Submarine Entertainment is excited to announce the upcoming release of the documentary PUMP – a movie that will change your attitude about fuel forever.
Watch the PUMP trailer: http://youtu.be/iTytxMdlazM
Film Website: www.pumpthemovie.com
Narrated by Jason Bateman and from the Director of the Sundance award-winner, FUEL, and the company that brought you the acclaimed CHASING ICE, PUMP is an inspiring, eye-opening documentary that tells the story of America's addiction to oil, from its corporate conspiracy beginnings to its current monopoly today, and explains clearly and simply how we can end it – and finally win choice at the pump. Moving beyond the typical eco-film, this riveting documentary differentiates itself by offering new and unique solutions to discovering and utilizing fuel alternatives. PUMP entertains the viewer by presenting exciting and affordable options for fuel sources, while also exploring the devastating economic ramifications that an oil monopoly has on the global economy.
Today oil is our only option of transportation fuel at the pump. Our exclusive use of it has drained our wallets, increased air pollution and sent our sons and daughters to war in faraway lands. PUMP shows us how through the use of a variety of replacement fuels, we will be able to fill up our cars – cheaper, cleaner and American made - and in the process, create more jobs for a stronger, healthier economy.
The film features notable experts such as John Hofmeister, former President of Shell Oil US; Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors; Peter Goldmark, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation; and other noteworthy figures who share their passionate views and knowledge.
Right now we have the ability to change our country's future, but we never knew it. PUMP is the movie that could make this happen.
Fuel Freedom Foundation: www.fuelfreedom.org. Yossie Hollander and Eyal Aronoff are cofounders of the foundation as well as producers of PUMP.
FFF is working to reduce the cost of driving your existing car or truck by opening the market to cheaper fuel choices at the pump with the goal to reduce the cost of transportation fuels in the U.S. by $300 billion annually within ten years.
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Monday, August 25, 2014
Satellites Capture the Birth and Movement of Tropical Storm Cristobal
On August 24 at 15:55 UTC (11:55 a.m. EDT) Cristobal's center appeared near Turks and Caicos Islands in this visible image from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite.
Image Credit:
NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team
The third tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season formed near the southeastern Bahamas on Sunday, August 24. NASA's Aqua satellite and NOAA's GOES-East satellites provided imagery of the storm's birth and movement.
System 96L lingered in the eastern Caribbean over the last couple of days and on Saturday, August 23, became a tropical depression. That depression strengthened into a tropical storm during the morning of August 24. A GOES-East satellite image was taken at 9:30 a.m. EDT on August 24 showed Cristobal as a rounded area of clouds north of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) moving into the southeastern Bahamas. The GOES image was created at NASA's GOES Project office in NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Upon its birth Cristobal had sparked Tropical Storm Warnings for Southeastern Bahamas, Including the Acklins, Crooked Island, Long Cay, the Inaguas, Mayaguana, the Ragged Islands, as well as the Turks and Caicos Islands, Central Bahamas, Including Cat Island, The Exumas, Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador.
NOAA's GOES-East satellite saw Tropical Storm Cristobal form north of Hispaniola on Sunday, August 24.
Image Credit:
NASA/NOAA GOES Project
Heavy rainfall is a problem for the islands because Cristobal is moving so slowly. The National Hurricane Center noted that the tropical storm is expected to produce rainfall totals of 4 to 8 inches over the Turks and Caicos as well as portions of the southeastern and central Bahamas through Tuesday, with isolated amounts around 12 inches possible. Minor flooding was already reported during the morning of August 25 near Pirates Cove on Mayaguana Island.
On August 24 at 15:55 UTC (11:55 a.m. EDT) Cristobal's center appeared near Turks and Caicos Islands in this visible image from the Moderate Imaging Resolution Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite. In the MODIS image, it appeared that northerly wind shear was affecting the storm, blowing most of the strongest clouds and thunderstorms south of the center.
By August 25, the wind shear had not let up. The National Hurricane Center described the storm as remaining sheared with the low-level center fully exposed on the north side of the "deep convective cloud mass (the area of the strongest thunderstorms)."
