Dadamotive: December 2008 Archives

Unconscious

Posted by Herman | December 31 | 2008 12:44 PM | permalink

Our model of our brain assumes that the conscious mind is the decisionmaker. Logic and reasoning lead to hypotheses, conclusions and actions. Our subconscious mind is only messing things up.

Well, it seems that everyone who has thought differently has had a point.

Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions--but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice."A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

Pouget has run a series of tests determining the way people get to a decision.

Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects simply "realized" suddenly what was the "right" answer.

Catching up

Posted by Herman | December 31 | 2008 11:42 AM | permalink

Vernor Vinge is a writer annex professor in mathematics and physics. One of his last books " Rainbows End" explores a near-future scenario with an interesting twist.

What if Alzheimer could be cured? Some elderly patients would regain their full mental capabilities after maybe 10 or 20 years of being disconnected. They would have to be reintegrated in a hyperconnected world where you cannot function as a citizen without using the tools. Vinge postulates some technological advancements which are close to the current state: high bandwidth wireless connections everywhere, wearable computers, contact lenses that can superimpose images on what you see. This would allow for instance children to superimpose their fantasy game environment (i.e.World of Warcraft) upon reality. Teaching would change to immersing the class in a collective superimposed environment.

And chatting? Still there ;-)

As for curing Alzheimer? Some recent developments give a lot of hope.

" A slow, chronic starvation of the brain as we age appears to be one of the major triggers of a biochemical process that causes some forms of Alzheimer's disease."

Big City, Brighter Lights

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:25 PM | permalink

Where design meets sustainability.

The Office for Visual Interaction has designed a marvelous sleek new streetlamp for New York, based on (up to) 100 LED's that use very little energy. The light distribution pattern can be tailored to the specific place and purpose.

When do we get them over here?

Double duty

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:20 PM | permalink

We all know about the ideas that cars with large batteries might be used as a temporary storage of energy, to be fed back to the grid when needed. Reality has more or less overtaken us.

A Prius owner in the USA has used his car as a source of electric energy to run his household after heavy snow storms created a very long outage, lasting almost a week. The engine kept the batteries charged and one tank of gas lasted long enough.

Clever...

Ultralight

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:06 PM | permalink

2008 is the year marking the fact that more laptops were sold than desktop PC's.

Combining low weight, a bright screen, high performance and a long batterylife is the ultimate goal for any laptop producer. This has spurred a continuous flow of improvements with impressive results: the latest Apple Macbook uses something like 9 Watt, and there is still some more room to reduce the power requirements according to GigaOm.

mere 9 watts....... it will only be a matter of time before solar cells will be integrated in the casing of the laptop, extending the battery life to unprecedented lenghts.

Given the potential of E-ink or OLED based screens that are well readable in bright light while using very little power on might envision a future where we carry selfsustaining netbooks with us. Through wireless connections we communicate with the infrastructure: "computing clouds" that do the heavy computing stuff and secure storage.

Easier, flexible and efficient use of energy.

Waves

Posted by Herman | December 22 | 2008 11:37 PM | permalink

Some recent news gives new hope to the viability of extracting energy from the motion of the sea.

Seagen's tidal wave generator (see photo) has reached its maximum output of 1.2 MW in real life circumstances.

At the same time Eric Stoutenberg, a researcher from Stanford University, published a paper which shows that wind and (surface) wave energy usually peak at different moments. The impact of this result is twofold. First of all it promises that the variation in power generated by renewables can be reduced. But that is not all: the cost of power transmission lines from offshore windparks can be shared by both the wave generator and the windpark, reducing the cost per KWh.

Santa Phone

Posted by Herman | December 22 | 2008 11:36 PM | permalink

For free on your Iphone, for kids who believe in Santa Claus.

The Iphone Santa Claus tracker shows you where the sled is.

Cute.

Flashback

Posted by Herman | December 22 | 2008 6:21 PM | permalink

Thanks to one our favorite weblogs Infectious Greed we have these links to 3 wonderfull photo series of 2008. Watch them....

2008: series 1

2008: series 2

2008: series 3

Losers of 2009

Posted by Willem | December 21 | 2008 10:37 PM | permalink

Chris O'Brien of the The Mercury News predicts three Silicon Valley companies that will have major trouble in 2009: Sun, AMD and Palm. Not very shocking, since they haven't done well in 2008 but nevertheless interesting to see the reasons why. AMD doesn't have a good product anymore and massive debt. Case closed. Sun focuses on open source, but is not receiving enough revenue. It needs to cut jobs or it will lose large amounts of money. Palm finally is a dinosour of the handheld age. And it is consequently failing to innovate after missing the link with the mobile phone market. Interestingly enough O'Brien thinks Yahoo will make it through a deal with Microsoft. And then will reinvent itself. I do not agree there. Yahoo, although big in Asia and the US, is very vulnerable. It probably will strike a deal with Microsoft, but my guess is this will mean the end of Yahoo as a brand. But then again, I am a recognized bad gambler.

