SAN JOSE, Calif. — California’s colleges are facing a funding crisis, so universities are turning to massive open online education (dubbed “MOOCs”) to bolster pass rates and help students graduate on time.

At a press conference today, San Jose State University announced it would be expanding its online course offerings and opening a facility for adaptive and blended learning. This new center will train faculty members at the 11 participating California State University campuses.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has been pushing state universities to move more aggressively into online education. He first approached San Jose State University to come up with a technological solution to many of its problems, including the large and oversubscribed introductory courses.

But with Gov. Brown on a trade mission in China, it was another prominent figure in state politics who spoke today at San Jose State. California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) serves on the boards of University of California and CSU, and he is also a keen supporter of online courses.

“We need to learn to compete with limited resources,” Newsom said. “We have to provide more access.”

With all the initial hype around MOOCs, it’s not often we see real results. However, one of the first trials at San Jose State has proven promising.

San Jose State University’s campus.

In the fall, professor Khosrow Ghadiri used a blended learning model for his introduction to circuits analysis course. The class received instruction from an online video component — an MIT course via EdX‘s website – which students could complete at home, coupled with in-class problem solving and discussion with Ghadari.

Although the numbers of students were small, the pass rate in the blended class was 91 percent, far higher than the usual 55 percent.

Michelle Rhee-Weise, an education researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute, refers to this trial an example of “sustaining innovation,” meaning that it’s a “palatable or less controversial step.”

“It focuses on blended learning techniques and not on moving an entire campus experience online,” said Rhee-Weise. The circuits course will now be offered to 11 other CSU schools.

San Jose State first announced its partnership with edX in October. Edx is a nonprofit founded by MIT and Harvard that has subsequently grown to 12 university partners. Formed in 2011, it is one of the pioneers of MOOCs, and competes with Coursera and Udacity.

Education technology startup Udacity also offers San Jose State students access to its online video courses, the New York Times reports. The pilot program from Udacity includes a remedial algebra course, a college-level algebra course and introductory statistics.

“Our work is about trying many new approaches, identifying what works and pushing forward a national conversation on effective ways to infuse the opportunities offered by technology into the way we teach and learn,” San Jose State President Mohammad Qayoumi said. According to Qayoumi, the school’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley makes it a natural fit to test many of the new online education tools.

This San Jose State expansion follows a bill, which was under consideration in the California State Senate in March, and would force California’s universities and colleges to give credit for online courses. The bill was proposed to tackle the problem of students failing to graduate because they couldn’t get a seat in a required course.

Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) said the state’s 112 community colleges each had an average of 7,000 enrolled students who were on waiting lists, and at the 420,000-student, 23-campus California State University, only 16 percent of students graduate within four years.

Steinberg and others view MOOCs as a potential solution; students can enroll in an online course, rather than wait until a spot opens up in an oversubscribed — but required — introductory course.

San Jose State claims the expansion of the partnership will benefit thousands of students. The university hopes it will pave the way for community colleges and universities to examine new styles of learning.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc/campus image via San Jose State University

Facebook’s lackluster IPO didn’t just burn Facebook and its investors, it burned California as well.

California Governor Jerry Brown expected his state to pull in $1.9 billion from the Facebook IPO, but revised estimates cut that number by a third to $1.3 billion, reports The Wall Street Journal.

While Facebook launched at $48 a share, the stock dropped off a cliff almost immediately afterwards. That sluggish performance meant lower earnings for the company’s investors, including holders of restricted stock. This, in turn, meant less tax revenue for California.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, IPOs are a big, big deal for California, which gets a lot of its revenue from taxes on capital gains on assets like stocks.

Fortunately for the state, Facebook’s stock has recovered somewhat in recent weeks, which means that there’s not much preventing California from revising its revenue estimates once again to reflect the positive developments.

As of the first of the year, it is officially illegal to request a Facebook password when interviewing prospective employees in California. A pair of bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September took effect on Tuesday.

Brown signed the Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which “prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords,” as Brown said on his Facebook page. Earlier in 2012, people began calling out interviewers and institutions for asking for Facebook passwords as part of the review process. The process of screening a prospective student’s or employee’s social media accounts to decide whether or not they’d be a good addition to the institution is not a new one. But at least with this process, people felt as if their private information was still sacred.

When employers and universities request passwords, however, people undoubtedly feel as if saying no is a red flag and hand over the credentials.

