hubevents

Energy (and Other) Events - February 5, 2012

2012-02-05T20:17:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events is a weekly mailing list published most Sundays covering events around the Cambridge, MA and greater Boston area that catch the editor's eye.

Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com is the web version.

If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe to Energy (and Other) Events email gmoke@world.std.com

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Futures of Coral Reefs
Monday, February 6th 2012

12:00pm - 1:00pm

BU, BRB 113, 5 Cummington Street, Boston

Speaker: Peter Sale, United Nations University & University of Windsor Talk: Our planet does not have to die.

Host: Les Kaufman

http://www.bu.edu/cecb/ebe-seminars/

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The Evolution of Drug Resistance and the Curious Orthodoxy of Aggressive Chemotherapy
WHEN Mon., Feb. 6, 2012, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
WHERE HSPH FXB Building, 641 Huntington Ave., Room G13
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Health Sciences, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Program in Infectious Disease Epidemiology and the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at HSPH
SPEAKER(S) Andrew F. Read, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, professor of biology and entomology, Penn State University
NOTE Lunch will be provided.

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Askwith Forum with Arne Duncan: Fighting the Wrong Education Battles

WHEN Mon., Feb. 6, 2012, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
WHERE Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge
TYPE OF EVENT Forum, Lecture, Question & Answer Session
BUILDING/ROOM Askwith Hall
SPONSORING ORGANIZATION/DEPARTMENT Harvard Graduate School of Education
REGISTRATION REQUIRED No
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Education
NOTE
Speaker: Arne Duncan, secretary of education, U.S. Department of Education
Secretary Duncan will discuss either-or orthodoxies about school reform, including competing claims about the importance of in-school and out-of-school influences on student achievement, and the struggle to advance both a well-rounded curriculum and school accountability.
This will be a ticketed event. Please check back for further information.
This forum will be live streamed. Please check back the day of the forum for the link.
Want to win a ticket for this forum? Become a fan of the Ed School on Facebook (www.facebook.com/harvardeducation) and watch for a posting about this event.
Connect with Us:
Tweeting at an Askwith Forum? Use the #Askwith hashtag.
Attending a Forum? Check in on Foursquare (www.foursquare.com/hgse)
For more information on Askwith Forums, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.
CONTACT NAME
Amber DiNatale
CONTACT EMAIL
askwith_forums@gse.harvard.edu
CONTACT PHONE
617-384-9968

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Seminar in Ukrainian Studies: "Chornobyl and Catastrophism in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture"
WHEN Mon., Feb. 6, 2012, 4 – 6 p.m.
WHERE Room S-050 (Concourse Level), CGIS South Building, Harvard University, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Ukrainian Research Institute
SPEAKER(S) Tamara Hundorova, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Ukrainian Research Institute
COST Free of charge and open to the general public
LINK http://www.huri.harvard.edu

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Famine in the Horn of Africa TED-style Talks Addressing the Causes and Structural Challenges of Famine and Global Hunger: Potential Solutions to Persistent Food Insecurity
WHEN Mon., Feb. 6, 2012, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
WHERE Radcliffe Gym, Harvard University
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Health Sciences, Lecture, Social Sciences, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard African Students Association, Harvard AIDS Coalition, Harvard College Alliance for Africa, Committee on African Studies,
SPEAKER(S) Opening remarks by Paul Farmer, Partners In Health, followed by a panel discussion featuring Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins, Ken Menkhaus, Robert Paarlberg, and William Masters
COST Free
CONTACT INFO Mackenzie Hild: mhild13@college.harvard.edu
NOTE https://www.facebook.com/harvard.for.the.horn?sk=wall
LINK http://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/news/articles/famine_in_the_horn_of_africa_talks_to_be_presented_feb_6/

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Pioneers of the Civil Rights and Labor Movement: A Forum in Honor of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, William Lucy and Norman Hill
WHEN Mon., Feb. 6, 2012, 6 – 7:30 p.m.
WHERE Austin Hall, Ames Courtroom, Harvard Law School, 1515 Mass Ave
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Award Ceremonies, Law, Lecture, Religion
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, HLS; Harvard Trade Union Program
SPEAKER(S)
Norman Hill, president emeritus of the A. Philip Randolph Institute;
William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists;
Sephira Shuttlesworth, civil rights activist;
Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Carry Me Home"
CONTACT INFO jtrumpbo@law.harvard.edu
LINK http://www.charleshamiltonhouston.org

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Coop Food Systems Skillshare
Monday, February 6, 2012
6:30 PM
Whirlybird Coop, 36 Faneuil st, Brighton

Let's get together and talk about food systems. Specifically, what kind of systems does each coop have set up already. Whirlybird will present our own shared bank account and finance system for food shopping as well as our involvement with the Mission Hill Food Buyers Club. I'd like to hear how other coops are doing this so please contact me ahead of time to say if you can present something about the way in which your coop orgainizes around food. Or what's the best way to store bulk food? Or where can one buy giant wheels of cheese? or etc. =)

Yum! Yum! This'll be Fun!

Register at http://meetup.bostoncoops.org/events/43511242/?eventId=43511242&action=detail

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Garbage Dreams: The story of three boys born into the trash trade on the outskirts of Cairo
Monday, February 6
6:30-8:30pm
MIT, Building 32-123
Pizza + Movie

For a trailer, visit http://www.garbagedreams.com

For more information about waste, check out http://web.mit.edu/idi/yunus_2012.htm.

Presented by International Development Initiative, IDEAS Global Challenge, Global Poverty Initiative

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"Women and War in the Arab World."
Tuesday, February 7

12 p.m.

Harvard, Taubman 275, 5 Eliot Street, Cambridge

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, foreign correspondent, NPR.

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Open Government Data for Open Accountability
Tuesday, February 7
12:30 pm
Harvard, Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2012/02/heusser#RSVP
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast
Felipe Heusser, Berkman Center Fellow

Over the past decade 'transparency' has become one of those key words in the debates on modern governance. A pervasive cliché captured by the rhetoric of politics, which has raised 'transparency' as a perfect paracetamol to potentially remedy problems as diverse as accountability, growth, public service delivery and participation. For years, the cornerstone of transparency policies has been the 'Freedom of Information Act', a regulation that since the mid 1960's has spread from 3 to nearly 80 countries around the globe, but which maybe increasingly gaining obsolesce in the context of the digital age.

Open Government Data policy, is the latest chapter of the transparency story. It is moving the paradigm from 'access to public documentation' (FOIA) towards 'access to public data', avoiding obsolesce, and keeping up to date our right to access public information that increasingly flows through a digital ecosystem.

Though the implementation of Open Data policies is likely to impact a diverse variety of sectors, 'accountability' is certainly one of the main domains of impact. The bursting rise and spread of online accountability tools and watch-dogs such as the Sunlight Foundation (US.), MySociety (UK), Ushahidi (Kenya), and Ciudadano Inteligente (Chile), are good examples of how the web is creating a more powerful sort of open and crowd sourced accountability. More eyes now rest upon government, the question is 'how' (if) does this matter.

The talk will quickly overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of 'Open Government Data' as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact 'open accountability' and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.

About Felipe
Felipe is the Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation. He graduated as a Lawyer from the P. Universidad Católica (Chile) and holds a Master degree in Public Policy from the London School of Economics (UK), where he is also a PhD Candidate in Government with research in the field of Freedom of Information, Regulation, and Internet Technology. Felipe is also an Ashoka Fellow for the News and Knowledge program, and achieves work experience in both the Chilean NGO and Government sectors, working for Un Techo para Chile, and both Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Labour. In 2010, he organized the first Personal Democracy Forum for Latin America, and currently coordinates the Open Data research project for Latin America in collaboration with IDRC, ECLAC (UN) and W3C.

As a Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Felipe’s research aims to bridge the relationship of traditional Freedom of Information regulation with recent-born open data policies, highlighting how this relationship changes according to the habitat where these policies are embedded.

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Do Nuclear Power Plants Benefit Japan's Local Communities?
WHEN Tue., Feb. 7, 2012, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
WHERE Bowie-Vernon Room (K262), CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge St.
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Program on U.S.-Japan Relations; co-sponsored by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies; and the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) and the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA), Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA), Harvard Kennedy School
SPEAKER(S) Jun Saito, assistant professor of political science, Yale University
COST Free
CONTACT INFO xtian@wcfia.harvard.edu
LINK http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/us-japan/schedule/schedule.htm

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International Migration, Refugees and Forced Migrants: Questions answered and questions remaining
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
4:30p–6:00p
MIT, Building E40-496, Lucian Pye Conference Room
Contributors to the symposium include Nazli Choucri, Luise Druke, John Harris, Karen Jacobsen, Jennifer Leaning, Peggy Levitt, and Robert Lucas. Co-chaired by John Tirman and Anna Hardman.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Center for International Studies, Inter University Committee on International Migration

For more information, contact:
Sarah Jane Vaughan
svaughan@mit.edu

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Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political CommunicationBook event and discussion
Tuesday, February 7, 6:00 pm
Austin West Classroom (111), Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
Free and Open to the Public
RSVP Required at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2012/02/connecteddemocracy#RSVP
Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
A Panel Discussion about Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication
with Peter Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School Library (co-editor of the book)

David Lazer, Associate Professor, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT

Matthew Baum, Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, Professor of Public Policy, Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

John Palfrey, Berkman Faculty Co-Director, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School

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Daylight Simulation in Design
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
6:00p–7:30p
MIT, Building 7-431, The Long Lounge
IBPSA Boston in conjunction with IES Boston will be hosting a 90 minute session on Daylight Simulation in Design. The speakers will initially showcase some state-of-the-art computer-based daylighting analysis and then enter into a discussion on the role simulations can play in informing design. We will have two sets of speakers. Thomas Schroepfer, Alstan Jakubiec and Azadeh Omidfar will be discussing the Schroepfer + Hee???s New Jurong Church in Sangapore. Afterwards Glen Heinmiller and Kera Lagios form Lam Partner will be discussing examples from their work and show ways in which daylight modeling can be crafted strategically to support design ideas.

Web site: http://ibpsa-boston.com/ and http://www.iesnewengland.com/
Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Sponsor(s): Building Technology Program, Architecture, IBPSA Boston, IES Boston
For more information, contact:
Holly Samuelson
hsamuelson@gsd.harvard.edu

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Spacewar! Turns 50: MIT Celebrates Its Earliest Computer Game
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
9:00a–5:00p
MIT, Building 32-123, Outside of 32-123
Speaker: Generoso Fierro
In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT a PDP-1 computer and the games began. From discussions about "interesting displays" to new lessons in interactive programming, MIT's Kludge Room became the birthplace of Spacewar!

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of this momentous occasion with two larger-than-life celebrations of this influential game.

On February 8th, 2012 from 9AM-5PM at Stata's "Student Street" (1st floor of Stata Center in front of Room 123) you can play a new iteration of Spacewar! by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab on a giant mockup of the PDP-1 monitor made especially for the anniversary.

Web site: http://gambit.mit.edu/spacewar
Open to: the general public
Cost: FREE!
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies
For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617-253-5038
generoso@mit.edu

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America's Lawless Empire: The Constituional Crimes of Bush and Obama
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
11:45am - 1pm
Harvard Law School, Austin East

Talk and Discussion led by Ralph Nader, Bruce Fein, and Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer.

Free Lunch
SPONSOR HLS Forum, Harvard Law Record

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The Human Capital Stock: A Generalized Approach
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
2:30p–4:00p
MIT, Building E51-376
Speaker: Benjamin Jones (Northwestern)

Web site: http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/7482
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): MIT/Harvard Development and Environmental Economics Workshop
For more information, contact:
Theresa Benevento
theresa@mit.edu

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Radcliffe Institute Fellows’ Presentation Series. “Habitable Worlds”
WHEN Wed., Feb. 8, 2012, 4 p.m.
WHERE Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
SPEAKER(S) Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 2011–12 Maury Green Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Emory University
COST Free
CONTACT INFO 617-495-8212
LINK http://www.radcliffe.edu/fellowships/fellows_2012garland-thomson.aspx

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Poverty, Human Rights and Development in Latin America Study Group Meeting
WHEN Wed., Feb. 8, 2012, 4 – 5 p.m.
WHERE Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Conference Room 219, Rubenstein Building, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Conferences, Ethics, Lecture, Social Sciences, Special Events, Sustainability
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR The Latin American Initiative @ The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
SPEAKER(S) Maria Green, development and human rights scholar, visiting scholar, Northeastern University
CONTACT INFO Git Nahmens: git_nahmens@hks.harvard.edu
LINK http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/initiatives/latin_america/events/calendar.php

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How and why people hack
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
4:00 pm-5:00 pm
BU, HIC Seminar Room (MCS-180), 111 Cummington Street, Boston
http://www.cs.bu.edu/news/calendar.shtml

Security Unveiled: How and Why People Hack
Speaker: David Seidman, Microsoft.
Abstract: David Seidman, Senior Security Program Manager at Microsoft, will talk about the seedy underbelly of computing and things that go bump in the night. He'll expose how security vulnerabilities are bought and sold in a complex black market ecosystem and how Stuxnet is different from other viruses. He'll also cover some of the other interesting things Microsoft's security team sees on a daily basis, and there will be lots of time for questions.

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Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy: "Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster"
WHEN Wed., Feb. 8, 2012, 4 – 5:30 p.m.
WHERE Harvard Kennedy School, Littauer-382
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Environmental Sciences, Lecture, Sustainability
SPEAKER(S) Solomon Hsiang
LINK http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k82245&pageid=icb.page443881

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TARA-OCEANS: towards an eco-systemic understanding of plankton in the global ocean
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
4:00pm
MIT Stata Center, Lecture Theater 32-123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

"TARA-OCEANS: towards an eco-systemic understanding of plankton in the global ocean" with Eric Karsenti and Colomban de Vargas (European Molecular Biology Laboratory / Station Biologique de Roscoff)
TARA OCEANS is a three year, global expedition to characterize and understand the organization of populations of bacteria and plankton in the ocean through microscopy, metagenomics and other methods. The sailing vessel TARA, platform for the expedition, arrives in New York this week. Expedition leader, Eric Karsenti, and plankton ecologist, Colomban de Vargas, will describe the aims, methods and first findings of the expedition.

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February 2012 Mass Innovation Nights
February 8
6:00 - 8:30 pm
Microsoft New England Research & Development Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

Welcome to our February event!! Mass Innovation Nights number 35! (#MIN35)
Check out the products. Visit their websites for more info. Pick your favorite. Support them with Tweets, LinkedIn status updates, links from your blog, Likes, etc. (No need to wait for the live event - do it now!)
RSVP at http://mass.innovationnights.com/events/february-2012-mass-innovation-nights
Come to our live event on February 8 at the and blog, Tweet, Like, link, or post pictures or videos!
Bring your questions for our experts (see the experts tab here for the lineup)
Contact http://mass.innovationnights.com/

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Smart Grid Webinar Sessions
February 9th
11:00AM EST and 12:00PM EST
Contact http://www.virtualenergyforum.com

Smart Grid Update: Security, Privacy, and Compliance in 2012
Andy Bochman
Energy Security Lead
IBM
The Implications Of Cyber Security For Smart Grid Tech Development
Peter Fuhr
Distinguished Scientist
U.S. Department of Energy

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M-RCBG Seminar: Super PACs--The WMDs of Campaign Finance
WHEN Thu., Feb. 9, 2012, 11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m.
WHERE Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Ethics, Humanities, Law, Lecture, Social Sciences, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government
SPEAKER(S) Ben Heineman, senior fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
NOTE Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to mrcbg@ksg.harvard.edu.

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"Feeding the World Sustainably: Challenges for Brazilian Agribusiness"
Thursday, February 9, 2012
12:00pm - 2:00pm
CGIS South, Room S-050, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge

Kátia Abreu, Brazilian Senator, Tocantins; President, Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA).
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Harvard-MIT Workshop on the Political Economy of Development in Brazil.

Seminars are free and open to the public, and registration is not required. Lunch will be provided. Presentations will begin at 12:15 p.m.

Contact Name: Aaron Litvin
litvin@fas.harvard.edu

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"Power Politics in the Age of Google."

Thursday, February 9

4–6 p.m.

Harvard, Wiener Auditorium, Taubman Building, ground floor, 5 Eliot Street, Cambridge

A digital power play stopped the SOPA and PIPA legislation. What are the implications?
A discussion with Susan Crawford, Visiting Stanton Professor;Micah Sifry, Visiting Murrow Lecturer; Nicco Mele, Adjunct Lecturer; and Elaine Kamarck, Lecturer in Public Policy. Moderated by Alex Jones, Shorenstein Center Director.

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Estimating pressure limited CO2 storage capacity in the UK North Sea

Thursday, February 09, 2012

4:00p–5:00p

MIT, Building 48-316

Speaker: Simon Mathias, Durham University, UK

Much work has focused on estimating volumetric CO2 storage capacity in saline aquifers over large regional areas in many different countries. But such estimates are of limited value if not attached to some form of associated economic cost. A major geologically dependent factor in this respect is the number of injection wells needed to utilize the storage capacity within a practical amount of time. This paper presents and discusses the various methods used to estimate number of injection wells needed for to utilize the hundreds of saline aquifer units contained within the recently completed, Energy Technology Institute funded, UK Storage Appraisal Project (UKSAP). A range of issues are covered including: maximum pressure stipulation, injection pressure estimation and how to deal with open and closed aquifers. Finally the paper presents relevant regional scale findings from UKSAP concerning utilization of saline aquifers in the North Sea and their economic implications.

Web site: http://cee.mit.edu/events/60
Open to: the general public
Cost: free
Sponsor(s): Civil and Environmental Engineering
For more information, contact:
Roberta Pizzinato
robertap@mit.edu

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Equilibria in an oligopolistic electricity pool with stepwise offer curves
Thursday, February 09, 2012
4:15p–5:15p
MIT, Building E62-550
Speaker: Antonio Conejo

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/orc/www/seminars/seminars.html
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): Operations Research Center
For more information, contact:
Joline Ann Villaranda Uichanco, Yehua Wei, or Yuan Zhong
253-6185
uichanco@mit.edu, y4wei@mit.edu, zhyu4118@mit.edu

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How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign
Thursday, February 09, 2012
4:30p–6:00p
Harvard K354 (1737 Cambridge Street)
Speaker: Tommaso Nannicini

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MIT/Harvard Seminar on Positive Political Economy

For more information, contact:
Theresa Benevento
theresa@mit.edu

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Morocco's Role as a Transit State: Climate Change and Sub-Sahara African Migration to Europe
WHEN Thu., Feb. 9, 2012, 5 – 6:45 p.m.
WHERE Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 38 Kirkland Street, Room 102, Cambridge, MA 02138
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Moroccan Studies Forum
SPEAKER(S) Gregory White, professor of government, Smith College
CONTACT INFO Liz Flanagan, elizabethflanagan@fas.harvard.edu
LINK http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu/node/2771

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Green Conversations with Andrew R. Revkin
WHEN Thu., Feb. 9, 2012, 5 – 6 p.m.
WHERE Center for Government and International Studies South (CGIS South), Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Environmental Sciences, Lecture
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard University Center for the Environment / co-sponsored by the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Environment & Natural Resources Program
SPEAKER(S) Andrew R. Revkin, New York Times Dot Earth columnist

Discussants:
William C. Clark, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy and Human Development, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School
Cristine Russell, adjunct lecturer in public policy, Environment and Natural Resources Program Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
Daniel P. Schrag, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and professor of environmental science and engineering; director, Harvard University Center for the Environment
CONTACT INFO Lisa Matthews: matthew@fas.harvard.edu
NOTE “FINDING YES: Creating A Constructive Global Conversation about Our Planet's Future”
Is it possible to create a 'knowosphere' that enhances public communication about the global environment and fosters more constructive discussion about the future of this finite planet?
Revkin presents an optimistic, but realistic, exploration of ways to fill the information gaps left by shrinking mainstream media, a divisive blogosphere, and strangled public budgets.
LINK http://environment.harvard.edu/events/2012-02-09/green-conversations

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"Heavy Light - Finding Biomimetic Construction"
Thursday, February 09, 2012
5:30p–7:30p
MIT, Building 7-431
Speaker: Mark West, Professor of Architecture, University of Manitoba

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Department of Architecture

For more information, contact:
617-253-7791

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Terrible and Charismatic Waste: A Close Reading of Ocean Plastics
WHEN Thu., Feb. 9, 2012, 6 – 7 p.m.
WHERE Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Environmental Sciences, Lecture, Science
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Peabody Museum and the Harvard Natural History Museum
SPEAKER(S) Max Liboiron, New York University
COST Free
CONTACT INFO 617.496.1027
LINK http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/calendar

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BASEA Forum: Is Solar Right for Where You Live and Work?
Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Doors open at 7:00 p.m.; Presentation begins at 7:30 p.m
First Parish in Cambridge Unitarian Universalist; 3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge

When is the best time to add a solar system, to make electricity or hot water, to your residential or commercial building in Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville?

What are the ingredients necessary to make a successful solar installation?

What are some challenges that may be encountered due to construction type and location?

How can an experienced consultant act to navigate the process and verify performance?

This presentation will focus on the optimal conditions for adding solar to your home, condominium building or business, and how to overcome the obstacles to getting the job done in a cost-effective manner.

