I find urban studies fascinating, which is perhaps why it was a concentration back when I was in school. To me--perhaps because I have lived in big cities most of my life--finding ways to reform city government, bring transparency, better deliver services and improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas is a passion, because I think there are so many possibilities (especially with today's technology) for making people's lives better by rising up to meet these challenges.

This is why I am thrilled to be working with the City Forward initiative. What is City Forward? It is a tool that pulls public data from urban centers on different issues (user specified) and displays it in customizable graphs.

For example, users can create an ‘exploration’ for important environmental issues such as water usage in multiple cities, and then have it displayed in charts that will visually present the data in a way that people can understand it. These charts allow anyone to make a case or tell a story about what one city or many cities are doing to improve in an areas such as this one, and what others are neglecting.

In other words, in addition to being groundbreaking in its potential applications, its a pretty cool tool for improving government transparency and letting people access public records in a useful, understandable way.

You can go to the site and see what explorations have already been done in cities across the world, and come up with some of your own. And you can encourage your city to share data with the initiative, to fight for the kind of improvements we all need, and quite frankly, deserve.

This is just provides another way to bring some light into the often dark corners of government, while improving our everyday lives. Not a bad thing in today's world, for sure.

Follow Cliff Schecter on Twitter: @cliffschecter

Our Libyan Success No Capital

This is amazing. Libya is the "victory" that Bush has touted so often, asserting that that nation dismantled its nuclear programs in accordance with US demands.

Well, maybe not so much:

Authorities hunting traffickers in nuclear weapons technology recently uncovered an audacious plan to deliver a complete uranium enrichment plant to Libya.

The discovery provides fresh evidence of the reach and sophistication of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's global black market in nuclear know-how and equipment. It also exposes a previously undetected South African branch of the Khan network.

Details of the plot began to emerge in September, when police found the elements of a two-storey steel processing system for the enrichment plant in a factory outside Johannesburg. They were packed in 11 freight containers for shipment to Libya.

South African officials will say only that they discovered nuclear components. It appears, however, that the massive system was designed to operate 1000 centrifuges for enriching uranium.

Once assembled in Libya, the plant could have produced enough weapons-grade uranium to manufacture several nuclear bombs a year. Delivery of the plant would have greatly accelerated Libya's efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

If you have gone to whitehouse.gov since Saturday you may not have noticed any real changes. On the outside this is true, but underneath the hood they just replaced the entire engine and drive train.

When President Obama took over at 1600 Pennsylvania one of the first things he did was order the people who manage the White House website to investigate new software. The outcome was a move from expensive and clunky proprietary software to a very familiar open source system – Drupal.

Now I don’t expect all our readers to know what Drupal is, but actually it should be very familiar. Drupal is the same software that powers Crooks and Liars. The software is extremely robust and can be extended beyond you imagination through contributed modules. In the coming months you will see more examples of this as we start rolling out our latest updated that includes countless new features to better engage you – the C&L community.

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I thought this was fascinating. Yes, we've gotten so used to being able to document on demand with our technology - but there's only so far it can go:

Pre-inauguration concertgoers who flocked to the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday sent about 10 times the volume of wireless calls, text messages, pictures and videos as on the busiest hour of a typical day, causing scattered outages that customers who gather for President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in should expect again today, company officials said.

About 400,000 people surrounded the Reflecting Pool for the three-hour concert, according to some estimates, but much larger crowds are expected to fill the Mall and inaugural parade route today. Major wireless carriers urged customers to expect minor delays and to reduce their usage, but they said networks are expected to handle the surge in use.

"The vast majority of calls went through on the first try," Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson said. "We'll be making every adjustment we can make. I don't believe there's any critical capacity we can add, but [Sunday] did help us to do some fine-tuning."

"We did experience some mild call-blocking, as was expected, but with the capacity we added and the number of calls we got on the network and the amount of activity, our network worked about as well as we expected," said Crystal Davis, a spokeswoman for Sprint Nextel.

The industry has prepared for months to boost capacity, anticipating record-breaking demand. Companies have spent millions of dollars to add radio channels, install mobile cell towers, expand in-building wireless coverage and bolster network capacity.

But just as adding lanes on a highway won't stop congestion if too many people get on the road at the same time, the changes might not prevent problems, industry spokesmen said.

Another piece of the Bush legacy, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by the majority of scientists we surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.

What has worried many of the experts, who include recognised authorities from the world's leading universities and research institutes, as well as a Nobel Laureate, is the failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through international agreements, namely the Kyoto Treaty, and recent studies indicating that the Earth's natural carbon "sinks" are becoming less efficient at absorbing man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.

Levels of CO2 have continued to increase during the past decade since the treaty was agreed and they are now rising faster than even the worst-case scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. In the meantime the natural absorption of CO2 by the world's forests and oceans has decreased significantly. Most of the scientists we polled agreed that the failure to curb emissions of CO2, which are increasing at a rate of 1 per cent a year, has created the need for an emergency "plan B" involving research, development and possible implementation of a worldwide geoengineering strategy.