Wobble

Posted by Herman | December 19 | 2008 12:34 PM | permalink

We all known that soldiers must pass a bridge walking out-of-sync. You don't want to trigger and amplify a vibration that could destroy the bridge.

So when the Millenium Bridge was opened and people complained about a wobble scientists expected to see a rythm in the way people walked across the bridge. To their surprise they found that the wobble could be generated by people walking out-of-sync. It appears that the human mind has a certain "algorithm" that directs how your legs and feet will behave when walking on a more or less flexible surface. It appears to be possible that the reaction of the bridge to a person walking on it can create a feedbackloop through that "algorithm", amplifying the wobble.

No more hiding

Posted by Herman | December 19 | 2008 7:27 AM | permalink

The implications of mobile phones with camera's is far greater than one would expect. The ability to shoot a photo or small video at any moment combined with the hyperconnectivity of the Internet creates video's like this one. Watch the policeman knocking over a cyclist.

The policeman later said the cyclist was obstructing traffic and deliberately steered his bicycle into an officer. A video of the body-check was posted on YouTube and has been viewed more than 1.6 million times. The policeman has been degraded as a consequence.

Fiber 101

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 6:17 PM | permalink

For most people the fierce debates and battles about fiber-to-the-home (FttH) will have been invisible or boring. Only specialized webzines and bloggers or a good journalist have understood what has been going on.

This will most likely change in the near future: FttH will be something we will be getting used to. So what is the reason there is so much fuss about fiber? This post is the beginning of a small series trying to give you some background on a thin wire with a very disruptive power. So lets start with the basics.

Telecommunication means "communicating over a distance", sending signals back and forth.

You can send signals through the air (sound, radio) or through a guide (wire). The nice thing about sending signals through the air is that everybody can pick them up at the same time, which is at the same time its major drawback. The nice thing about a wire is that it guides and confines the signals, but you have to have a wire first. Lets focus on signals over wires.

Signals tend to weaken with distance until they are unreadable. Usually high frequency signals weaken quicker than low frequency signals. Like if you walk to an open air popconcert: you here the bass notes from very far away, the high notes only when you are close. So if we have a wire travelling a certain distance there is a maximum signal frequency you can send over the wire before it becomes too weak to read at the other end. The longer the wire the lower the maximum frequency.

The amount of information you can send over the wire (per second) is limited by the maximum signal frequency,

Now we have a key indicator of the quality of a wire for telecommunication: the best wire lets high frequencies travel far without weakening.

Fact is that the copper wires used for telephone networks are quite bad at this. The coax cable as used for cable-TV networks is already quite an improvement. Glass fiber is more than a million times better. Thats why 98 % of all the (globespanning and local) networks are built from fiber....except the last part to your home.

Betting the future

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 8:06 AM | permalink

Did anyone ever wonder how Youtube makes money?

We all watch the videos available on their site, embed them in our posts, send the links to our friends. Allthough they do not have to pay for the content in videos that are uploaded by us, Youtube has to pay for bandwidth.

How does this work? Anyone can buy space in a datacentre for storage and servers. The next thing you need is the connection to the Internet so users like us can reach the storage through a hyperlink and request the file to be sent or streamed to us. The network owners charge money for this bandwidth to Youtube. The more videos that are watched, the higher the bill sent to Youtube.

Our subscription fee for Internet access (DSL, Cable, Fiber, wireless) does NOT cover these costs.

Youtube uses all tricks known to man to reduce these costs, but our favorite industry experts at Telco 2.0 estimate Youtube's bandwidth bill at a staggering USD 1 milllion per day (!). The income generated by ads does not cover this bill at all, yet. (The bandwidth costs are by far the dominant costs in their business model).

Must be an interesting challenge to get to breakeven.

Imagine if Youtube would start streaming HD video instead of small highly compressed video's: their bandwidth costs would increase 10-20 fold to USD 10-20 mio per day.

The indepth analysis of Telco 2.0 provides you with the details, showing the big gap between the concepts of TV-over-Internet and the business model behind it.

We need a big change in the business model to get to a sustainable business.

Agile

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 7:34 AM | permalink

Today our politicians are debating the purchase of a new fighter jet (again). The JSF, Saab or an updated F-16 are being compared. Technology, trade politics and power play, in an explosive package.