Paul Lyons, a licensed mechanical engineer, is President of Zapotec Energy, an engineering and consulting firm specializing in solar design and contracting services, based in Cambridge. Mr. Lyons will draw on his 15 years of direct experience in feasibility, design, project management, and installation of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal systems in the Boston metro area.

Paul Lyons founded Zapotec Energy in 1997 to provide objective advice to a variety of clients to solve their dilemmas related to energy management, conservation and renewable energy production. In 2003, Zapotec Energy began providing design-build services for solar electric systems and solar commissioning services. In 2007, the firm was incorporated and began to add employees and take on larger projects. Today there are five employees involved in a multitude of renewable energy projects throughout New England.

Mr. Lyons has led all of Zapotec's previous and current projects, and continues to play a key role in bringing together communities, developers and contractors to create a solar future in Massachusetts. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England (SEBANE), and is a member of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) and the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA).

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"The Battle for Control of Online Communications."
Friday, February 10
1:30p.
Nick Feamster
BU: Photonics Center, 8 Saint Mary's St, Room 339

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Spacewar! Turns 50: MIT Celebrates Its Earliest Computer Game at The MIT Museum
Friday, February 10, 2012
5:00p–8:00p
MIT, Building N51, MIT MUSEUM
Speaker: Philip Tan

In 1961, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gave MIT a PDP-1 computer and the games began. From discussions about "interesting displays" to new lessons in interactive programming, MIT's Kludge Room became the birthplace of Spacewar! Celebrate the 50th anniversary of this momentous occasion with two larger-than-life celebrations of this influential game.

On February 10th 2012 at The MIT Museum beginning at 5:00PM and running till 8PM, you will have a second chance to play the new iteration of Spacewar! on the specially created giant mockup of the PDP-1 monitor and on the big presentation screen at The MIT Museum. At 6:30PM, GAMBIT's US Executive Director Philip Tan will give a short lecture on the game's development and impact.

Web site: http://gambit.mit.edu/spacewar
Open to: the general public
Cost: FREE!
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies
For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617-253-5038
generoso@mit.edu

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Transportation@MIT Data Hack-A-Thon

Co-hosted by Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Sunday, February 12, 2012 | 8.30 am - 8 pm
MIT, Building E62-233

Registration at http://transportation-hackathon.eventbrite.com/?ref=ebtn
Open to public | Limited to 75 participants

Do you have great ideas for innovative use of transportation-related data? Come join our hack-a-thon and get a chance to win big cash prizes for your 12 hours of effort!

Transportation@MIT is organizing the first data hack-a-thon event, where talents with different skill sets gather and develop projects using trasportation-related data. The theme for this year’s hack-a-thon is transportation in Boston/Cambridge areas. Many interesting data sets will be made available exclusively for this event. Let's show the public how we can make innovative use of transportation-related data!

Who should participate?

Programmers who want to develop mobile/web applications that make daily commutes a better experience

Designers or visualization/GIS experts who can help the public understand complex transportation systems

Engineers who love crunching numbers and analyzing data

Anyone who are interested in transportation and willing to learn more!!
Schedule:

8.30 - 9.00 am Registration + Breakfast + Networking
9.00 - 10.00 am Introduction
12.00 pm Lunch
7.00 pm Presentations/Demos
8.00 pm Announce the winner

Should you have any questions, please contact us at transportation-hackathon@mit.edu.

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Upcoming

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Restoring the Gulf of Mexico—An Energy Policy? A Historical Perspective on Energy/Environment in the Gulf Region"
Monday, February 13, 2012
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Harvard, Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, 79 JKF Street, Cambridge

Jason Theriot, Energy Policy Fellow, Consortium for Energy Policy Research at Harvard

Contact Name: Louisa Lund
louisa_lund@harvard.edu

----------------------------
Challenges of Globalization: Global Engagement
WHEN Mon., Feb. 13, 2012, 2 – 5 p.m.
WHERE First Parish in Cambridge, 3 Church Street (Harvard Square)
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Conferences, Humanities, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Cambridge Forum
SPEAKER(S) Richard Parker, Mark N. Katz, and others
COST FREE
CONTACT INFO director@cambridgeforum.org, 617.495.2727
NOTE At a conference on the impact of global engagement on America's sense of security and well-being, speakers examine the challenges posed by the European debt crisis, changing relationships with Israel and Palestine, and the war on terror.
LINK http://www.cambridgeforum.org

----------------------

The Future of Power
WHEN Mon., Feb. 13, 2012, 7 – 8:30 p.m.
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Cambridge Forum
SPEAKER(S) Joseph Nye
COST FREE
CONTACT INFO director@cambridgeforum.org, 617.495.2727
NOTE Kennedy School Professor Joseph Nye discusses the options that “soft power” and “smart power” offer to American foreign policy in the 21st century.
LINK http://www.cambridgeforum.org

---------------------

Legatum Lecture: Mastering Business Model Innovation
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
5:30p–6:30p
MIT, Building E62-276, Reception to follow

Speaker: Alexander Osterwalder

The Business Model Canvas, a conceptual management tool to visualize, discuss, and invent business models, has known a phenomenal success around the world. Now its inventors, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur are working on a series of new practical tools to continue to revolutionize how executives and entrepreneurs think of business. Besides explaining the Business Model Canvas, Alexander will elaborate on the usability of management concepts and how this will change the way we approach business.
Web site: http://legatum.mit.edu/content/1130
Open to: the general public
Cost: 0
Sponsor(s): Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship
For more information, contact:
Agnes Hunsicker
617-324-2768
agnesh@mit.edu

------------------------

What is Massachusetts Doing to Address Climate Change: From the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to the Global Warming Solutions Act
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
5:30p–7:00p
MIT, Building 4-145
Speaker: Dwayne Breger, Director of the Renewable and Alternative Energy Division at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER)

While federal attention to global climate change has waned, Massachusetts continues to confront and embrace the challenge. Massachusetts played a leading role in the development of the northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a 10-state, first-in-the-country mandatory CO2 cap-and-trade program on the power generation sector in effect since 2009. In 2008, the Massachusetts passed the Global Warming Solutions Act which commits the Commonwealth to economy-wide reductions of GHG emissions of 25% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. This presentation will provide a summary and update on RGGI, as well as an overview of the policies and programs being implemented across the state to meet our GHG reduction commitments.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Club, Energy & Environment Community

For more information, contact:
Energy & Environment Community @ MIT Energy Club
energy-environment@mit.edu

-----------------------------

MassChallenge UnTapped @ CIC: Featuring 2011 Alum Sonia Divney
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (ET)
Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway, 14th Floor, Cambridge

What is MassChallenge? When can I apply?

Join MassChallenge Alumni Sonia Divney, CEO & Founder ofZarzaTech, who will share her experience in the MassChallenge program. Learn first-hand the benefits of participating in the Accelerator from one of our very own!

Joining Sonia is Akhil Nigam, Founder & President of MassChallenge, who will talk about the founding of MC and what we have in store for 2012. Find out how you can compete for a portion of $1 Million, no strings attached!

Please join us for an information session and lunch
at Cambridge Innovation Center
Pizza and drinks on us

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Suggestions?
events@masschallenge.org
Register at http://mcinfosessioncic-esearch.eventbrite.com/?srnk=13
--------------------------

Amory Lovins presents "Reinventing Fire"

February 16, 2012

4:00p–5:00p

MIT, Building 54-100

Lovins is Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent nonprofit think-and-do tank that drives the efficient and restorative use of resources. Lovins will present key ideas form one of his latest books titled "Reinventing Fire." In it, he builds a case that maps pathways for running a 158%-bugger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions. "Reinventing Fire's" business case -- built on enduring value, resilience, and risk management -- is so compelling that its execution wouldn't require new federal taxes, subsidies, mandates, or laws; it makes sense and makes money. Written for all of America's leaders, it's a story of astounding choices and opportunities for creating the new energy era.

Sponsored by: MIT Energy Campus Events

Admission: Open to the public

For more information: Contact MIT Energy Club

energy-events@mit.edu

--------------------------------

Harvard Law School Food Law Society Hosting a Raw Milk Debate
When: Thursday, February 16, 2012, 7:15 pm – 8:45 pm
Where: Harvard Law School, Langdell South Classroom. For those that can’t make it, the event will be live-streamed. Video will also be available after the event.

At one time, everyone drank raw milk. But with the invention of pasteurization and its attendant safety benefits, consumption of raw milk in this country almost completely disappeared. In fact, in many states it is illegal to sell raw milk. But a growing segment of the population is clamoring for increased access to raw milk, citing its nutritional benefits. Opponents are skeptical of such nutritional claims and believe the safety risks of unpasteurized milk are simply too high.

Join the Food Law Society as we present a debate covering the legal, health, and nutritional merits of raw milk. The participants are:

Fred Pritzker, Pritzker & Olson Law Firm
Dr. Heidi Kassenborg, Director, Dairy & Food Inspection Division, Minnesota Department of Agriculture
vs.
Sally Fallon Morell, President, Weston A. Price Foundation
David Gumpert, Author, The Raw Milk Revolution

Contact: Jonathan Abrams, jabrams@jd12.law.harvard.edu

---------------------------

Implementing Bold State Energy-Related Environmental Regulations, Policies, & Programs in Massachusetts and Connecticut;
and The Future of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)

Friday, February 17, 2012
9 am to 12:30 pm
Foley Hoag LLP, 155 Seaport Boulevard, 13th Floor, Boston, MA 02210

***Free and open to the public with no advanced registration***

Join us as we kick off the Roundtable's 17th year with a blockbuster Roundtable focusing on bold state and regional energy-related environmental regulations, policies, and programs.

Our first panel features recent important state-level developments in Massachusetts and Connecticut.Massachusetts Department of Environmental ProtectionCommissioner Ken Kimmel will describe the various new activities that DEP and the state are undertaking to insure the successful implementation of Massachusetts' landmark legislation, including the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Green Communities Act.

Connecticut's recently-appointed Deputy Commissioner of Energy Jonathan Schrag will then discuss the plethora of activities Connecticut is undertaking (following the recent consolidation of its energy and environmental agencies under a new Department of Energy and Environmental Protection), all of which aim to reduce energy prices, while enhancing the pursuit of energy efficiency and clean energy technologies.

Our second panel focuses on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first carbon cap and trade system in the United States, as it completes its third year of operation and begins a three-year review process that could result in changes to RGGI's design and implementation. Yet with New Jersey's recent withdrawal from RGGI and New Hampshire's near-withdrawal, is RGGI's future secure?

The panel begins with Maine PUC Commissioner David Littell (who is also Chairman of RGGI,Inc.)
Commissioner Littell will take stock of RGGI's first phase, laying out the questions that the states will be trying to answer in their review process and describing the review process itself.

Analysis Group Senior Vice President Paul Hibbardwill then present the findings of an in-depth study undertaken by Analysis Group, with funding support from several foundations, on the economic costs and benefits of RGGI's first phase - both regionally and state-by-state. Rounding out the panel and sharing their insights on RGGI's first three years, the Analysis Group study, and their hopes and fears regarding RGGI's future, will be Environment Northeast's Director for Energy/Climate Policy Derek Murrow, and NRG Energy's Senior VP for Sustainability Policy & Strategy Steve Corneli.

12/9/11 Restructuring Roundtable Meeting video at http://www.raabassociates.org/main/roundtable.asp?sel=110

------------------------------

The Boston Globe's digital strategy: a peek behind the (pay)wall
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
7:00 PM
Boston Globe, 135 Morrissey Blvd., Dorchester

Jeff Moriarty, vice president of digital products, will talk about the Boston Globe’s digital strategy – the launch of the premium BostonGlobe.comalongside the advertising supported boston.com — and how the websites embody and renew the values and ambitions that have guided its parent newspaper for 139 years.
With more ways to present the news, tell stories, and convey data the Globe is pursuing new products and transforming its business across all of its print and digital brands.

RSVP at http://meetupbos.hackshackers.com/events/43943892/?a=ea1_evn&eventId=43943892&action=detail&rv=ea1&rv=ea1

-----------------------------

"Drones: the New Frontier of Warfare and Spying"
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
7:00pm until 10:00pm
Friends Meeting, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge

Description
U.S. use of drones for warfare and spying has become routine. The use of drones increased dramatically under the Obama administration. Pentagon funding for drones is scheduled to increase by up to 60 percent while other programs are being cut. Drones have been used for targeted killings in Pakistan,. Afghanistan and Yemen. One in three U.S. warplanes are now drone piloted. Drones have also been used for surveillance in the U.S.

Learn more about this new instrument of war and plan together about how we can respond.

Bruce Gagnon - Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
Nancy Murray - American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
Matthew Hoey - Military Space Transparency Project

For more information contact:
boston.wilpf.org -- 617-244-8054 or www.justicewithpeace.org -- 617-383-4857

-----------------------------

Statewide Farm to School Convention
March 15, 2012
Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, MA!

Come hear how inspiring food service directors, educators, students, parents, and community members are building connections between schools and farms in Massachusetts - and learn what you can do to further those connections.

This year's convention will feature Curt Ellis, Executive Director of FoodCorps, and Abbie Nelson, Vice President of the SNA in VT and Director of VTFEED, as well as six workshop tracks:
New Ideas for Locally Grown in School Cafeterias
Farm to School for Very Young Students
New Strategies for Expanding Farm to School Sales
Models for Successful Agriculture-Based Education
Community Connections
New Initiatives in Colleges and Other Institutions

Register at http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1103105356625-127/Convention+Registration+Form.pdf

*************
----------------

Opportunity

---------------
*************

Cambridge Energy Alliance is kicking off a brand new pilot project to make Cambridge more energy efficient and install more renewable energy one neighborhood at a time. Live Better Porter Square will simultaneously engage every sector in Porter Square; bringing together churches, schools, community gardeners, business leaders,
students and more!

The goals of this four month campaign are to promote community involvement, support the local economy, and highlight Porter Square as a model for the rest of the city.

Neighborhood Liaison volunteers will assist with planning and implementing outreach efforts, as well as community events. We are looking for individuals with an interest in community organizing, outreach, and event planning.

If you are interested in volunteering please sign up to attend the information and interview session on February 14th.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGhQRUFaRU85dVp1c244LVJnWERTaXc6MQ

We’ll be offering an interactive and fun half-day training session for Neighborhood Liaison volunteers on March 3rd.

Questions? Email Meghan at outreach@cambridgeenergyalliance.org

---------------------------

*J e s t e r*
**Facebook Profile **¦**
LinkedIn
**
P a r a n o i d Z e n
jes...@paranoidzen.com*
http://www.paranoidzen.com

Hi All,

I am sending this out to a bunch of lists I'm on, so apologies for cross posting effects.

Our new forums are up and running, and they are free for all! We are aiming for this to become a place where Boston area collaborations, discussions and skill shares in audio, video, lighting, programming, hacking, and other various forms of 'making' happen.

Find them here: http://cemmi.org/index.php/forum/index

Since its early, I imagine they will go through some serious evolutions in terms of organization but we hope you will stop by and check them out. The forums even work on most mobile platforms :)

You can sign in using your Gmail, Google app, or Facebook credentials so there is no need to create a new account (we'll be adding a button to make that more obvious soon).

If you have any suggestions or changes, let us know, and if you are up for helping moderate, please reach out!

Many thanks, and I hope to see you there!

------------------------

Young World Inventors Success!

Young World Inventors (http://yinventors.wordpress.com/) finished their Kickstarter campaign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1036325713/youngworldinventorscom) to fund insider web stories of African and American innovators in collaboration successfully.

New contributions, however, will be accepted.

*********
-----------

Resource

-----------

Massachusetts Attitudes About Climate Change – An opinion survey of Massachusetts residents conducted by MassINC and sponsored by the Barr Foundation found that 77% of respondents believe that global warming has “probably been happening” and 59% of all respondents see see it as being at least partially caused by human pollution. Only 42% of the state’s residents say global warming will have very serious consequences for Massachusetts if left unaddressed. The 18 to 29 age group is more likely to believe global warming is appearing and caused by humans compared to the 60+ age group. African-American (56%) and Latino residents (69%) are more likely than white residents (40%) to believe global warming will be a very serious problem if left unaddressed. The MassINC report, titled The 80 Percent Challenge: What Massachusetts must do to meet targets and make headway on climate change (http://www.massinc.org/Research/The-80-percent-challenge.aspx), contains many other findings.

----------------------------------------------------

The presentations from the recent Affordable Comfort National Home Performance Conference are available online at
http://2011.acinational.org/downloadable_resources

Lots of good information from what some call the best energy conference in the USA on Deep Energy Retrofits to Community Energy Challenges with details on insulation, heat flow, energy metering, ducting, hot water, and many, many other topics. If you are a practical energy wonk, this should make your eyes light up.

--------------------------------------------------

Free Monthly Energy Analysis

CarbonSalon is a free service that every month can automatically track your energy use and compare it to your past energy use (while controlling for how cold the weather is). You get a short friendly email that lets you know how you’re doing in your work to save energy.

https://www.carbonsalon.com/

---------------------------------------

Boston Food System

"The Boston Food System [listserv] provides a forum to post announcements of events, employment opportunities, internships, programs, lectures, and other activities as well as related articles or other publications of a non-commercial nature covering the area's food system - food, nutrition, farming, education, etc. - that take place or focus on or around Greater Boston (broadly delineated)."

The Boston area is one of the most active nationwide in terms of food system activities - projects, services, and events connected to food, farming, nutrition - and often connected to education, public health, environment, arts, social services and other arenas. Hundreds of organizations and enterprises cover our area, but what is going on week-to-week is not always well publicized.

Hence, the new Boston Food System listserv, as the place to let everyone know about these activities. Specifically:
Use of the BFS list will begin soon, once we get a decent base of subscribers. Clarification of what is appropriate to announce and other posting guidelines will be provided as well.

It's easy to subscribe right now at https://elist.tufts.edu/wws/subscribe/bfs

----------------------

Artisan Asylum http://artisansasylum.com/

Sprout & Co: Community Driven Investigations

Greater Boston Solidarity Economy Mapping Project http://www.transformationcentral.org/solidarity/mapping/mapping.html
a project by Wellesley College students that invites participation, contact jmatthaei@wellesley.edu

------------------------

Bostonsmart.com's Guide to Boston http://www.bostonsmarts.com/BostonGuide/

********************************************
-----------------------------------------------------

Links to events at 60 colleges and universities at Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com

Thanks to

Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area http://www.BostonScienceLectures.com

Boston Area Computer User Groups http://www.bugc.org/

Arts and Cultural Events List http://aacel.blogspot.com/

http://www.mitenergyclub.org/calendar/mit_events_template

http://sustainability.mit.edu/

http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/calendar/

http://green.harvard.edu/events

http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

http://pechakuchaboston.org/blog/

http://boston.nerdnite.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.eventbrite.com/

Energy (and Other) Events - January 29, 2012

2012-01-29T21:09:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - January 22, 2012

2012-01-22T23:09:00.001-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - January 15, 2012

2012-01-15T20:02:00.001-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - January 8, 2012

2012-01-08T22:02:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - December 18, 2011

2011-12-18T23:11:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - December 11, 2011

2011-12-11T20:10:00.001-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events - December 4, 2011

2011-12-04T20:38:00.001-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events is a weekly mailing list published most Sundays covering events around the Cambridge, MA and greater Boston area that catch the editor's eye.

Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com is the web version.

If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe to Energy (and Other) Events email gmoke@world.std.com

---------------------------------------------------------
************************************************

I was away from computers all this past week, doing some serious relaxing with friends in a beautiful place. Regular writing should resume next week.

---------------------------------------------------------
************************************************

MIT Future of Electric Grid: An Interdisciplinary Study
Monday, December 5, 2011
12:30 PM Eastern
Webcast at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=83545

--------------------------------

"Investigating the Gulf Oil Spill: Challenges and Opportunities"
Monday, December 5, 2011
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Harvard, Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, HKS, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

Energy Technology Innovation Policy/ Consortium for Energy Policy Research
Energy Policy Seminar Series:

Speaker: Richard Lazarus, Harvard Law School

Lunch will be provided.

Contact Name: Louisa Lund, louisa_lund@hks.harvard.edu

------------------------

Interconnected Energy Grids - a Future for Electric Energy
Monday, December 5, 2011
12:30-1:45
Tufts, Cabot 108b, The Fletcher School, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford

Aleksandar Stanković, Alvin H. Howell Professor in Electrical Engineering

The area of energy processing, which includes power electronics, electric drives and power systems, is at a crossroads. Its challenges are both external (contribution to climate change, nonfunctional markets) and internal (inability to integrate renewable sources and efficient loads). The promise of energy processing comes from a growing array of potentially transformative technologies that currently exist in energy components, power electronics, distributed sensing, and networked control. The first part of this talk will review available energy technologies, and outline salient features of the existing energy systems. The second part will outline desirable future developments in electric energy systems with an emphasis on interconnection of networks with different energy carriers.

------------------------------
How to Organize a Resilience Circle: Live Discussion Webinar

Monday December 5

3pm EST for an interactive webinar about organizing a Resilience Circle!

Register here.

We’ll talk about how to start a group for your community, including:

finding an organizing partner

finding participants through "base communities" and the "linking method"

how to share the idea of a circle with others

some notes on the curriculum
You will receive a confirmation email after registering with information about how to join the webinar.