As Wired notes, six states total have adopted similar legislation, as there isn’t federal regulation banning the password-requesting process yet. The states that join California include Illinois, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and New Jersey.

At the time, Facebook quickly responded saying that it did not approve of employers asking for social-media passwords and noted that people agree in the terms of service not to give out that information.

“As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job. And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job,” said Facebook chief privacy officer, policy Erin Egan in a blog post. “That’s why we’ve made it a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.”

via Wired; Jerry Brown image via Jerry Brown 2010/Flickr

Two new privacy-focused bills has been signed into law in California that prohibit employers and universities from asking for social media usernames and passwords from employees, students, and potential hires.

We first heard about the unsettling trend in March where recruiters would ask for an applicants’ Facebook login credentials. Facebook immediately denounced the practice and the U.S. and U.K. governments said they’d look into it. While the instances of this level of social media snooping appear to be rare, California took the extra step to say “no more” with a new law.

“Today I am signing Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords,” Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown wrote on his Facebook page. “California pioneered the social media revolution. These laws protect Californians from unwarranted invasions of their social media accounts.”

Calif. State Senator Leland Yee, a sponsor of SB 1349, said in an interview in May that he believed this practice could become more common because the tough job market. Employers have the upper hand over potential hires.

“You can imagine that people are desperate for jobs,” Yee said at the time. “They have to make ends meet, and when there are no prospects of a job or income coming in, then people are put in these kind of difficult positions and sometimes they should not. They know they should not, but then, unfortunately, they do turn that information over.”

Assemblymember Nora Campos, who wrote AB 1844, had previously described the bill as a “preemptive measure” that will give guidelines to employers and universities on how to go about asking for information related to social networks.

The federal government could pursue what California did next. In May, several Democratic senators introduced a bill called the Password Protection Act Of 2012. If passed, it would enhance current laws “to prohibit employers from compelling or coercing employees into providing access to their private accounts.”

Woman at work computer photo via Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock

California just added its name to the list of states allowing driverless cars to operate on public roads — and inadvertently made David Hasselhoff’s work on Knight Rider a bit more relevant to future generations.

Governor Jerry Brown signed bill SB1298 into law today, thus adding automated vehicles to the state’s safety standards and permissions. This is, of course, wonderful news for tech giant and California native Google, which has been developing its own driverless car for the past few years. Brown even visited Google headquarters to sign the proper documents.

California joins Nevada as the second state to allow driverless vehicles on the road. Under the new law, a person is still required to sit behind the wheel while driving the car in case the automated technology fails to function. (Nevada’s law isn’t as strict.)

The state did post a video of Brown’s visit to Google HQ  online earlier, complete with Google CEO Sergey Brin on a podium wearing some slick Google Glasses. However, that video is now marked private for some reason. (My guess is that it’ll get fixed soon-ish.)

If it seems like it might be getting tougher to hire employees in the tech sector, where there’s always a war for the best talent, this could explain why.

The nine-county Bay Area region — which includes San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and surrounding cities — produced its best one-month job growth since September 2011. It was buoyed by tech jobs and growth in the East Bay, Michael Bernick, a research fellow with the Milken Institute, told the San Jose Mercury News. He said that tech firms, social media companies, and internet commerce companies are leading the recovery.

The East Bay (Oakland) added 7,400 jobs, while the South Bay (San Jose) added 4,000 and the San Francisco-San Mateo area added 6,100, according to the California Employment Development Department. Beacon Economics said a quarter of the gains were due to tech.

The comeback in June compared to weakness in May, when only 3,800 jobs were added, and April, when the region grew by 2,400 jobs. That was sharply slower than in the winter and fall.

California itself added 38,300 jobs last month, and the Bay Area accounted for 44 percent of the job gains. It was also 21 percent of the job gains for the entire nation. Statewide, the unemployment rate is 10.7 percent, compared with 8.5 percent in the Bay Area. That is down slightly from 8.6 percent in May in the Bay Area.

[Image credit: 1008racing]

California’s electric-car advocates are often “true believers,” and they can be single-minded in the pursuit of what they believe is right.

But the nuts-and-bolts experience they’ve gained during the state’s 15 years of electric-car use can be invaluable–which is why policy-makers and car companies take their views seriously.

Usually.

Which brings us to the strange case of California Assembly Bill 475, and why it has upset advocates so much that they want it vetoed or completely rewritten.

