Alexis C. Madrigal

A new video shows a specialized Skycrane helicopter lifting a transmission-line tower into place near Roosevelt, Washington. Released by the Department of Energy on its new blog, the work is Big Engineering fun at its best.

But it also shows how difficult it is to lay new miles of transmission. This particular line, the McNary-John Day, will allow hundreds of megawatts of wind power to get to the rest of the state. To lay even thirty miles of line takes months of work and substantial amounts of money. And to really tap the nation's wind resources, it's going to take a lot more than a few miles here of new high-voltage transmission lines here and there.

"[A]nalysis on transmission found that the cost per mile for transmission typically falls between $1.5 to $2.0 million per mile--lines that run underwater or underground can cost significantly more," a Senate Democratic Policy Committee report found. "To simply keep up with demand between 2010 and 2030, nationwide transmission investment will need to reach $300 billion. To provide 20 percent of our nation's electricity from wind, it is estimated that $60 billion in transmission will be needed between now and 2030."

That's exactly the kind of infrastructure investment that private companies are not likely to make and that our government hadn't in recent decades. Investment in transmission infrastructure bottomed in 1998 at about $3 billion a year.

You've probably heard of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which allows artists and other creative people to raise small amounts of money from a big group of people to execute their projects.

A new site, FundScience, launched to provide a similar funding model for scientific projects last week. Now, interested parties can directly back projects, rather than sending money off to some foundation for eventual distribution to researchers. Beyond providing scientists with a (small, new) revenue stream, the site's founders are hoping to generate greater public interest in science by providing people with greater access to the process.

"The idea behind FundScience is two-fold, says David Vitrant, the organization's executive director: providing a novel system of support for young researchers with innovative ideas, and engaging the public more directly in science," Nature's Alla Katsnelson reported. "Sure, people who want to support cancer research can make a donation to a foundation, but that money disappears into a black hole, and the donor remains completely disconnected from the science that money supports."

FundScience's vetting process is a lot more rigorous than Kickstarter's. Researchers have to be connected through a university and the grant administered in standard ways. The maximum amount of funding is $50,000 (while most scientific projects cost much more).

Perhaps for these reasons, you can only fund three projects at the moment. The proposals seeking support involve the genomics of pneumococcus, modeling a neural transporter, and recording insect neural impulses. This is real science, so it's not exactly whiz-bang stuff.

The crowdfunding model seems like a natural fit with the burgeoning Open Science movement, which attempts to put the tools and methods of science (particularly biology) in the people's hands.

Via @NoahG

You may not have noticed, but over the last few years, web and application designers rounded your corners. Buttons and app icons lost hard edges, and it seemed fine and refined. Everything started to look like this:

Now, the Data Mining blog points out that the clean lines of the square are coming back. Trendsetting firm, Stamen Design, has gone square-crazy (see below). So has the BBC.

Design crazes certainly do come and go, but be on the lookout for this one. One subtext is that it may become a bit of an Apple-Microsoft battle. The iPhone has round cornered icons; the new Windows 7 operating system has gone square.

This move from clean lines to rounded ones and back again reminds me of when beveling your text was all the rage in the mid-90s. The faux-3D effect was sort of the faux-marble countertop of the web world, especially if you dropped a shadow on it.

In some previous phase, perhaps to reconnect with my Latin roots, I signed up for a tango class. I never actually went, but that moment of inspiration landed me on Portland dance teacher Clay Nelson's email list.

For years, I idly meant to get off of the e-mail list: I don't tango and I don't live in Portland, and even if I did, I don't think I would need regular updates about the union of that Venn diagram.

But I never quite hit the unsubscribe link. This morning, my laziness and/or faith have been rewarded. Nelson's latest missive arrived with the subject: "Using an iPhone to measure your tango walk." In it, he describes his recently completed paper on using the device's accelerometers to measure the smoothness of one's tango walk. That, in turn, is a good proxy for dance skill, Nelson argues.

"Generally speaking, a smoother walk will result in lower acceleration readings, and, although of a more subjective nature, there also appears to be a correlation in the smoothness of a person's walk (low acceleration readings) and the experience and proficiency of the dancer," he wrote.

Turns out Nelson got a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics at the University of Illinois, so the accompanying paper details his methodology [pdf] and app choice (AccelGraph) with generous helpings of charts and descriptions. Here's one:

"Note that the lines start fairly smooth as the subject stands still for the first 4 counts. After this smooth part, the walking motion is easily detected on the graph. Note also that the average 'Up & Down' motion is displaced in the negative direction by a magnitude of approximately 1.0," Nelson explained. "This is a result of gravity pulling in the downward direction. Note also that the 'Side to Side' and 'Start & Stop' motion do not average around zero as they should. This is because the iPhone was not held in a perfectly vertically aligned position. Thus there is a small component of the gravity vector acting in these other two directions."

A good Sunday morning reminder that if you put tools in people's hands, they'll do things with them you could never have anticipated.

The X-Prize Foundation and Wendy Schmidt, venture capitalist and wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, announced a $1.4 million contest for new oil cleanup tech yesterday.

The one-year contest will culminate next year in a competition to determine which team can best recover oil from the surface of the ocean.

It's too early to know if the contest will yield interesting results, but it may be a sign that the X-Prize Foundation itself is shifting away from the long-term, incredibly ambitious goals it had set for previous prizes. At the very least, the organization will have a more diverse portfolio of contests.