Before the webinar, please take 10 - 15 minutes to familiarize yourself with the Resilience Circle seven-session curriculum. Contact us (info@localcircles.org) for an electronic copy.

Register for the free webinar here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/638377470

Onward,
Sarah Byrnes
Find us on Facebook
Follow us @ResilienCircles

System Requirements:
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows(R) 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Macintosh(R)-based attendees
Required: Mac OS(R) X 10.4.11 (Tiger(R)) or newer

--------------------------

The Dark Side: Reporting on the War on Terror
WHEN Mon., Dec. 5, 2011, 4 – 6 p.m.
WHERE CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, room S-030
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Ethics, Lecture, Social Sciences
SPEAKER(S) Roger Cohen, New York Times columnist and Shorenstein Fellow, and Carlotta Gall, reporter for The New York Times and Nieman Fellow
CONTACT INFO Donna Hicks: dhicks@wcfia.harvard.edu

----------------------------

Thermodynamic analysis of the deposited carbon on the anode of solid-oxide fuel cells
Monday, December 05, 2011
4:15p–5:15p
MIT, Building 1-242, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Won Yong Lee, Department of Mechanical Engineering, M.I.T.
Center for Energy and Propulsion Research - Reacting Gas Dynamics Seminar
SPEAKER BIO.
Won Yong Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT. Won Yong's research focuses on modeling of SOFCs using hydrocarbon fuels. He completed his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering at MIT in 2006, receiving the Padmakar P. Lele student award for outstanding research and thesis. A Samsung Scholarship supports his graduate study at MIT. Prior to coming to MIT, Won Yong earned his B.S. degree from Seoul National University in 2001, and worked as an engineer at Hyundai Heavy Industries.

ABSTRACT
Fuel cells are well known for their clean power-generation capability. A significant amount of research is focused on the development of hydrocarbon-fueled fuel cells as an alternative to hydrogen-fuel ones. This eliminates the challenges of hydrogen storage and delivery and the need to first produce hydrogen from hydrocarbon sources. The most promising fuel cell for conversion of hydrocarbon fuels is a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). However, SOFCs operating with hydrocarbon fuels and a conventional Ni/YSZ anode suffer from performance degradation due to carbon formation and deposition on anode surfaces caused by internal reforming and conversion of the hydrocarbon. Since a kinetic model for carbon deposition is not yet fully developed, the problem has been analyzed mostly from a thermodynamic standpoint. However, the ability to predict the likelihood and extent of carbon deposition from a thermodynamic analysis are not always successful because the deposited carbon is typically assumed to be bulk graphite regardless of the actual carbon structure. In this talk, I will discuss (1) three types of carbon-deposit structures and their formation/growth mechanisms, and (2) how to incorporate this knowledge into the thermodynamic analysis in order to improve predictions of carbon deposition.

Refreshments will be provided.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): RGD Lab

For more information, contact: Jeff Hanna

--------------------------------

The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World: A "Fred Friendly" Seminar
Monday, December 5, 6:00 pm
Harvard, Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/12/civiceducation#RSVP

Featuring Professor Charles Nesson as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis (Harvard SEAS), Elizabeth Lynn (Project on Civic Reflection) and Juan Carlos de Martin (Berkman Center) as participants.

Civic education is the cultivation of knowledge and traits that sustain democratic self-governance. The broad agreement that civic education is important disintegrates under close scrutiny. As the social networks of individuals become less based on geography and more based on friendships and common interests, consensus on shared civic values seems harder to achieve. American education is under stress at every level, and schools and colleges must re-imagine their commitment to civic education. This seminar will probe tensions that make civic education difficult, for example:

What's the problem? Doesn't everyone agree that civic education is important? Is civic education being squeezed out in schools, either because of the demands of subject testing or the desire to avoid political controversy?
Does the connectedness of social media support or impair the sorts of connections that lead to active citizenship?
Every tertiary institution wants to be a "global university." What, if any, are the civic responsibilities of a global institution? What civic values are transnational? Should American students learn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
What about civic education outside of school--for adults, prisoners, and the home-schooled, for example?
Then there was model UN; now there are online simulations. Do they achieve the same ends?
Does civic education include instruction in civic activism, using social media for example?
With connectedness come instantaneity and constant interruptions. Is it even possible to maintain anyone's attention on understanding anything as subtle as the complexities of representative government?
This lively, "Fred Friendly" style seminar is timed to coincide with publication of two edited volumes: Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (David Feith, ed.; Rowman & Littlefield), and What is College For?: The Public Purpose of Higher Education (Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis, eds.)

---------------------------------

Bioclimatic Devices and Adaptations at Alijares Palace (Alhambra, 14th century) and other Nasrid Buildings

Monday, December 05, 2011

6:00p–7:30p

MIT, Building 7-431, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

AKPIA@MIT LECTURE

Speaker: Luis Jose Garcia Pulido, Post-Doctoral Fellow, AKPIA@MIT

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/lecturescurrent.htm

Open to: the general public
Cost: FREE
Sponsor(s): Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
For more information, contact:
Jose Luis Arguello
253-1400
akpiarch@mit.edu

-----------------------------

Elijah Wald Presents the History & Early Blues' Traditions

Monday, December 05, 2011

7:30p–9:00p

MIT, Building 4-231, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Elijah Wald

Bluesologist and author Elijah Wald presents the history and early traditions of the blues.

Open to: the general public

Cost: free

Sponsor(s): Literature Section

--------------------------

CReM Seminar Series: "Regenerative Medicine, Stem Cells, Where Is This All Taking Us" with Juan Enriquez
Tuesday, Dec 6, 2011
9:00am until 10:00am
Evans Biomedical Research Center, X Building, 650 Albany Street (X715), Boston
Speaker(s): Juan Enriquez

Juan Enriquez is a leading authority on the economic impact of life sciences on business and society and is a respected business leader and entrepreneur. He is a Managing Director at Excel Medical Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm. Prior to Excel, Juan was the founding Director of the Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project, and then founder of Biotechonomy which invested in BioTrove, Xcellerex, and Synthetic Genomics, a company he co founded with Drs. J. Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith to apply life sciences to energy markets.

The Harvard Business Review showcased his ideas as one of the breakthrough concepts in its first HBR List. Fortune profiled him as Mr. Gene. Time asked him to co-organize the life sciences summit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of DNA. Seed picked his ideas as one of fifty that "shaped our identity, our culture, and the world as we know it."

In addition, he is well known for giving a number of the popular TED talks, highlighting the future of biotechnology and the profound changes that advances in life sciences will have in business, politics, and society. He is the author of As The Future Catches You, which provided an accurate blueprint of how a bio-based economy changes industries and corporations, and The Untied States of America, which looks at the forces threatening America's future as a unified country. His latest publication is an eBook, Homo Evolutis: A Short Tour of our New Species, which describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves, and other species. He graduated from Harvard with a B.A. and an M.B.A., both with honors.

Watch Juan's TED talks at: http://www.ted.com/speakers/juan_enriquez.html

Open to General Public
Admission is free
More Info http://www.ted.com/speakers/juan_enriquez.html
Contact: Pulmonary Center
Amulya Iyer
amiyer@bu.edu
617-638-4466

---------------------------

Congress is considering several bills that would censor the Internet and emulate China by creating a Great Firewall of the US.

*Join us on Dec. 6th to tell the Congress: Don?t Censor the Internet!*

Noon, Tuesday, December 6th.
JFK Federal Building, Cambridge St. entrance
Next to Boston City Hall Plaza

We will bring our fight against the censoring the Internet directly to Senator Brown?s Boston office on Tuesday, December 6th. We will meet at noon in front of the JFK Federal Building near the Cambridge St. entrance next to Boston City Hall Plaza. Please join us in telling Senator Brown and the Massachusetts Congressional delegation that they must oppose efforts to censor the Internet.

*NOTE: *Check http://www.masspirates.org/blog/dontcensorthenet/ for updated information on this rally and efforts to stop Congress from censoring the net.
*Posters*

*Why we oppose censoring the Internet*
Our Information Packet for Senators Regarding PIPA and CFSA

is available. We hope you will find it a useful reference when considering the implications of these harmful bills.

This rally is being organized by the Massachusetts Pirate Party.

Editorial Comment: This is an important issue and the comparison to China's Great Firewall to this legislation is not an exaggeration but confirmed by Rebecca McKinnon, former CNN China correspondent and co-founder of Global Voices Online (http://globalvoicesonline.net), a great resource to learn about the news of the world from people living in the countries they write about. I also find it interesting that there is a MA Pirate Party, a name and idea that is spreading internationally.

-----------------------------

Urban Citizenship and Community-Based Conservation in Indonesia
WHEN Tue., Dec. 6, 2011, 12 – 1 p.m.
WHERE 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100-North, Room 106
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Classes/Workshops, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation
COST Free
CONTACT INFO Trisiawati Bantacut: trisiawati_bantacut@hks.harvard.edu, 617.384.8156
NOTE Please join us as two Harvard student recipients of HKS Indonesia Program travel research grants present their work. Jaclyn Sachs, candidate for master’s degree in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will discuss the interplay between conceptions of urban citizenship and land contestation struggles in Indonesia. Sachi Oshima, bachelor’s degree candidate at Harvard College, will share her internship experience at Project ASRI in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Indonesia Research Fellow Inka Yusgiantoro will serve as a moderator. Offered every January-term and during the summer, HKS Indonesia student research grants encourages students from across Harvard University to apply their analytical skills to challenges in Indonesia through both internship as well as independent research projects.

-----------------------

Electricity Market Design and the Green Agenda
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
12:15p–1:30p
MIT, Building 4-145, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Speaker: Prof. William W. Hogan

Energy & Environment Community Lecture/Discussion Series

Prof. William W. Hogan from Harvard Kennedy School will join us to discuss electricity sector's role in addressing climate change through improved efficiency, development of renewable energy, and use of low-carbon fuels--which creates expanded demands for and of electricity restructuring.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Club, Energy & Environment Community

For more information, contact:
MIT Energy Club
energy-environment@mit.edu

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Optimal Information Revelation

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

2:30p–4:00p

MIT, Building E62-550, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge

Speaker: Anton Kolotilin (MIT)

Web site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/oe-seminar/
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): MIT/Sloan Seminar in Organizational Economics
For more information, contact: Theresa Benevento
theresa@mit.edu

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Engineering the Microstructural Architecture of New Materials Using Freedom and Constraint Topologies
Tuesday, December 06, 2011

3:00p–4:00p

MIT, Building 3-270, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Jonathan Hopkins, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The ability to design and fabricate microstructural architecture enables the creation of new materials that possess radically superior properties from those currently achieved by composites, alloys, and other naturally occurring materials. The Freedom and Constraint Topologies (FACT) synthesis approach has been successfully applied to the design and optimization of such new materials (e.g., materials with large negative Poisson's ratios and zero/negative thermal expansion coefficients). The basis for FACT is a comprehensive library of geometric shapes that represent the mathematics of screw theory and enable designers to visualize all the regions wherein various microstructural elements may be placed for achieving desired bulk material properties. In this way, designers may rapidly consider and compare every microstructural concept that best satisfies the design requirements before selecting the final concept.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MechE Seminar Series

For more information, contact:
Ian Hunter
617-253-3921
ihunter@mit.edu

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"IN THE DOCK: Lawrence Lessig Interrogates Jack Abramoff about Corruption"
WHEN Tue., Dec. 6, 2011, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
WHERE Ames Courtroom (Austin Hall 200), Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Ethics, Law, Lecture, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
SPEAKER(S) Jack Abramoff and Professor Lawrence Lessig
COST Free and open to the public
CONTACT INFO ethics@harvard.edu
NOTE Seating is limited. Overflow seating will be available.
The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics has had a long list of great souls offering their insight about ethics, philosophy, and the question of institutional corruption. With this event, we launch an occasional series drawing on people from the other side of that ethical line. The "In the Dock" series will, when appropriate and edifying, interview the guilty, not the innocent or inspirational. In this first of the series, Professor Lessig will interview Jack Abramoff about corruption and the nature of lobbying. We hope you will join us.
LINK http://ethics.harvard.edu/news-and-events/in-the-dock

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Join Boston Climate Action Network this Wednesday Evening to Plan the Future of the Climate Movement
Dimensions of Resilience: A Potluck and Discussion

Tuesday, December 6
6-9 pm
at the Nate Smith House, 155 Lamartine Street, Jamaica Plain

All are welcome to join this potluck and talk, featuring local activists working on the artistic, food, spiritual, and equity dimensions of Community Resilience. We'll hear from:
Andi Sutton, a JP performance artist - on the artistic dimensions
Jim Bukle, farmer at Allandale Farm - on the food sustainability dimensions
Lilli Nye, minister at West Roxbury UU church - on the spiritual dimensions
Juan Gonzalez, community organizer at JP NDC - on the social justice and equity dimensionsYouth Ambassadors from Bikes Not Bombs, to talk with us about their work creating an after school bike shop at Boys and Girls Clubs.
Q&A will be followed by break out groups on a variety of issues.

Please bring a dish to share for the meal.

---------------------------------

CSE Fraunhofer AR Project Introduction
Tuesday, December 06, 2011

6:00p–7:00p

MIT, Building 56-114, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge

Speaker: Daniel Kokonowski

Dan recently joined Fraunhofer USA Center for Sustainable Energy to head the development and implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) in coordination with the Building Technology Showcase (BTS).

The BTS is Fraunhofer CSE's plan to retrofit a historic building in South Boston's Innovation District, transforming it into a living laboratory and test bed for the latest technologies in sustainable energy systems. The BTS will also include an Interactive Lobby Showcase.

With the design and layout headed by Daniel, the showcase will deploy the use of the latest Audio/Visual technologies developed by Fraunhofer and industry partners. This is including, but not limited to; interactive hand gesturing displays, facial recognition software, 3-D televisions, and potentially bidirectional OLED microdisplays.

Web site: http://mit.edu/e-club/
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): Entrepreneurs Club

For more information, contact:
MIT Solar Decathlon
SolarDecathlon@mit.edu

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“Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST): What role does scientific information on ecosystem services play in decision-making?”
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
12:00pm - 1:30pm
124 Mt Auburn Street, Suite 160, Room 105, Cambridge

Emily McKenzie, Natural Capital Project
Lunch will be served, please RSVP here: http://bit.ly/sxkAaR to ensure enough food is ordered.

Presentation summary: InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs) is a suite of models developed by the Natural Capital Project that provides information on where ecosystem services are provided and how they will be affected by alternative plans and policies. InVEST is designed to help local, regional and national decision-makers incorporate ecosystem services into processes such as spatial planning, strategic environmental assessments and payments for ecosystem services. Based on experiences applying InVEST around the world, the Natural Capital Project is beginning to assess if, how and when decisions are transformed by access to scientific information on ecosystem services.

Emily McKenzie leads the science-policy interface work of the Natural Capital Project (NatCap), and manages NatCap’s work at WWF. Her focus is on enabling scientific information on ecosystem services to be effectively incorporated into institutions, policies and decisions. Emily’s research interests include environmental valuation, and policies and payments for ecosystem services. She has applied environmental economics to policy questions in sixteen countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Pacific, Caribbean and Europe. Her research has helped to ensure nature’s benefits to people are considered in decisions around land use planning in Indonesia, black pearl farming in the Cook Islands, aggregates extraction in the Marshall Islands and forest biodiversity in Montserrat. She has built several environmental economics programs - leading research, developing tools, building capacity and providing technical and policy advice. She previously worked as Environmental Economics Advisor to the UK government, based at the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. In 2003-2005, she was awarded an Overseas Development Institute Fellowship as the Resource Economist at the Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji. Emily received a Masters Degree in International Policy Studies from Stanford University, and a Bachelors Degree in Economics from Cambridge University.

Contact:
Lauren Bloomberg
lauren_bloomberg@hks.harvard.edu

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The Occupy Movement and Student Debt Refusal
WHEN Wed., Dec. 7, 2011, 4:15 p.m.
WHERE CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., Room S050, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics
SPEAKER(S) Andrew Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis, NYU
CONTACT INFO jbarnard@wcfia.harvard.edu, 617.495.8923
LINK http://programs.wcfia.harvard.edu/jwe/

---------------------------------

COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL PHENOMENA IN ON-LINE NETWORKS
12/7/2011
4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Microsoft New England R&D Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142

Description: With an increasing amount of social interaction taking place in the digital domain, and often in public on-line settings, we are accumulating enormous amounts of data about phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us: the collective behavior and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people, recorded at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution. Analyzing this data computationally offers new insights into the design of on-line applications, as well as a new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences. We discuss how this perspective can be applied to questions involving network structure and the dynamics of interaction among individuals, with a particular focus on the ways in which evaluation, opinion, and in some cases polarization manifest themselves at large scales in the on-line domain Biography Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation, and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council. He is the recipient of MacArthur, Packard, and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, as well as awards including the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences

--------------------------------------

Reinventing the City @ MIT: A Planet of Civic Laboratories: The Future of Cities, Information and Inclusion
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
5:30p–7:00p
MIT, Building E14-633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge
Speaker: Dr. Anthony Townsend, Research Director, Institute for the Future

Reinventing the City @ MIT

During 2011-2012, the Department of Urban Studies & Planning will host a series of high-profile speakers and panels on a wide-range of topics related to the future of cities, planning, participation, economies, technology, design, and development. This series is part of a multi-year initiative in the department to raise cutting-edge questions about the field in an era of rapid change.
See http://dusp.mit.edu/p.lasso?t=7:6:0 for more in this series.

How are tools like smart phone apps and mobile communications changing the way people experience and interact with the built environment? How will new forms of visualization and simulation inform the planning process? What new skills will urban designers need to integrate ubiquitous technologies into mediated public spaces, and how can we re-interpret key planning tenets - such as the ideas of Lynch, Jacobs and Alexander - in a world of ubiquitous information technology?

Lecture at 5:30, with reception following.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Department of Urban Studies and Planning

For more information, contact:
Ezra Glenn
617-253-2024
eglenn@mit.edu

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HTC Forum: The Body as Archive/ The Archive as Body: Live Art in Los Angeles 1970-75, A Case Study

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

6:30p–8:00p

MIT, Building 7-431, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Amelia Jones

HTC Forum: After the fact

The re-presentation of ephemeral or fragile works of art and architecture raises vital questions regarding ideas of originality, authenticity, authority, and temporality. Whether reconstructed, repurposed, or reenacted, these works establish new meanings in relation to their new spatial, social, and temporal contexts while maintaining vestigial but unimpeachable reference to their previous histories. This semester's HTC Forum invites artists, historians, and curators who critically engage re-presentation, to surface the issues that it poses for the production and presentation of history.

Amelia Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. She practices a queer, anti-racist, feminist history and theory of twentieth- and twenty-first century Euro-American visual arts, including performance, film, video, and installation. Dr. Jones is the author of numerous books, including: Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts (2012) and Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, 2012). Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (2006), Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (2004), and Body Art/Performing the Subject (1998). She has published several articles on the subject of presence and live art, most recently including "'The Artist is Present': Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence," in the Spring 2011 volume of The Drama Review. Dr. Jones has also curated such landmark exhibitions as "Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History," held at UCLA's Armand Hammer Museum of Art in 1996.

Web site: http://htc.scripts.mit.edu/wordpress/?page_id=1305
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): School of Architecture and Planning, Department of Architecture, History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art

For more information, contact:
258-8439/8
htc@mit.edu

-----------------------------------

ENCUENTRO5 TURNS 5! COMMEMORATIVE DINNER: Celebrating 5 solid years and 5 inspiring honorees!
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
7:00 pm
Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Ave, 5th Floor, Chinatown T, Boston

As a dynamic movement-building space, encuentro 5 has balanced the day-to-dayneeds of grassroots organizations and community groups with the wide-ranging
social change goals that their organizers embrace for 5 solid years ofsolidarity and inspiration.

For e5, challenging the militarism and corporate globalization that institutionalize the current moment of capitalism and white supremacy has meant offering a space for the spontaneous needs of local groups, housing over a dozen resident organizations, offering offices for new projects and small NGOs, archiving the efforts of social movements, providing cross-movement institutional memory, resourcing emerging projects with much needed research, materials and equipment, and ongoing daily efforts of networking and support.

Although it has meant a lot of intense work, it has also been greatly inspiring to connect with creative activists, engaging writers, soulful musicians and dedicated community members. Together, we have made e5 a platform for major demonstrations, thoughtful debates, heartwarming performances, and strategic conversations as a review of the e5 website reveals.

Always thriving on the insights and energy of countless groups and individuals, we chose five exemplary honorees who have contributed directly to e5's programming and/or inspired the work we do. To honor them and to launch the e5 movement-builders sustainer program, e5 is hosting its first annual,
Commemorative Dinner, at 7pm Wednesday, December 7, 2012.

The five honorees are:
Sergio Reyes, a Chilean-born revolutionary. musician, and founder of the Boston May Day Committee and a founder of Latin@s for Social Change

Avi Chomsky, a scholar and activist whose work connects people across borders

Paul Shannon, a peace movement veteran active in United for Justice with Peace and a founder of the Majority Agenda Project who has been on staff at the
American Friends Service Committee for over 30 years.

Robin Jacks, a long-time activist challenging low-wage work in the South and a founder of the #OccupyBoston effort

Dorotea Manuela, a founder of the Boston Rosa Parks Human Rights Day Committee, a member of the Downtown Workers Center collective, and an active defender of
Puerto Rican sovereignty.

