and ideas for future articles.

If you are interested in writing for Factoidz, create an account here.