At the same time it is good to take a broader view. Our Russians neighbours (the competition?) have a tradition of excellent fighter jet design based on a keen grasp of aerodynamics. Look at the SU-30 doing some incredible acrobatics at very low or even zero airspeeds.

But neither of them is an answer to the question Gunnar Heinhson poses.

Broadband motoring

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 6:32 AM | permalink

Our petrolheads have done it. If you want to see how the Tesla faired, see the video below.

Update: And for the comments of Tesla on the "mis-characterizations" of Topgear see this link.

Update: The BBC does not like all this interest apparently, so the video has been removed from Youtube. But you can find it through here.

Softwear

Posted by Willem | December 16 | 2008 11:16 PM | permalink

So now Microsoft is starting to think that they are cool as well and belong to the history of software. As of December 15 they have launched their own collection of t-shirts called Softwear by Microsoft, A Clothing Line (so that you definitely understand what it is all about). On the t-shirts among others police mugshots of a really young Bill Gates, old Microsoft logo's and bits and bytes. Just interesting enough to check it out here. Oh, they also had a serious launch party!

Lightheaded

Posted by Herman | December 16 | 2008 12:06 PM | permalink

Even more interesting than the Tesla is the test by our petrolheads of a Honda fueled by hydrogen. Looks like a normal usable real car.

A man's world

Posted by Herman | December 15 | 2008 11:10 PM | permalink

Why is it that beer commercials express as no other (part of) the soul of the male population?

Important

Posted by Herman | December 15 | 2008 5:27 PM | permalink

There are a lot of different pension systems in the world. The Netherlands have big private pension funds with a lot of assets and a relatively minor contribution from taxes. The OECD tracks the various pension systems and compares them. The statistics tell a very clear story about the different choices made in securing our old age income.

The gross replacement rate is the percentage of a normal pension paid by taxes levied on people who work (like the "AOW" in the Netherlands). The rest is paid for by a pension fund. The sheer size of accumulated assets in pension funds as a % of GDP is shown on the x-axis. The graph below accentuatues the enormous amount we Dutch have saved in our pension funds.

It is interesting to see what the investment choices have been, given the current drop in share prices, The OECD report does not give detailed information, only that in most countries pension fund managers have chosen bonds over equity (shares): except Belgium, where equities are held ahead of bonds by 48% to 21.5%; Canada by 50% to 34.4%; Germany by 31.3% to 28.8%; and the United States by 59.2% to 22.4%.

The report does report the trend over the last couple of years. The Dutch lead the pack in going away from shares (equity) to bonds and other investments.

Blind spot

Posted by Herman | December 15 | 2008 7:59 AM | permalink

Our governments are investing billions in the financial sector to keep our economy going. The main objective is to keep the supply of badly needed credit lines open so trade continues as before.

It is therefore amazing to observe that (at least in the Netherlands) they do not see the second big blockade in trade: credit insurance. Atradius, the former NCM ("Nederlandse Credietverzekerings Maatschappij") is one of the major insurers of trade credits. In a highly unusual and abrupt manner Atradius has informed its clients by email of the severe reduction of credit limits, mostly for a large number of small companies.

How does this credit insurance work? Lets take a machine builder who can export a machine to another country. The buyer does not pay 100 % in advance ofcourse. A 100 % garantuee of payment by a Dutch bank (letter of credit) is often difficult to get because the buyer has to garantuee the payment for 100 % with a local (foreign) bank. The machine builder must invest in raw materials and components, time of his staff and runs a risk that the machine is not paid for when completed. Enter the credit insurance company. They insure the risk for non-payment by the foreign company, up to a certain limit, the so-called credit limit. The combination of the credit insurance and a certain amount of prepayments by the buyer gives the bank of the machine builder the comfort to finance the work-in-progress.

The same more or less applies to transaction within the Netherlands.

So when Atradius suddenly reduced the credit limits on many (foreign) companies the direct effect was that banks will not finance new orders any more.

Another variation is experienced by a friend of mine. He imports textiles. They are manufactured for him in Turkey, shipped to Romania for processing and imported to the Netherlands for the big retailers. Everything suddenly stops. The Romanian factories will go bankrupt. My friend is contemplating to stop his business.

It is frustrating to see that in most cases the market demand is still there. Bankruptcies caused by shifting consumer demands or lousy management is part of our system.

Bankruptcies caused by removal of the "oil" out of the system is bad public policy.

Factcheck.org

Posted by Herman | December 14 | 2008 9:04 PM | permalink

For anyone who cares for debunking of spin based on good investigative journalism this site Factcheck.org is a breath of fresh air. Well balanced, thorough, factual.

Their latest gem: do autoworkers in Detroit really make USD 70/hr or almost 3 times as much as other workers, as the Heritage Foundation (a conservative thinktank/action group) claimed?

