Cities Should Be Designed for People Instead of Cars
February 20, 2009
traffic jam
Public transportation in most American cities is insufficient in many ways. Cars are typically the only way to properly get around a city. It would be great if public transportation was well funded and innovative instead of stagnant. Unfortunately, most cities were developed with cars in mind and few provisions for public transportation.
“There’s this cycle of automobile dependency,” he said. “You have to have a place to park at home, a place to park at work, and a place to park at retail establishments.” In an absurd “market distortion,” cities have become places where “cars have a right to housing and people don’t.”
That distortion, he says, is the result of years of increasing capacity for automobiles and shifting funds away from alternative forms of transportation. It’s brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life. Papandreou suggests a sea change in how we view personal mobility.
It’s Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars article from Wired.
Graph of Historical Stock Market Crashes Based on Percentage Lost
February 20, 2009
Time Magazine’s 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
February 12, 2009
View the blameworthy.
IBM Cognitive Computing Research Team is Reverse Engineering the Brain
February 12, 2009
The IBM Team that won the DARPA SyNAPSE Cognitive Computing Contract has a sensible approach to new hardware architectures and machine learning.
“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain,” says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.
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One of the main challenges to building this system in hardware, explains Boahen, is that each neuron connects to others through 8,000 synapses. It takes about 20 transistors to implement a synapse, so building the silicon equivalent of 220 trillion synapses is a tall order, indeed.
“You end up with a technology where the cost is very unfavorable,” says Boahen. “That’s why we have to use nanotech to implement synapses in a way that will make them much smaller and more cost-effective.”
Boahen and his team are trying to create a device smaller than a single transistor that can do the job of 20 transistors. “We are essentially inventing a new device,” he says.
Meanwhile, at the University of California-Merced, Kello and his team are creating a virtual environment that could train the simulated brain to experience and learn. They are using the Unreal Tournament videogame engine to help train the system. When it’s ready, it will be used to teach the neural networks how to make decisions and learn along the way.
Wired Article Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
More info about the DARPA Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) contract.
Aerial Photographs of London at Night
January 29, 2009
In recent years a multitude of Green business ventures have cropped up, and this marketplace has received a large amount of attention from investors and concerned citizens as the US economic downturn and volatile energy prices have begun to take their toll on businesses and individuals. The latest Cleantech Forum in Washington DC gives a good example of these ventures.
The demand and popularity of fuel-efficient gas, hybrid, and all-electric vehicles is at an all-time high. American auto makers who had been staying afloat for the past two decades by selling technologically stale trucks, SUVs, and large sedans that guzzled affordable gas have had to retool their assembly lines, scramble to get research and development operations out of their basements, and reinvent themselves as progressive companies through sleek advertising campaigns. The need for stable and renewable energy sources has prompted many new business ventures in areas including wind farms, solar plants, biofuel plants, recycling technologies, and smart grid technologies for utilities. The installation of new wind farms by large foreign and domestic energy firms took off significantly in 2007 and backlogs of wind turbine orders continue to grow. Venture capital is available from specialized green venture capital firms as well as large firms looking for future growth markets after the tech and housing bubbles have left them seeking the next big investment meal ticket.
The business models of these ventures are dependent on high energy prices. Auto makers would gladly continue to manufacture and market big cars in large numbers if gas prices went down. American oil companies would like nothing more than a steady supply of cheap barrels to keep their entrenched positions as the primary energy suppliers of the nation. While there is an increasing amount of legislation being proposed in many nations to promote and protect green business practices, the worldwide economic downturn threatens these initiatives, even as the reality of climate change starts to sink:
The Prince of Wales’s UK Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change said “deep and rapid” cuts were needed in greenhouse gas emissions.
The group includes the bosses of Tesco, BAA, Shell and energy group E.ON.
Greenpeace accused some of those involved of “hypocrisy of a previously unknown magnitude”.
In a letter to the three major party leaders, the business leaders urged them not to allow fears of an economic slowdown to divert them from forging a cross-party consensus on policies to cut emissions.
They wrote: “We now urgently need cross-party effort to develop a comprehensive package of policy measures to change every major sector of the economy.”
the above is an excerpt from the BBC article Bosses urge climate change action.
