Tag: organization

50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

The Ocean Cleanup , a Dutch foundation that aims to deal with plastics polluting our seas, says it’s finally ready to put its technology to work. In a statement released today, the organization has revealed that it plans to start cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in early 2018 using its newly redesigned cleaning system. That garbage patch is the biggest collection of debris in the ocean, a massive soup of visible and microscopic plastic particles poisoning marine life. The ship captain who discovered it in 2003 said he “never found a clear spot” in the week it took to cross the region. While Boyan Slat (the organization’s founder) originally envisioned trapping plastic trash with one large screen tethered to the ocean floor, the new design is smaller, sturdier and can save the group a ton of money. Instead of deploying a 60-mile stationary screen, they plan on releasing 50 smaller ones that measure 0.6 miles in length. They’ll weigh the floating screens down with anchor, so they can move with the currents like plastics do, albeit a bit slower in order to trap debris. Slat told FastCompany that he expected the original design to clean up half of the massive garbage patch in 10 years for $320 million. Now, he expects the new design to cut that timespan in half and to cost the group significantly less than that amount. Since he and his team still need to fund the project, though, they plan to use the plastic they collect to make items they can sell, such as sunglasses, chairs and car bumpers. Source: The Ocean Cleanup

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50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

The Ocean Cleanup , a Dutch foundation that aims to deal with plastics polluting our seas, says it’s finally ready to put its technology to work. In a statement released today, the organization has revealed that it plans to start cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in early 2018 using its newly redesigned cleaning system. That garbage patch is the biggest collection of debris in the ocean, a massive soup of visible and microscopic plastic particles poisoning marine life. The ship captain who discovered it in 2003 said he “never found a clear spot” in the week it took to cross the region. While Boyan Slat (the organization’s founder) originally envisioned trapping plastic trash with one large screen tethered to the ocean floor, the new design is smaller, sturdier and can save the group a ton of money. Instead of deploying a 60-mile stationary screen, they plan on releasing 50 smaller ones that measure 0.6 miles in length. They’ll weigh the floating screens down with anchor, so they can move with the currents like plastics do, albeit a bit slower in order to trap debris. Slat told FastCompany that he expected the original design to clean up half of the massive garbage patch in 10 years for $320 million. Now, he expects the new design to cut that timespan in half and to cost the group significantly less than that amount. Since he and his team still need to fund the project, though, they plan to use the plastic they collect to make items they can sell, such as sunglasses, chairs and car bumpers. Source: The Ocean Cleanup

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50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

The Ocean Cleanup , a Dutch foundation that aims to deal with plastics polluting our seas, says it’s finally ready to put its technology to work. In a statement released today, the organization has revealed that it plans to start cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in early 2018 using its newly redesigned cleaning system. That garbage patch is the biggest collection of debris in the ocean, a massive soup of visible and microscopic plastic particles poisoning marine life. The ship captain who discovered it in 2003 said he “never found a clear spot” in the week it took to cross the region. While Boyan Slat (the organization’s founder) originally envisioned trapping plastic trash with one large screen tethered to the ocean floor, the new design is smaller, sturdier and can save the group a ton of money. Instead of deploying a 60-mile stationary screen, they plan on releasing 50 smaller ones that measure 0.6 miles in length. They’ll weigh the floating screens down with anchor, so they can move with the currents like plastics do, albeit a bit slower in order to trap debris. Slat told FastCompany that he expected the original design to clean up half of the massive garbage patch in 10 years for $320 million. Now, he expects the new design to cut that timespan in half and to cost the group significantly less than that amount. Since he and his team still need to fund the project, though, they plan to use the plastic they collect to make items they can sell, such as sunglasses, chairs and car bumpers. Source: The Ocean Cleanup

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50 floating screens will clean the Pacific garbage patch next year