No.

" The automakers say that the average wage earned by its unionized workers is about $29 per hour. So how does that climb to more than $70? Add in benefits: life insurance, health care, pension and so on. But not just the benefits that the current workers actually receive - after all, it's pretty rare for the value of a benefits package to add up to more than wages paid, even with a really, really good health plan in place. What's causing the number to balloon is the cost of providing benefits to tens of thousands of retired auto workers and their surviving spouses. "

Chasing cheap labor

Posted by Herman | December 14 | 2008 9:00 PM | permalink

Proponents of "Lean" manufacturing remind us time and again that chasing cheap labor is a stupid strategy. The hidden costs of quality problems, of training new staff with a high turnover, of large batches and long lead times that make you very inflexible, of capital tied up in long supply chains are often bigger than the perceived labor savings.

TXM in Australia has made the comparison between local lean sourcing and outsourcing to China with realistic data. The results confirm what everybody has been saying: lean local is cheaper.

Bottom up

Posted by Herman | December 14 | 2008 8:41 PM | permalink

Electric vehicles are hot. If you would believe all the news releases and PR it is only a matter of years before we all will be buying electric cars. Unfortunately (as anyone who tries to buy 50 cars will notice) reality is different. The technology is advancing fast but the practical hurdles as charging time, charging stations, limited range and costs of batteries are still there. I am not pessimistic: we humans usually overestimate the speed of developments for the short term and underestimate the changes over a longer period of time. But most likely we will be driving more hybrids and plug-in-hybrids than you might expect now.

The bottom end of the mobility scale is much less sexy: electric bicycles and electric scooters do not attract as much attention as a Tesla, but they are much closer to practical use.

E-assist bikes are being sold as fast as they can be produced. According to Ecovelo there are more than 1400 e-assist bicycle manufacturers in China, producing 5.5 mln units a year for prices between Euro 400 and 1000.

A number of manufacturers produce E-scooters with very practical specifications, like this one:(source Autobloggreen) 80 to 120 km range with speeds up to 80 km/hr is OK. It is well known that 50 cc twostroke engines in scooters produce a disproportionate amount of emissions (including noise), so a strategy that would force the replacement of twostroke scooters to EV would be welcomed in cities. Combine this with free parking where at the same time you could charge up your scooter and this might be a winning combination in cities like Amsterdam.

Let it rain

Posted by Marjolein | December 13 | 2008 3:05 PM | permalink

There are many ways to renewable energy, and countless ways to benefit from the sun, movement of wind and water, and even from sound. Human movement also requires a lot of energy, so why not benefit in return?
A number of ideas are put to the test, generating energy by piezoelectric technology (production of energy when stress is applied).

Piezoelectric floors in the Tokyo subway

The energy generating revolving door

A sustainable dance club

And even Rain power...

Maybe also a good idea for the train tracks in the Netherlands, that are among the most heavily used in the world.

Simple minds

Posted by Herman | December 11 | 2008 4:20 PM | permalink

One must be very carefull with interventions in complex systems. Beware of what you wish for.

A storm is brewing in the USA after Congress and Senate passed a bill almost unanimously. This bill was a knee-jerk reaction after lead contamination was discovered in toys imported by Mattel from China. Protecting children from contamination is laudable but the cure has devastating side-efects. The problem was imports from China, the solution destroys a wide range of small manufacturers in the West (including the EU).

Evolving Excellence has an excellent overview of how bad the legislative design is.

Lead levels must be reduced to 600ppm within 180 days of when the Act is enacted on February 10th, then down to 300ppm in a year and 100ppm in three years. This is not really a problem with the vast majority of products, which typically have about 6ppm.
This is not just toys, it is any type of product that could come into contact with kids... so clothing, car seats, you name it.
Problem #1: certification testing must be done by a lab on a "certified list". This list isn't exactly long, and their are hundreds of thousands of products. Guess what is happening to those labs: the waiting list for lab work extends out months and the cost per lab workup has gone from $200 to as much as $6000... per sample.
Problem #2: testing must be done at the product level, not the component level. So a common component used in multiple types of products must be tested multiple times. What does this mean? Each SKU must be tested separately, even if they are virtually identical. One pair of jeans and a slightly different pair of jeans, both using the exact same raw denim, must be tested separately. See the video below, where a manufacturer of science kits has 40,000 SKU's... and is looking at a $20 million dollar cost for initial certification testing. This is why many products, and companies, will simply cease to be sold.
Problem #3: testing must be done by the final manufacturer, and supplier certification cannot be used. So if a company supplies the same denim to a variety of manufacturers, then each final manufacturer must test and certify their product... which has the exact same raw material. Companies are allowed to use supplier certification for attributes such as flammability, but not lead.
Problem #4: ongoing final product testing, which is different than the initial product certification test, must be done by batch. Guess what will happen: batch sizes will increase and the companies that leverage speed and small batch sizes will have to give up that competitive advantage.
Problem #5: even large manufacturers use bank lines of credit to handle long lead inventory purchases through cash generation after payment. Banks can only issue credit to "legal" activities (obviously), so on February 10th many types of products will cease being legal and credit will dry up.