The immediacy of an economic crisis far outweighs the prospective dangers of climate change and the finite supplies of oil and natural gas within the Earth. The immediacy of once-more affordable oil imports, even from semi-hostile governments, will likewise cause Green and not-so-green Energy Diversification businesses to struggle for funding as their business models become unprofitable. Established alternative energy businesses may not be able to turn a profit or break even, causing them to collaps, downsize, or relocate.
A Wall Street Journal article entitled New Turnaround in Oil Prices Isn’t All Good News states,
But a sustained turnaround in oil prices could also pose long-term challenges to various efforts to broaden the world’s energy supplies. Concerns over skyrocketing fuel costs have prompted U.S. consumers to cut back sharply on gasoline consumption while spurring vigorous debate in Washington over ways to boost efficiencies and promote new forms of energy. That momentum for change may ebb quickly if prices recede to more comfortable levels.
If prices fall much below $90 a barrel, that could also put a crimp on some of the more complex and costly oil projects, especially the massive work under way in the oil-sands region of Western Canada. Forecasters are counting on the oil sands, which now provide around 1.4 million barrels a day, to help meet rising demand in coming years.
OPEC would be happy if the Canadian Tar Sands oil projects were shut down or their scope downgraded as a result of affordable oil imports to America. While extracting oil for tar sands is by no means a Green or renewable energy source, it demonstrates that even alternatives to oil imports from the Middle East, Russia, and South America are endangered by a decrease in current oil prices. Startup companies involved in the Green sector are typically small in scale, but investors may be hesitant to provide funding when the prospect of a return to business-as-usual is present. These businesses may survive with moderate energy prices, but they will certainly not thrive. On the other hand, extremely high energy prices may create a renewable energy sector bubble as the valuations of these business models are directly or indirectly related to high energy prices. It is likely that the geopolitical volatility of the past decade, the depletion of gas and oil resources, and the inevitability of climate change will make it apparent to investors and voters that the funding and protection of a sustainable future is in everybody’s best interests.
Price Per Barrel in 2008 USD
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The PickensPlan Can Help Reduce American Oil Dependance
July 15, 2008
Oilman, philanthropist and 117th richest person on Earth, T. Boone Pickens, Jr. has created a political action group and campaign called the PickensPlan. He is spending his own money to promote the reduction of oil dependence by promoting domestic wind, solar, natural gas, and biofuel energy source development. The plan is essentially a proposed national energy policy for the next US Presidential Administration. Here is the summary courtesy of wikipedia:
Pickens said the plan could cut the amount the country spends annually on foreign oil from $700 billion to $400 billion.” He proposed the following steps:
1. Using the United States’ wind corridor, private industry will fund the installation of thousands of wind turbines in the wind belt, generating enough power to provide 20 percent or more of the country’s electricity supply.
2. Again funded by the private sector, electric power transmission lines will be built, connecting these wind power generating sites with power plants providing energy to the population centers in the Midwest, South and Western regions of the country.
3. With the energy from wind now available to operate power plants serving the large population centers in key areas of the country, the natural gas that was historically utilized to fuel these power plants can be redirected and used to replace imported gasoline and diesel as a fuel for thousands of vehicles in the transportation system.
PickensPlan wikipedia article.
How is talk going to turn to action? The plan seems to be to organize enough plan supporters to actually offset the lobbying and political meddling done by the Usual Suspects,
How do we get it done?
The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.
Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. But it will take leadership.
On January 20th, 2009, a new President will take office.
We’re organizing behind the Pickens Plan now to ensure our voices will be heard by the next administration.
Together we can raise a call for change and set a new course for America’s energy future in the first hundred days of the new presidency — breaking the hammerlock of foreign oil and building a new domestic energy future for America with a focus on sustainability.
link to the PickensPlan. The recent high price of oil has seemingly caused a stir in the American People, but whether or not it will lead to the much needed and highly underfunded development of alternative energy sources is still unknown. The US does have a solar and wind energy corridors that can provide stable and infinite sources of energy. The uncertainty of oil should naturally lead to a growing alternative energy market, but a definitive plan will help speed and promote the transition. Thank you and good luck, Mr. Pickens and all.