AB 475 is a bill, backed by General Motors [NYSE:GM], to allow Chevrolet Volts (and other plug-in cars with engines too) to use certain charging stations legally.

Plug-in cars, with engines too

Public charging stations have existed in California since the first wave of electric cars started to arrive in 1996. In 2002, a law was passed that restricted parking in certain “EV spaces” to Zero-Emission Vehicles.

About 800 electric-car owners have paid the state $18 for a “Zero Emission Vehicle” sticker that marks their car as authorized to park in these spaces. But not all charging-station spaces in California require electric cars to display the stickers, though some do–no one seems to know how many.

California Zero-Emission Vehicle parking permit, from DanielBusby.com

Because they didn’t exist at the time, the 2002 law said nothing about plug-in hybrids (e.g. the 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid) or range-extended electric cars (e.g. the Chevy Volt).

These cars have plugs, but also gasoline engines, so they’re not zero-emission vehicles. So they can’t get the ZEV sticker, and hence are illegal at charging stations that require a sticker to use.

Drafted by Betsy Butler, staff, GM

The bill that became AB 475 started out by adding language to make this new type of plug-ins eligible for the stickers.

The largest number of plug-in hybrids today are Volts, leading GM to assist the staff for sponsor Assemblymember Betsy Butler in drafting the bill. The company did so, it says, at the request of Volt owners who wanted legal access to chargers.

A subsequent draft of the bill eliminated the need for electric-car owners to get the sticker. At that point, Plug-In America and other advocates got involved to address several concerns about the bill’s new language.

GM: We’ll work with you

GM said it would work with the advocates, recounted advocate Chelsea Sexton, to refine the new draft so it addressed their concerns. After months of meetings and revisions, the bill was passed by the Senate on August 18. Butler introduced it in the Assembly on Friday, August 19, where it was passed on Monday, August 22.

But the final bill contained none of the revisions urged by advocates. Instead, it used the same wording that had brought Plug-In America and others into the process in the first place.

Sacramento Electric Vehicle Gathering, June 18, 2011

California Governor Jerry Brown has until October 9 to sign or veto the bill. If he does neither, it passes into law.

Plugged in isn’t always charging

The final wording requires any vehicle parked at a charging-station space to be “connected for charging purposes,” i.e. plugged in. Or as GM representative Shad Balch put it, “Your charging cord is your parking permit.”

Balch stressed that GM sees the overall goal of AB 475 as ensuring spaces with charging stations are occupied only by vehicles “using the space as intended–to charge” and to ensure that it does not in any way simply provide a better, “preferential parking” space for any random electric car.

But whether a car is charging is different from whether it’s plugged in. If that little green light on a Prius Plug-In or Volt dash is green, it’s done charging, whether or not the plug is still inserted into the socket. If it’s orange, the car is still charging.

Unfortunately, the requirement that a parked electric car be plugged in at all times makes illegal a practice called “charger sharing,” which Sexton and others say has worked well for 15 years now.

Share with your friends, kids

Here’s the problem: Suppose you’re driving an electric car, you want to recharge while you shop, so you pull in next to a plug-in vehicle already hooked up to a public charger.

You can see at a glance whether it’s done charging. Let’s say the light on top of the dash is green, meaning the car has fully recharged. And, let’s say the owner left a sign on the dash–as electric-car drivers may do–saying, “If my car is done charging, you can unplug it IF you need to charge.”

So you unplug the Volt, close its charger door, and plug the cord into your own car to start recharging. It’s called “charger sharing.” Simple enough, right?

Under the new law, Sexton points out, that would mean the first guy’s car could be towed away, because he would now be illegally parked.

You couldn’t get ticketed for unplugging. At least, not yet: GM has said unplugging an electric car is “tampering” and should be viewed as vandalism–like smashing car windows or slashing tires–that carries criminal penalties.

Doing the right thing gets harder

The net effect is to reduce access to charging stations, advocates say. And they base their claims on 15 years of experience: If every electric car at a charging spot must be plugged in, so-called “charging” could come to take as long as the owner needs to spend doing whatever she planned to do while the car was parked.

Ask yourself: Which is easier, leaving a sign saying “unplug me if I’ve finished,” or interrupting your business to walk out to your car, unplug it, and move it to a different space further away just as soon as it notifies you it’s charged up?