With friends like this....

Compassionate ruthlessness

Posted by Herman | December 11 | 2008 11:08 AM | permalink

Frank Herbert is the author of one of the best SF books ever, "Dune", renowned for his intelligent and deep exploration of ecology, dependence on a rare substance (like oil), ethics and religion. In one of his books he introduced the ethical concept that in a truly civilized society compassionate ruthlessness needs to have its (carefully managed) place. The alternative may lead to much more human suffering.

The report released today about the relative "high" mortality rates of newborn babies in the Netherlands reminded me of this idea. According to the press the researchers believe that the cause of this relative position might be related to the higher age of the pregnant women and the hesitation of Dutch doctors/midwifes to keep babies that are born very premature alive at all costs.

A member of my family works in an institution that cares for handicapped children. She has seen a major change in the last 25 years: the number of children that have multiple handicaps has risen dramatically. These handicaps are directly related to premature birth.

Maybe the advances in technology create the need for our doctors and midwifes to consider compassionate ruthlessness. Ethics is never simple when put to practice.

Simply happy!

Posted by Willem | December 10 | 2008 9:35 AM | permalink

Yesterday my son persuaded me to buy the Ocarina application for my iphone. It turned out to be one of the best spent seventy-nine cents ever. Ocarina is an application developed by Smule, a company created by some Stanford people. The concept is simple: turn your iphone into a flute. Or Ocarina, an ancient flute-like wind instrument, according to Wikipedia. You can then play this flute by blowing into the microphone of your iphone and tapping four 'holes' on your touch screen. Now this is nice. But was is really great is the fact that the Ocarina is a social application. Tap on the globe icon and you will see and hear other Ocarina players throughout the world. The globe view will highlight the source of the music. Name your Ocarina if you want listeners around the world to identify your performances. The globe is shown as a night-globe with light spots where people played the Ocarina. If you tap on a spot, you hear ocarina music that was played by someone in this place. So i listened to music from Japan, Florida, Brazil and Australia in 3 minutes. And became very happy from the fact that in all these places people spent time on this totally useless, but highly entertaining application and shared it. This concept was previously exploited by the same people in an even more silly lighter application, which consist of a lighter on your iphone screen. And that on produces bright spots on the globe the more virtual kilojoules were burnt in a specific city. Read about this one here.

Life in the fast lane

Posted by Herman | December 10 | 2008 12:05 AM | permalink

It's about time our favourite petrol heads at Top Gear start testing electric cars. More and more Youtube movies show how devastating the effect is of having all the torque available at low RPM's. Or in simple terms: a normal car engine needs to revv up to 3000-5000 RPM before it can deliver a lot of acceleration and its maximum power. An electric motor starts to deliver all its pulling power right from standstill. The difference? Check out this video of drag races between a converted Atom and a Ferrari and Porsche. Smoking.....!!

Precision

Posted by Herman | December 09 | 2008 11:46 PM | permalink

Our mental models of technology often are too simple. Another example is shown in Vanity Fair. In 2006 two airplanes crashed into each other over the Amazon. If your really drill down to the cause? The accuracy and reliability of guidance systems has increased over time to a level where two arrows indeed will meet head-to-head.

In the old days the inaccuracies would almost garantuee that two planes would never meet head-to-head, and the relative unreliability of systems would make pilots more alert.

Aptera promo video

Posted by Herman | December 08 | 2008 8:44 PM | permalink

For something completely different (and I sincerely hope they will be succesfull) a video about the Aptera.

Follow me

Posted by Herman | December 08 | 2008 7:27 PM | permalink

We rely upon a lot of sophisticated technology in our daily life. Unfortunately a lot of people (and politicians) do not understand the background and limitations of the systems we rely on. Or even worse, take pride in the fact that they do not understand technology. Not very smart, as a recent example shows.

People assume that navigation systems (satnav) like Garmin, TomTom, Route66 and others work identical. After all, the road is the same and the satellites are the same. Wrong.

There have been some serious accidents with motorcyclists touring in the countryside and crashing into each other because the satnav systems gave different instructions. One said "go straight", the other said "go left". Differences in software, hardware, or which satellites are being used can lead to different directions. Currently motorcyclists who use satnav in touring clubs are instructed to drive behind each other to prevent these kind of accidents.