At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) Cristobal was centered about 120 miles (195 km) east-northeast of San Salvador Island, Bahamas, and 715 miles (1,150 km) southwest of Bermuda. That puts the center of Tropical Storm Cristobel near latitude 24.6 north and longitude 72.7 west. Cristobal's maximum sustained winds were near 60 mph (95 kph) and some strengthening is expected over the next two days. Cristobal is moving toward the north-northeast near 2 mph (4 kph) and is expected to turn northeast and speed up on Tuesday.
The government of Bahamas has discontinued the tropical storm warning for the central Bahamas.
The National Hurricane Center noted that a strong, elongated area of low pressure (a trough) just of the U.S. east coast is forecast to capture Cristobal and gradually lift out the cyclone to the northeast.
Text credit: Rob Gutro
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Space Station Astronauts to Speak with California Elementary School Students
Expedition 40 Commander Steve Swanson and Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman of NASA, currently orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station, will speak with students and educators at Elliott Ranch Elementary School in Elk Grove, California, Wednesday, Aug. 27.
The event, which begins at 1:10 p.m. EDT (10:10 a.m. PDT) will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website.
Elliott Ranch focused its 2014 science fair on NASA and encouraged exploration-related experiments. Throughout the summer, students worked to develop projects that could lead to meaningful questions for the astronauts about life, work and research aboard the space station. Students with winning projects will speak with Swanson and Wiseman during the live downlink. Prior to the event, former NASA astronaut Stephen Robinson will visit the school to share his experiences living and working in space.
Media interested in covering the event must contact Matt Hessburg at 646-942-1429 or mhessburg@gmail.com. Elliott Ranch Elementary School is located at 10000 East Taron Drive in Elk Grove, California.
Linking students directly to astronauts aboard the space station provides an authentic, live experience of space exploration, space study, the scientific components of space travel and the possibilities of life in space.
This in-flight education downlink is one in a series with educational organizations in the United States and abroad to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teaching and learning. It is an integral component of NASA's Teaching From Space education program, which promotes learning opportunities and builds partnerships with the education community using the unique environment of space and NASA's human spaceflight program.
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Green Your Dorm (or Home!) with Our Back to School Pinterest Board
By Stephanie Businelli
It's that time of year again! The summer is slowing down and if you are a high school graduate heading to college, chances are you are frantically buying items from that (never-ending) list of dorm essentials. Before you head out to another store, be sure to check out our new Green Your Dorm (or Home!) Pinterest board. Find easy do it yourself (DIY) projects that can help you recycle objects you have around the house while crossing items off of your shopping list. You'll find green ways to create cork boards, jewelry holders, air fresheners, and more. Aren't shopping for dorm supplies this summer but feel inspired? These DIY ideas are great for your home as well!
Why are we sharing this information with us? We need your help to reduce these numbers:
· Americans threw away 250,000,000 tons of trash in 2012.
· 134,000,000 tons of that trash ended up in landfills and incinerators.
Your actions can have a huge effect. Be sure to check out our Green Your Dorm (or Home!) Pinterest board before you go shopping this summer.
About the Author: Stephanie Businelli is a biological basis of behavior major and environmental studies minor at the University of Pennsylvania. As an intern for the EPA Communications Services Staff in the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, she loves all DIY projects, especially those that help her protect the Earth (and her bank account).
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Happy 98th birthday to the National Park Service! We’re 98 Today!
08/25/2014 11:31 AM EDT
Happy 98th birthday to the National Park Service! We're celebrating this week by highlighting some of the amazing wilderness managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (all bureaus within the Department of the Interior). Each day this week, we will post a photo of wilderness managed by the Department. Which ever photo gets the more shares and likes will be featured next week on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act, which has protected millions of acres of America's stunning lands.
Our first photo comes from the Tuolumne Meadows Wilderness Center within Yosemite National Park.
Photo: Sean Goebel
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Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
As a concerned citizen, I believe changes are needed to the federal structure in Washington D.C. Once the federal government started abusing its authority and ignoring the citizen's concerns, we started losing our freedoms. Our only recourse is provided in Article V of the Constitution.
