📺 “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Kirsten Gillenbrand/M. Night Shyamalan | CBS

Watched "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" Kirsten Gillenbrand/M. Night Shyamalan from CBS
With Stephen Colbert, Kirsten Gillibrand, M. Night Shyamalan, Jonathan Batiste. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan (Glass (2019));

📅 Changing the Conservation Conversation! | Innovate Pasadena, Friday Coffee Meetup

RSVPed Attending Innovate Pasadena, Friday Coffee Meetup: Changing the Conservation Conversation!

Friday, January 18, 2019
8:15 AM to 9:45 AM
at Cross Campus, 85 N. Raymond Avenue · Pasadena, CA

Less than 1% of the earth’s water is potable and suitable for our survival. Today, we are using up those resources faster than they are naturally replenished. By the year 2050 we will see the world population grow by 50%. Compound that growth with increased standards of living and increased per capita usage and there is a disaster in the making. As agriculture and residential water consumers battle over water rights, residential consumers will win in the short term. Will they really win in the end?

If we do nothing, our grandchildren will be faced with famine and lack of water on a global scale. Droughts like we are experiencing in the 9 western states give us a glimpse of what a future with limited potable water would be like. In a recent 5-year period, water prices increased 41%. Energy prices are rising at a similar rate. Fines for “bad behavior” are more common, but ineffective.

The only way to truly solve this dilemma is to make water conservation second nature. What are the characteristics of such a solution? Can we access the solution on a personal level? Come to the Friday MeetUp at Cross Campus on 1/18/19 to learn what you can do to join the movement toward intelligent water and energy solutions.

Bio:
Kerry Austin-Dunkijacobs - Disruptor for Good l Inventor l Water Conservation Advocate l Co-Founder l CEO
Epiphany Shower US l Intelligent Green Products
www.epiphanyshower.com

Kerry Austin-Dunkijacobs is a problem-solving visionary that creates solutions that are unique, simple to use, and provide uncompromising performance. A “conscious capitalist,” I listen to the spoken and unspoken needs of all the stakeholders that impact the products and companies that I envision and bring to life.

By focusing on Disruptive Innovation that creates widespread product adoption and continued enthusiastic use by consumers, I envision products that are so effective and aesthetically pleasing that they become the standard by which competitive products are measured.

My most recent product, the Epiphany!™ 1000 Digital Flow Optimizer, brings this philosophy to the Bath and Shower space. Saving a typical 50-60% in water and energy use, this device delivers Conservation without Compromise™, Benefits without Sacrifice™ and Savings without Effort™.

Vision must be complemented by the ability to execute. The most critical component of execution is the ability to identify the right talent to move a project along from the earliest concept stages through product development and on to marketing, manufacturing, distribution and customer service. The team we assembled at Intelligent Green Products and Epiphany Shower US brings together a unique blend of product development, business development, marketing, and finance needed to create successful products in today’s rapidly evolving markets.

Replied to RSS is not dead. Subscribing is alive. by Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)

Sinclair Target, writing for Motherboard:

Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was.

This isn’t the first nor the last article to cover the creation of the RSS standard, its rise to relative popularity with Google Reader, and its subsequent fall from popularity.

Colin, I saw this article last week and I agree with your thoughts. Your analysis and the concept of the fear of missing out is a strong one. It’s even more paralyizing when one is following feeds with longer and potentially denser articles instead of short status updates or even bookmarks.

RSS definitely needs a UI makeover. I’ve been enamored of the way that SubToMe has abstracted things to create a one click button typically with a “Follow Me” or “Subscribe” tag on it. It looks a whole lot more like the follow buttons on most social services, but this one can recommend a feed reader or provide a list of potential readers to add the subscription to. Cutting out several layers and putting the subscription into something where it can be immediately read certainly cuts through a lot of the UI problems generally presented to the average person. It would be nice to see more sites support this sort of functionality rather than needing the crufty pages full of XML and pages describing what RSS is, how it works, and how to add a particular site to a reader.

We’ve come a long way, but we still have a way to to continue on.

📺 “Equus Story of the Horse: Origins” | Nature | PBS

Watched "Equus: Story of the Horse" | Nature from PBS
Join anthropologist Dr. Niobe Thompson and equine experts on a two-part adventure around the world and throughout time to discover the origins of the horse.
Passively watching television this evening and this popped up. Very interesting. Might be worth watching the other episodes in this sub-series.

📺 PBS NewsHour – January 16, 2019 | PBS

Watched PBS NewsHour: January 16, 2019 from PBS NewsHour
Wednesday on the NewsHour, Nancy Pelosi asks President Trump to postpone his State of the Union address over security concerns due to the government shutdown. Also: ISIS on the attack in Syria, two mayors share how the shutdown is affecting their cities, how new members of Congress are adapting to Washington, the shutdown’s impact on the EPA, an NBA player fears his country and much more.

📖 Read pages 77-121 of 215 of Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

📖 Read pages 77-121 of Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

Things have been growing nicely and generally organically, but the plant of the baby crying followed by the “let’s go explore downstairs” seems a bit too incredulous to me.

Replied to Indie Communities and Making Your Audience Known by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

It sounds ludicrous now, but back in 2014, when I cofounded Known as a startup, a lot of people were questioning whether a business even needed a website. Pockets of people - for example in the indieweb community, which I enthusiastically joined - were pointing out how short-sighted this was, but it was a minority opinion. There was Facebook and Twitter! Why would you want to have any kind of property that you fully controlled on the internet?

Fast forward to today, and... 

As I read this, there are some underlying ideas that again make me think that newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic outlets should pick up the mantle of social media and help their readers (aka community) by providing them with websites that they can control and use to interact. Many newspapers and other outlets are already building their own CMSes and even licensening them out to other papers, why not take the next step and build a platform that can host and manage websites for individual users? They’ve got most of the infrastructure there already? Why not tack on a few simple things that allow their users to better interact with them on the open web. It solves their ownership issues as well as their reliance on social media silos and could even provide a nice, modest income stream (or even a bonus that comes along with one’s subscription?)

Perhaps Kinja wasn’t a bad idea for a CMS cum commenting system, it just wasn’t open web enough?