If you hate cycling: take a bike!

Posted by Marjolein | December 08 | 2008 1:59 PM | permalink

Imagine you love bikes but you hate cycling, what will you do? To get out of this awkward predicament this might be the solution: the Treadmill Bike.

Link: bikeforrest.com

Burn and Earn

Posted by Marjolein | December 07 | 2008 4:23 PM | permalink

Every time I see a gym I wonder why they don't power their equipment and their building with the energy generated by their customers. I never saw one myself, but apparantley they exist! At least one: The Green Microgym in Portland. By using the energy of the efficient equipment and solar panels on the roof they manage to cover about 40% of the gyms' operational energy. For achieving a 100% coverage they motivate users to spend time on the energy generating equipment by giving them a dollar per hour that can be used for fitness related products. Cool initiative!

Via: The chic ecologist

Police Car, the Italian way

Posted by Willem | December 07 | 2008 2:32 PM | permalink

Is this possible in any other country than Italy? The police of Sant'Agata-Bolognese have just taken into operation a new car: a Lamborghini Gallardo. 325 km/hr and 0-200 in 11.8 seconds. The good news it that tha car contains a defibrillator and has just enough space in the trunk for a cool-box with a donor organ. Provided the organ is not too large... See for some more pictures, including the organ-box, this link.

Vortex Energy

Posted by Willem | December 07 | 2008 11:38 AM | permalink

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

The machine is called VIVACE, which stands for Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy. It doesn't depend on waves, tides, turbines or dams. It's a hydrokinetic energy system that relies on "vortex induced vibrations." And it is now being commercially exploited, always a good sign!

Vortex induced vibrations are undulations that a rounded or cylinder-shaped object makes in a flow of fluid, which can be air or water. The presence of the object puts kinks in the current's speed as it skims by. This causes eddies, or vortices, to form in a pattern on opposite sides of the object. The vortices push and pull the object up and down or left and right, perpendicular to the current. Although small by themselves, collectively they can generate massive amounts of energy. For example, these vibrations in wind toppled the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington in 1940 and the Ferrybridge power station cooling towers in England in 1965. In water, the vibrations regularly damage docks, oil rigs and coastal buildings. And now there is the potential to use them for renewable energy. Nice.

Money for nothing

Posted by Herman | December 06 | 2008 11:47 PM | permalink

As we see the ruins created by banks acting as speculators around us the question arises how to improve our financial system and prevent a recurrence.

In cases like this it pays to go back to the fundamentals. Gunnar Heinsohn has a simple example. If you own a piece of land and grow food on it, you have possession. If you put a fence around the piece of land and start borrowing things with the land as collateral, you have an economy and money.

Paul Grignon's animated presentation of "Money as Debt" tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created. Great for everyone who has started to ask him/herself how we got into this mess.

Dinousars

Posted by Herman | December 06 | 2008 11:15 PM | permalink

The proposed bailout of the Big Three (GM. Ford, Chrysler) is considered by many to be highly questionable given their lousy trackrecord compared to other (profitable) car manufacturing plants in the USA. GM alone has destroyed a staggering 1.5 billion USD per month (!) the last 10 years

The political cartoonists however have a field day. Check out this cartoon, (Copyright restrictions do not allow me to show it here) and the other 20 in the series.

First Casualty

Posted by Herman | December 06 | 2008 10:20 PM | permalink

"The first casualty in war is the truth".

If we reverse the causality we can conclude that telecom and broadband are a warzone. Apparently there is such much at stake that there is enough money and energy available to spin a series of half-truths, near-lies, rigged statistics and outright propaganda in the press. This week we could witness at least 2 good examples.

In the USA Scott Cleland has created a big row by claiming in The Register and his blog that Google is reponsible for 20 % of the Internet traffic and should therefore pay for 20 % of the cost of Internet. A false but fiendishly clever argument. Why is it false?

All the internet traffic is generated by people like us making the choice to request a reponse from Googles/Youtubes servers. We pay already for the transportation costs through our broadband subscriptions. Google pays for the servers and the bandwidth from its servers to the net. So Mr Cleland is fundamentally wrong. But for telco's the idea of billing both Google and customers by the "tick" sounds great. Proponents of "Net Neutrality" argue that this would kill the Internet as we know it and destroy a lot of the value for society. Mr Cleland writes for a socalled "astroturf" organization, organized lobbying posing as a spontaneous "grassroots" movement.