I believe citizens need to get involved. We the people with our State Legislators, can call a convention of states for proposing amendments to the Constitution, to limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.
I believe the way to preserve our liberties is through the Convention of States Project, launched by the Citizens for Self Governance Organization, to urge state legislators to call a Convention and ultimately change Washington's dangerous course.
As a concerned citizen, I am concerned over our irresponsible government and our nation's future. Please consider joining us and others in supporting this grassroots movement so we can change the direction our country is going. Visit our website,www.conventionofstate.comand facebook.com/conventionof states and facebook.comTexas convention of states. We need the courage to stand up to Washington's power grab and preserve our nation's freedoms.
For Freedom,
Toula Anagnostis
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Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
The best government response to the "inversion" of Burger King with Canada's Tim Hortons Inc. for the purpose of avoiding US Taxes is the opposite of what you might think. Rather than club Burger King over the head with yet more tax avoidance rules, don't tax Burger King - or its ilk - at all.
Why not? Won't this solution deplete Uncle Sam's coffers of badly-needed revenue from BK? Actually not. The reason why not requires one to understand that no profitable business, not even BK, eats taxes. To be sure, BK collects money for its burgers and writes big checks to Uncle Sam. But the tax on the burger is passed on to the customer in the price.
If we stop taxing BK and instead tax the customer, we arrive at the same result. But why should we change? Because taxing BK taxes productivity, and taxing the customer taxes consumption - but the customer will have the same purchasing power. We stop taxing the customer's income too. If we change, Tim Hortons will re-domicile in the US rather than BK re-domicile to Canada.
Will the plan work? Peer-reviewed academic and market research says yes. Is there a proposal in Congress today to change our tax code to keep BK in the US? Indeed there is. The Fair Tax Act of 2013, with 87 sponsors, replaces Subtitles A, B and C of the Internal Revenue Code with a national tax on all services and all new tangible goods sold at retail to a consumer in the United States.
The FairTax®, as the bill is known, also phases out the IRS over a three-year period and requires the destruction of its records of "ABC" taxes, except those records needed to calculate Social Security Benefits and to support ongoing litigation. A Family Consumption Allowance assures that lawful residents of the United States, regardless of income, pay no tax on essential consumption up to the poverty level. To learn more, go towww.fairtax.org.
~James M. Benentt
Jim Bennett is a member of the Board of Directors and Secretary of Americans for Fair Taxation ("AFFT"). AFFT is the organization that educates the public about the FairTax®.
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The ScottMadden Energy Industry Update – August 2014
August 2014
I Feel the Earth Move under My Feet
We are pleased to announce our Summer 2014 issue of THESCOTTMADDEN ENERGY INDUSTRY UPDATE. This semi-annual publication features our view of recent significant events and emerging trends in the energy industry.
Download Full Report (PDF)
The energy and utility industries continue to anticipate and react to potential fundamental shifts in the 100+ year-old model of investment, regulation, and earnings. Policy and regulatory changes are big factors driving the design of the new landscape. For many of these changes, significant investment in existing and new infrastructure is needed across all parts of the energy value chain. And by the way, load growth is no longer, so investment and cost recovery are uncertain. Highlights include:
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We hope you will find THE SCOTTMADDEN ENERGY INDUSTRY UPDATE to be a useful and informative resource. If you would like to discuss our observations in greater detail or have us present them or our views on other industry or management issues to your executive team, please contact us. View our Energy Practice area.
