Grant lived at 505 East 43rd Street in East Flatbush; he was struck and killed in front of 608 East 42nd Street, between Foster Avenue and Avenue D.

Time, we think, to consider speed bumps.

American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC) (NASDAQ: AMSC) and Consolidated Edison, Inc. (Con Ed) (NYSE: ED) have teamed with the Department of Homeland Security on a project to protect New York’s power grid with surge suppressing superconductor cable technology.

Work has started on what is expected to be a $39.3 million project for Con Ed to develop and deploy new high temperature superconductor (HTS) power grid technology in Con Ed’s network in New York City. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is expected to invest up to $25 million in the development of this technology to enable “Secure Super Grids” in the United States. Secure Super Grids utilize customized HTS wires, HTS power cables and ancillary controls to deliver more power through the grid while also being able to suppress power surges that can disrupt service.

Concurrently AMSC introduced a new surge-suppressing, high-capacity superconductor power grid technology – a system-level solution that increases the capacity of power grids while also being able to rapidly suppress power surges. This technology is expected to significantly enhance the capacity, security and efficiency of electric power infrastructures in urban and metropolitan areas around the world, enabling “Secure Super Grids.”

Read more at The Fraser Domain’s Energy Blog.

A new website, HealthMap, addresses that challenge by siphoning up text from Google News, the World Health Organization and online discussion groups, then filtering it and boiling it down into mapped data that researchers — and the public — can use to track new disease outbreaks, region by region.

"There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it’s obscured by garbage and noise," said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. "The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource."

The site’s free accessibility could be particularly important in the developing world, where poor public health infrastructure and lack of money has handicapped epidemiological efforts. That’s a problem because those regions are exactly where scientists predict new and dangerous diseases are likely to emerge.

HealthMap goes beyond the standard mashup and is more like a small-scale implementation of the long-awaited semantic web. The site, which the researchers describe in the latest issue of open access PLoS Medicine, creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

WHITEHAVEN, England — The citizens of Whitehaven try, really they do. They separate out their cans, their paper, their cardboard and their glass, and they recycle them all. They compost. They jump up and down on their trash to cram it into their government-issued garbage cans, and they put the trash out for collection at exactly 7 a.m., twice a month.

But when Gareth Corkhill, a bus driver, was fined $215 — and given a further $225 fine and a criminal record when he failed to pay — for leaving his garbage can lid slightly ajar this spring, Whitehaven’s residents banded together in dismay. They raised the money to pay the fine, and they began to complain.

“I consider the fine against Mr. Corkhill to be a matter of injustice, really, and as a Christian minister I’m required to speak out against injustice,” declared the Rev. John Bannister, the rector of Whitehaven, a seaside town in Cumbria, in the far northwest. Referring to the garbage cans residents here use, he said, “To be given a criminal record for leaving your wheelie bin open by three inches has, I think, really gone beyond the bounds of responsible behavior.”

Across Europe, residents are struggling to adjust to a new era of garbage rules. Britain, particularly, is in the midst of a trash crisis, with dwindling landfill space and one of Europe’s poorest recycling records. Threatened with steep fines if they dump too much trash, local governments around the country are imposing strict regimens to force residents to produce less and recycle more.

Many now collect trash every other week, instead of every week. They restrict households to a limited amount of garbage, and refuse to pick up more. They require that garbage be put out only at strict times, reject whole boxes of recyclables that contain the odd nonrecyclable item and employ enforcement officers who issue warnings and impose fines for failure to comply.

In an era of dwindling environmental resources, garbage-heavy societies like Britain’s are under growing pressure to change their profligate ways. “These are challenging times, and the U.K. is behind the game when it comes to relying on landfills,” said Beverley Parr, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Or, as Ian Curwen, a spokesman for Copeland Borough Council, which encompasses Whitehaven, said: “Ultimately as a country, we have to do more. We can’t just keep producing and throwing things away.”