Precluding this additional access to a charging station would seem to ill-serve all plug-in drivers, including the Chevrolet Volt owners whose interests GM says it’s representing.

Scenes from dedication of electric-car charging station at Creekside Inn, Palo Alto, CA

She said, he said

Yet when Plug-In America raised alarms about the loss of sharing, Sexton says, the office of sponsor Assemblymember Betsy Butler told the group, “General Motors didn’t want changes.”

GM says that while it recognizes that advocates had concerns, it didn’t see them as critical–so when the Assemblymember reached out, the company said it was fine with the bill as written.

Advocates: Kill the bill

Electric-car advocates are now so upset that they now either want AB 475 killed altogether, or to revert to the original language that added plug-in hybrids to the list of vehicles eligible for a sticker. A Plug-In America action alert has, the group says, generated hundreds of letters to Governor Brown’s office urging that he veto the bill as written.

A letter sent by Plug-In America to Assemblymember Butler 10 days ago says, in part:

Plug In America enthusiastically originally endorsed AB 475 at introduction (February 15, 2011), which would have simply added plug-in hybrids to an existing EV parking law. Unfortunately, the current amendments to AB 475 will actually make it more difficult for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids to share charging infrastructure.

We now oppose this bill because it will hurt the consumers who it was designed to help and will not accomplish its stated goal. This, in turn, could reduce the demand for the next generation of clean efficient vehicles which run on clean domestic electricity.

GM: No backing down

GM is sticking energetically to its guns.

2011 Chevrolet Volt test drive, Michigan, October 2010

Shad Balch, who works with Volt owners in California and is GM’s front-line representative both to the broader electric-car community, has written and posted numerous approving comments on AB 475.

One can be found on Volt portal MyChevroletVolt; it’s worth reading for the countervailing comments from advocate Mark Larsen and others.

About AB 475, Balch says confidently, “This is the best public policy.” In a lengthy interview with GreenCarReports, he made other points:

• It is an entirely voluntary protocol, so any individual parking lots, municipalities, and others are free to adopt its provisions or not
• Even if lots do adopt it, localities can enact their own laws to override it–which could maintain charger sharing where it’s an established community protocol

But asked if he thought this was a good model for other states to adopt, Balch said it would be “a good start.”

Bad blood like EV1 days

Balch said that GM had not engaged other automakers–like Nissan, Tesla, Fisker, or Toyota–in discussions over the language of the draft bill, nor was he aware of any participants from other makers present at any discussions.

But since advocates called for a rethink, bad blood has boiled up between GM and the advocacy community, to a degree not seen since GM took back and crushed its EV1 electric cars starting in November 2003.

As AutoblogGreen notes: “The funny thing is, one of Chevrolet’s slogans is ‘It’s more than a car, it’s a community.’ Hmm.”

The difference could be based on outlook: GM seems to have a much darker (or less idealistic) view of how its customers and other electric-car drivers will behave than do advocates.

“Less altruistic” electric-car buyers

Rob Peterson, who works in GM Communications, wrote on a Facebook group for Volt owners:

Today, the EV community is filled with well-intended owners/advocates who are pushing for a faster adoption of electric vehicles, but this community will soon grow to include others who drive electric cars for less altruistic reasons.

You’re already seeing dissension among the troops, as owners of pure EVs are pushing to have Volts excluded from public charging as they believe either their EV miles have inherently more “goodness” than those of a Volt or they have specific [knowledge] to understand how much liquid fuel a charging Volt has on board.

Electric vehicles are coming, and we need to be prepared for tens of thousands of electric-car, extended-range electric, and plug-in hybrid owners–some who may not have the same values that those of us in the community share today.

GM’s dark fears seem to envision a scenario in which drivers of battery-electric vehicles (like the Leaf) feel free to unplug plug-in hybrids (like the Volt) from charging stations, rationalizing that, “They have an engine to get them home, whereas I’ll be stranded if I can’t charge.”

Under that scenario, Volt owners consistently lose–which would explain why GM wants unplugging anyone’s car, ever, to become illegal.

2011 Chevrolet Volt being recharged via a plug.

Sexton points out that there’s absolutely no indication that this has happened to date, or that it will happen in the future. “There’s no reason to believe the vehicle population will ever outgrow the driver population’s ability to behave considerately,” she said. “GM’s entire point of view is based on a fallacy.”