Wind penetration on central US grid hits 52% Sunday night, breaking record

(credit: Indigo Skies Photography ) An organization that manages transmission systems across the central US announced on Tuesday that it broke a record for wind penetration in North America. On Sunday at 4:30am, Southwest Power Pool (SPP) became the first regional transmission organization (RTO) to serve 52.1 percent of its load using wind energy. SPP also set the previous record in April 2016 with 49.2 percent wind generation. A record previous to that was set by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in late March 2016, when the organization hit 48.28 percent wind penetration at 1:10am. Records for wind penetration, which measure the amount of total load supplied by wind on a moment-to-moment basis, are being broken more frequently these days, on a regional and internal level. As RTOs, which generally serve large areas and cross state lines, add more wind turbines to their portfolios , wind is becoming a more important part of the energy mix. SPP noted that “wind is now the third most-prevalent fuel source in the SPP region,” which covers 550,000 square miles of territory in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and portions of neighboring states. Natural gas and coal are still the primary fuel sources for SPP, but the organization said that wind accounted for 15 percent of its generating capacity in 2016. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wind penetration on central US grid hits 52% Sunday night, breaking record

Use 375,000 images from the Met however you want, for free

If you want to use images of paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like Woman with a Parrot by Gustave Courbet (above), you no longer have to worry about rights. All of the Met’s approximately 375, 000 public-domain artwork images are now available for free, unrestricted use. The new “Open Access” policy, based on Creative Commons Zero (CC0), means bloggers, schools and businesses alike can use them without even the need for attribution. In 2014, the Met opened up 400, 000 images for downloading, but only for scholarly, non-commercial use. Now, however, it wants them spread far and wide, as it also unveiled partnerships with Pinterest, Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America and others. “Increasing access to the Museum’s collection and scholarship serves the interests and needs of our 21st-century audiences, ” said Met CEO Thomas P. Campbell in a statement. Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses” (Metropolitan Museum of Art) The images comprise the main body of the museum’s collection, apart from 65, 000 artwork images not in the public domain for copyright and other reasons. The museum has 1.5 million works in total, including prints and engravings, many of which could also be digitized in the future. Other institutions, including Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, offer free, unlimited-use downloads, and you can find gigapixel-sized photos and Street View-style tours on Google. No other single site, however, has Met’s prodigious number of well-known works that range back over 6, 000 years. The museum worked closely with Creative Commons, and you can find images on the organization’s CCSearch beta or the main Met collection , and even create your own search using tools from the Met’s Github repository. Via: The New York Times Source: Met Museum

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Use 375,000 images from the Met however you want, for free

Rescuing 1,200 rolls of film that were never processed

The Rescued Film Project rose to prominence last year with the release of hundreds of photos by an unknown World War 2 soldier . Founded by photographer Levi Bettweiser, the organization seeks out unclaimed film rolls from the 20th century before developing and archiving them for posterity. Bettweiser has previously kept this effort going with donations alone, but for his latest haul, he needs a little help. The Rescued Film Project has recovered 66 bundles of film containing around 1, 200 rolls, and it’s currently seeking funding on Indiegogo to pay a third party to process them. The bundles are meticulously packaged. Rolls are labeled with the camera used, photo details and details about the subjects. Each was then wrapped in foil and athletic tape, with additional labeling on top. They were then tightly packed into cigar boxes and wrapped in multiple layers of foil, newspaper and tape, before being labeled again. The photographer is only known as “Paul, ” and was a steel worker. The Rescued Film Project has processed just one of the 1, 200 rolls, and it revealed some remarkably well preserved, candid shots of family life. While the collection unlikely to be as important as the discovery of Vivienne Meier’s extensive work, Bettweiser feels that every unprocessed roll of film is important. Through his project, he hopes to “ensure that the photographers memories and dedication to preserving them aren’t lost.” He’s seeking $15, 000 to cover the vast processing costs, and at the time of writing has already raised over $11, 500. The Big Picture is a recurring feature highlighting beautiful images that tell big stories. We explore topics as large as our planet, or as small as a single life, as affected by or seen through the lens of technology. Source: The Rescued Film Project (Indiegogo)

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Rescuing 1,200 rolls of film that were never processed

Scan Images Into Text with Google Keep’s OCR Feature

Chrome: If you’re a regular Google Keep user, you might have missed a (relatively) new feature in the app. If you paste an image into a note, Google lets you convert the image into editable text. Read more…

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Scan Images Into Text with Google Keep’s OCR Feature

Improve Your Facebook News Feed in Minutes with the "Organize" Tool

Facebook has an awful lot of noise , especially if you’re “friends” with people you don’t really care about. If you want to clean up your News Feed, Facebook actually has a handy tool to help you do just that. Read more…        

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Improve Your Facebook News Feed in Minutes with the "Organize" Tool