On December 7th, join us to honor these 5 outstanding movement builders, to celebrate the extraordinary efforts of the e5 Residents and the expansive social justice community, and to make e5 a sustainable effort for 2012! RSVP at http://encuentro5.org/home/node/234

-----------------------------------

Promoting Safety, Protecting the Environment and Conserving Offshore Resources Through Vigorous Regulatory Oversight and Enforcement
WHEN Thu., Dec. 8, 2011, 11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m.
WHERE Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, Harvard Kennedy School, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Environmental Sciences, Lecture, Science, Social Sciences, Special Events, Sustainability
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government
SPEAKER(S) Michael R. Bromwich, director, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, US Department of Interior
CONTACT INFO Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to mrcbg@ksg.harvard.edu

---------------------------------

How Social Networks Shape Human Behavior...and Vice Versa
December 8, 2011
2:50 pm - 4:00 pm
Tufts, Halligan 111A, 161 College Avenue, Medford

Speaker: Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT Media Lab
Host: Soha Hassoun
Abstract: Increased productivity and creative output lie in understanding how social networks - face-to-face and digital - shape the behavior both of employees and customers. By use of the `big data' collected by my research group's unique `reality mining' sensor platforms, we can measure the behavior of hundreds of people in great detail and over long periods of time, and build mathematical models that provide accurate predictions of human decision making performance across a wide range of scales...team, organization, and even city. We can also use these models to more effectively shape social behaviors, as illustrated by our win of DARPA's 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge. As a consequence of these new capabilities personal data is becoming ever more valuable, and also more dangerous. To address this concern I will describe my work with the World Economic Forum that has lead to the emergence of a new personal data framework.
Bio: Alex `Sandy’ Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and advises the World Economic Forum, Nissan Motor Corporation, and a variety of start-up firms. He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health.

Sandy is one of the world's most-cited computer scientists, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, mobile computing, image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has recently been featured in Nature, Science, the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, and the popular press.

-------------------------------

Harvard Thinks Green
WHEN Thu., Dec. 8, 2011, 5 – 6:30 p.m.
WHERE Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Environmental Sciences, Health Sciences, Humanities, Law, Special Events, Sustainability
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Office for Sustainability, Harvard Thinks Big, Harvard University Center for the Environment

SPEAKER(S)
Eric Chivian, HMS
Rebecca Henderson, HBS
Rob Kaplan, HBS
Richard Lazarus, HLS
James McCarthy, FAS
Christoph Reinhart, GSD
CONTACT INFO jennifer_stacy@harvard.edu
NOTE 6 all-star environmental faculty, 6 big green ideas, 10 minutes each
LINK http://green.harvard.edu/thinksgreen

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Root Cause's Social Innovation Forum presents: Celebrating Innovation: A Winter Reception
Thursday, December 8, 2011
5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Microsoft New England R&D Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142

Please join Root Cause’s Social Innovation Forum for cocktails and hors d'oeuvre as we welcome our 2012 Social Innovators and celebrate the 2011 Innovators' achievements

The evening will feature the formal announcement of the 2012 Social Innovators and the presentation of the 6th Annual Margaret Stewart Lindsay Inspiration Award to Lindsay Hyde, President and Founder of Strong Women, Strong Girls, a 2007 Social Innovator. The award is sponsored by the Margaret Stewart Lindsay Foundation.

Help us congratulate our 2011 Social Innovators...

Future Chefs

Fiscal Health Vital Signs, a program of DotWell

Massachusetts Senior Action Council

MathPOWER

Smart from the Start
...and be the first to meet our 2012 Social Innovators, one for each of the following social issue tracks:

At-Risk Children and Youth in MetroWest: Providing Adult Guidance and Support
Sponsoring Partner: The Sudbury Foundation
Food, Nutrition, and Fitness: Promoting Healthy Living for Children, Youth, and Families
Sponsoring Partner: The Trefler Foundation
Healthy Aging: Engaging and Supporting Older Adults in their Communities
Sponsoring Partner: Tufts Health Plan Foundation
Impact Investing: Scaling Social Enterprise
Sponsoring Partner: The Devonshire Foundation
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education and Enrichment for Children and Youth
Sponsoring Partners: Amelia Peabody Foundation and Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
Workforce Development: Skills and Support for Workers in Today’s Economy
Sponsoring Partner: Highland Street Foundation

---------------------------------

Reinventing the City @ MIT: Building resilience in in low- and middle-income nations: Challenges for city governments
Thursday, December 08, 2011
5:30p–7:00p
MIT, Building 3-370, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Speaker: David Satterthwaite, Senior Fellow, Human Settlements Group, Home International Institute for Environment and Development

Reinventing the City @ MIT

During 2011-2012, the Department of Urban Studies & Planning will host a series of high-profile speakers and panels on a wide-range of topics related to the future of cities, planning, participation, economies, technology, design, and development. This series is part of a multi-year initiative in the department to raise cutting-edge questions about the field in an era of rapid change.
See http://dusp.mit.edu/p.lasso?t=7:6:0 for more in this series.

Most of the measures needed to build resilience to climate change for urban populations fall to city and municipal governments -- a difficult challenge when many are struggling to provide basic infrastructure and services, and most have shown themselves to be unable or unwilling to act to reduce disaster risks that are already known. In the face of these difficulties, how can planners concerned with climate change be most effective?

David Satterthwaite is a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Editor of the international journal Environment and Urbanization. A development planner by training with a Doctorate in social policy, he has long had an interest in the power and capacity of grassroots organizations formed by residents of informal settlements; this was the focus of a book written with Jorge Hardoy in 1989 entitled Squatter Citizen. More recent books published by Earthscan include: The Earthscan Reader on Sustainable Cities (editor), 1999; Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World (with Jorge Hardoy and Diana Mitlin), 2001; Empowering Squatter Citizen (co-editor with Diana Mitlin), 2004 and Adapting Cities to Climate Change (co-editor with Jane Bicknell and David Dodman), 2009.

Lecture at 5:30, followed by reception in 9-450.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Department of Urban Studies and Planning

For more information, contact:
Ezra Glenn
617-253-2024
eglenn@mit.edu

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An Evening Celebrating the Legacy of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS)

Thursday, December 08, 2011

6:00p–8:00p

MIT, Building E15-001, MIT Cube, Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge

PROGRAM
Lecture: Marton Orosz, Curator and Gyorgy Kepes Fellow for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology
Screening: Centerbeam, Directed by Richard Leacock and Jon Rubin. CAVS 1978, 16 mm, color, 13 min.
Round table discussion:
Otto Piene, Professor and CAVS Director Emeritus
Elizabeth Goldring, former CAVS Co-Director and ACT Fellow
Joan Brigham, former CAVS Fellow
Lowry Burgess, former CAVS Fellow
Alejandro Sina, former CAVS Fellow
Aldo Tambellini, former CAVS Fellow
Moderated by Joao Ribas, Curator, List Visual Arts Center

The Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship for Advanced Studies and Transdisciplinary Research in Art, Culture and Technology is a joint initiative of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), tranzit.org and ERSTE Foundation. The preservation of Centerbeam is supported in part by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program funded by The Film Foundation.

Web site: http://visualarts.mit.edu/about/events.html

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free and open to the public.

Tickets: http://visionsandprojections.eventbrite.com/

Sponsor(s): MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology

For more information, contact:
Laura Anca Chichisan Pallone
617-253-5229
act@mit.edu

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MIT Clean Energy Prize Info Session & Networking Opportunity
Thursday, December 8, 2011
6:30pm
Harvard, Maxwell Dworkin 119, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Want to shape our energy future through entrepreneurship? Interested in winning $200,000?
Come learn about the MIT CLEAN ENERGY PRIZE
The MIT Clean Energy Prize is a multi-stage, student-organized business plan competition. The top twenty-one teams receive professional, legal and industry mentors, and three finalists are awarded $20,000. The competition culminates with a $200,000 Grand Prize winner in April 2012.

Info Session and Networking Opportunity
(Meet potential teammates!)

Pizza will be provided!

RSVP at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dExHcTZSQl9BbUxUOVRPM2pxOTNRQ1E6MQ

http://cep.mit.edu/

--------------------------------

An Update on Deep Energy Retrofits for Buildings - the Intersection of Human-Based and Energy Efficient Design
Thursday, December 08 2011
7:00pm reception, program begins at 7:30 pm
1st Parish Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge

BOSTON AREA SOLAR ENERGY ASSOCIATION Forum
Speakers: Henry MacLean (Timeless Architecture) & Friends

Contact : http://www.basea.org/
The BASEA forums are held September through May, the second Thursday of each month, except as noted. The forums are free and open to the public.

-----------------------------

Renewable Energy-Related Transmission for New Englanders: By Land and By Sea
Friday, December 9, 2011
9:00 am to 12:30 pm
Foley Hoag LLP, 155 Seaport Boulevard, 13th Floor, Boston

New England Electricity Restructuring Roundtable

We welcome two new speakers to our December 9 Roundtable: Associate Deputy Minister for Energy, Mario Gosselin, Québec Ministry of Natural Resources and Wildlife, and Deepwater Wind CEO, William Moore.

Our 126th New England Electric Restructuring Roundtable focuses on renewable energy-related transmission for New Englanders - both by land and by sea. Utility-scale wind, hydro, and even solar must be sited in proximity to the resource, which is often far from population centers, thus necessitating the building of new transmission lines. The siting, cost, and cost allocation related to these lines is often no less (and sometimes more) controversial than the renewable energy resources they are built to transmit. And the promise of off-shore wind development on the East Coast presents a bevy of additional new technical and other challenges. At this Roundtable, we will explore numerous, very current, renewable energy-related transmission studies and proposed projects.

Our first panel focuses primarily on land-based renewable energy-related transmission. Starting off the panel is Associate Deputy Minister for Energy, Mario Gosselin, from Québec's Ministry of Natural Resources and Wildlife, who will discuss Québec's current and planned renewable energy resources that could be exported to the Northeast. David Whiteley , Executive Director for the Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative (EIPC) then discusses the collaborative scenario planning analysis currently underway on transmission and renewables for the entire Eastern Interconnect (comprising 24 RTOs and over 40 states). Next, First Wind Executive VP/CDO, Kurt Adams, provides a wind developer's perspective on transmission, including potential transmission projects in Maine. David H. Boguslawski, VP for Transmission Strategy/Operations atNortheast Utilities rounds out the panel with a presentation on a transmission owner's perspective on connecting New England wind to the grid and NU/NSTAR's proposed Northern Pass Transmission Project to bring approximately 1,200 MW of mainly hydro power from Québec to New England through New Hampshire.

Our second panel brings together three CEO's to discuss sea-based renewable energy-related transmission. Robert Mitchell, CEO ofAtlantic Wind Connection kicks off the panel with a discussion of Atlantic Wind's proposal to construct a transmission line 20 miles off-shore, between New Jersey and Virginia, to facilitate off-shore wind development (aka Google Line) Edward Krapels, CEO pf Anbaric Transmission, then discusses Anbaric's just- announced (11/14) Bay State Offshore Wind Transmission System, to be located 25 miles off-shore in Massachusetts, to carry up to 2,000 MW of off-shore wind to the NE Grid. Deepwater Wind CEO William Moore rounds out the panel by discussing the Deepwater Wind Energy Center proposal to build 1,000 MW of off-shore wind off the Rhode Island coast, with transmission to both New England and Long Island.

--------------------------------------

Architecture Lecture Series - Design and Computation

Friday, December 09, 2011

12:30p–2:00p

MIT, Building 7-431, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Ayodh Kamath

Title: Craft and the Computer: Theory and Practice

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Computation Group Events

For more information, contact:
Daniela Stoudenkova
danielas@mit.edu

--------------------------------------

BUILDING TECHNOLOGY LECTURE SERIES: Vernacular Construction Technology: Knowledge and Preservation

Monday, December 12, 2011

12:30p–2:00p

MIT, Building 7-431, The Long Lounge (AVT), 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Camilla Mileto and Fernando Vegas; Polytechnic University of Valencia

Building Technology Fall 2011 Lecture Series

Vernacular construction technology represents the most immediate, sustainable and functional answer to the needs of a dwelling using the available resources and materials. Its knowledge allows us to design the architecture of the future, being more rational and sensible to the environment. The preservation of traditional buildings requires innovative technology as well as respect for history. This lecture will present a series of recent design projects which investigate historical construction methods and their long-term preservation.

Camilla Mileto and Fernando Vegas are architects and professors at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain). They have extensively published on traditional architectural technology and its preservation, and have won a number of international awards for their work.

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): Building Technology Program, School of Architecture and Planning

For more information, contact:
Kathleen Ross
253-1876
kross@mit.edu

---------------------------------

Crowdsourcing: Quality Assurance and Connections with Machine Learning

Friday, December 9 2011
1:00PM to 2:00PM
Refreshments: 12:45PM
MIT, CSAIL Reading Room (G882), 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Speaker: Panos Ipeirotis, NYU
Host: Rob Miller, MIT CSAIL

I will discuss the acquisition of "labels" for data items when the labeling is imperfect. Labels are values provided by humans for specified variables on data items, such as "PG-13" for "Adult Content Rating on this Web Page." With the increasing popularity of micro-outsourcing systems, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it often
is possible to obtain less-than-expert labeling at low cost. I will present strategies of managing quality in a crowdsourcing environment, showing in parallel how to integrate data acquisition with the process of learning machine learning models. I illustrate the results using real-life applications from on-line advertising: leveraging
Mechanical Turk to help classify web pages as being objectionable to advertisers. Time permitting, I will also discuss our latest results showing that mice and Mechanical Turk workers are not that different after all.

Bio: Panos Ipeirotis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at the Stern School of Business of New York University. His recent research interests focus on crowdsourcing and on mining user-generated content on the Internet. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2004, with distinction. He has received three "Best Paper" awards (IEEE ICDE 2005, ACM SIGMOD 2006, WWW 2011), two "Best Paper Runner Up" awards (JCDL 2002, ACM KDD 2008), and is also a recipient of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. He also maintains the blog "A Computer Scientist in a Business School" where he blogs about crowdsourcing, user-generated content, and other random facts, and his blogging activity seems to generate more interest and recognition than any of the other activities mentioned in this bio.

Relevant URL: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/seminar.shtml
Contact: Katrina Panovich, kp@mit.edu

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Weatherization Barnraising

Saturday, December 10, 2011
9:30 AM to 12:30 PM
364 Marrett Road, Lexington, MA 02421

HEET Cambridge and myself are looking for 20 volunteers who are interested in energy efficiency!

We are hosting a weatherization barnraising at our 100 year old home in Lexington, MA.

HEET will be educating people and training them to do specific (small) projects of their choice, which they can in turn bring the skills home to their own home.

We will meet at 9:30, work til12:30 and then share lunch with our new friends!

Register at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2598040810/esearch?srnk=19

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Powerful Potential: The Gift of Energy
A Holiday Lecture for Children and their Parents
Saturday, December 10th
10:00 - 11:00 am or 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Harvard University, Science Center, Lecture Hall B, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Energy makes things work! In this lecture featuring Professor Howard Stone, we’ll explore where energy comes from, as well as electricity, energy conversion, and entropy. From explosions to electrons, we’ll take a look at many different forms of energy. We’ll have many kinetic activities for children to show their potential!

Free and Open to the Public
Preregistration required for guaranteed seating
Recommended for ages 7 and up

For more information, visit http://www.eduprograms.seas.harvard.edu/HolidayLecture or send email to: sciencetix @ seas.harvard.edu
For guaranteed seating please register online at: http://eduprograms.seas.harvard.edu/HolidayLecture.
Sponsored by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences , the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Harvard, and the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) at Harvard.

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MTA Composer Forum features Terry Riley

Monday, December 12, 2011

5:00p–6:00p

MIT, Building 14e-109, MIT Lewis Music Library

Dec. 12 MTA Composer Forum features Terry Riley in a talk about his new work for gamelan (his first for that medium), commissioned by Galak Tika & MIT, to be premiered at Kresge on Dec 15. 5pm, MIT Lewis Music Library, 14E-109. A Reception will follow. Free. Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

Open to: the general public

Cost: FREE

Tickets: NOT TIX REQ.

Sponsor(s): Music and Theater Arts

For more information, contact:
Clarise Snyder
mta-request@mit.edu

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Reinventing the City @ MIT: U.S. Housing & Urban Development in the Aftermath of the 'Great Crash'

Monday, December 12, 2011

5:30p–7:00p

MIT, Building 7-431, AVT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Reinventing the City @ MIT
During 2011-2012, the Department of Urban Studies & Planning will host a series of high-profile speakers and panels on a wide-range of topics related to the future of cities, planning, participation, economies, technology, design, and development. This series is part of a multi-year initiative in the department to raise cutting-edge questions about the field in an era of rapid change.
See http://dusp.mit.edu/p.lasso?t=7:6:0 for more in this series.

The Future of U.S. Housing & Urban Development in the Aftermath of the 'Great Crash': How Can Adversity Be Turned to Advantage?
Paul Willen, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Raphael Bostic, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Todd Sinai, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; Tom Davidoff, University of British Columbia (not confirmed)

In the 20th-century, housing dominated "The American Dream" and was a driver of urban development and the consumer-led economy. In the past decade, housing led the great financial collapse. Now "Generation Y" may be looking for a new housing paradigm. The ramifications are fundamental and far-reaching???for the economy, the financial system, and the shape of our cities. How can we extricate ourselves from the current predicament? What reforms are needed? What is the future role of owning versus renting, of suburbs versus central cities, of single-family versus multi-family, and what is housing's role in the income disparities that are tearing at society? This panel invites discussion of several cutting-edge scholars and policy leaders dealing with housing markets in the U.S. today.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Department of Urban Studies and Planning

For more information, contact:
Ezra Glenn
617-253-2024
eglenn@mit.edu

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Upcoming

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Please join American Farmland Trust for the second webinar in the series on Planning for Food and Agriculture: Taking a Systems Approach.

On Tuesday, December 13, AFT is offering an opportunity for people interested in local and regional food systems to learn about successful examples of county- and community-based food system planning. Presenters include Kathy Creahan of King County, Washington, Department of Natural Resources & Parks; Jason Grimm from Iowa Corridor Food and Agriculture Coalition; Katie Lynd of Multnomah County, Oregon, Office of Sustainability; and David Shabazian of Sacramento Area Council of Governments.

Register for the webinar, Planning for Food and Agriculture: Taking a Systems Approach on the County or Community Level, at 2 pm on December 13 at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/679320458

In case you missed our first webinar on state and regional food systems planning, visit farmland.org/systems-planning to access a video recording, copies of presentations, and links to download model plans from our presenters: Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.

We hope you will join us to learn more about how to form strategic partnerships, conduct food system assessments, gather stakeholder input, and establish forward-thinking goals and steps for implementing them.

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10 in 1 StreetTalk: Ten Transportation Talks

Tuesday, December 13
6:00pm-9:00pm (note earlier start time)
70 Pacific St, Cambridge, MA (around the corner from our 100 Sidney St office)
$5-$15 suggested donation. Beverages provided.

Come hear 10 innovative transportation research and advocacy stories from students, advocates, consultants, planners and engineers from around the Boston area. Learn about transit equity and the Silver Line, youth empowerment through cycling, and a Broadway Bikeway and Urban Renewal proposal all in the same night.

Stories are from around the world, from Brookline to China, Massachusetts Avenue to Scotland, Virginia to Toronto. LivableStreets sent out a request for your transportation stories last month, and on December 13 you will hear 10 of them, each seven minutes long.

Seventy minutes of presentations with a social break in the middle, and time afterwards to chat, ask questions, network, and discuss. Don't miss out, it's the last event of the year!

Contact kara@livablestreets.info
617.621.1746
http://www.LivableStreets.info

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Opportunity

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Free Solar Panels for Houses of Worship

From a recent Mass Interfaith Power & Light (http://mipandl.org/) email
"We've recently been talking with DCS Energy (http://www.dcsenergy.com/) who has an unbeatable offer: if your site qualifies, they design and install the panels at no cost, don't charge you for any electricity, and donate the system to your house of worship after five years. Your only costs will be for a building permit, possibly a structural engineer to verify that your roof can support their weight, and any preparatory work such as roof work or tree removal. If solar panels are so expensive how can anyone give them away for free? First, there is a federal grant program that is only available until November that pays for 30% of the cost of the system. Then there is an accelerated depreciation option that gives certain kinds of investors another tax advantage. Finally, the state awards a special allowance called a "Solar Renewal Energy Credit" (SRECs) to owners of solar electricity systems which are sold at auctions to utilities who buy them to meet their requirements under the Massachusetts' renewable portfolio standard. DCS is betting that the price of these SRECs will remain high. Jim Nail, president of MA IP&L, has talked to DCS Energy and is currently having them prepare a proposal for his church, St. Dunstan's Episcopal in Dover. Jim says, "The references I've talked to have been quite positive about the program and the company has been very responsive. "If you think your site might qualify, contact Peter Carli, pete@dcsenergy.com, with the address of your house of worship and your contact information. He'll take a preliminary look at your site and advise you if it meets their criteria."

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Young World Inventors Success!