In the Netherlands Telecompaper has released a review together with Iping of developments in broadband speeds. The article states that cable outperforms DSL. Close reading of the report and reviewing testresults produced by a fiber user in Amsterdam running the Iping testtool Nuria produce quite a different picture. Telecompaper and Iping look only at maximum downloadspeeds and rate connections on the ratio between maximum speed and measured average speed. The independent testresults show that fiber connections outperform everything else by far, but most spectacularly in uploadspeeds and latency (gaming). DSL performs great and at least as good as cable when surfing responses and gaming are considered.

So they have taken an approach where fiber (the biggest threat to cable) is ignored. The rating is chosen in such a way that it makes cable look good against DSL.

Beware: the first casualty in discussions over broadband is the truth.

Electra Glide

Posted by Herman | December 05 | 2008 11:46 AM | permalink

I did not think it was already possible but here is the proof. A full electric twoseater airplane you can purchase (as a kit) and use (120 km/u for 90 minutes). Ecogeek has the link to this website.

One nice touch: the propellor can be set to regenerate energy and fill the batteries.

Mainport

Posted by Herman | December 05 | 2008 6:28 AM | permalink

TeleGeography has created interesting graphs showing how the flow of data over the Internet between countries and continents has grown (CAGR 57 %) and shifted over time.

The Netherlands was and is by far one of the major hubs for connectivity. The amount of capacity connected to the Netherlands is 2.1 TBps (15 %). The ratio between datavolumes and number of inhabitants is far higher than other countries, showing it to be a supernode with a very important role in the Internet (see Linked).

Om Malik has the most pointed view. The density of shipping routes once was a direct indicator of the trade volumes. Nowadays information is the indicator of trade. These charts clearly show the shift from a very dominant USA to a different order. Like the fact the African countries view the EU as their dominant hub.

So we have 3 mainports in the Netherlands. Rotterdam, Schiphol and the AMSIX. I wish our politicians would have as much attention for the new source of wealth as for the old ones.

Physicists and Economists

Posted by Willem | December 04 | 2008 1:34 PM | permalink

The other day I was in a conversation with a physicist and an economist. The physicist tried to explain the theory of sources and sinks, as used in physics a lot for e.g. energy, current and turbulence. He claimed that the financial crisis could be explained using this theory. Banks are sources of money when they provide credit. Houses or stocks are sinks when they drop in value. In his opinion a lot of trouble could have been avoided if more physicists would have worked in financial institutions.

The economist countered this argument with proof that in the last 10-15 years a lot of smart physicist had entered financial institutions. She claimed that because of their complex calculations involving a lot of non-linear differential equations (OK, it was an econometrist) which no manager could understand they provided the foundation for the current crisis. Because the real issue is that common sense had disappeared from the banking industry, hidden behind mathematical equations. I think she actually has a point. Additional proof for this comes from China, where illegal banks prosper. They are solely based on trust. Trust that the bank will provide you with the money and trust that the other side will pay back in time, because the banker knows him as a good citizen and a hard worker. Banking is too simple for physicists.

Hyperconnected

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 6:16 PM | permalink

Here is what connectivity can do for you. Over 105 million views in 2 years, probably one of the second best viewed Youtube clip ever.

No plowing

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 5:49 PM | permalink

The debate about biofuels is increasing.

It amazed me to see a full page ad by a Brazilian biofuel company in the "Financieele Dagblad" claiming that first generation biofuel production did not trigger rising food prices. After discovering that the Brazilian ethanol industry is booming it started to make sense. They export 605,000 m3 of ethanol this year to the EU, Asia and the USA but the drop in oil prices and the doubts about fuel-for-food implications might hamper the growth.

Second generation biofuels are still many years away of delivering this kind of volume to the market, triggering a response from outsiders " let' s focus now on reducing the amount of fuel we waste instead of waiting for an alternative supply of fuel".

Researcher at the University of Illinois have added valuable information to the debate. The topsoil (first meter) captures and stores a massive amount of carbon. Plowing previously untouched soil actually releases a large portion of the carbon to the atmosphere and it can take many years or decades to compensate for the extra emissions.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions by using second generation biofuels you need to plant selected perennial plants on cultivated plowed soil.

Which catapults you head-first into the fuel-for-food dilemma, because plowed land is food-producing.

Witch hunt

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 9:22 AM | permalink

A lot of lobby-power is aimed at getting all kinds of laws passed in the EU which will make filesharing a crime which surpassed child pornography or calls for terrorism.

In the USA we can see the effects of these kinds of laws. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association) is throwing an enormous amount of lawsuits and expensive lawyers at all kinds of individuals as a scare tactic. Fortunately some people fight back, now with the help of a Harvard Law professor and his students. (For those interested BoingBoing has a good podcast of an interview.). Their case is summarized in the following excerpt of their counterclaim. Something to remind our lawmakers of....

