‘I Came By Boat’ Campaign Highlights The Critical Skills Migrants Are Contributing

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a key building block for next-generation devices. It takes features from diamonds, one of the toughest materials in the world, and combines them with features of silicon, our ubiquitous semiconductor technology in electronics to make a very new kind of material for power electronics. SiC can more efficiently handle higher voltage and three times the amount of energy compared to silicon chips, allowing us to run everything from locomotives to planes and wind farms faster and more efficiently.

Best known as the digital ledger at the core of bitcoin, blockchain is “a great way for making and preserving truths.” Just as blockchain tracks the movement of bitcoins, it could be used as an open way to follow any other good or product, bringing “concrete trustable facts to the retail environment”, she said. For example, Provenance is working on a blockchain project to track fish, noting when and where and how the animal is caught, checking its status with certifiers (such as whether it qualifies as organic) and tracking it as it changes hands, so that data can be shown to the final buyer. That could help brands prove to their customers that products are as promised, helping build trust.

WIRED Retail 2015: Blockchain could track your fish supper from boat to plate (Wired UK)

Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?

For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.

Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)

The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.

I like cancelled plans. And empty bookstores. I like rainy days and thunderstorms. And quiet coffee shops. I like messy beds and over-worn pajamas. Most of all, I like the small joys that a simple life brings.

Unknown (via wordsnquotes)

How To Build More Resilient Cities

Welcome to my world. Check out this new virtual reality tour of my home on Mars, Gale Crater. It was made by @latimes. (You’ll want some headphones.)

http://graphics.latimes.com/mars-gale-crater-vr/

Thursday is World Maritime Day which this year spotlights maritime transport as a cost-effective and energy-efficient link in the global supply chain.

Get more information from International Maritime Organization on shipping, sustainable development and the “future we want” here.

You're only an "economic migrant" if you're poor and brown

Ned Richardson-Little is a Canadian academic who went to the US “in search of a better life,” did research in Germany and settled in the UK, something he was able to do thanks to his economic migrant grandfather who happened to have been born in Scotland.

Richardson contemplates the vilified category of “economic migrant” – “the greedy, dark other to those virtuously fleeing conflict” – and wonders how it is that no one has ever vilified him, given that he, too, is so obviously an “economic migrant.”

My grandparents (and father) were displaced people – Red Army deserters who destroyed their papers so that they could escape Europe via the DP boats to Canada – and I left Canada for the USA to found a company, then moved to the UK to represent an NGO and became a citizen, and have now moved back to the USA to write novels and campaign for better information policy. No one has ever called me an economic migrant.

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/29/youre-only-an-economic-mig.html

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: outstanding lecture

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations.

Brown looks at the human rights enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, and how they have been interpreted in successive Supreme Court rulings like Hobby Lobby (corporations are people whose religious freedom entitles them to deny contraception to their workers) and Citizens United (corporations are people and have the free speech right to buy politicians). She suggests that these have been misread as merely conservative/business-oriented thinking gaining influence, and that rather, they are best understood as an ongoing project that grants personhood to companies at the expense of real people.

Brown speaks for more than an hour with almost no poli-sci/econ jargon, building elegant, beautiful arguments that should be accessible to anyone. If you listen to anything this weekend, make it this.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution [Wendy Brown/Zone Books]

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: neoliberal jurisprudence in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores [LSE]

MP3

Emily, a process engineer at GE Aviation in Auburn, AL is all suited up to remove a print from a Direct Metal Laser Melting machine. These machines additively manufacture metal components for CFM’s best-selling LEAP jet engine, printing in 20 micron layers — roughly 1/3 the width of a human hair.