And she noted the plug-in vehicle population will grow slowly as a proportion of the overall vehicle pool–slowly enough to let issues be resolved if they arise.

Why did it get so ugly?

But the dispute has gotten surprisingly ugly. In comments on Sexton’s first blog post and in concurrent Twitter discussions, Balch said advocates’ concerns are “misguided” and an attempt at “spreading misinformation,” among other characterizations.

The tone of the discourse seems doubly odd given that GM invited Sexton to be part of its first Volt Advisory Board, followed by an amusing sequence of articles she wrote about pretending to “hide” her Volt to prevent the company from taking it back.

Just six months ago, that got her slammed by some advocates as “in GM’s pocket.” My, how times change. For the record, Sexton chuckles, she has less vested interest than most of the other parties–she doesn’t own a plug-in vehicle.

But to Plug-In America and other advocates, the question has expanded beyond the bill’s language to include: Why is General Motors fighting for it so fiercely?

The company has shad some success after three years of wooing electric-car advocates bitter over its crushing of EV1s. Balch admitted that engaging with electric-car advocates is a primary part of his communications role.

Unclear what’s to be gained

But battle-scarred advocates say GM is reverting to type–notwithstanding its bankruptcy, restructuring, new management, and the launch of a plug-in vehicle. “The current stonewalling and refusal to engage … most closely resembles the EV1 standoff,” said a frustrated Sexton.

Why that has happened remains very unclear.

When asked why GM is fighting the advocates so strongly, Balch simply reiterated, “We have a good public policy, and we’re standing behind it.”

GM out on a limb?

But it’s possible the carmaker has gone out on a limb. GM may be the only electric-car maker that supports AB 475 as now written.

Nissan Leaf spokesperson Ryan Reynolds recharges a Leaf.

While Nissan’s government affairs representative is away on vacation this week, Nissan said she had already expressed its concerns to Governor Brown’s office. The company, said Katherine Zachary, is “looking to fully understand the considerations and nuances of the bill.”

And Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] has expressed its own concerns with the bill to the governor’s office as well.

New draft altogether?

On Wednesday, Plug-In America, Sexton, and others met with Governor Brown’s staff and were asked to draft an amended version of the law that would address their objections. They did so, and have submitted it for consideration.

We’ll keep you posted on what happens with AB 475.

And, tell us, what do you think: Should it always be illegal to unplug an electric car at a public charging station? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.

This article by John Voelcker originally appeared on GreenCarReports.com, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners.

In this past quarter, Amazon’s net sales increased 51 percent to $9.91 billion compared year-over-year with $6.57 billion in Q2 of 2010.

In the earnings call, chief financial officer Tom Szkutak supported the increase by saying, “The growth rate you see in Q2 really stems from investments we’ve made over a long period of time. These are investments that we’ve made in the past several quarters.”

Szkutak used Amazon’s Kindle as an example of one of those investments.

Kindle sales swelled compared to Amazon’s first quarter (although, as in the past, the company would not provide exact sales numbers for the Kindle). The Kindle 3G with Special Offers is Amazon’s best selling Kindle device. The product costs $139 and includes a limited amount of advertising. Amazon also recently announced textbook rentals would be available on the Kindle.

“We’re investing in the conversion from physical to digital,” said Szkutak. Amazon already has a number of digital media offerings through its Kindle products and Amazon Prime.

Prime customers can now stream CBS television shows in their browsers without extra cost. The addition of CBS’s digital library brings Prime’s watch-instantly offerings from 2,000 episodes to 8,000. Amazon Instant Video customers will gain access to the library this summer.

The company denied to comment on its rumored plans to produce a tablet in the future.

On the international front, sales were also up 51 percent this quarter, reaching $4.51 billion. Amazon is particularly interested in growing its business in China.

“We’re very pleased with our business in China, it’s growing very fast,” said Szkutak. “But we think it’s a very interesting long-term opportunity.”

Currently, the UK, Germany, Japan, France, China and Italy make up Amazon’s international reach.

At home in the U.S., Amazon dealt with affiliate sales tax issues during quarter two, culminating in its controversial decision to cut off California-based affiliates because of the company’s dispute with that state over paying sales tax. When asked about Amazon’s actions, Szkutak provided the blanket statement, “We think in the U.S. the federal solution is the right way to solve this.”

Amazon expects to see third quarter net income to sit between $10.3 billion and $11.1 billion. The company did not provide guidance beyond the third quarter.

