Cool stuff

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world (music, television, books, film, software, the worldwide web, EVERYTHING)

Biography

Brewster Kahle's stated goal is "Universal access to all knowledge," and his catalog of inventions and institutions created for this purpose read like a Web's Greatest Hits list. In 1982 he helped start Thinking Machines, a supercomputer company specializing in text searching, and would go on to invent the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS, whose customers included the New York Times and the United States Senate.

But most notably, perhaps, Kahle is founder and director of the Internet Archive, a free service which steadfastly archives World Wide Web documents, even as they are plowed over by breakneck trends in commerce, culture and politics. (On his Wayback Machine, you can view pages as they appeared in web antiquity -- say, Yahoo! in 1996.) As a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he works to keep such information free and reachable.

Kahle is a key supporter of the Open Content Alliance and has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife operate a nonprofit organization, the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which funds the Internet Archive.

"Brewster is one of those guys who has been successful in spite of the fact that he has never been after that kind of success. He's been pushing protocols for the benefit of humanity."

Kip Parent, on Edge.org

Ann Cooper: Reinventing the school lunch

Biography

Ann Cooper has a frontline view of the daily battle to keep kids healthy -- and of the enemy, the processed-foods industries that, it sometimes seems, want to wrap every single thing that children eat in a fried coating and then a plastic bag. As the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley (California) Unified School District, she's an outspoken activist for serving fresh, sustainable food to kids. Her lively website, LunchLessons.org, rounds up recipes, links, and resources for food activism.

Cooper's influential program in Berkeley involves kids in every stage of the food they eat, from growing to disposing of it. And along the way, eating some delicious cafeteria lunches.
She's the author of several books, including Bitter Harvest, an examination of the food chain, and her latest, Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.