Young World Inventors (http://yinventors.wordpress.com/) finished their Kickstarter campaign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1036325713/youngworldinventorscom) to fund insider web stories of African and American innovators in collaboration successfully.

New contributions, however, will be accepted.

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Resource

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Massachusetts Attitudes About Climate Change – An opinion survey of Massachusetts residents conducted by MassINC and sponsored by the Barr Foundation found that 77% of respondents believe that global warming has “probably been happening” and 59% of all respondents see see it as being at least partially caused by human pollution. Only 42% of the state’s residents say global warming will have very serious consequences for Massachusetts if left unaddressed. The 18 to 29 age group is more likely to believe global warming is appearing and caused by humans compared to the 60+ age group. African-American (56%) and Latino residents (69%) are more likely than white residents (40%) to believe global warming will be a very serious problem if left unaddressed. The MassINC report, titled The 80 Percent Challenge: What Massachusetts must do to meet targets and make headway on climate change (http://www.massinc.org/Research/The-80-percent-challenge.aspx), contains many other findings.

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The presentations from the recent Affordable Comfort National Home Performance Conference are available online at
http://2011.acinational.org/downloadable_resources

Lots of good information from what some call the best energy conference in the USA on Deep Energy Retrofits to Community Energy Challenges with details on insulation, heat flow, energy metering, ducting, hot water, and many, many other topics. If you are a practical energy wonk, this should make your eyes light up.

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Free Monthly Energy Analysis

CarbonSalon is a free service that every month can automatically track your energy use and compare it to your past energy use (while controlling for how cold the weather is). You get a short friendly email that lets you know how you’re doing in your work to save energy.

https://www.carbonsalon.com/

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Boston Food System

"The Boston Food System [listserv] provides a forum to post announcements of events, employment opportunities, internships, programs, lectures, and other activities as well as related articles or other publications of a non-commercial nature covering the area's food system - food, nutrition, farming, education, etc. - that take place or focus on or around Greater Boston (broadly delineated)."

The Boston area is one of the most active nationwide in terms of food system activities - projects, services, and events connected to food, farming, nutrition - and often connected to education, public health, environment, arts, social services and other arenas. Hundreds of organizations and enterprises cover our area, but what is going on week-to-week is not always well publicized.

Hence, the new Boston Food System listserv, as the place to let everyone know about these activities. Specifically:
Use of the BFS list will begin soon, once we get a decent base of subscribers. Clarification of what is appropriate to announce and other posting guidelines will be provided as well.

It's easy to subscribe right now at https://elist.tufts.edu/wws/subscribe/bfs

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Artisan Asylum http://artisansasylum.com/

Sprout & Co: Community Driven Investigations http://thesprouts.org/studios

Greater Boston Solidarity Economy Mapping Project http://www.transformationcentral.org/solidarity/mapping/mapping.html
a project by Wellesley College students that invites participation, contact jmatthaei@wellesley.edu

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Bostonsmart.com's Guide to Boston http://www.bostonsmarts.com/BostonGuide/

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Links to events at 60 colleges and universities at Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com

Thanks to

Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area http://www.BostonScienceLectures.com

Boston Area Computer User Groups http://www.bugc.org/

http://www.mitenergyclub.org/calendar/mit_events_template

http://sustainability.mit.edu/

http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/calendar/

http://green.harvard.edu/events

http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

http://pechakuchaboston.org/blog/

http://boston.nerdnite.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.eventbrite.com/

Energy (and Other) Events - November 25, 2011

2011-11-25T22:44:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events is a weekly mailing list published most Sundays covering events around the Cambridge, MA and greater Boston area that catch the editor's eye.

Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com is the web version.

If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe to Energy (and Other) Events email gmoke@world.std.com

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Occupy: History and International Examples to Learn From
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/25/1039885/-Occupy:-History-and-International-Examples-to-Learn-From

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Webinar: Start-Up Thinking: How Systems Thinking Helps Entrepreneurial Ventures Start, Grow, and Mature
Monday, November 28, 2011
12:00p–1:00p
Location: Virtual - registration at http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_112811/webinar-grama-entrepreneurial-ventures.html

Speaker: Sorin Grama, Founder and CEO, Promethean Power Systems; SDM Alumnus Sam White, Founder and Vice President for Business Development, Promethean Power Systems

MIT SDM Systems Thinking Webinar Series
The MIT System Design and Management Program Systems Thinking Webinar Series features research conducted by SDM faculty, alumni, students, and industry partners. The series is designed to disseminate information on how to employ systems thinking to address engineering, management, and socio-political components of complex challenges.

Soon after a business plan is hatched and long before manufacturing ramps up, start-ups begin to apply systems design principles to create their breakthrough products. It turns out that systems engineering, an art developed and perfected in large organizations, applies just as well to small entrepreneurial ventures. What can start-ups learn from the likes of Ford and Boeing? Sorin Grama and Sam White, who launched Promethean Power Systems just after Grama graduated from SDM, will discuss how systems thinking shaped their start-up journey and helped them address social challenges while developing their first product.

Website: http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_112811/webinar-grama-entrepreneurial-ventures.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Sponsor(s): Engineering Systems Division, MIT System Design and Management (SDM) Program

For more information, contact:
Lois Slavin
617-253-0812
lslavin@mit.edu

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"Recent Developments in Shale Gas: Observations from the Vantage Point of Two New Studies (National Petroleum Council and the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board)"
November 28, 2011
12 pm
Harvard, Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

Energy Technology Innovation Policy/ Consortium for Energy Policy Research
Energy Policy Seminar Series: Sue Tierney, Analysis Group, speaker

Lunch will be provided.

Contact Name: Louisa Lund louisa_lund@hks.harvard.edu

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"The role of environmental gradients and food web interactions in fish diversification" with
November 28, 2011
12 pm - 1 pm
MCZ 101 Seminar Room, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Travis Ingram, Postdoctoral Researcher, Herpetology, Losos Lab

Feel free to bring your lunch! Beverages and snacks will be provided.
Contact Name: Catherine Weisel cweisel@oeb.harvard.edu (617) 495-2460

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Data is Power, or Is It? Mobilizing the Ethical Consumer
WHEN Mon., Nov. 28, 2011, 4:10 – 5:30 p.m.
WHERE 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 200-North
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Classes/Workshops, Ethics, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School

Co-spnsored by the Transparency Policy Project and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government
SPEAKER(S) Dara O’Rourke, University of California, Berkeley
COST Free
CONTACT INFO Bruce Jackan: bruce_jackan@hks.harvard.edu, 617.495.1948
NOTE By simply downloading an app, consumers can access environmental, social,and health impacts of more than 140,000 products. What does this mean for market interactions? What are the implications for governance of global supply chains? GoodGuide co-founder Dara O’Rourke will discuss the promise and peril of pushing the envelope in a new age of transparency.
LINK http://ash.harvard.edu/Home/News-Events/Events/Data-is-Power-or-Is-It-Mobilizing-the-Ethical-Consumer

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20 Questions with Chris Hedges on "The Death of the Liberal Class"
WHEN Mon., Nov. 28, 2011, 6 p.m.
WHERE Yenching Auditorium, 2 Divinity Ave.
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Humanities, Lecture, Social Sciences, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard
SPEAKER(S) Featured speaker: Chris Hedges
Moderated by: Homi Bhabha
Questioners: Nancy Cott, Jim Engell, Steven Hyman, Jill Lepore, and Richard Thomas
CONTACT INFO 617.495.0738, humcentr@fas.harvard.edu
LINK http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/

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Fiddle Folklorist Alan Jabour Gives Lec-Dem of Appalachian Style
Monday, November 28, 2011
7:30p–9:00p
MIT, Killian Hall
Speaker: Alan Jabbour

"Folk Music of the British Isles & North America" invite scholar and fiddle folklorist Alan Jabbour to present a lec-dem of his Appalachian style

Open to: the general public

Cost: free

Sponsor(s): Literature Section

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Nerd Night Boston
Monday November 28, 2011
8pm
Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
In Central Square
$5

Featuring Nerd-appropriate tunes by Claude Money

Talk 1. “On the vices and joys of machining at home: Blue collar aspirations of white collar men.”
by Tom Trikalinos

Talk 2. “What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain”
by Brandon Moore

Contact http://boston.nerdnite.com/

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DARPA Talk
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
12:00p–1:00p
MIT, Building E15-070, E15-070 (Bartos Theater)
Speakers: Dr. Regina Dugan & Dr. Ken Gabriel

MIT Political Science Distinguished Speaker Series welcomes Dr. Regina Dugan & Dr. Ken Gabriel of DARPA. Formed in 1958 after the Sputnik launch, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a singular mission: to prevent and create strategic surprise. The principal agency within the Department of Defense (DoD) for research, development and demonstration of high-risk, high-payoff capabilities, DARPA has persisted as a critical-mass collection of some of the best and brightest technical visionaries for the DoD and the Nation for more than 50 years. "Throughout its history, DARPA has had achievements ranging from the Internet to stealth, from GPS to MEMS, from rockets to the M-16 rifle, and from crowd sourced vehicles to plant-derived vaccines." Today, DARPA is tackling some of the most pressing and vexing challenges facing the DoD.

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/polisci/news/dss.dugan.shtml
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): Political Science Department, SHASS Dean's Office, PIE (Production in the Innovation Economy)
For more information, contact:
Adriane Cesa
617-253-6194
acesa@mit.edu

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OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court
Tuesday, November 29, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge
RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/opencourt#RSVP

This event will be webcast live at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

OpenCourt aims to create a model for judicial transparency in the U.S as envisioned by our Founders. This Knight News Challenge pilot project streams live daily coverage and posts it onto the Internet daily. The inherent tension in this project is between the First and Sixth Amendments -- the press’ right to free speech and citizens’ rights to a fair trial.

Our streaming and archive videos represent a firehose of information. How do we increase the value of this raw footage -- by helping people use it, by contextualizing the content and meta-data such as subject tags to better organize and increase access to the information gathered.

Other challenges we face are how to scale up beyond a single courtroom and how to make the project sustainable.

John Davidow, Executive Producer

John Davidow was named WBUR’s executive editor of new media in July of 2009, where he has overseen the growth of the award-winning wbur.org. John joined WBUR as news director/managing editor in 2003 after spending more than two decades as a journalist in Boston. John’s work has been recognized with national and regional awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Associated Press and UPI. He has also been the recipient of a number of regional Emmy Awards. Davidow graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in economics.

Joe Spurr, Director

Joe Spurr is a multimedia journalist and a web developer. Before coming to WBUR, he was the staff web developer for San Diego’s NPR station, which he helped completely overhaul in 2009. He pioneered the station’s adoption of Twitter and Google “My Maps” which culminated during the 2007 California wildfires, built layered, interactive maps to help track the drug-related murder surge in Tijuana, and produced in a roving, three-person skeleton crew from the DNC and RNC in 2008. Joe is a Boston native, a graduate of Northeastern University, and a former freelance reporter at the Boston Globe.

Val Wang, Producer

Val Wang is an experienced writer and multimedia producer who has worked for Reuters Television, NBC News, and UNICEF in both New York and Beijing. She has also developed and produced documentaries airing on PBS, National Geographic Channel, and The History Channel. Val graduated from Williams College and has an MA from the Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. A recent transplant to Boston, she is excited to get an in-depth look into a unique corner of the city as well as into our nation’s judicial system.

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Energy-efficient Wireless Sensors: Fewer Bits, Moore MEMS

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

4:00p–5:00p

MIT, Building 34-101
Speaker: Fred Chen MTL Doctoral Dissertation Seminar: Ph.D, MIT

MTL Seminar Series

Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.

Most technical challenges surrounding wireless sensor networks can be linked to the energy constraints of each sensor node, where wireless communication and leakage energy are the dominant components of active and idle energy costs. To address these two limitations, compressed sensing (CS) theory is presented as a generic source coding framework that can minimize the transmitted data while micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) relay technology is proposed to eliminate the leakage.
The practicality of adopting CS under finite resources, input noise, and wireless channel constraints is examined. We show that CS, despite being a lossy compression algorithm, can realize compression factors greater than 10X with no loss in fidelity for sparse signals quantized to medium resolutions. A 90nm CMOS test chip, consuming 1.9 ??W for frequencies below 20 kHz, demonstrates an efficient hardware encoder design that enables continuous, on-the-fly compression of EEG and EKG signals.

To address sub-threshold leakage, we develop design methodologies towards leveraging the zero leakage characteristics of MEM relays while overcoming their slower switching speeds. Scaled relay circuits show the potential for >10X improvements in energy efficiency over CMOS, while early experimental results demonstrate the functionality of several circuit building blocks to validate the viability of the technology.

Web site: http://www-mtl.mit.edu/seminars/fall2011.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: free
Sponsor(s): Microsystems Technology Laboratories
For more information, contact:
Valerie Dinardo
253-9328
valeried@mit.edu

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Energy Storage for Renewable Generation
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
4:00 PM (reception following)
MIT, Stata Center, Room 32-141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Abas El Gamal, Stanford
Abstract: The high variability of renewable energy resources (especially wind) presents significant challenges to the operation of the electric power grid. This variability can be mitigated architecturally via spatial averaging and renewable resource diversity (wind + solar), and operationally using conventional generators, demand response, and energy storage. My talk will focus only energy storage and conventional generation. First, I will formulate the single-bus power flow with storage as an infinite horizon stochastic optimization problem with the net renewable generation as input and conventional generation and storage as control variables. I will show that greedy policies are optimal for average conventional generation (environmental penalty) and average loss of load probability cost functions. I will then argue that the error of the short term prediction of net renewable generation can be modeled as an IID process, and formulate a residual power flow problem as an infinite horizon average-cost dynamic program with the net generation error as input and fast-ramping generation (gas turbines) and fast-response storage (EV batteries) as control variables. Under this model, the asymptotic benefits of fast-response storage can be quantified. With the additional assumption of Laplace distributed net generation error, closed form expressions for the stationary distribution of storage and fast-ramping generation can be obtained. I will then propose a two-threshold policy that trades off fast-ramping generation with loss of load. Finally, I show that our results and the Laplacian assumption corroborate well with simulations using wind power generation data from NREL.

This talk is based on joint work with Han-I Su.

Biography: Abbas El Gamal is the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering and the Director of the Information Systems Lab in the department of electrical engineering at Stanford University. His research contributions have spanned network information theory, Field Programmable Gate Array, and digital imaging devices and systems. He has authored or coauthored over 200 papers and holds 30 patents in these areas. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has received several honors and awards for his research contributions, most recently the 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award.

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Large Scale Banking for the Poor
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
4:00p–6:00p
MIT, Building Wong Auditorium-E51
Stratton Lecture on Critical Issues

About 70 percent of the world's people live in informal economies that require financing-from working capital to tools, equipment, and labor. But historically most low income people have been left out of the banking system. Instead they pay usury rates to moneylenders or stash money around their houses.

Major advances over the last decade have vastly improved knowledge of the lives and financial needs of poor people and addressed them through enhanced environments for commercial microfinance and better delivery of loans, savings, insurance, and payments. Breakthroughs in technology enable wider outreach, faster service, and improved security. Countries with demonstrated successes with millions of microfinance clients include Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cambodia, Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Mongolia, Peru, and South Africa.

Commercial microfinance for the poor is a critical issue because it is the only possible route to long-term global financial inclusion. Three distinguished speakers will discuss obstacles and opportunities that lie ahead. These speakers are Marguerite S. Robinson, advisor to governments, banks, an donors on commercial microfinance policy and issues; Michael Chu, Harvard Business School senior lecturer; and Robert Peck Christen, president of the Boulder Institute of Microfinance.

Web site:http://web.mit.edu/womensleague/images/LargeScaleBanking2.pdf
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): MIT Women's League
For more information, contact:
Sis de Bordenave
617-253-3656
wleague@mit.edu

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Science and Democracy Lecture: "Investigating with a Camera"
November 29, 2011
5 pm
Harvard, Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge

Science and Democracy, a lecture series aimed at exploring both the promised benefits or our era's most salient scientific and technological breakthroughs and the potentially harmful consequences of developments that are inadequately understood, debated, or managed by politicians, lay publics, and policy institutions.

"Investigating with a Camera"
Errol Morris, Academy Award-winning Filmmaker and Author

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts

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Tech Tuesday: Meet the Rockstar Developers of Massachusetts
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
5:30 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
MicroSoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Dr, Cambridge, MA

MassTLC is hosting the region's colleges and universities for a night of networking and pizza with the area's hottest developers!
Registration Opens at 5:30pm. The event will start at 6:00pm sharp!
Register at http://1129techtuesday-esearch.eventbrite.com/?srnk=13

Moderator: Vinit Nijhawan, Managing Director, Technology Development Office and Lecturer School of Management & Director Enterprise Programs, ITEC, Boston University
Panelists:
Walt Doyle, CEO, WHERE
Eran Egozy, Founder, Harmonix Music Systems
Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder, HubSpot
Jeremy Wertheimer, Founder, ITA Software by Google
We’re kicking off this unique night with a group of powerhouse developers who have successfully built companies and cool technologies that have powered a generation. We’ll discover the decisions that influenced the trajectory of their careers, from an idea through development, implementation and success. They’ll share their insights on triumphing and the lessons they learned along the way.

Next, developers from some of the region’s hottest companies will give a 20 second shout out on the cool technologies they’re working on and why you should learn more. Students will then get a chance to network with the developers and visit their demos.

This is a must attend event for students and developers looking to connect with amazing technology companies in Massachusetts – from start-ups to well established enterprise – the opportunities for students in Massachusetts are endless!

Did we mention give aways? We will be giving away two $150 AMEX giftcards to students only! Details to come

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Energiewende: German Angst or Bold Step Ahead?
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
5:30p–6:30p
MIT, Building 66-110

Speaker: Joschka Fischer, Principal, Joschka Fischer and Company; Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany, 1998-2005

The imperative to decouple growth from emissions must be shared by the developing and developed world alike if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. This will require the installation of a new economic model across the globe. To this end, energy efficiency, sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and energy security will be the keys to avoid a global crisis for the world climate.
Germany is a highly industrialized country and with its recent decision to eliminate nuclear energy, it has the potential to become a model for how a carbon-free economy without nuclear power can prosper. However, the political environment in Germany means it has passed a "point of no return" - nuclear energy will be completely phased out in 2022 while Germany vows to continue to honor its greenhouse gas emissions reductions commitments. For Germany, there is no way back to the energy sources of the 20th Century.

Today, the country faces uncertainty regarding how exactly it will meet its energy needs while facing self-imposed nuclear and emissions constraints. But by creating a "sink or swim" situation, Germany will be forced to innovate and lead. In doing so, Germany seeks to create a huge opportunity for companies and technologies that will help it to master this ambitious energy transformation, or "Energiewende".

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/mitei/news/seminars/fischer.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Initiative
For more information, contact:
Jameson Twomey
617-324-2408
jtwomey@mit.edu

---------------------------------

Harvard Energy Innovation Showcase
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
6:00pm - 7:30pm
Harvard Hall 201, 12 Harvard Yard, Cambridge

Harvard Energy Innovation Showcase
Come hear Harvard's leading energy innovators present their cutting-edge clean energy research and perspectives on commercializing innovation.
Featuring:
Daniel Schrag, Professor of Geology, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Senior Advisor on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
Eric Mazur, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Co-Founder of Black Silicon Company SiOnyx
Michael Aziz, Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies
Michael B. McElroy, Professor of Environmental Studies

Please register at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dC1RZTNKNnk4bEg4UXFZWU8tWEd5RUE6MQ

Pizza will be provided.

Presented by the Harvard College Global Energy Initiative, the HBS Energy and Environment Club, theEnvironmental Action Committee, and the Graduate School of Design Green Design Club

----------------------------

Life in the Universe: Finding Intelligence

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

6:00p–7:30p

MIT, Building N51, MIT Museum

Speaker: Paul Horowitz, Richard Wrangham

Are We Alone? That question has perplexed humanity for centuries. Perhaps scientists are getting closer to the answer; come find out during four evenings of discussion as biologists, astronomers, geologists, chemists and anthropologists talk and share their insights with you as they explain some of their latest research about life on other planets, as well as on our own.

Part 4 of 4: Finding Intelligence
Mind matters. Harvard researchers Paul Horowitz, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, and Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, lead the final conversation of the series, discussing the nature of intelligence and how we go about detecting it--on Earth, and elsewhere in the universe. What does it take for animals to evolve intelligence, and how common is this event in the universe?

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/museum/programs/calendar.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: free
Sponsor(s): MIT Museum
For more information, contact:
Josie Patterson
617-253-5927
museuminfo@mit.edu

---------------------------------

WHAT'S IN YOUR STUFF? How today’s technology is helping consumers choose products for a better world.
Networking Reception begins at 6:30pm. Drinks will be served
Speakers begin at 7pm
Microsoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA

Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/register?orderid=60381245932&ebtv=F&eid=2511610294&client_token=noqueue

Come join a conversation hosted by Cone Communications about transparency and consumer choice. We will be joined by Dara O’Rourke, founder of the GOOD GUIDE; Theo Forbath, the VP of Innovation Strategy at Frog Design; Julie Wittes Schlack, SVP of Innovation and Design at Communispace; and Beth Holzman, Manager of CSR Strategy and Reporting at Timberland. The event promises to be an engaging and interesting opportunity to learn about and contribute to new ideas in transparency, technology and consumer demand!

