There are several reports of the hacked ‘www.iirs-nrsa.gov.in’ website of India’s Institute of Remote Sensing. A report from ‘PC1 News’ indicates that cyber criminals are using the site to distribute malicious code. The report goes into some detail regarding the tools that were used to spread a virus to all visitors, and reminds readers to be certain to have an anti-virus program installed on their machines.

Russia and Nigeria have signed a five-year memorandum of understanding to foster space science cooperation, including remote sensing, meteorology, satellite navigation and planetary studies. The exchange of technical information will include the use of earth observation in areas of agriculture, mineral exploration, water studies and environmental monitoring.

The Australian Federal Police Association is working to understand and define their role in enforcing the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme. Those that fail to adhere to the scheme would be committing a crime against the Commonwealth, and the police investigate and enforce other complicated crimes against the state. According to a story on ABC News, the police are considering remote sensing and other tools to catch violaters.

The Department of Interior announced an initiative to speed the development of utility-scale solar energy development in the western United States by identifying prime Solar Energy Study Areas. The effort identifies two dozen study areas that encompass 670,000 acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The designated tracts will receive funding for environmental studies and a coordinated effort by federal agencies to speed review of industry proposals. The  federal funding comes under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The study areas that are currently being evaluated could generate as much as 100,00 megawatts of solar electricity. These areas are undergoing landscape-scale planning and zoning with environmental impact assessments and resource suitability studies. Maps of these study areas are now available online in PDF format.

As part of the effort, these areas will be removed from mining claims and other actons for two years. This moratorium on other uses will give the BLM time to complete environmental review. Evaluation of these areas is expected to be completed in late 2010.

The Interior Department continues to work with the Western Governors Association to develop renewable energy zones and transmission corridors.

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle conducted an online webinar last week to outline the vision of Web Squared, and to promote the upcoming Fall Web 2.0 Summit. The idea for the webinar was to update the thinking on Web 2.o, and to introduce the idea of Web meets World.

The essence of successful Web applications in the Web 2.0 paradigm was that they harnessed collective intelligence. But, O’Reilly asks, “Is the Web getting more intelligent?” Now with Web Squared, the Web becomes more of a platform for collective action. The location database plays an integral part of this action, and the harnessing of location is a key ingredient to make the Web more intelligent.

O’Reilly emphasized the fact that Web applications will be driven increasingly by mobile sensors connected to cloud databases. Mobile devices, with a sophisticated sense of place, will coordinate our senses and accumulate context. The example of the recently launched Layar augmented reality application plays a big part of the future vision, where sensors drive applications. Connectivity will increasingly lead to real-time interactions, and what O’Reilly calls the “collective mind.”

You can view the full presentation, including Q&A below:

The World Bank’s new Eco² Cities Program aims to balance economic growth and ecological impact in the developing world by changing the way that cities are developed in order to make good use of energy and resources, and to avoid problems with pollution, congestion and the rapid growth of slums.

The problem is a pressing one, as the growth of cities is expected to be dramatic over the coming decades:

“It took the world hundreds of years to build today’s urban space of 400,000 square kilometers of cities. It will take only about another 30 years to build that same amount of urban space in cities of developing countries.”

The first phase of this program recently culminated with the publication of a three-part book that outlines a comprehensive analytical and operational framework. The framework outlines the steps necessary for successful and equitable growth, and was built using the example cities of Curitiba, Brazil, Stockholm, Sweden, and Yokohama, Japan.

There are four guiding principles in the program:

1. ‘A City Based Approach,’ which enables local governments to lead a development process that takes into account their specific circumstances, including their local ecology
2. ‘An Expanded Platform for Collaborative Design and Decision Making’ that accomplishes sustained synergy by coordinating and aligning the actions of key stakeholders
3. ‘A One System Approach’ that enables cities to realize the benefits of integration by planning, designing, and managing the whole urban system
4. ‘An Investment Framework that Values Sustainability and Resiliency’ by incorporating and accounting for life cycle analysis, the value of all capital assets (manufactured, natural, human, and social), and a broader scope of risk assessments in decision making.

The guiding documents promote the use of spatial tools to visualize urban forms, in combination with flow diagrams that illustrate urban metabolism. The report promotes the integration of forms and flows for collaborative decision making with a visual approach that combines the expertise of a large number of stakeholders.

The next phase is to start applying the framework in several cities around the world. Representatives from Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia are meeting in Singapore this week to learn more about the program.