Wallace Broecker with the Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the subject of an article in the Smithsonian Magazine that discusses removing C02 from the atmosphere using scrubbers. The article does not mention any of the technical details about these carbon dioxide scrubbers. Perhaps the process involved in removing C02 from the air is possible with little energy, maybe even hydroelectric, solar or wind power.
We need something that can be manufactured, like air conditioners or cars, by the millions. Each day, a unit would take about a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, liquefy it and send it out through pipes to wherever it’s going to be stored.
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How many devices would be needed?
Each of us in America is responsible for generating about 20 tons of CO2 a year. So I suppose roughly 17 million scrubbers would take care of the United States. Worldwide, we’d need a lot more. On a long time scale the rich nations can do more than just stop or neutralize their own emissions. They can also neutralize some of what was done in the past.
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What happens to all the CO2 the scrubbers take out of the air?
There are many places to store it. The most obvious is the saline aquifers that are under every continent. Ultimately, I think we’ll want to put CO2 into the deep sea. We at Columbia are exploring with Icelanders the possibility of injecting CO2 dissolved in water into basaltic terrains that make up the earth’s mantle, to combine the CO2 with magnesium and convert it into a mineral. One has to figure out a clever way to do this without using a lot of energy.
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Everybody is worried about carbon footprints as if that is a solution. It’s not. It is important, I’m not putting that down, but conservation in itself can’t do it. The world has to run on energy.
Smithsonian Magazine article via BoingBoing
The company Global Research Technologies is developing an air-capture system to reduce atmosphere levels of carbon dioxide. Here are some excerpts from the company’s FAQ, which overall is ambiguous and wildly confident,
How does an air-capture device compare to a tree?
The GRT air-capture system is about one thousand times more efficient than a tree of equal size, in large part because the GRT collector does not need to capture sunlight. Its “leaves” can be packed tightly without concern over shading, and the ACCESS™ system will function 24 hours a day.What sorbent is used to capture the CO2 from ambient air in the air- capture collector?
GRT used sodium hydroxide (NaOH) in its very early work on CO2 air-capture. Currently a different sorbent which is proprietary in nature is used. This new sorbent represents a major step forward in air-capture as it greatly reduces the energy consumed in the process and avoids the toxicity issues associated with sodium hydroxide (lye).
The idea of a device that is primarily intended to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is great, and hopefully this type of technology will be developed and manufactured. If C02 is the problem, then get rid of it. Future generations can certainly find a good use for the safely sequestered problem, if it means averting a planetary disaster.
There are quite a few cars on the west coast that have biodiesel-related bumper stickers professing the righteousness of driving a biofuel compatible car or truck. They claim “Biodiesel – No War Required” or a similar idea about the clean and environmentally friendly aspects of biodiesel. But oil is already there and the infrastructure to pump and transport it is well invested. Converting crops into fuel instead of food and feedstock does not seem to be an efficient process, but investments and subsidies continue to encourage growth. And rightly so, in part, because diversification of energy sources is important to keep an economy afloat when oil begins to run out. The economic implications of converting a nation’s food sources into fuel resources for export are apparent to many people. The cost of living for many third world country citizens is highly dependent on affordable food. If the profit from selling food as commodity energy outweighs that of selling food as nourishment, then profit motive will starve the people. The most vulnerable of a population has always been the poorest, and they may have a bleak future ahead as peak oil brings economic upheaval and desperation.
And then there are the possible detrimental environmental effects of increasing biofuel use. A BBC News article reads,
Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.
The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.
Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020.
Oxfam estimates the EU’s target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.
Read BBC News article
The amount of energy required to plant, cultivate, and harvest a crop and then convert it into biofuel is not always a sensible and efficient process. The subsidies that are offered to encourage the use of corn as biofuel in in the US, for example, offset the actual cost of producing the end product. Other crops such as sugar are easier to convert into fuel. Market forces will see us through these troubled times.
The non-profit organization 826 Valencia has several fake stores selling themed stuff as a method of raising funds. This organization is spearheaded by the author Dave Eggers. One store has a time travel theme and the other has a superhero theme. From their about page,
Simply put, 826 Valencia is dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the writing. Our work is based on the understanding that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success and that great leaps in learning can be made when skilled tutors work one-on-one with students.
Photos of the Time Travel Martvia boingboing gadgets
Brooklyn Superhero Supply photos at boingboing gadgets