The X-Prize Foundation rose to prominence on the back of the Ansari X Prize, which was awarded to aerospace designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen for building a spacecraft that could carry three people 100 kilometers up twice in two weeks. While it drew attention because it signaled a new beginning for private space exploration, what really got people excited was this: the prize purse was $10 million but competing teams spent $100 million. Prizes, it seemed, could provide (10x!) leverage to get more R&D done for less money.

But that Ansari win was back in 2004. Since then, a host of prizes have been launched in genetics, fuel efficiency, and landing a robot on the moon. But Ansari-level successes haven't come easily. Many of the contests have been going on for years without major milestones of progress.

The oil spill contest is being structured differently. The timeline is shorter, purse smaller, and goals more limited. For other X Prizes, the goals are technical and based on doing something out in the world, not on just being the best of the competitions. In this case, there will be a winner next year, no matter what, because it's about being relatively better, not hitting an absolute goal.

Will the new structure bring about the "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" that are the group's mission? Who knows, but at least we'll find out quickly.

General awareness of the blogging platform Tumblr is rising out there among the Internet masses. Founded in New York, the service's well-designed templates, ease-of-use, and excellent browser bookmarklet made it a favorite for people looking for something more than Twitter but less than a blog.

But for tech-savvy media outlets, it has not been exactly clear *what* to use Tumblr for. The most successful effort (in my humble opinion) was created by former Newsweek employee Mark Coatney, who then promptly got hired by Tumblr itself. (The New Yorker tumblr is a solid runner up.)

So, leave it to ProPublica, an old-school investigative journalism non-profit to come up with the best use of Tumblr I've seen yet. It launched Officials Say the Darndest Things today, which presents funny or telling quotes by public figures. Here's a selection:

• Obama on his iPod: "I've got Jay-Z on there. I've got Frank Sinatra on there. I've got Maria Callas on there... I do not have Justin Bieber on there."
• Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on the White House reporters: "You TV guys all look shiny together."
• Former BP chief Tony Hayward: "I became a villain for doing the right thing."

What ProPublica has done here is special. I think they are showing media companies how Tumblr should be done. Here are the five things that make it great:

• It's not duplicative. This Tumblr is not what ProPublica does, but it is what ProPublica is. Their primary business is long-form journalism, but they are (more generally) watchdogs of the powerful. Their Tumblr fits in beautifully with their mission.
• It's native to the platform. The best Tumblrs are focused and immediately graspable, even if they are silly, like windbreakernoshirt.tumblr.com. Officials Say the Darndest Things feels like something some random user would just do, but that ProPublica might do best.
  
• It's low-effort. All they have to do is post a few quotes collected from around the office each day. It's practically a collective bulletin board.
• It's interactive. Users can submit their own quotes, which also reduces the amount of effort required to run the site if it gains traction.
• It's viral. The quotes are short and telling, made for easy reblogging Once they hit the Tumblr ecosystem's important nodes, I have no doubt they'll diffuse quickly through the system.

Who else is doing a good job? I'd love to hear about other media outfits who've figured out how to execute on the platform. For now, hats off to the non-profit. Thanks for showing us how it's done.

Update: My apologies to Press Secretary Gibbs for initially tagging him Joe. Childhood Redskins fandom reared its ugly head.

One of the last refuges from electromagnetic traffic in New York is about to be overrun.

The city's 277 subway stations will get wireless and cellular phone access over the next several years courtesy of Transit Wireless, a group of companies anchored by new partner Broadcast Australia, which built a similar system for Hong Kong. They'll charge phone networks to use their networks, but there's no word on what kind of WiFi service they'll offer. Gothamist notes that you'll probably get reception in most tunnels between stations.

Transit Wireless estimates the project will cost $200 million to complete, not including the $46 million that New York's transit authorities will receive under the deal. The company was originally awarded the contract to wire up the subway stations three years ago, but could never actually manage to fund its work, Bloomberg reports. Broadcast Australia now has a majority stake in the enterprise and is pushing ahead.

The lucky stations slated to get service first at 14th Street at Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Avenues and at 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, a spokesman for New York City Transit told Bloomberg.

In a fascinating analysis of the release of the Afghanistan war logs, George Mason policy wonk Janine Wedel and journalist Linda Keenan argue that when traditional institutions break down, a new breed of power broker -- exemplified by WikiLeaks -- takes over.

"WikiLeaks has upended the old-fashioned venues of investigative journalism and watchdog organizations," they argue at the Huffington Post. "While it is surely good that WikiLeaks has emerged as a counterweight -- a tool for making the powerful squirm -- WikiLeaks has enormous power itself, the kind of unaccountable power that its founder decries."

Digital technologies enable the players to act effectively without centralization or bureaucracy, which makes them unresponsive to "traditional means of accountability." This is the dark side of WikiLeaks acting as the first "stateless news organization."

"Bureaucracy gets pushed aside by so-called "adhocracy," executive power/one-man shows flourish, with institutional checks and balances flouted," they write (emphasis added). "These are some of the signature developments of the shadow elite era, and WikiLeaks is clearly a creature of that era.

A rare cross between a donkey and zebra was born last week at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Georgia. The new baby "zedonk" is the latest in short line of the hybrids.

"Donkeys and zebras don't usually mate, but zedonks turn up occasionally. In 2005, a zebra gave birth to a zedonk in Barbados, according to the news website Science Daily," the AP reports. "And in the 1970s, three zedonks were born at a European zoo to a donkey mother, according to the website of Britain's Colchester Zoo."

Now, the zedonk can finally take its place in the menagerie of weird hybrid animals like ligers, wholphins, and camas (camel-llama mixes), all testaments to the power of "love" to transcend all obstacles, even speciation.

At the top of this page, you see a flickr image by Tim Ellis of one of those British zedonks.

Via @Wired