In Washington DC today, an Earth Day festival on the National Mall was almost rained out by heavy thunderstorms, leaving many concert-goers dripping from head to toe.

The concerts may be over, but Earth Day is not actually until Tuesday. The Washington Post featured a number of editorials giving opposing views on the cost and viability of solar power and other alternative energies. Many of these are aimed at supporting or debunking the claims of various interest groups that plan to introduce new legislation this week aimed at limiting U.S. carbon emissions.

That’s a fine goal in its own right, but in the long term we need to restructure our approach to serving the world’s energy needs. In debating the finer points of legislation it is too easy to forget the role that technological innovation can play in problem solving. It is difficult to predict which technologies will win the day, but encouraging green-tech investment now could have a payoff much larger than we can image. There is a bewildering array of research underway, ranging from growing bio-diesel fuel from algae to replacing cell phone batteries with water-powered fuel cells.

As these examples suggest, there probably will not be one single replacement for traditional energy sources, but rather a whole variety of approaches that together will help to reduce our impact on the environment. One thing that is almost certain, however: we are not spending nearly enough on green tech investment.

On that note, here are some ideas for using your dollar to promote green investment:
- Calculate your carbon footprint and buy carbon offsets.
- Consider mutual funds or ETFs that track “green” companies or alternative energies.
- Buy a hybrid car (and no, not the SUV variety, which takes a lot more steel to produce).

If you have any other suggestions, please let us know in the comments.

The Academy Awards were on TV last night, and the many retrospective montages showing 80 years of film made me want to write something about why few of those movies are available legally online today. Remember all those promises back in the late 1990s about how the Internet would soon allow people to watch any movie they want from anywhere at any time? We’re still a long way from that goal. Here’s why legal online movie distribution has been so difficult to achieve.

The first hurdle has been getting the rights to distribute movie content online. The Hollywood writers’ strike forced this issue into the public eye; the main obstacle to a deal was the proportion of revenue that the writers are entitled receive for digital distribution of movies and TV shows. Now that the writer’s strike has ended, the issue seems to be resolved — at least for new movies produced in the U.S. — but the studios may still have to negotiate rights for older movies produced in an era when contracts did not anticipate online distribution. And don’t forget the studios will also need to procure similar rights from actors, musicians, directors, and other rights holders, if they don’t already have them. The process is long and cumbersome, sometimes requiring case-by-case negotiations with each artist involved in each movie.

The second hurdle is getting the content across the Internet. Broadband speeds in the U.S. and Europe are just starting to reach the point where a standard definition movie can be easily downloaded in one sitting. HD will take longer, although abc.com and others are proving that reliable real-time HD streaming is possible across a 2 Mbit downlink. In Japan, where a recent push to deploy 100Mbit fiber optic connections to most homes has been extremely successful, HD movies should download in a matter of minutes, and (Japan-only) services such as gigalink.com seem to be taking off. Yet people there mainly seem to watch Internet video (and live TV) on their broadband-speed mobile phones, and NTT (the telecom giant responsible for the fiber deployment) has yet to launch its video-on-demand service.

The third hurdle — more important for full length movie viewing than for TV shows — is getting the content from the Internet to the living room television. In the U.S., the major players seem to be Netflix, Apple, Xbox, and Amazon. None of these seems to be a great solution yet. Netflix offers a thousand or so titles, but they aren’t in HD and you have to figure out your own way of getting the movies to your TV and streaming doesn’t work on the MacOS. Apple has only just released a new version of its Apple TV, which does offer HD, but you have to buy their box and connect it to your TV. The Xbox is already connected to your TV and has HD titles but uses a confusing “point system” for online purchases, which may be a deterrent for people who do not already use Xbox Live for online gaming. Finally, Amazon Unbox offers a large library online, and if you have a Tivo you can download them directly from your remote, but Amazon is not yet offering HD. Of these four, no clear frontrunner has emerged. Although some argue that there needs to be a common standard before consumers will link up in droves, this is not necessarily true. Online rentals, which seem to be more popular than purchases, typically “self-destruct” after a month or so anyway, so portability between formats is not necessarily as much of an issue as it was with Betamax and VHS or HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

These hurdles are not insurmountable. The TV studios have proven that the first two can be overcome. In fact, all of the major U.S. TV studios have now jumped on the online bandwagon. Many people in the U.S. are now in the habit of catching missed episodes of “Lost” and other shows by watching them on my laptop, and don’t really seem to mind the occasional ads.

Meanwhile, by most accounts, unauthorized services such as thepiratebay.org and zml.com account for the vast majority of online movie downloads. Megabit-connected users willing to take on the legal risk have access to a wide array of pirated movies from South Korea to Bollywood. So far, it is only in this black market that the promise of ubiquitous movies-on-demand appears close to realization. It should, however, only be a matter of time before the cost and availability of legal downloads reach a level where they can successfully compete with the pirate sites.

The Japanese love beer and they love automatic vending machines. So, naturally, beer can vending machines are plentiful. But what if you want draft beer? The Japanese also have that covered: This little gadget automatically tilts your beer glass to the perfect angle while dispensing beer with just the right amount of head. Check it out in this video:

You can find these machines in all the major airlines’ business-class lounges at Narita airport.

If you want a clearer view, check out the photos of a similar machine over at CrunchGear.

  The architecture of Angkor (in Cambodia, the seat of the Khmer empire from the 9th to 14th centuries) reflects the unique sophistication of the Khmer culture.  For example, there are the “elephant gates” of Angkor Wat, the main temple of Angkor, which are built to accommodate royalty that traveled on… well… elephants. My personal favorite, shown in the picture (at right), is an elephant “loading zone” of sorts — a hallway that ends abruptly about eight feet (maybe three meters) above the ground, which is apparently the perfect height for unloading bricks, or people, from elephants into the complex.

Today, of course, times have changed, and the vehicle of choice in Cambodia is the motorcycle. Rides are frequently a family affair; it is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 people piled on to one bike. Catering to the motorcycle culture are fueling stations that are basically miniature versions of the petrol/gasoline stations seen in many other countries — except that the fuel is stored in reused glass bottles. (For some reason, Johnny Walker Whiskey bottles are popular for this use.)

For larger images, follow the link below.

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One of Intel’s anthropologists, Genevieve Bell, gave the keynote speech at the Australasian Computer Science Conference last year. After the conference, she was asked if it would be fair to characterize her job as reminding American technology experts that all Internet users aren’t Americans. Her frank reply:

“[T]hat’s certainly one way of thinking about it. . . . One of the jobs for most anthropologists is to tell stories of the people we spend time with, and to really do justice to their aspirations and desires and frustrations by telling their stories back to other people who wouldn’t listen to them otherwise. Often that means yes, I am talking to Americans about the rest of the world . . . .”

The question was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless worth asking. U.S. companies frequently set the standards for technology used all over the world, but they sometimes (often?) fail to take into account socioeconomic differences beyond simply translating the project into another language. Bell gives the example of the phone system in Ghana where many people, fearful of large phone charges, rarely complete a call and instead make an agreement in advance to ring once and hang up (a practice known as “flashing” or “peeping” which was also once common even in the U.S.)

Engineers also can build much more useful tools by taking the time to learn about the lives of users. By doing so, the tools enhance rather than hinder the users’ lifestyles. For example, Bell explains that in Malaysia, Indonesia and much of the middle east, mobile phones have become an important part of religious ritual by incorporating software that allows you to orient the phone towards Mecca and remind the user when to pray.

Read the full article here.