Amazon is by far the largest online retailer with more than $34 billion in annual sales. Until now, Amazon and other digital retailers have had a significant advantage over local stores because it doesn’t have to charge sales tax in any state where it doesn’t have a substantial corporate presence.

In an e-mail to its California affiliates, Amazon said it opposed the bill because it is “unconstitutional and counterproductive.” Amazon further asserts that the bill is supported by big-box retailers that are out to harm their competitors.

California introduced the law, which requires Amazon and its affiliates to pay sales taxes, in the wake of a staggering budget deficit and amid hopes the online sales tax could help narrow the gap. In 2008, Amazon axed its affiliate programs in New York, North Carolina, Hawaii, and Rhode Island after those states added online sales taxes. Last year, Amazon cut off Colorado for the same reasons.

Other states are still fighting with Amazon on this issue as well. Texas, for example, sent Amazon a $269 million invoice on four years of unpaid taxes in late 2010.

What do you think of Amazon’s move? Do you think Amazon should continue to not have to issue sales taxes?

Twitter

The company appears to have more than 175 million users, has sent over 25 billion tweets, and 100 million accounts added in 2010, according to statistics from Royal Pingdom. What do these numbers have to do with moving headquarters? Twitter is growing and with more than 300 employees it may be looking for more room.

Twitter moved to its current location at 795 Folsom St., Suite 600 in San Francisco a little over a year ago and, according to the New York Times, it expanded from the sixth floor to the third floor in May. The article goes on to quote Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, as he predicted that Twitter will probably outgrow its 62,000 square feet around the spring of 2011 and need to take over new space in the building or move elsewhere.

The rumor is that the company may take over a 200,000 square feet Walmart.com complex on Sierra Point (pictured above) in Brisbane (just south of San Francisco).  While Walmart.com’s online operations are still on premise, it plans to move later this year, which may match up to Costolo’s prediction of a move in the spring.

Twitter, founded in 2006, has recently raised $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation. The latest round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

California’s electric car rebates could run out — The state fund that pays $5,000 rebate California offers for zero-emission cars is currently funded with $8 million, enough to pay out 1,600 car buyers. But the amount of money available doesn’t match the pace of electric car rollouts, and would likely run out by mid-2011, according to advocacy group Plug In America, the Los Angeles Times reports. The state’s financial crisis could also mean the funds won’t be there to support the rebates in the future, the  state’s Air Resources Board said.

Carsharing catching on with major automakers — Daimler’s Car2go pilot program in Austin, Tex. has taken off to 15,000 participants in the first year, and PSA-Peugot-Citroen and BMW have launched similar programs, Autoblog Green points out. Zipcar has filed for an IPO and acquired Streetcar (Zipcar MINI Cooper pictured, left) ; carsharing-friendly legislation has also been passed in California, Earth2Tech notes.

Researchers make thermoelectric breakthrough — An international research effort has resulted in a discovery that could result in more efficient ways to create electricity from waste heat like industrial emissions and car exhaust, CleanTechnica reports. The breakthrough involves the thermoelectric effect — the creation of voltage by arranging materials of different temperatures adjacent to each other.

Federal regulators approve cost sharing for Midwest lines — The Federal Energy Regulation Commission has decided that new transmission lines in the Midwest must be paid for by all who will benefit from it, Greentech Media reports. The agency concludes that the decision will be good for renewable energy since it will allow transmission lines for wind power in the Midwest to be built — though there will likely be future battles over how big a portion individual wind farms will have to pay in conjunction with developers.

SunPower completes sale of 44-megawatt solar park – The company announced it has completed the sale of its Lazio, Italy Montalto di Castro solar park  to a group of international investors that include MetLife, Fondo PPP Italia  and Voigt & Collegen. SunPower designed and built the solar power plant and will continue to provide operations and maintenance.

Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and Kevin Skillern of GE’s energy venture-capital arm will speak at a TechCrunch Disrupt  panel on cleantech at noon Pacific time today. GreenBeat will cover the talk, so check back in this space.

Chevrolet will be taking the Volt on a nationwide tour starting Oct. 9 in Seattle. Participants can take the car for a test drive and showcase the Volt’s extended range – it can run up to 40 miles on a battery before switching to a gas engine. GM also announced it will invest an additional $23.5 million for electricfic car components in its Baltimore plant . Part of the money comes from Recovery Act funds.