More details about the Eco² Program through can be found in this brochure and this report.

Paul Krugman writes in his column in today’s New York Times that deniers of climate change are performing an act of treason against the planet. In strong words, he outlines the current state of scientific evidence, and the news that the planet is changing much faster than previous worst-case scenarios predicted.

The  American Clean Energy & Security Act passed the House by a narrow margin today (217-205). The legislation aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, would mandate utilities to get 15 percent of their energy from renewables, and introduces a cap-and-trade measure to reduce emissions and fund conservation efforts. The bill now makes its way to the Senate where more compromises may be necessary in order to pass there.

The idea of designing holistically in tune with all economic, social and environmental outcomes is the goal of sustainable development. In order to achieve the vision of holistic design there needs to be an increased awareness of all the interactions that take place between all three of these elements. That’s a tall order to fill, as we continue to unlock new understanding that turns previous insights upside down.

Software provides the means to amass a great deal of information, to uncover relationships with analytical tools, and to constantly adjust our approaches. Where previously we might have had to rewrite the books when we gained new understanding, with digital data and models it’s simply a matter of tweaking our input with new assumptions in order to gain new insights.

Integrated Design

The means to achieve a holistic design lies in the ability of software to bridge the knowledge among different disciplines. The process of pulling together an understanding of the whole from different domain expertise requires a construct of individual work spaces that mesh knowledge seamlessly together for the whole project.

Software aids communication and provides the framework for an incremental project evolution. Some control of the process is needed for a collaborative effort, and software provides the means to guide the process along in a structured and measured fashion.

A strong vision of the whole is aided by software that helps interpret design conflicts and issues with the interface to the natural world. For insight into the interface between structural, electrical and heating/cooling, the conflicts become clear when viewed as a 3D design. 3D viewing of the whole provides an ability to fully explore the design and uncover issues with structure or appearance. For other more subtle interactions that can’t be uncovered with our eyes, such as environmental reactions to materials or siting, an evolution of software to contain machine intelligence will become important.

Engaging Reality

As designs become reality, they often neglect important aspects of their surroundings that aren’t discovered until something is built. With a holistic design approach, the design incorporates information and inputs of the surroundings as the design evolves. Sophisticated models that incorporate environmental inputs such as weather and lighting for all four seasons aid the design process. There are also increasingly intelligent design environments that take a close look at the energy efficiency and costs of the building design.

Sensors have an expanding role to play in helping to manage the building when it’s built, but to also provide a detailed understanding of the site before and during the design process. Sensors have the ability to feed computer models in order to build up a detailed knowledge of site characteristics. They also provide real-time information to input into the model as it evolves or to raise alerts to changing conditions.

Software provides the means to visualize and fuse all the different inputs so that the project fits seamlessly into reality. The complexity of combining all these inputs into a holistic view requires a system approach, where visualization and analytics can be done individually and as a whole.

Ensuring Openness

There are barriers that still need to be overcome in order to achieve the full promise of our digital age. Chief among these is to tackle interoperability that stands in the way between different tool users that can’t interchange their data or models.

An open approach will bring together existing providers and users together with an array of new practitioners, and scientific disciplines. Without software that is open and accessible to new users, the system becomes closed. Software can’t come close to achieving a holistic vision when it cuts off collaboration.

Openness also relates to the need for backward compatibility in our information and models. In order to built up a repository of details about the interaction between the manmade and natural world, it’s necessary to build a long-term framework for the creation of a detailed and easily accessible archive. The archive of information and knowledge becomes a critical element to inform design, with greater understanding achieved through each successive effort.

Software dramatically accelerates our understanding of complex interactions. It also records our knowledge and information so that we can built organically upon our understanding of our complex world, ensuring that future generations can advance their way of life while decreasing impacts on our planet. Without software, and compounding digital data, we wouldn’t have a hope to achieve sustainability.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Department of Transportation (DOT) have banded together on an Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The goal of this initiative is to provide integrated planning and investment for smart growth.

This effort defines a set of “livability principles” that can be applied to all future projects. These principles include a variety of transportation choices, affordable housing, economic competitiveness, support for existing communities, encouraging locally generated renewable energy, and valuing communities and neighborhoods. The partnership plans to develop livability measures, information platforms and analytic tools that will evaluate a community’s progress toward their goals, as well as a means to provide incentives for communities that implement these new government guidelines.

A wealth of resources, including the partnership agreement, and a more detailed outline of livability principles can be found online here.