But Britons do not like being told what to do. Encouraged by anti-government newspapers, they particularly resent government meddling, as they see it, in such intimate matters as the contents of their garbage cans. As regulations get more stringent and enforcement more robust, there have been reports across the country of incensed residents shouting and throwing trash at garbage collectors, illegally dumping and burning excess garbage, and even surreptitiously tossing trash in — or stealing — their neighbors’ garbage cans.

“It’s like something out of ‘Mad Max,’ ” Paul Nicholls, a resident of Cannock, near Birmingham, told the newspaper The Guardian recently, describing the free-for-all in his town at garbage-collection time. “Every man for himself, scavenging for an extra bin.”

The government says the new regulations are necessary if Britain is to adjust to the changing times. Along with the rest of Europe, Britain has been ordered to reduce the waste it puts in landfills — by 2015, to 50 percent of what it was in 1995 — or face untold millions of dollars in European Union fines.

That means that people have to completely rethink their relationship to their refuse, said Paul Bettison, chairman of the environment board of the Local Government Association.

“It’s a sad thing to have to shatter people’s illusions, but gone are the days when we could put all our rubbish and junk in a big bag and overnight the fairy would come and take it away, and that would be the end of it,” Mr. Bettison said. “The rubbish fairy is dead.”

The twice-a-month collection regime, now in use in more than half the country, is particularly unpopular and became a contentious issue in recent local elections, in which the ruling Labor Party was trounced by its opponents. Among other things, said Doretta Cocks, who runs the 22,000-member Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, having infrequent collections creates a health hazard, what with the smell, the maggots and the rats.

“It’s supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it’s not,” Mrs. Cocks said. “How can it be environmentally friendly to have two weeks’ worth of rubbish in your house?”

Whitehaven provides many of its homeowners with an array of recycling bins as well as government-regulation wheelie bins that are often modest in size, to say the least, holding perhaps four black garbage bags.

Into these they are expected to stuff their two weeks’ worth of garbage.

“My bin’s always full,” said a 62-year-old Whitehaven resident, who says that he can force five bags in there if he jumps on them vigorously enough. He is engaged in a running battle with the garbage collectors. Once he put an extra bag of trash on top of his bin; they refused to pick it up and left the garbage from the now-ripped bag sprawled on the street. Once, when he failed to close his lid properly, he received a “nasty note saying it was overloaded,” he said.

The note was followed by a sticker of shame affixed to the bin announcing that he was violating local garbage laws. The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is afraid of running afoul of the authorities, says he now regularly takes his extra trash out to an empty field and burns it.

Ms. Parr, the environmental department spokeswoman, said that in 1997 Britain recycled just 7 percent of its waste, compared with 33 percent now. (More than 60 percent of its waste ends up in landfills, compared with 55 percent for the United States in 2006.) Britain is poised to experiment with programs under which households would pay according to how much garbage they threw out, just as they pay for water or electricity.

Under one idea, people’s bins would be fitted with microchips, enabling local councils to record the weight or volume of garbage per household. Although such bins are used already in other European countries, even the prospect has critics in Britain muttering about Big Brother and creeping taxation.

In Whitehaven, the residents are annoyed enough about the rules they already have.

Claire Corkhill, whose husband received the fine for their open bin, is still recovering from the indignity of having two uniformed garbage enforcement officers, or “garbage police,” as they are known locally, show up at her house.

She said they were wearing protective vests. “My sister is a police officer, so we thought it was a joke, to be honest.”

Mr. Curwen, the local council spokesman, said the Corkhills had failed to respond to several warnings. “They got a sticker, and then a letter, and then another letter saying, ‘Would you like us to come round and discuss your waste situation with you, because we need to reduce our land filling and the fines are quite steep,’ ” he said.

Mr. Curwen said that people in similar situations — unable to close their bins because of too much garbage — should telephone the council. “We can give you tips on recycling and reducing waste,” he said.

Mr. Bettison of the Local Government Association said there would always be some people who needed extra prodding.

“To encourage people to do something, you start off by asking them ‘Please,’ ” he said. “Then you say ‘Pretty please.’ But if they don’t respond to carrots, you have to move a little more along the scale that has carrots on one end and sticks on the other. You have to make it a little more difficult for them not to recycle.”

Take Out the Trash Precisely, Now. It’s the Law.