Dara O’Rourke, a former MIT professor and successful social entrepreneur, has worked with leading companies and organizations - from Nike to the World Bank to Target - on supply chain issues and transparency. Dara’s latest venture is the Good Guide, a website and iPhone app that provides consumers with real-time ratings of a product’s health, social and environmental impacts.

Check out the Good Guide: www.goodguide.com
Check out Cone's Cause and CR blog: http://www.coneinc.com/whatdoyoustandfor
Twitter: @ConeLLC #whatsinyourstuff
Latest Cone/Echo Global CR Opportunity Study: http://www.coneinc.com/globalCRstudy

There is no charge for this event.

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Noam Chomsky: Democracy in America and Abroad

Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 7:00 pm
Tufts University, Cabot Intercultural Center, ASEAN Auditorium, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford

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The Street Just Out of Sight
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
7:00p–9:00p
MIT, Building 6-120

Speaker: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, memoirist, blogger, and about-to-be historical novelist has created a body of work that examines America, past and present. He covers culture, politics and social issues from within the knowledge that ours is not a post racial community. Coates will read from his first novel, set before, during and after the Civil War, told through a series of voices those of slaves and former slaves, of slave owners, and more.

From there, he will speak about how creating those voices led him to think about the idea of the writer's voice and what it takes to create stories that are not just read, but remembered.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies

For more information, contact:
Shinika Spencer
617-253-4741
www-humanistic@mit.edu

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Harvard Fall Freecycle

Wednesday, Nov.30th, 2011
9am-10:30am: drop off items
11am-2pm: browse, take and celebrate

Harvard, Maxwell Dworkin, 1st Fl. Lobby, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Freecycle is back! Don’t trash your office leftovers, freecycle them! File folders, cabinets, printers/cartridges, books, lamps and other office supplies. Please, NO: TVs, computers, large electronics, or large furniture. Save big items for Craigslist, the ReuseList or Harvie.

Please bring items to donate on the day of the event (9-10.30am). All leftover items will be donated to local charities.

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"From Democratic Consensus to Cannibalistic Hordes: The Principles of Collective Behavior"
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
11:00am - 12:00pm
Harvard, BioLabs Main Lecture Hall, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge

Speaker: Iain Couzin, Princeton University
Hosted by: Olveczky and Pierce Labs

--------------------------------

Photonic Quantum Control from Simulation to New Architectures for Quantum Computers

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

11:00a–12:00p

MIT, Building 36-428

Optics & Quantum Electronics Seminar Series

Speaker: Prof. Philip Walther, University of Vienna

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Optics, EECS/RLE

For more information, contact:
Donna Gale
253-8529
dgale@mit.edu

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“Winning the Clean Energy Race”: Dr. Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy
Wednesday, November 30, 12:00-1:00pm
Morss Hall, Walker Memorial
Registration: www.mitenergyclub.org
Lunch will be served following Secretary Chu's remarks.

The MIT Energy Club and MIT Energy Initiative are pleased to welcome U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to MIT who will be giving an address on November 30, 2011 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm EST on "Winning the Clean Energy Race."

Registration is now open at www.mitenergyclub.org and we highly encourage you register as soon as possible to guarantee a spot. The event is open to all MIT personnel, student and faculty from other neighboring universities, professionals, and other members of the community.

Speaker Biography

As United States Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu is charged with helping implement President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in clean energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, address the global climate crisis, and create millions of new jobs.

Dr. Chu is a distinguished scientist and co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1997). He has devoted his recent scientific career to the search for new solutions to our energy challenges and stopping global climate change - a mission he continues with even greater urgency as Secretary of Energy.

Prior to his appointment, Dr. Chu was the Director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he led the lab in pursuit of alternative and renewable energy technologies. He also taught at the University of California as a Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology. Previously, he held positions at Stanford University and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

--------------------------------

Beyond Conventional Climate Sensitivity: Mechanisms of Pliocene Warmth
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
4:00p–5:00p
MIT, Building 54-918
EAPS Department Lecture Series talk

Speaker: Professor Alexey Fedorov, Dept. of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University

Web site: http://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/dls.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: $0.00
Sponsor(s): Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)
For more information, contact:
Jacqui Taylor
617-253-2127
jtaylor@mit.edu

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The effects of microstructure on transport and chemistry within porous composite electrodes for fuel cells and batteries
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
4:15p–5:15p
MIT, Building 4-159
Center for Energy and Propulsion Research - Reacting Gas Dynamics Seminar

Speaker: Prof. Robert J. Kee, Mechanical Engineering Department, Colorado School of Mines

SPEAKER BIO:
Professor Kee holds the George R. Brown Distinguished chair in the Division of Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Kee's research efforts are primarily in the modeling and simulation of thermal and chemically reacting flow processes, with applications to combustion, electrochemistry, and materials manufacturing. His fuel-cell research concentrates on elementary chemistry and electrochemistry formulations and their coupling with reactive fluid flow. Primary applications are to solid-oxide fuel cells operating on hydrocarbon fuels. Dr. Kee is the principal architect and developer of the CHEMKIN software, and primary author of Chemically Reacting Flow: Theory and Practice (JohnWiley & Sons, 2003).

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
The performance of electrochemical devices depends greatly upon the structure and microstructure of porous composite electrodes. Because of great scale disparities between the complete electrode and its microstructure, effective transport properties (e.g., electronic and ionic conductivity) are required to model at the larger cell and system scales. A number of alternative approaches have been developed to model transport within porous electrode structures and to derive effective properties.

Percolation theory leads to analytic expressions that relate effective properties to intrinsic material properties in ways that depend upon microstructural characteristics. Effective properties can also be estimated from the direct computational simulation of transport through synthesized structures. Experimental techniques can deliver geometrically accurate 3D representations of actual electrodes. Actual electrode microstructures can be discretized with finite-volume representations and conservation equations solved to predict transport within complex 3D microstructures. In addition to advancing fundamental understanding and insight, such models provide the means to evaluate the validity of more-approximate models that are derived from synthesized microstructures.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): RGD Lab

For more information, contact:
Jeff Hanna

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“North America’s New Age of Energy Abundance: Prudent Oil and Natural Gas Development”
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
5:00pm
Harvard, Science Center D, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Featuring James Hackett, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.

Future of Energy

James T. Hackett is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, one of the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. He joined the company in December 2003 as President and Chief Executive Officer. Houston-based Anadarko is active in the United States, Algeria, Brazil, China, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Ghana and is executing strategic exploration programs in several other countries.

Before joining Anadarko, Mr. Hackett served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Devon Energy Corporation following its merger with Ocean Energy where he served as Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, itself a product of a merger in 1999 with Seagull Energy Corporation where he was Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President. He joined Seagull from Duke Energy where he led its Energy Services Division as President. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President of Pan Energy when the company merged with Duke Power to create Duke Energy. His energy experience includes positions in engineering, finance and marketing with NGC Corp., Burlington Resources and Amoco Oil Co.

Mr. Hackett is Chairman of America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) and is on the Board of several industry associations including the American Petroleum Institute and the National Petroleum Council. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. He is a director of Fluor Corporation and Halliburton and serves as Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He is the former Chairman and now member of Houston Grand Opera’s Board and serves as Vice Chairman of the Baylor College of Medicine, and on the Boards of the Welch Foundation for Chemistry, the Business Roundtable, and the Trilateral Commission. He is also a Board Member and adjunct professor at Rice University.

Mr. Hackett holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Illinois and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University. He and his wife Maureen have four children.

Contact Name: Lisa Matthews lisa_matthews@harvard.edu

----------------------------

Relics: Travels in Nature's Time Machine
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
6:00pm
Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge

A lecture and booksigning by Piotr Naskrecki.
In his newest book, Relics, world-renowned zoologist Piotr Naskrecki travels the globe to photograph “relics,” creatures or habitats that, while acted upon by evolution, remain remarkably similar to their earliest manifestations in the fossil record. From horseshoe crabs of the Atlantic to orchids of New Guinea, Naskrecki has created a time-lapse tour of life that has persisted nearly untouched for hundreds of millions of years. Free and open to the public

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/lectures_and_special_events/index.php

----------------------------

Smart Grid Webinar Sessions on December 1st
11:00AM EST
12:00PM EST
http://www.virtualenergyforum.com

Attend this complimentary event to learn from leading smart grid experts. Speakers will discuss DOE smart grid initiatives and share the latest research on how utilities should articulate the value of smart grid investments.

US DOE Smart Grid Perspectives & Implementation Experience

The Value of Smarter Energy: Making the Case for Orchestrating the Network
Dan T. Ton, Program Manager, Smart Grid Research & Development, U.S. Department of Energy
Bridget Meckley, Energy & Utilities Leader, IBM Center for Applied Insights

------------------------------

"The Role of Science, Technology and Innovation in Solving the Energy Challenge"
Thursday, December 1, 2011
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Northwest Lecture Hall B-103, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology Lecture:

Speaker: Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy

http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/NewsEvents/Calendar/Event.asp?ID=3148
Contact Name: Michelle Cicerano mcicerano@mcb.harvard.edu (617) 495-4448
--------------------------------
Reinventing the Energy Future

December 01, 2011

12:00p–1:30p

MIT, Building E62-262

Andrew Chung, Partner at Khosla Ventures, will discuss how venture capitalists and entrepreneurs can address the energy crisis and invest in our future by placing big bets and searching for "black swans." Such opportunities may carry greater risk and higher failure rates, but are more likely to have a revolutionary impact on our world. To borrow the words of Robert Kennedy, "Only those who dare fail greatly can achieve greatly."

Category: MIT events/clubs: interest clubs/groups

Sponsored by: MIT Energy Club, Energy & Environment Community

Admission: Open to the public

For more information: Contact MIT Energy Club

energy-environment@mit.edu

---------------------------------------

"Environmental Consequences of International Trade, with Focus on China"
Thursday, December 1, 2011
3:30pm
Harvard, Pierce Hall 100F, 29 Oxford St., Cambridge

XU Ming, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment; Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan
Abstract: Globalization has been primarily facilitated by international trade in the way that countries specialize in producing products and services in which they have comparative advantages. One of the environmental consequences of international trade is the creation of pollution havens in the sense that developing countries become more specialized in pollution- and energy-intensive industries. This talk will summarize the author’s past research on evaluating environmental impacts embodied in international trade, focusing on US-China trade and China’s exports.

http://chinaproject.harvard.edu/seminar%20folder/seminar/XuMing111201
Contact Name: Chris Nielsen nielsen2@fas.harvard.edu
-------------------------

Howard Gardner: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed
WHEN Thu., Dec. 1, 2011, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
WHERE Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138
TYPE OF EVENT Discussion, Forum, Lecture, Question & Answer Session
BUILDING/ROOM Harvard Graduate School of Education, Askwith Hall
CONTACT NAME Amber DiNatale
CONTACT EMAIL askwith_forums@gse.harvard.edu
CONTACT PHONE 617-384-9968
SPONSORING ORGANIZATION/DEPARTMENT Harvard Graduate School of Education
REGISTRATION REQUIRED No
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Education, Lecture, Special Events
NOTE Speaker: Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, HGSE
Introduction: Kathleen McCartney, Dean and Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development, HGSE
Howard Gardner will discuss the challenges faced by traditional education in light of two forces: the post-modern critique from the humanities and the disruptive potentials of the new digital media. As addressed in his most recent book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues of the Twenty-First Century, Gardner will describe how the core ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness can survive and even be strengthened in education across the life span. Expanding on the argument in his book, he'll describe promising approaches for educators.
Professor Gardner will sign his new book prior to the forum. Copies will be available for purchase.

----------------------------------
"Products, Plastics, Putrefaction and Power: Rethinking how we Manage Materials to Achieve Just Sustainability"
Thursday, December 1, 2011
5:30pm
Harvard, Peabody Museum Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge
Samantha MacBride, Adjunct Professor, Columbia University.

This is part of the series, “Trash Talk: the Anthropology of Waste.” ADMISSION IS FREE and the Peabody's Geological Lecture Hall is located at 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, a 5 minute walk from the Red Line's Harvard Square station.

--------------------------

"When the Experts are Uncertain: Scientific Knowledge and the Ethics of Democratic Judgment"
Thursday, December 1, 2011
5:30pm
Harvard, Austin Hall, 100 North, Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

Melissa Lane, Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Lectures are free and open to the public. Refreshments will be available.
Please visit www.ethics.harvard.edu for a full listing of this year’s events.

Abstract: This paper explores the problem of the relation of democratic judgment to expert knowledge, focusing in particular on the case of scientific knowledge and the implications of its forms of uncertainty. It begins by broadly characterizing the problem of knowledge in political theory and in democratic theory in particular, drawing on the history of political thought – and in particular on democratic Athens and its philosophical critics – to do so. The model of popular judgment – and its relation to organized domains of expert knowledge – is elicited from this history as a promising lens for contemporary democratic theory. The paper then turns to the evaluation of the relation of democratic judgment to expert knowledge in a variety of modern disciplines, surveying certain positions in social epistemology and in social psychology. It identifies an excessive limitation to the question of identifying experts to whom to defer in the former literature, and an excessive tendency to manipulation in the question of how to correct for known biased heuristics in judgment in the latter (also indeed borrowed by the former). Both of these weaknesses will be exacerbated in the case of significant scientific uncertainty of certain kinds, as attends our current knowledge of the likely course of climatic change. As an alternative, the paper concludes by proposing a focus on enabling the public to engage in judging the broad outline of scientific claims, including an assessment of where uncertainties do and do not affect it and of what kinds. While this is a more demanding standard than deference and identification alone, it may also prove more robust.

Contact Name: Abigail Bergman Gorlach abigail@ethics.harvard.edu 617.495.0599
---------------------------
NE Games SIG Event: Building the Talent Pipeline: A Collaboration of the Game Industry and Academia
Thursday, December 01, 2011
6:00p–9:00p
Microsoft NERD Center One Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02139
Speaker: Tim Loew of Becker College, Phillip Tan of the MIT Gambit Game Lab, Monty Sharma of MassDigi, Terrence Masson of Northeastern University, Mark Claypool of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Mary Jane Begin of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Talent is the essential ingredient to success in game development. The MIT Enterprise Forum's New England Games SIG provides a look at the state of collaboration between industry and academia with this panel discussion.
Register at http://videogametalent.eventbrite.com/

How can we build a stronger pipeline of talent and what more can be done to improve the number and quality of graduates from schools in the region? This panel of game industry veterans and academic leaders will discuss this topic, as well as provide an overview of the Massachusetts Digital Game Institute???s (MassDigi) outreach from K-12 to colleges/ universities across the Commonwealth and MassDigi???s industry focused programs. In addition, colleges from around the region will provide an overview of their video game programs.

6:00pm-7:00pm: Networking & Light Appetizers, Refreshments
7:00pm-8:15pm: Panel
8:15pm-9:00pm: Post-Panel Networking

Come early or stay late to enjoy light appetizers/ drinks and to network with your peers.

Moderated by Robert Ferrari of Bare Tree Media;

Web site: http://www.mitforumcambridge.org/events/ne-games-sig-event-building-the-talent-pipeline-a-collaboration-of-the-game-industry-and-academia/

Open to: the general public

Cost: No charge, but pre-registration required

Tickets: http://videogametalent.eventbrite.com/

Sponsor(s): MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge

For more information, contact:
Amy Goggins
617-253-3937
entforumcambridge@mit.edu

------------------------------------

"Ideal Cities in the Tropics: Lucio Costa's 1957 Brasilia Pilot Plan"

Thursday, December 01, 2011

6:30p–8:30p

MIT, Building 7-431

Architecture Lecture Series

Speaker: Fares el-Dahdah

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Department of Architecture

For more information, contact:
617-253-7791

--------------------------------

The EU Energy Policy in the 21st Century
WHEN Thu., Dec. 1, 2011, 7:30 – 9:30 p.m.
WHERE RCC conference room, 26 Trowbridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Environmental Sciences, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Real Colegio Complutense
SPEAKER(S) Rafael Caballero Sánchez
COST Free and open to the public
CONTACT INFO rcc_info@harvard.edu
NOTE In English
LINK http://www.realcolegiocomplutense.harvard.edu
----------------------------------

Social Good 2.0: Breakfast with Cause-Related Tech Startups
Friday, December 2, 2011
8:30 AM
Space with a Soul, 281 Summer Street, Boston, MA (map)

The past few years have seen a surge of activity around technology and the nonprofit world. Boston is a hotbed of innovative ideas that might really be interesting to cause-related organizations - but it seems like new ones emerge daily. Who has time to keep track - let alone hear what they might be able to offer you? Join us for a morning breakfast highlighting the latest additions to the cause-related technology startup scene in Boston.
Free registration: http://socialgood-2-dot-oh.eventbrite.com/

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Supply and Demand at a Municipal Utility: How Local Solar Generation Can Help Utilities Meet Peak Loads

December 02, 2011

12:00p–1:00p

MIT, Building 1-246

Brian Crounse received his M.S. in Environmental Engineering from MIT in 2000. He serves on the Concord Municipal Light Board.

In the Northeast U.S., peak electrical loads typically occur on hot summer days. For a municipal utility, meeting these peak loads is expensive, and requires infrastructure that is underutilized most of the time. Of the strategies that a municipal utility can employ to address peak loads, local solar generation offers an intriguing mix of load matching, reduced transmission requirements, low emissions, and, for the first time, competitive economics. This talk will explore the rationale and implications behind the Concord (MA) Municipal Light Board's solar energy strategy.

Category: lectures/conferences

Sponsored by: MIT Energy Club

Admission: Open to the public

For more information: Contact MIT Energy Club

energyclub@mit.edu

--------------------------------------

Rambax Senegalese Drum Ensemble. Lamine Toure and Patricia Tang, co-directors.
Friday, December 02, 2011
8:00p–10:00p
MIT, Lobdell, MIT Stratton Student Center

Open to: the general public

Cost: FREE

Tickets: NOT TIX REQ.

Sponsor(s): Music and Theater Arts

For more information, contact:
Clarise Snyder
mta-request@mit.edu

---------------------------------------

"Investigating the Gulf Oil Spill: Challenges and Opportunities"
Monday, December 5, 2011
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Harvard, Bell Hall, 5th Floor, Belfer Building, HKS, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge

Energy Technology Innovation Policy/ Consortium for Energy Policy Research
Energy Policy Seminar Series:

Speaker: Richard Lazarus, Harvard Law School

Lunch will be provided.

Contact Name: Louisa Lund, louisa_lund@hks.harvard.edu

----------------------------

"Minds for Sale"
Monday, December 5, 2011
12:15pm - 2:00pm
Harvard, 124 Mt. Auburn St, Suite 100, Room 106
Spekaer: Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law & HKS

Please RSVP to sts@hks.harvard.edu by the Thursday before.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts

------------------------

The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World: A "Fred Friendly" Seminar
Monday, December 5, 6:00 pm
Harvard, Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/12/civiceducation#RSVP

Featuring Professor Charles Nesson as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis (Harvard SEAS), Elizabeth Lynn (Project on Civic Reflection) and Juan Carlos de Martin (Berkman Center) as participants.

Civic education is the cultivation of knowledge and traits that sustain democratic self-governance. The broad agreement that civic education is important disintegrates under close scrutiny. As the social networks of individuals become less based on geography and more based on friendships and common interests, consensus on shared civic values seems harder to achieve. American education is under stress at every level, and schools and colleges must re-imagine their commitment to civic education. This seminar will probe tensions that make civic education difficult, for example:

What's the problem? Doesn't everyone agree that civic education is important? Is civic education being squeezed out in schools, either because of the demands of subject testing or the desire to avoid political controversy?
Does the connectedness of social media support or impair the sorts of connections that lead to active citizenship?
Every tertiary institution wants to be a "global university." What, if any, are the civic responsibilities of a global institution? What civic values are transnational? Should American students learn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
What about civic education outside of school--for adults, prisoners, and the home-schooled, for example?
Then there was model UN; now there are online simulations. Do they achieve the same ends?
Does civic education include instruction in civic activism, using social media for example?
With connectedness come instantaneity and constant interruptions. Is it even possible to maintain anyone's attention on understanding anything as subtle as the complexities of representative government?
This lively, "Fred Friendly" style seminar is timed to coincide with publication of two edited volumes: Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (David Feith, ed.; Rowman & Littlefield), and What is College For?: The Public Purpose of Higher Education (Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis, eds.)

---------------------------------

Bioclimatic Devices and Adaptations at Alijares Palace (Alhambra, 14th century) and other Nasrid Buildings

Monday, December 05, 2011

6:00p–7:30p

MIT, Building 7-431

AKPIA@MIT LECTURE

Speaker: Luis Jose Garcia Pulido, Post-Doctoral Fellow, AKPIA@MIT

Web site: http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/lecturescurrent.htm

Open to: the general public
Cost: FREE
Sponsor(s): Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
For more information, contact:
Jose Luis Arguello
253-1400
akpiarch@mit.edu

-----------------------------

Elijah Wald Presents the History & Early Blues' Traditions

Monday, December 05, 2011

7:30p–9:00p

MIT, Building 4-231

Speaker: Elijah Wald

Bluesologist and author Elijah Wald presents the history and early traditions of the blues.