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Food Bank Competition Enters Final Week
| Winner Signs Up Most U.S. Food Waste Challenge Partners |
WASHINGTON, Aug. 25, 2014 – A friendly competition among the nation's food banks to sign up the most donors in the U.S. Food Waste Challenge is drawing to a close, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Feeding America will determine a winner in early September. The food bank that registers the most donors as participants in the U.S. Food Waste Challenge will be honored in an event hosted by the Department of Agriculture. The competition was launched on July 22 and closes this week. Food bank donors and partners can join the competition by signing up for the U.S. Food Waste Challenge on Feeding America's website and listing the activities they will undertake to help reduce, recover, or recycle food waste in their operations. USDA's Economic Research Service estimated food waste in the U.S. at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. "When we do our part to lower food waste, we can help ease pressure on our natural resources and feed families in need," said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. "Through the Food Waste Challenge, food banks, producers, manufactures, and retailers are stepping up to do just that." The U.S. Food Waste Challenge was inaugurated in June 2013 by USDA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and calls on businesses and organizations to join the effort to reduce food waste in the United States. The goal of the U.S. Food Waste Challenge is to lead a fundamental shift in how we think about and manage food and food waste in America. Participants join the Challenge by listing what activities they will undertake to help reduce, recover, or recycle food waste in their operations. The Challenge includes a goal of 400 partners by 2015 and 1,000 by 2020. By joining the U.S. Food Waste Challenge, businesses that donate to the nation's food banks are adding their voice to the growing movement to reduce food waste and keep wholesome food where it belongs: on someone's plate. More information about the U.S. Food Waste Challenge is athttp://usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/. # USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. To file a complaint of discrimination, write: USDA, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office of Adjudication, 1400 Independence Ave., SW, Washington, DC 20250-9410 or call (866) 632-9992 (Toll-free Customer Service), (800) 877-8339(Local or Federal relay), (866) 377-8642 (Relay voice users). |
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What Do You Do With 100 Million Photos? David A. Shamma and the Flickr Photos Dataset
David Ayman Shamma, a scientist and senior research manager with Yahoo Labs and Flickr. Photo from xeeliz on Flickr.
Every day, people from around the world upload photos to share on a range of social media sites and web applications. The results are astounding; collections of billions of digital photographs are now stored and managed by several companies and organizations. In this context, Yahoo Labs recently announced that they were making a data set of 100 million Creative Commons photos from Flickr available to researchers. As part of our ongoing series of Insights Interviews, I am excited to discuss potential uses and implications for collecting and providing access to digital materials with David Ayman Shamma, a scientist and senior research manager with Yahoo Labs and Flickr.
Trevor: Could you give us a sense of the scope and range of this corpus of photos? What date ranges do they span? The kinds of devices they were taken on? Where they were taken? What kinds of information and metadata they come with? Really, anything you can offer for us to better get our heads around what exactly the dataset entails.
Ayman: There's a lot to answer in that question. Starting at the beginning, Flickr was an early supporter of the Creative Commons and since 2004 devices have come and gone, photographic volume has increased, and interests have changed. When creating the large-scale dataset, we wanted to cast as wide a representative net as possible. So the dataset is a fair random sample across the entire corpus of public CC images. The photos were uploaded from 2004 to early 2014 and were taken by over 27,000 devices, including everything from camera phones toDSLRs. The dataset is a list of photo IDs with a URL to download a JPEG or video plus some corresponding metadata like tags and camera type and location coordinates. All of this data is public and can generally be accessed from an unauthenticated API call; what we're providing is a consistent list of photos in a large, rolled-up format. We've rolled up some but not all of the data that is there. For example, about 48% of the dataset has longitude and latitude data which is included in the rollup, but comments on the photos have not been included, though they can be queried through the API if someone wants to supplement their research with it.
Data, data, data… A glimpse of a small piece of the dataset. Image shared by aymanshamma on Flickr.
Trevor: In the announcement about the dataset you mention that there is a 12 GB data set, which seems to have some basic metadata about the images and a 50 TB data set containing the entirety of the collection of images. Could you tell us a bit about the value of each of these separately, the kinds of research both enable and a bit about the kinds of infrastructure required to provide access to and process these data sets?
Ayman: Broadly speaking, research on Flickr can be categorized into two non-exclusive topic areas: social computing and computer vision. In the latter, one has to compute what are called 'features' or pixel details about luminosity, texture, cluster and relations to other pixels. The same is true for audio in the videos. In effect, it's a mathematical fingerprint of the media. Computing these fingerprints can take quite a bit of computational power and time, especially at the scale of 100 million items. While the core dataset of metadata is only 12 GB, a large collection of features reach into the terabytes. Since these are all CC media files, we thought to also share these computed features. Our friends at theInternational Computer Science Institute andLawrence Livermore National Labs were more than happy to compute and host a standard set of open features for the world to use. What's nice is this expands the dataset's utility. If you're from an institution (academic or otherwise), computing the features could be a costly set of compute time.
