While these projects are certainly a step in the right direction, Dunham-Jones concedes that these projects are “astroturf town greens”. The fundamental energy gap between city residents and suburban residents will continue to exist, and there is a sense in the United States of a growing divide between “Small Town America” and the cities. Since most main street commercial areas have declined as commercial developments are built a few miles away, there is not much of a difference between sprawl housing developments and small towns in terms of economics and energy-consumption. Alex Steffan of Worldchanging considers cities versus suburbs as a political conflict.

via Grist

Previously on badorbit were posts on suburban psychology and car culture.

What really struck me about this video is how modern technology is able to skew reality. Recently I posted about the advances being made in bringing Augmented Reality to mobile devices.

Chromakey is everywhere via Boing Boing

With chroma keying tech, it has become difficult for the human eye to discern reality from fiction when viewing a video screen. What are the implications of blue screens and video editing? I am reminded of the movie Wag The Dog from 1997:

How will this chroma key technology be used in the next decade? I would like to know what you are thinking, reader.

Augmented Reality is now entering widespread adoption with the emergence of powerful smartphones capable of taking geotagged photographs and video, and especially by streaming videos over a 4G cellular network. As online mapping applications become feature-rich and widely used, people will provide their own content in the forms of annotations, photographs and videos. As a result, true telepresence will be possible, allowing a sort of virtual tourism via a computer screen. A user could experience the bustle of a city square at night or the rising sun in a silent desert. Art, hidden shops, and curious city features can be documented and tagged for the benefit of others. A cyclist can mount a smartphone to his helmet and take an audience for a tour of his city in realtime. In the next few years, the possibilities of combining the real and virtual worlds will begin to emerge and be discovered, and it will help to connect and enrich us all.

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 market crashes

This graph puts the current bear market into perspective.

Link

View the blameworthy.

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.

…

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.

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

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.