Open to: the general public

Cost: free

Sponsor(s): Literature Section

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Upcoming

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An Update on Deep Energy Retrofits for Buildings - the Intersection of Human-Based and Energy Efficient Design
Thursday, December 08 2011
7:00pm reception, program begins at 7:30 pm
1st Parish Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge

BOSTON AREA SOLAR ENERGY ASSOCIATION Forum
Speakers: Henry MacLean (Timeless Architecture) & Friends

Contact : http://www.basea.org/
The BASEA forums are held September through May, the second Thursday of each month, except as noted. The forums are free and open to the public.

-----------------------------

Renewable Energy-Related Transmission for New Englanders: By Land and By Sea
Friday, December 9, 2011
9:00 am to 12:30 pm
Foley Hoag LLP, 155 Seaport Boulevard, 13th Floor, Boston

New England Electricity Restructuring Roundtable

We welcome two new speakers to our December 9 Roundtable: Associate Deputy Minister for Energy, Mario Gosselin, Québec Ministry of Natural Resources and Wildlife, and Deepwater Wind CEO, William Moore.

Our 126th New England Electric Restructuring Roundtable focuses on renewable energy-related transmission for New Englanders - both by land and by sea. Utility-scale wind, hydro, and even solar must be sited in proximity to the resource, which is often far from population centers, thus necessitating the building of new transmission lines. The siting, cost, and cost allocation related to these lines is often no less (and sometimes more) controversial than the renewable energy resources they are built to transmit. And the promise of off-shore wind development on the East Coast presents a bevy of additional new technical and other challenges. At this Roundtable, we will explore numerous, very current, renewable energy-related transmission studies and proposed projects.

Our first panel focuses primarily on land-based renewable energy-related transmission. Starting off the panel is Associate Deputy Minister for Energy, Mario Gosselin, from Québec's Ministry of Natural Resources and Wildlife, who will discuss Québec's current and planned renewable energy resources that could be exported to the Northeast. David Whiteley , Executive Director for the Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative (EIPC) then discusses the collaborative scenario planning analysis currently underway on transmission and renewables for the entire Eastern Interconnect (comprising 24 RTOs and over 40 states). Next, First Wind Executive VP/CDO, Kurt Adams, provides a wind developer's perspective on transmission, including potential transmission projects in Maine. David H. Boguslawski, VP for Transmission Strategy/Operations atNortheast Utilities rounds out the panel with a presentation on a transmission owner's perspective on connecting New England wind to the grid and NU/NSTAR's proposed Northern Pass Transmission Project to bring approximately 1,200 MW of mainly hydro power from Québec to New England through New Hampshire.

Our second panel brings together three CEO's to discuss sea-based renewable energy-related transmission. Robert Mitchell, CEO ofAtlantic Wind Connection kicks off the panel with a discussion of Atlantic Wind's proposal to construct a transmission line 20 miles off-shore, between New Jersey and Virginia, to facilitate off-shore wind development (aka Google Line) Edward Krapels, CEO pf Anbaric Transmission, then discusses Anbaric's just- announced (11/14) Bay State Offshore Wind Transmission System, to be located 25 miles off-shore in Massachusetts, to carry up to 2,000 MW of off-shore wind to the NE Grid. Deepwater Wind CEO William Moore rounds out the panel by discussing the Deepwater Wind Energy Center proposal to build 1,000 MW of off-shore wind off the Rhode Island coast, with transmission to both New England and Long Island.

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Opportunity

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Free Solar Panels for Houses of Worship

From a recent Mass Interfaith Power & Light (http://mipandl.org/) email
"We've recently been talking with DCS Energy (http://www.dcsenergy.com/) who has an unbeatable offer: if your site qualifies, they design and install the panels at no cost, don't charge you for any electricity, and donate the system to your house of worship after five years. Your only costs will be for a building permit, possibly a structural engineer to verify that your roof can support their weight, and any preparatory work such as roof work or tree removal. If solar panels are so expensive how can anyone give them away for free? First, there is a federal grant program that is only available until November that pays for 30% of the cost of the system. Then there is an accelerated depreciation option that gives certain kinds of investors another tax advantage. Finally, the state awards a special allowance called a "Solar Renewal Energy Credit" (SRECs) to owners of solar electricity systems which are sold at auctions to utilities who buy them to meet their requirements under the Massachusetts' renewable portfolio standard. DCS is betting that the price of these SRECs will remain high. Jim Nail, president of MA IP&L, has talked to DCS Energy and is currently having them prepare a proposal for his church, St. Dunstan's Episcopal in Dover. Jim says, "The references I've talked to have been quite positive about the program and the company has been very responsive. "If you think your site might qualify, contact Peter Carli, pete@dcsenergy.com, with the address of your house of worship and your contact information. He'll take a preliminary look at your site and advise you if it meets their criteria."

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Young World Inventors Success!

Young World Inventors (http://yinventors.wordpress.com/) finished their Kickstarter campaign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1036325713/youngworldinventorscom) to fund insider web stories of African and American innovators in collaboration successfully.

New contributions, however, will be accepted.

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Resource

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Massachusetts Attitudes About Climate Change – An opinion survey of Massachusetts residents conducted by MassINC and sponsored by the Barr Foundation found that 77% of respondents believe that global warming has “probably been happening” and 59% of all respondents see see it as being at least partially caused by human pollution. Only 42% of the state’s residents say global warming will have very serious consequences for Massachusetts if left unaddressed. The 18 to 29 age group is more likely to believe global warming is appearing and caused by humans compared to the 60+ age group. African-American (56%) and Latino residents (69%) are more likely than white residents (40%) to believe global warming will be a very serious problem if left unaddressed. The MassINC report, titled The 80 Percent Challenge: What Massachusetts must do to meet targets and make headway on climate change (http://www.massinc.org/Research/The-80-percent-challenge.aspx), contains many other findings.

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The presentations from the recent Affordable Comfort National Home Performance Conference are available online at
http://2011.acinational.org/downloadable_resources

Lots of good information from what some call the best energy conference in the USA on Deep Energy Retrofits to Community Energy Challenges with details on insulation, heat flow, energy metering, ducting, hot water, and many, many other topics. If you are a practical energy wonk, this should make your eyes light up.

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Free Monthly Energy Analysis

CarbonSalon is a free service that every month can automatically track your energy use and compare it to your past energy use (while controlling for how cold the weather is). You get a short friendly email that lets you know how you’re doing in your work to save energy.

https://www.carbonsalon.com/

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Boston Food System

"The Boston Food System [listserv] provides a forum to post announcements of events, employment opportunities, internships, programs, lectures, and other activities as well as related articles or other publications of a non-commercial nature covering the area's food system - food, nutrition, farming, education, etc. - that take place or focus on or around Greater Boston (broadly delineated)."

The Boston area is one of the most active nationwide in terms of food system activities - projects, services, and events connected to food, farming, nutrition - and often connected to education, public health, environment, arts, social services and other arenas. Hundreds of organizations and enterprises cover our area, but what is going on week-to-week is not always well publicized.

Hence, the new Boston Food System listserv, as the place to let everyone know about these activities. Specifically:
Use of the BFS list will begin soon, once we get a decent base of subscribers. Clarification of what is appropriate to announce and other posting guidelines will be provided as well.

It's easy to subscribe right now at https://elist.tufts.edu/wws/subscribe/bfs

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Artisan Asylum http://artisansasylum.com/

Sprout & Co: Community Driven Investigations http://thesprouts.org/studios

Greater Boston Solidarity Economy Mapping Project http://www.transformationcentral.org/solidarity/mapping/mapping.html
a project by Wellesley College students that invites participation, contact jmatthaei@wellesley.edu

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Bostonsmart.com's Guide to Boston http://www.bostonsmarts.com/BostonGuide/

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Links to events at 60 colleges and universities at Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com

Thanks to

Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area http://www.BostonScienceLectures.com

Boston Area Computer User Groups http://www.bugc.org/

http://www.mitenergyclub.org/calendar/mit_events_template

http://sustainability.mit.edu/

http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/calendar/

http://green.harvard.edu/events

http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

http://pechakuchaboston.org/blog/

http://boston.nerdnite.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.eventbrite.com/

Energy (and Other) Events - November 20, 2011

2011-11-20T22:38:00.002-05:00

Energy (and Other) Events is a weekly mailing list published most Sundays covering events around the Cambridge, MA and greater Boston area that catch the editor's eye.

Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com is the web version.

If you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe to Energy (and Other) Events email gmoke@world.std.com

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Occupy Green http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/16/1037270/-Occupy-Green

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Monday, November 21, 2011
Constructing Industrial Hazard and Pollution: The Nineteenth-Century French State's Vision
Speaker: Genevieve Massard-Guibaud, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
12:00p–2:00p
MIT, Building E51-275, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History Special Speaker
brown bag lunch

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): STS, History Office

For more information, contact:
Margo Collett
253-4965
history-info@mit.edu

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Monday, November 21, 2011
Glyoxal as a Probe of Atmospheric Oxidation and Aerosol Formation Processes
12:00p–1:00p
MIT, Building 54-915
Speaker: Frank Keutsch (University of Wisconsin)

MIT Atmospheric Science Seminar (MASS) Series

The MIT Atmospheric Science Seminar (MASS) is a student-run weekly seminar series within PAOC. Seminar topics include all research concerning the atmosphere and climate, but also talks about e.g. societal impacts of climatic processes. The seminars usually take place on Monday from 12-1pm.

Web site: http://eaps-www.mit.edu/paoc/events/mass-seminar-frank-keutsch-univ-wisc
Open to: the general public
Sponsor(s): MIT Atmospheric Science Seminars
For more information, contact:
Diane Ivy
mass@mit.edu

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Monday, November 21
12 p.m.
"A Media Lesson from the Financial Meltdown"
Diana Henriques, senior financial writer at The New York Times and the author of The Wizard of Lies.
Harvard, Taubman 275, 5 Eliot Street, Cambridge

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EBE Seminar
Monday, November 21, 2011
12 pm
Boston University, BRB 113, 5 Cummington Street, Boston

Effects of climate and landscape change on butterfly population dynamics
Elizabeth Crone, Harvard Forest

Ecologists are increasingly asked to predict effects of changing landscapes and environments on biodiversity. Can simple ecological theories make meaningful predictions in the absence of detailed biological knowledge? I explore this question based on studies of butterfly populations and communities in Oregon, Massachusetts and the UK. Key results include climate-driven changes in butterfly communities of Massachusetts during the past 20 years.

Lunch to follow in BRB 117
Please contact CECB for questions or comments:
cecb@bu.edu /// 617.353.6982

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Monday, November 21, 2011
"Fukushima Disaster Response" Robot Competition
2:45p–4:45p
MIT, Building 3-370, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
The students of 2.12, Introduction to Robotics, will be competing for the term project robot contest. This year's theme is "Fukushima Disaster Response". Please join us to see semi-autonomous robots that can enter a damaged nuclear reactor building, deliver cooling agent to critical spots, and shut down failed pipes.

Refreshments will be served.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Mechanical Engineering Dept.

For more information, contact:
Sucharita Berger Ghosh
253-4038
sbghosh@mit.edu

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Metro West Farm to School Initiative
Monday, November 21
3-5 p.m.
Weston High School Media Center, 444 Wellesley St, Weston, MA.

Please join us for the Metro West Farm to School Initiative on November 21: We will be hosting a panel discussion focusing on the supply and demand challenges and opportunities facing farms and school districts who are trying to bring more farm-fresh produce into school lunches in the Metro West area. Our panel of farmers, food service professionals and local government representatives will address questions such as:
Are there benefits to collective purchasing?
Can small-scale community farms grow specially for schools?
Can school gardens complement school efforts?

If you have any questions please email Greenpower@landssake.org. Please excuse any cross listings.

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How Finance Went Wrong, and How to Fix it: Some Worthwhile Canadian Initiatives — A Special Seminar To Celebrate the Publication of "Re-Creating Canada: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiler"
WHEN Mon., Nov. 21, 2011, 4 – 6 p.m.
WHERE East Dining Room, Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Business, Law, Lecture, Social Sciences, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Canada Program, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
SPEAKER(S) Randall Morck, Stephen Jarislowsky Distinguished Chair in Finance, University of Alberta
COST Free and open to the public and off the record
CONTACT INFO Canada@wcfia.harvard.edu
NOTE This is a special seminar to celebrate the new publication of "Re-Creating Canada: Essays in Honor of Paul C. Weiler."
LINK http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/seminars/canada/schedule

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Monday, November 21 2011
4:00PM to 5:00PM
Refreshments: 3:45PM
Location: MIT, Building 32-G882 (Stata Center - Hewlett Room) 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

How Can We Measure Social Life? New Approaches for Studying Social Interactions and Relationships from Everyday Conversations
Izhak Shafran, Oregon Health and Science University

For over 50 years, social psychologists and social scientists have relied on subjects' self-reported answers to carefully designed questionnaire as the primary tool for measuring social interactions, relationships and behaviors. While these tools are valuable in capturing subjects' perspective, they are notoriously unreliable, especially, in probing subjects' with cognitive impairments. Moreover, there are clear limitations on the temporal and contextual details that even high functioning adults can recall.

This talk will trace recent advances in developing complementary objective measures and will delve into our recent work whose goal is to study the relationship between social life of older adults and the rate of cognitive decline. In this preliminary study, we collected a comprehensive and naturalistic corpus comprising of all incoming and outgoing telephone conversations from 8 homes over the duration of a year. We utilize limited metadata to develop an automated score for characterizing the social nature of telephone calls from their content. To gain further insight into the nature of natural telephone conversations, we analyze our corpus from multiple perspectives. For example, we show that 30-words of openings are sufficient to predict the type of conversation. This is in comparison to 30-word closings, which were found to be no better than random segments -- a result contrary to what one might expect from prior assertion from social psychology that pre-closings differ significantly in personal and business conversations.

This work has wider applications in designing smart user interfaces in portable devices and in social network analysis where links can now be augmented with weights that relate to nature of social relationship.

Izhak Shafran is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Spoken Language Understanding in Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland. His primary research has been in large vocabulary speech recognition. Recently, he began investigating novel methods for assessing cognitive and social abilities in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. Before joining OHSU, he was a research faculty at the Center for Speech and Language Processing in Johns Hopkins University and a research member at AT&T's Research Lab in Florham Park. He received an NIH Career Development Award in 2010.

Contact: Marcia Davidson, 617-253-3049, marcia@csail.mit.edu

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Monday, November 21 2011
4:00PM to 5:00PM
Refreshments: 3:45PM
MIT, Building 32-D463, Star Conference Room, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

Internet of Things is around the Corner
Speaker: Yrjö Neuvo, Aalto University (formerly Helsinki University of Technology)

Future development of embedded systems can be seen as a one way street, we move towards more and more complex systems where embedded intelligence plays an ever increasing role. The systems will be more and more interconnected and cooperative. The Internet together with the very fast growth of wireless data speeds and coverage is the key enabler of this development. Car and smart phone are good examples of how increasing system interconnectivity enables innovative smart applications. Internet and embedded intelligence in home appliances provides significant savings in energy consumption. The low cost of wireless connectivity has made it possible to have even single light bulbs connected to Internet. Internet of Things has been around in science fiction style discussions for slightly over a decade. Interconnected large scale embedded systems are now making Internet of Things real. The role of Internet of Things in addressing our global scale challenges like energy and climate is significant.

Bio: Yrjö Neuvo received his Ph. D, degree from Cornell University in 1974. Currently he is Professor and Research Director at Aalto University (formerly Helsinki University of Technology). He was Chief Technology Officer and a member of the Group Executive Board in Nokia in 1993 – 2005. His responsibilities included managing mobile phones R&D. Before joining Nokia, he had a 19 year academic career as Professor of Signal Processing at Tampere University of Technology, as National Research Professor at the Academy of Finland and as Visiting Professor at University of California, in Santa Barbara, USA.
He has been Chairman of ARTEMIS Joint Technology Initiative Governing Board 2007 – 2008, Bureau Member of European Science and Technology Assembly (ESTA) 1994 – 1997. He was General Chairman of the 1988 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2001). Currently he is Member of Governing Board (and its Executive Committee) of European Institute of Innovation and Technology. He is also Board Member of two listed companies Metso and Vaisala as well as three high tech start-ups. He has received four honorary doctorates and is Life Fellow of the IEEE. Asteroid 1938 DN carries his name.

Contact: Mary McDavitt, 617-253-9620, mmcdavit@csail.mit.edu

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Heat Transfer
Nathan Myhrvold (former Microsoft CTO; co-founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures; and author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking)
When: Nov 21, 2011 | 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: Harvard, Science Center C, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Speaker Biography:
Nathan Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures after retiring from his position as chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corporation. He earned a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics and a master's degree in mathematical economics from Princeton University. He is author of “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,” was released in March 2011.
Host:
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Contact: Christina Andujar
candujar@seas.harvard.edu

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Monday, November 21, 2011

7:00p–8:30p

MIT Building 26-100

MISS REPRESENTATION Film Screening

GWAMIT and WGS are very excited to announce that we will be hosting a screening of the documentary Miss Representation at MIT! The film exposes how mainstream media contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. The film challenges the media's limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls, which make it difficult for women to achieve leadership positions and for the average women to feel powerful herself.

The film premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and has been showing at sold-out screenings around the country. There will be a screening and short moderated discussion afterwards about the film.

Web site: http://missrepresentation.org
Open to: the general public
Cost: FREE
Sponsor(s): Women's and Gender Studies, Graduate Women @ MIT

For more information, contact:
Lindy
lindy_l@mit.edu

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Population Aging and Its Macroeconomic Consequences Around the World
WHEN Mon., Nov. 21, 2011, 4:30 – 6 p.m.
WHERE Pop Center, 9 Bow Street, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Health Sciences, Lecture, Social Sciences
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies
SPEAKER(S) Ronald Lee, Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Family Professor of Economics, professor of demography, director, Center on Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California, Berkeley

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November 21, 2011
6:00pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/11/palfrey#RSVP
Reception to follow
Intellectual Property Strategy
John Palfrey, Berkman Center Faculty Co-Director and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School
Special guests will include Terry Fisher, Eric von Hippel, Lawrence Lessig, Phil Malone, Jonathan Zittrain, and more

Entrepreneurs, corporate managers and nonprofit administrators should look at intellectual property as a key strategic asset. Most managers leave intellectual property issues to the legal department, unaware that an organization’s intellectual property can help accomplish a range of management goals, from accessing new markets to improving existing products to generating new revenue streams. In his new book,Intellectual Property Strategy (MIT Press), intellectual property expert, head of the Harvard Law School Library, and Berkman Center faculty co-director John Palfrey offers a short briefing on intellectual property strategy for them. Palfrey argues for strategies that go beyond the traditional highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, suggesting that flexibility and creativity are essential to a profitable long-term intellectual property strategy--especially in an era of changing attitudes about media.

Join us for a discussion on the book and a demonstration of an iPad app that will offer interactive media features with leaders in the IP field, and showcase new ways in which innovative organizations and people can employ multiple intellectual property approaches .

The book is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, which presents short, accessible books on need-to-know subjects in a variety of fields, written by leading thinkers.

About John
John Palfrey is Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. He is the co-author of "Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives" (Basic Books, 2008) and "Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering" (MIT Press, 2008). His research and teaching is focused on Internet law, intellectual property, and international law. He practiced intellectual property and corporate law at the law firm of Ropes & Gray. He is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Outside of Harvard Law School, he is a Venture Executive at Highland Capital Partners and serves on the board of several technology companies and non-profits. John served as a special assistant at the US EPA during the Clinton Administration. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School.

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From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Dialogue about a world without nuclear weapons
WHEN Tue., Nov. 22, 2011, 8 a.m. – 7 p.m.
WHERE Rotunda, Taubman Building, Harvard Kennedy School, 5 Eliot Street, Cambridge, MA
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Ethics, Exhibitions, Social Sciences, Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Harvard Kennedy School India Caucus, Harvard Kennedy School Student Government, SGI-USA
COST Admission is free
CONTACT INFO Erendro Singh (Erendro_singh@hks12.harvard.edu), Michelle Dow Keawphalouk (keawphalouk@fas.harvard.edu), Teesta Jain (Jain@bbri.org), Yumi Masui (masui@fas.harvard.edu)

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
10 a.m.
Boston University, 8 Saint Mary’s St., Room 339, Boston
Refreshments will be served outside Room 339 at 9:45 a.m.

The New Silk Roads for Technology
Professor Fiorenzo G. Omenetto, Tufts University

The New Silk Roads for Technology
The use of silk as a material for technological applications has been introduced over the past few years. Silk is now ﬁnding new applications as a useful biocompatible material platform with utility in photonics and electronics, ranging from nanoscale optical lattices to metamaterials. Professor Omenetto will provide an overview on how puriﬁed silkworm silk can be reassembled, among other things, in a multitude of high quality, micro- and nanostructured optical and optoelectronic elements largely or entirely composed of this organic, bio-compatible and implantable protein matrix that truly opens a new silk road that brings together the biological and high-tech worlds.