A 1 million photo sample of the 48 million geotagged photos from the dataset plotted around the globe. Image shared by aymanshamma on Flickr.
Trevor: The dataset page notes that the dataset has been reviewed to meet "data protection standards, including strict controls on privacy." Could you tell us a bit about what that means for a dataset like this?
Ayman: The images are all under one of six Creative Commons licenses implemented by Flickr. However, there were additional protections that we put into place. For example, you could upload an image with the license CC Attribution-NoDerivatives and mark it as private. Technically, the image is in the public CC; however, Flickr's agreement with its users supersedes the CC distribution rights. With that, we only sampled from Flickr's public collection. There are also some edge cases. Some photos are public and in the CC but the owner set the geo-metadata to private. Again, while the geo-data might be embedded in the original JPEG and is technically under CC license, we didn't include it in the rollup.
Trevor: Looking at the Creative Commons page for Flickr, it would seem that this isn't the full set of Creative Commons images. By my count, there are more than 300 million creative commons licensed photos there. How were the 100 million selected, and what factors went into deciding to release a subset rather than the full corpus?
Ayman: We wanted to create a solid dataset given the potential public dataset size; 100 million seemed like a fair sample size that could bring in close to 50% geo-tagged data and about 800 thousand videos. We envision researchers from all over the world accessing this data, so we did want to account for the overall footprint and feature sizes. We've chatted about the possibility of 'expansion packs' down the road, both to increase the size of the dataset and to include things like comments or group memberships on the photos.
Trevor: These images are all already licensed for these kinds of uses, but I imagine that it would have simply been impractical for someone to collect this kind of data via the API. How does this data set extend what researchers could already do with these images based on their licenses? Researchers have already been using Flickr photos as data, what does bundling these up as a dataset do for enabling further or better research?
Ayman: Well, what's been happening in the past is people have been harvesting the API or crawling the site. However, there are a few problems with these one-off research collections; the foremost is replication. By having a large and flexible corpus, we aim to set a baseline reference dataset for others to see if they can replicate or improve upon new methods and techniques. A few academic and industry players have created targeted datasets for research, such as ImageNet from Stanford or Yelp's release of its Phoenix-area reviews. Yahoo Labs itself has released a few small targeted Flickr datasets in the past as well. But in today's research world, the new paradigm and new research methods require large and diverse datasets, and this is a new dataset to meet the research demands.
Trevor: What kinds of research are you and your colleagues imagining folks will do with these photographs? I imagine a lot of computer science and social network research could make use of them. Are there other areas you imagine these being used in? It would be great if you could mention some examples of existing work that folks have done with Flickr photos to illustrate their potential use.
Ayman: Well, part of the exciting bit is finding new research questions. In one recent example, we began to examine the shape and structure of events through photos. Here, we needed to temporally align geo-referenced photos to see when and where a photo was taken. As it turns out, the time the photo was taken and the time reported by the GPS are off by as much as 10 minutes in 40% of the photos. So, in work that will be published later this year, we designed a method for correcting timestamps that are in disagreement with the GPS time. It's not something we would have thought we'd encounter, but it's an example of what makes a good research question. With a large corpus available to the research world at-large, we look forward to others also finding new challenges, both immediate and far-reaching.
Trevor: Based on this, and similar webscope data sets, I would be curious for any thoughts and reflections you might offer for libraries, archives and museums looking at making large scale data sets like this available to researchers. Are there any lessons learned you can share with our community?
Ayman: There's a fair bit of care and precaution that goes into making collections like this - rarely is it ever just a scrape of public data; ownership and copyright does play a role. These datasets are large collections that reflect people's practices, behavior and engagement with media like photos, tweets or reviews. So, coming to understand what these datasets mean with regard to culture is something to set our sights on. This applies to the libraries and archives that set to preserve collections and to researchers and scientists, social and computational alike, who aim to understand them.
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