California is plowing through solar farm approvals and on track to more than double the state’s solar capacity, USA Today writes. Four major projects have cleared regulatory hurdles since August, including the BrightSource Ivanpah project (artist’s rending pictured). The state has also set a goal that one-third of electricity sold in the state must come from renewables by 2020.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has received $2 million to study the use of nanotech ceramics and its uses in storing energy. As CleanTechnica notes, the technology can “smooth out the bumps” with the variable nature of wind and solar availability by storing excess energy with capacitors, which can quickly charge and release energy faster than batteries.

Ideological foes of the state’s stem-cell effort, which voters approved by a large margin in a 2004 ballot initiative, have waged a two-year battle in the courts to shut it down. The opponents — a coalition of anti-tax and limited-government conservatives and anti-abortion activists — argued that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine is rife with conflicts of interest and that its establishment violated the state constitution because CIRM wasn’t fully under control of the state government. (The initiative text shields CIRM from legislative interference for three years, and beyond that point requires legislative supermajorities to enact any changes.)

The suits effectively froze CIRM’s ability to dole out research funds, since the uncertainty over entire effort’s constitutionality made it impossible to sell the state bonds that will fund research proposals and laboratory construction at universities across the state.

The court’s decision was largely foreshadowed by a district court ruling in CIRM’s favor more than a year ago. The institute’s opponents, however, insisted on pressing their case through two levels of appeal, to no avail.

Yesterday’s ruling occasioned the overheated rhetoric we’ve become accustomed to whenever the subject of stem cells comes up. Robert Klein II, chairman of CIRM’s powerful advisory board and effectively head honcho of the entire effort, called the ruling “a great victory” and said “our $3 billion is free from these restrictions put on by the ideological right.” Meanwhile, Terry Thompson, a lawyer for two of the plaintiffs, declared that the ruling “establishes a precedent for well-meaning but misdirected rich people to invade the public treasury for projects of their own and parlay a few million dollars [of campaign expenses] into a few billion dollars of wasted taxpayer money.”

CIRM has already managed to issue $158.8 million in research grants, thanks to some creative financing that included a $150 million state loan approved by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the sale of $45 million in “bond anticipation notes” to mostly wealthy individuals whose money would have been lost had the court decision gone the other way. The first $250 million in state bonds, likely to be issued in July or August, will mostly go to repay the loan and notes.

With California’s stem-cell program in the clear, the big question now is whether activists will mobilize against similar but smaller scale efforts in New York and Massachusetts — not to mention, of course, whether their luck will be any better if they do.

For more, see the SF Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and the LAT.

Although Patrick’s plan is similar in some respects to California’s enormous $3 billion stem-cell effort and New York’s proposed $1 billion investment in stem-cell and related research, it differs in key respects. The most significant may be that Patrick isn’t billing the effort primarily as a stem-cell plan, even though it’s clear that the state initiative would give the stem-cell field a major boost.

The Massachusetts plan would devote roughly half its total funding to capital investment in research facilities across the state — in part, simply to ensure the wide availability of expensive research equipment for use in stem-cell work. (In California, by contrast, only about 10 percent of the $3 billion can be directed to “bricks and mortar.”) Currently, instruments purchased under a federal grant can only be used in studies involving a limited number of stem-cell lines, a restriction that has hampered the work outside of privately-funded laboratories.

According to this piece in the Boston Globe, another $250 million in the Massachusetts plan will be devoted to direct research grants — a much smaller amount than in other states. The remainder of the $1 billion will consist of tax subsidies designed to draw biotechnology firms to the state. Among the individual projects the plan may subsidize are a tissue bank for housing newly created lines of stem cells and a center for the exploration of a gene-silencing technique called RNA interference that earned a University of Massachusetts scientist the Nobel Prize last year.

Also unlike proponents of the similar plans in California and New York, Patrick isn’t promoting this initiative specifically as a way to cure deadly diseases or to boost economic development in the state. Instead, he casts it as an effort to meet competitive challenges from foreign nations and other states, as well as a way to counter a recent flattening in biomedical research funding through the National Institutes of Health, which has disproportionately affected states like Massachusetts.

The NYT has more here, and notes that the plan also includes $250 million in hoped-for private-sector “matching funds” that will pay for grants, fellowships and capital investment. You can also check out the state’s official press release, a more detailed outline and five-point plan, and even the video of the governor’s announcement.