Tags: recycling, trash, garbage

More than a million Iranians are addicted to some form of opium, heroin or other opium derivative, according to the government, and some estimates run as high as 10 million.

In a country where the discussion of some social and cultural issues, like homosexuality, can be all but taboo, drug addiction has been widely acknowledged as a serious problem. It is talked about openly in schools and on television. Posters have encouraged people to think of addiction as a disease and to seek treatment.

Iran’s theocratic government has encouraged and financed a vast expansion in the number of drug treatment centers to help users confront their addictions and to combat the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through shared needles.

The center in central Tehran, which is called Congress 60 and is run by a private nonprofit agency, is one of 600 centers that provide drug treatment across the country with help from government money. An additional 1,250 centers offer methadone, free needles and other services for addicts who are not ready to quit, including food and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections.

Iran’s government, trying to curb addiction’s huge social costs, has been more supportive of drug treatment than any other government in the Islamic world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

It was not always this way. After the 1979 revolution, the government tried a more traditional approach: arresting drug users and putting them in jail.

But two decades later, it recognized that this approach had failed. A sharp increase in the crime rate and the number of people infected with H.I.V., both directly linked to a surge in narcotics use, persuaded the government to shift strategies.

"We have realized that an addict is a social reality," said Muhammad-Reza Jahani, the vice president for the Committee Combating Drugs, which coordinates the government’s efforts to fight drug addiction and trafficking. "We don’t want to fight addicts; we want to fight addiction. We need to manage addiction."

Apart from the observation that this is yet another piece of evidence that non-punitive approaches are more effective than "war on drugs" - it also suggest that the Iranian government is capable of changing course, rethinking problems - and thus perhaps - under the right circumstances - able to negotiate.

Tags: drug policy, harm reduction, heroin, Iran, HIV, syringe exchange

ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

From the website Bottlemania.

More on this after we score a copy of the book. Disclosure: Liz Royte and I were classmates at Bard College, and are on speaking terms. That said, she can write, she’s not afraid of complexity and she’s good at making complexity explicable. (Unlike the previous sentence, which took a simple notion and made it unpronounceable).

We brought a friend visiting from out of town, and she was amazed and inspired. You will be too. We bring at least one person every season, and they’re always happy, no matter how fussy they are.
Tickets are available online at the Streb website or by calling (718) 384-6491.

Video gallery - with previews of some of the current pieces - here.

[Ethics disclosure: we’ve made the odd contribution, volunteered as ushers, given the odd piece of professional advice - but stand by our assessment of last night’s performance, for which we were happy to purchase tickets. But proudly encumbered by association and bias, which we here disclose].

I move at least once a year.

Since 2003, I’ve subjected myself to six rounds of searches on Craig’s List, six tedious packing rituals, and six tales of mishap with sundry scurrilous moving companies.

You might think me a carefree, irreverent type who treads with a conscience-light, exploratory flounce and lays my whistling head wherever it suits me. But actually, the opposite is true. I’m unsettled seeing my life in boxes. I don’t like spending first nights alone in new bedrooms. In general, I’m risibly bad at goodbyes.

That’s why the most soul-gutting feeling in the world is after the movers have finished, and you’re left standing small and swallowed in an empty apartment, where only months ago you ate and cried and fucked and perhaps fell in love and had your heart broken. But it’s over. So you learn to move on.

In fact, I wonder if I’ve learned too well. Each time I go through a move, I throw away a portion of what I had before-losing some detritus of my life’s misguided homing instincts, like Hansel and Gretel laying crumbs behind them on the way to the Gingerbread Witch. Each time, I shed a piece of my past I no longer care to carry; I’ve gotten the resettling down to a routine, hanging pictures in the same, rehearsed places and hooking up the wires to my electronics like a pro. Which is saying something, since I’m a moron when it comes to technology (don’t ask me why I started a blog).

There’s No Place Like Home, from Marcelle Manhattan.

Rinsing Feeling — not so bad
what you knew would happen
has only happened later
than you expected
the delay: a blip.

By Todd Colby - at Todd Colby’s GleeFarm.