For more information: http://www.bu.edu/ece/calendar

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Rule Britannia: The Rise and Rise of UK Offshore Wind
Speaker: David Parkin, Head of Offshore Renewables at Atkins
12:00p–1:30p
MIT, Building E51-372, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
MIT Energy Club Lecture Series

David Parkin, Head of Offshore Renewables at Atkins, a UK Engineering consultancy and a current student at Sloan, will tell the story of UK offshore wind. He will cover early projects and the introduction of the Crown Estate leasing process, which has resulted in the most ambitious development plan in the world with a planned capacity of up to 50GW. His talk will be broadly non-technical and will cover areas including the development process, engineering, construction, financing and the regulatory environment. He will conclude by looking at the challenges facing the industry in the UK, and drawing some lessons for the development of an offshore wind sector in other countries.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Club

For more information, contact:
MIT Energy Club
energyclub@mit.edu

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The Spanish Revolution & the Internet: From free culture to meta-politicsMayo Fuster Morell, Berkman Center Fellow
Tuesday, November 22, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge
RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/morell#RSVP
This event will be webcast live at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

From Mayo:

In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – large mobilizations are taking place in several countries.

In the Spanish case, we have seen some of the largest demonstrations since the country transitioned to democracy in the 70th with massive occupations of public squares, attempts to prevent parliaments functioning and citizen assemblies of thousands of people taking place in spring and autumn 2011. Furthermore, the free culture movement (FCM) played an important role in the rising and shaping of the mobilization. The campaign agents "Sinde Law" (on Internet regulation) in December 2010 and its afterworld meta-political derivation into "Don't vote them" campaign (referring to do not vote the parties which approved the law) are considered a starting point of the mobilization cycle. Additionally, FCM has influenced the agenda and organizational logic of the protest for a "True Democracy Now" (particularly in terms of the use of the new technologies); even if the mobilization has also caused an split between two sectors of the FCM itself.

The presentation will be based on a qualitative research analysis and aims to open up a debate on the similarities and contrast between the Spanish case and the mobilization that emerged in other places (such as Arab Countries, Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Israel, Chile or New York City).

About Mayo
Mayo Fuster Morell has developed research in the field of the Internet and politics; social movements (Global Justice Movement, Free Culture Movement and recent mobilization wave of "indignated" in Spain); online communities; common-base peer production; and public policies. She specializes in online methods and action-participation research.

Mayo recently concluded her PhD thesis (Title: Governance of online creation communities. Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons) at the European University Institute in Florence (2006-2010) under the supervision of Professor Donatella della Porta. She analyzed models of governance of common-based peer production and the relationship between governance, participation size and collaboration complexity. She combined a large N statistical analysis and case study comparisons (World Social Forum, Flickr, Wikihow and Wikipedia).

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Tuesday, November 22

4:00–6:00 pm

MIT, Building E19-623, 400 Main Street, Cambridge

Blind children see and in turn teach us neuroscience.
Pawan Sinha, Associate Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience, MIT

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011

4:00 PM (reception following),

MIT, Stata Center, Room 32-141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

The next level of modeling social interaction: How to detect, quantify and utilize emotional influence . . . Abstract & Bio
Frank Schweitzer, ETH Zurich, and LIDS, MIT
Abstract: Models of (bounded) rational agents failed to predict, or even capture, recent collective phenomena in social and economic systems. Ranging from the current financial crisis to the Arab spring, social "ingredients" such as herding, (dis)trust, empathy, agression, or other forms of positive or negative emotions seem to play the major role in amplifying critical situations.

Do we have tools to detect and to quantify such emotions? Online datasets (written text from fora, microblogs, or reviews) can be used to apply sentiment analysis algorithms and to map the writer's emotions along the dimensions of valence and arousal. But what do we learn from that analysis, beyond the nation's mood in the morning? How do expressed emotions affect the response of other users in the cyberspace? Can we develop an interaction model of emotional agents to reproduce the stylized facts observed? Could we even manipulate cyberemotions? (and can I answer all these questions in less than one hour? -- I'll try at least)

http://www.sg.ethz.ch/research/social_organizations/collective_emotions

Biography: Frank Schweitzer is Professor and Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich, one of the leading research universities in the world. Starting out as a theoretical physicist, he received a second Ph.D in philosophy of science, before turning his scientific interests on social and economic systems. Currently, he is a visiting professor at MIT.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Energy 101 : Oil and Gas
Speaker: Dr Dan Burns
12:30p–1:30p
MIT, Building 3-133, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Energy 101 lecture series

Energy 101 presentation on the the oil and gas industry : scientific, technical and economical aspects.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): MIT Energy Club

For more information, contact:
Aziz Abdellahi
aziz_a@mit.edu

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Cultural Survival Bazaar
WHEN Fri., Nov. 25, 10 a.m. – Sat., Nov. 26, 2011, 6 p.m.
WHERE Cambridge College, 1000 Mass Avenue, Cambridge
GAZETTE CLASSIFICATION Special Events
ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR Cultural Survival
COST Free
NOTE The Cultural Survival Bazaar is a festival of Native arts and culture from around the world, featuring Native artisans, performers, and handmade products benefiting the livelihoods of artisans, fair trade, and Cultural Survival's nonprofit work throughout the world.
The bazaars will be every weekend from Friday, Nov. 25, to Sunday Dec. 18, at four different locations (many offering free parking).
LINK http://bazaar.culturalsurvival.org
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Monday, November 28, 2011

Webinar: Start-Up Thinking: How Systems Thinking Helps Entrepreneurial Ventures Start, Grow, and Mature

Speaker: Sorin Grama, Founder and CEO, Promethean Power Systems; SDM Alumnus Sam White, Founder and Vice President for Business Development, Promethean Power Systems

12:00p–1:00p

Location: Virtual - registration at http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_112811/webinar-grama-entrepreneurial-ventures.html

MIT SDM Systems Thinking Webinar Series
The MIT System Design and Management Program Systems Thinking Webinar Series features research conducted by SDM faculty, alumni, students, and industry partners. The series is designed to disseminate information on how to employ systems thinking to address engineering, management, and socio-political components of complex challenges.

Soon after a business plan is hatched and long before manufacturing ramps up, start-ups begin to apply systems design principles to create their breakthrough products. It turns out that systems engineering, an art developed and perfected in large organizations, applies just as well to small entrepreneurial ventures. What can start-ups learn from the likes of Ford and Boeing? Sorin Grama and Sam White, who launched Promethean Power Systems just after Grama graduated from SDM, will discuss how systems thinking shaped their start-up journey and helped them address social challenges while developing their first product.

Website: http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_112811/webinar-grama-entrepreneurial-ventures.html
Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Sponsor(s): Engineering Systems Division, MIT System Design and Management (SDM) Program

For more information, contact:
Lois Slavin
617-253-0812
lslavin@mit.edu

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Monday November 28, 2011
8pm
Middlesex Lounge, 315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
In Central Square
$5

Featuring Nerd-appropriate tunes by Claude Money

Talk 1. “On the vices and joys of machining at home: Blue collar aspirations of white collar men.”
by Tom Trikalinos

Talk 2. “What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain”
by Brandon Moore

Contact http://boston.nerdnite.com/

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Upcoming

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OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court
Tuesday, November 29, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge
RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/11/opencourt#RSVP

This event will be webcast live at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

OpenCourt aims to create a model for judicial transparency in the U.S as envisioned by our Founders. This Knight News Challenge pilot project streams live daily coverage and posts it onto the Internet daily. The inherent tension in this project is between the First and Sixth Amendments -- the press’ right to free speech and citizens’ rights to a fair trial.

Our streaming and archive videos represent a firehose of information. How do we increase the value of this raw footage -- by helping people use it, by contextualizing the content and meta-data such as subject tags to better organize and increase access to the information gathered.

Other challenges we face are how to scale up beyond a single courtroom and how to make the project sustainable.

John Davidow, Executive Producer

John Davidow was named WBUR’s executive editor of new media in July of 2009, where he has overseen the growth of the award-winning wbur.org. John joined WBUR as news director/managing editor in 2003 after spending more than two decades as a journalist in Boston. John’s work has been recognized with national and regional awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Associated Press and UPI. He has also been the recipient of a number of regional Emmy Awards. Davidow graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in economics.

Joe Spurr, Director

Joe Spurr is a multimedia journalist and a web developer. Before coming to WBUR, he was the staff web developer for San Diego’s NPR station, which he helped completely overhaul in 2009. He pioneered the station’s adoption of Twitter and Google “My Maps” which culminated during the 2007 California wildfires, built layered, interactive maps to help track the drug-related murder surge in Tijuana, and produced in a roving, three-person skeleton crew from the DNC and RNC in 2008. Joe is a Boston native, a graduate of Northeastern University, and a former freelance reporter at the Boston Globe.

Val Wang, Producer

Val Wang is an experienced writer and multimedia producer who has worked for Reuters Television, NBC News, and UNICEF in both New York and Beijing. She has also developed and produced documentaries airing on PBS, National Geographic Channel, and The History Channel. Val graduated from Williams College and has an MA from the Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. A recent transplant to Boston, she is excited to get an in-depth look into a unique corner of the city as well as into our nation’s judicial system.

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Tech Tuesday: Meet the Rockstar Developers of Massachusetts
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
5:30 PM to 9:00 PM (ET)
MicroSoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Dr, Cambridge, MA

MassTLC is hosting the region's colleges and universities for a night of networking and pizza with the area's hottest developers!
Registration Opens at 5:30pm. The event will start at 6:00pm sharp!
Register at http://1129techtuesday-esearch.eventbrite.com/?srnk=13

Moderator: Vinit Nijhawan, Managing Director, Technology Development Office and Lecturer School of Management & Director Enterprise Programs, ITEC, Boston University
Panelists:
Walt Doyle, CEO, WHERE
Eran Egozy, Founder, Harmonix Music Systems
Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder, HubSpot
Jeremy Wertheimer, Founder, ITA Software by Google
We’re kicking off this unique night with a group of powerhouse developers who have successfully built companies and cool technologies that have powered a generation. We’ll discover the decisions that influenced the trajectory of their careers, from an idea through development, implementation and success. They’ll share their insights on triumphing and the lessons they learned along the way.

Next, developers from some of the region’s hottest companies will give a 20 second shout out on the cool technologies they’re working on and why you should learn more. Students will then get a chance to network with the developers and visit their demos.

This is a must attend event for students and developers looking to connect with amazing technology companies in Massachusetts – from start-ups to well established enterprise – the opportunities for students in Massachusetts are endless!

Did we mention give aways? We will be giving away two $150 AMEX giftcards to students only! Details to come

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Harvard Fall Freecycle

Wednesday, Nov.30th, 2011
9am-10:30am: drop off items
11am-2pm: browse, take and celebrate

Harvard, Maxwell Dworkin, 1st Fl. Lobby, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge

Freecycle is back! Don’t trash your office leftovers, freecycle them! File folders, cabinets, printers/cartridges, books, lamps and other office supplies. Please, NO: TVs, computers, large electronics, or large furniture. Save big items for Craigslist, the ReuseList or Harvie.

Please bring items to donate on the day of the event (9-10.30am). All leftover items will be donated to local charities.

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“Winning the Clean Energy Race”: Dr. Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy
Wednesday, November 30, 12:00-1:00pm
Morss Hall, Walker Memorial
Registration: www.mitenergyclub.org
Lunch will be served following Secretary Chu's remarks.

The MIT Energy Club and MIT Energy Initiative are pleased to welcome U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to MIT who will be giving an address on November 30, 2011 from 12:00pm to 1:00pm EST on "Winning the Clean Energy Race."

Registration is now open at www.mitenergyclub.org and we highly encourage you register as soon as possible to guarantee a spot. The event is open to all MIT personnel, student and faculty from other neighboring universities, professionals, and other members of the community.

Speaker Biography

As United States Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu is charged with helping implement President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in clean energy, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, address the global climate crisis, and create millions of new jobs.

Dr. Chu is a distinguished scientist and co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1997). He has devoted his recent scientific career to the search for new solutions to our energy challenges and stopping global climate change - a mission he continues with even greater urgency as Secretary of Energy.

Prior to his appointment, Dr. Chu was the Director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he led the lab in pursuit of alternative and renewable energy technologies. He also taught at the University of California as a Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology. Previously, he held positions at Stanford University and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

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Noam Chomsky: Democracy in America and Abroad

Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 7:00 pm
Tufts University, Cabot Intercultural Center, ASEAN Auditorium, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford

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Smart Grid Webinar Sessions on December 1st
11:00AM EST
12:00PM EST
http://www.virtualenergyforum.com

Attend this complimentary event to learn from leading smart grid experts. Speakers will discuss DOE smart grid initiatives and share the latest research on how utilities should articulate the value of smart grid investments.

US DOE Smart Grid Perspectives & Implementation Experience

The Value of Smarter Energy: Making the Case for Orchestrating the Network
Dan T. Ton
Program Manager, Smart Grid Research & Development
U.S. Department of Energy
Bridget Meckley
Energy & Utilities Leader
IBM Center for Applied Insights

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The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected WorldA "Fred Friendly" Seminar
Monday, December 5, 6:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, 1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Free and Open to the Public; RSVP required for those attending in person at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2011/12/civiceducation#RSVP

Featuring Professor Charles Nesson as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis (Harvard SEAS), Elizabeth Lynn (Project on Civic Reflection) and Juan Carlos de Martin (Berkman Center) as participants.

Civic education is the cultivation of knowledge and traits that sustain democratic self-governance. The broad agreement that civic education is important disintegrates under close scrutiny. As the social networks of individuals become less based on geography and more based on friendships and common interests, consensus on shared civic values seems harder to achieve. American education is under stress at every level, and schools and colleges must re-imagine their commitment to civic education. This seminar will probe tensions that make civic education difficult, for example:

What's the problem? Doesn't everyone agree that civic education is important? Is civic education being squeezed out in schools, either because of the demands of subject testing or the desire to avoid political controversy?
Does the connectedness of social media support or impair the sorts of connections that lead to active citizenship?
Every tertiary institution wants to be a "global university." What, if any, are the civic responsibilities of a global institution? What civic values are transnational? Should American students learn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
What about civic education outside of school--for adults, prisoners, and the home-schooled, for example?
Then there was model UN; now there are online simulations. Do they achieve the same ends?
Does civic education include instruction in civic activism, using social media for example?
With connectedness come instantaneity and constant interruptions. Is it even possible to maintain anyone's attention on understanding anything as subtle as the complexities of representative government?
This lively, "Fred Friendly" style seminar is timed to coincide with publication of two edited volumes: Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (David Feith, ed.; Rowman & Littlefield), and What is College For?: The Public Purpose of Higher Education (Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis, eds.)

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Thursday, December 08 2011
7:00pm reception, program begins at 7:30 pm
1st Parish Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge

BOSTON AREA SOLAR ENERGY ASSOCIATION Forum:
An Update on Deep Energy Retrofits for Buildings - the Intersection of Human-Based and Energy Efficient Design
Henry MacLean (Timeless Architecture) & Friends

Contact : http://www.basea.org/
The BASEA forums are held September through May, the second Thursday of each month, except as noted. The forums are free and open to the public.

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Friday, December 9, 2011
9:00 am to 12:30 pm
Foley Hoag LLP, 155 Seaport Boulevard, 13th Floor, Boston

Renewable Energy-Related Transmission for New Englanders
Our 126th New England Electric Restructuring Roundtable focuses on renewable energy-related transmission for New Englanders. Utility-scale wind, hydro, and even solar must be sited in proximity to the resource, which is often far from population centers, thus necessitating the building of new transmission lines. The siting, cost, and cost allocation related to these lines is often no less (andsometimes more) controversial than the renewable energy resources they are built to transmit. At this Roundtable we will explore numerous, very current, renewable energy-related transmission studies and proposed projects.

Edward Krapels, CEO, Anbaric Transmission - leading independent transmission developer's just-announced (11/14) BayState Offshore Wind Transmission System, to be located 25 miles off-shore Massachusetts to carry up to 2,000 MW of off-shore wind to the NE Grid
David Whiteley, Executive Director for the Eastern Interconnection Planning Collaborative (EIPC) - the collaborative scenario planning analysis currently underway on transmission and renewables for the entire Eastern Interconnect (comprising 24 RTOs and over 40 states)
Robert Mitchell, CEO, Atlantic Wind Connection - lead developer of proposed transmission line (20 miles off-shore between New Jersey and Virginia) to facilitate off-shore wind development (aka Google line)
David H. Boguslawski, VP Transmission Strategy/Operations,Northeast Utilities - NU/NSTAR proposed Northern Pass Transmission Project to bring approximately 1,200 MW of mainly hydro power from Québec to New England thru New Hampshire
Kurt Adams, Executive VP/CDO, First Wind - Wind developer's perspective on transmission, including potential transmission projects in Maine

We are working on rounding out the morning with another presentation on a related and timely topic TBD.

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Opportunity

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Free Solar Panels for Houses of Worship

From a recent Mass Interfaith Power & Light (http://mipandl.org/) email
"We've recently been talking with DCS Energy (http://www.dcsenergy.com/) who has an unbeatable offer: if your site qualifies, they design and install the panels at no cost, don't charge you for any electricity, and donate the system to your house of worship after five years. Your only costs will be for a building permit, possibly a structural engineer to verify that your roof can support their weight, and any preparatory work such as roof work or tree removal. If solar panels are so expensive how can anyone give them away for free? First, there is a federal grant program that is only available until November that pays for 30% of the cost of the system. Then there is an accelerated depreciation option that gives certain kinds of investors another tax advantage. Finally, the state awards a special allowance called a "Solar Renewal Energy Credit" (SRECs) to owners of solar electricity systems which are sold at auctions to utilities who buy them to meet their requirements under the Massachusetts' renewable portfolio standard. DCS is betting that the price of these SRECs will remain high. Jim Nail, president of MA IP&L, has talked to DCS Energy and is currently having them prepare a proposal for his church, St. Dunstan's Episcopal in Dover. Jim says, "The references I've talked to have been quite positive about the program and the company has been very responsive. "If you think your site might qualify, contact Peter Carli, pete@dcsenergy.com, with the address of your house of worship and your contact information. He'll take a preliminary look at your site and advise you if it meets their criteria."

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Young World Inventors Success!

Young World Inventors (http://yinventors.wordpress.com/) finished their Kickstarter campaign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1036325713/youngworldinventorscom) to fund insider web stories of African and American innovators in collaboration successfully.

New contributions, however, will be accepted.

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Resource

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Massachusetts Attitudes About Climate Change – An opinion survey of Massachusetts residents conducted by MassINC and sponsored by the Barr Foundation found that 77% of respondents believe that global warming has “probably been happening” and 59% of all respondents see see it as being at least partially caused by human pollution. Only 42% of the state’s residents say global warming will have very serious consequences for Massachusetts if left unaddressed. The 18 to 29 age group is more likely to believe global warming is appearing and caused by humans compared to the 60+ age group. African-American (56%) and Latino residents (69%) are more likely than white residents (40%) to believe global warming will be a very serious problem if left unaddressed. The MassINC report, titled The 80 Percent Challenge: What Massachusetts must do to meet targets and make headway on climate change (http://www.massinc.org/Research/The-80-percent-challenge.aspx), contains many other findings.

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The presentations from the recent Affordable Comfort National Home Performance Conference are available online at
http://2011.acinational.org/downloadable_resources

Lots of good information from what some call the best energy conference in the USA on Deep Energy Retrofits to Community Energy Challenges with details on insulation, heat flow, energy metering, ducting, hot water, and many, many other topics. If you are a practical energy wonk, this should make your eyes light up.

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Free Monthly Energy Analysis

CarbonSalon is a free service that every month can automatically track your energy use and compare it to your past energy use (while controlling for how cold the weather is). You get a short friendly email that lets you know how you’re doing in your work to save energy.

https://www.carbonsalon.com/

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Boston Food System

"The Boston Food System [listserv] provides a forum to post announcements of events, employment opportunities, internships, programs, lectures, and other activities as well as related articles or other publications of a non-commercial nature covering the area's food system - food, nutrition, farming, education, etc. - that take place or focus on or around Greater Boston (broadly delineated)."

The Boston area is one of the most active nationwide in terms of food system activities - projects, services, and events connected to food, farming, nutrition - and often connected to education, public health, environment, arts, social services and other arenas. Hundreds of organizations and enterprises cover our area, but what is going on week-to-week is not always well publicized.

Hence, the new Boston Food System listserv, as the place to let everyone know about these activities. Specifically:
Use of the BFS list will begin soon, once we get a decent base of subscribers. Clarification of what is appropriate to announce and other posting guidelines will be provided as well.

It's easy to subscribe right now at https://elist.tufts.edu/wws/subscribe/bfs

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Artisan Asylum http://artisansasylum.com/

Sprout & Co: Community Driven Investigations http://thesprouts.org/studios

Greater Boston Solidarity Economy Mapping Project http://www.transformationcentral.org/solidarity/mapping/mapping.html
a project by Wellesley College students that invites participation, contact jmatthaei@wellesley.edu

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Bostonsmart.com's Guide to Boston http://www.bostonsmarts.com/BostonGuide/

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Links to events at 60 colleges and universities at Hubevents http://hubevents.blogspot.com

Thanks to

Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area http://www.BostonScienceLectures.com

Boston Area Computer User Groups http://www.bugc.org/

http://www.mitenergyclub.org/calendar/mit_events_template

http://sustainability.mit.edu/

http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/calendar/

http://green.harvard.edu/events

http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

http://pechakuchaboston.org/blog/

http://boston.nerdnite.com/

http://www.meetup.com/

http://www.eventbrite.com/