Over the course of the 2008 election, Barack Obama's campaign has leap-frogged John McCain online. As CBS, ABC and Politico (among others) have documented, Team Obama has far out-paced McCain in deploying web technology to fundraise, establish social networks, advertise to targeted audiences, build email lists and otherwise facilitate grassroots organizing. Now, with the release this week of its new application for the iPhone, the Obama campaign has added a powerful new tool to help its supporters get out the vote, literally wherever they are.

The Obama '08 iPhone application (available for free) brings much of the content and functionality of the Obama web site to the Apple mobile device now used by millions of Americans. Users can access positions on the issues, receive breaking campaign updates, get national and local campaign news, find nearby Obama events and browse video and photos. And as the Los Angeles Times noted, "with the device's global positioning system technology, it will give you directions to the nearest campaign office."

But the real breakthrough for political organizing at the grassroots level is the "Call Friends" feature. In a nutshell, Call Friends turns the iPhone into your own mobile, personal phone bank, letting you call and track the support of the people you know in the states that matter most.

As Stephen Shankland of CNET reported:

The most notable feature "organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly," according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

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It seems as though the only people left in the Bush administration are certifiable lunatics and knuckle draggers. The unthinkable is always possible with these people, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that they would sink to using such barbaric tactics to keep the public in line.

This clip, which is not directly linked to this story, is safe for work, although you might find yourself yelling at your monitor while watching it. (the related content starts at around 3:00 in) The video, made by an electronic ID bracelet manufacturer, shows how they will work to effectively disable the dirty, scary brown people in mid-air without compromising the structural integrity of the plane or harming innocent bystanders -- and I'm sure they're just as effective on anti-American liberals and dirty f*$king hippies as well. Would you allow yourself or your family to be fitted with one of these devices when you fly? Me either. More from Daily Kos:

Every feel like livestock when you fly? DHS is exploring a new technology (warning, Moonie Times link) which, if it makes to airlines, will guarantee I will never fly again:

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers.

This bracelet would:

• take the place of an airline boarding pass

• contain personal information about the traveler

• be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage

• shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes Read on...

Autoblog:

Automakers had until July 1st to plead their case to the NHTSA overlords before the government agency set off to finalize the 2011-2015 CAFE standards. After hearing comments from Detroit automakers, Toyota, Daimler, and others, it seems that the new standards are going to have a sweeping effect on both consumers and auto industry employees. The Auto Alliance states that the cuts would hasten the exit of 82,000 jobs, cost $29 billion for consumers, and raise the cost of your favorite truck by $4,000 or more. The added cost of vehicles will also cut annual production by up to 850k units industry-wide.

Buy that? Me neither. Especially since the Bush administration has hidden the benefits of emission regulations, saving the country $2 TRILLION.

Of course, we could go the automakers' way...keep producing an inefficient engine requiring a diminishing resource for fuel and allow other countries to continue to beat us in technology and sales.

No, it's not the latest ranting of Grampa McSame, but a news item my local San Francisco news affiliate carried. The context was a new way to combat the problem of loitering in high crime areas. The answer is a technology that struck me: "The Mosquito." an ultrasonic device that emits a high-pitched noise that only teenagers can hear.

Marketed under the banner "Kids Be Gone," the device emits a high-frequency modulated tone that has been likened to fingernails on a blackboard or a mosquito buzzing in the ear. Because the ability to hear higher frequencies fades with age, the Mosquito affects only people younger than about age 25. Also, according to the makers and various media reports, the sound does not annoy young children or dogs, only people in the 13 to 25 age bracket.[..]

A website focused on the Mosquito — www.kidsbegone.com — says studies have shown the device is safe and does not damage teenagers' hearing. The effective range is about 50 feet, according to the website.

In a sneaky twist, the same technology is available as a cellphone ring tone, alerting teens to calls that teachers, parents and other adults can't hear. The Kids Be Gone website has a link to the high frequency ring tone. In a test at The Courant, a 22-year-old said he could clearly hear the tone, while several staffers over age 25 heard nothing.

The technology rests with little tiny hair perceptors in our ears that usually die off by the age of 25. Although the manufacturers say that no permanent damage is done from The Mosquito, I'm a little wary of such assurances. The technology has been used in the UK and is now the subject of a protest for its indiscriminate use. (YouTube)

All Spin Zone: John "Doubletalk" McCain fails the political courage test.

Collateral News: Remote controlled bugs are the Pentagon's latest attempt to spy on terrorists. Wait a few years and this new technology called 'Hybrid Insect Mems' or 'Hi-Mems' will be in the hands of domestic law enforcement flying around your living room.

The Strange Death of Liberal America: In March the Pentagon released a report that included some alarming findings on the rate of suicide among American troops in Iraq.

Elizabeth de la Vega: Bush's OSHA: No laws, no crimes

TBogg: Put your hand in the puppet head

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Six Pulitzers for WaPo, two for ex-LATers and a triumph for investigations...Richard Cohen has a race problem...Mad Kane's advice for biased journos and bloggers...Russert plays Altoona...Greenspan and our business media ignored reality...The Seattle Times discovers poor people ...Get ready for Round 2 in the Internet's Battle Royale of 2008...Reporter Eric Lichtblau on the WH efforts to kill the NYT's '04 warrantless wiretapping story...Chris Matthews Sucks!...New media: a lot like the old media...As Gitmo trials near, the Pentagon limits what can be reported...