Who's acting to combat global warming?
The Background
The climate is changing, and we’re holding the bag. Simply put, nearly every action we take on the average day, from cooking eggs for breakfast, to watching “Project Runway” after dinner, relies on electricity created by burning carbon-rich coal or oil. Burning these fossil fuels releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. Because of all this frenetic burning of fuel that’s taken place since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased to the point that the planet’s overall surface temperature is rising. Needless to say, this is disrupting the delicate conditions that support reasonably predictable conditions for life on Earth.
Source: http://globalwarming.change.org/about/primer
The Mashup
(what's a mashup?)
In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data or functionality from two or more sources into a single integrated application. In this mashup, news data from RSS feeds is combined with language processing algorithms to present an interesting visualization of the news.
In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data or functionality from two or more sources into a single integrated application. In this mashup, news data from RSS feeds is combined with language processing algorithms to present an interesting visualization of the news.
Say Hello to Code That Can Read—and Feel. The mashup below is the result of applying language processing algorithms to news articles about MDGs. The AI tries to divine the names of people mentioned in the article as well as the sentiment (positive or negative) of the speaker in relation to that person.
Explore. The robots behind this website check to see if there is more information on the web about each person they find. If you’re curious about someone, take advantage of this by waving your mouse over their name and following any one of the links that show up.
Empathize. If an author voices particularly strong sentiment in a sentence, an icon is added next to the sentence to indicate that feeling. Phrases with hearts are usually about people doing good, and phrases with condescending frowns usually signal more controversial topics.
Get Inspired. Everyone mentioned in the articles below is in some way related to the MDGs. However, the algorithms powering this mashup are still not perfect, so we hope you’ll laugh along at the occasional mishap as you explore. While it’s not perfect, we hope you can draw inspiration from the mashup by meeting new people from across the world.