This law gives the RIAA unbridled discretion to sue millions of individuals and to threaten expensive time-consuming process and a bankrupting verdict against anyone with the effrontery and stamina to resist.

Delegation of such power to private persons represents "legislative delegation in its most obnoxious form."

Imagine a statute which, in the name of deterrence, provides for a $750 fine for each mile-per-hour that a driver exceeds the speed limit, with the fine escalating to $150,000 per mile over the limit if the driver knew he or she was speeding. Imagine that the fines are not publicized, and most drivers do not know they exist. Imagine that enforcement of the fines is put in the hands of a private, self-interested police force, that has no political accountability, that can pursue any defendant it chooses at its own whim, that can accept or reject payoffs in exchange for not prosecuting the tickets, and that pockets for itself all payoffs and fines.

Imagine that a significant percentage of these fines were never contested, regardless of whether they had merit, because the individuals being fined have limited financial resources and little idea of whether they can prevail in front of an objective judicial body.

A video of Stuff?

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 7:51 AM | permalink

The Story of Stuff shows how the price of a good does not reflect all the costs that are carried by society as a whole. A very well made piece.

BoingBoing points to a series by the BBC, following goods shipped by a container around the world. Seems like the interest in externalities is picking up.

Meltdown

Posted by Herman | December 02 | 2008 7:11 PM | permalink

If exaflood horrorstories are not enough you can always try to blame filesharing technology directly. GigaOm has an excellent analysis of a scare story on the usage of the UDP-protocol instead of the TCP-protocol for BitTorrent file transfers. (UDP is a basic mechanism for sending packets without explicitly asking for an acknowledge of reception, TCP asks explicitly for an ACK(nowledge) for each package sent.) Using UDP would crowd out all VOIP according to the scare story. False! according to GigaOm.

So why did Bennett (the author of the scare story) chose to ignore all of this? Because a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic. The only way to prevent the coming Internet meltdown, he contends, is to filter out uTorrent's UDP transfers on the ISP level, and the only way to get this done is do away with net neutrality. Right -- because if there's one thing that we've learned from the financial sector, it's that meltdowns are best prevented by doing away with regulation.

Too big to fail = only ER

Posted by Herman | December 02 | 2008 6:55 PM | permalink

The ever-sharp Tom Evslin argues that yes it sometimes can be necessary to support institutions who are too big too fail. The collateral damage on innocent citizens and society as a whole can be too big to let that happen.One should try to prevent the creation of these single-points-of-failure, a more distributed system would have ideally no entity "too big to fail".

His new point is that bail-outs are a sign of weakness of the big institution and constitute a big threat to its competitors who are better managed and do NOT get support. Shoulder the weak and destroy the strong in one go is bad policy.

Therefore a bailout should mean only protection of society and a soft landing of the institution. Let the better competitors take over the business.

Too big to fail SHOULD mean too big for life support. Emergency collateral damage control is sometimes necessary; perpetuating the failed institutions only causes cascading failures among their competitors.

Very challenging, I like the idea.

Exaflood

Posted by Herman | December 02 | 2008 6:36 PM | permalink

Every now and then a story is printed claiming that the Internet is clogging up. Usually filesharing is named as the culprit, implying in the same breath that all filesharing is criminal and those terrible illegal filesharers are stealing capacity from law-abiding citizens. Therefore unfortunately a limit must be imposed upon the total amount of data one can transport in a month and/or the ISP has to check for filesharing and block or limit it.

These stories are bogus. There is no clogging as the University of Minnesota and the renowned prof. Andrew Odlyzko has shown. Ars Technica has a fine summary of the results of the study, showing a drop in utilization because bandwidth grows faster than usage.

The real reason behind the stories is money. Big Content wants to sustain its old business model based on strict limits how to get access to content. Big ISP and telco's want to increase their ARPU, unfortunately by making capacity scarce instead of delivering more value.

As Ars put it eloquently :

"exaflood" horror stories should never be used in an attempt to justify a nonneutral 'Net on the grounds that the "tech simply can't handle it." The tech can handle it just fine; the question is whether companies are willing to handle the tech."

Tallest building in China

Posted by Willem | December 01 | 2008 9:40 PM | permalink

Coming in 2014, construction of the Shanghai Tower. The 632-meter building is designed by Gensler, who calls itself a leading global architectural design firm and claims that the tower advances sustainable design strategies and gives prominence to public spaces. But is it true? Well, they state that the façade's taper, texture and asymmetry work in partnership to reduce wind loads on the building by 24 percent, offering considerable savings overall in both building materials and construction costs. In addition, the building's spiraling parapet collects rainwater, which is used for the tower's heating and air conditioning systems. Wind turbines located directly beneath the parapet generate on-site power. Sounds not bad, but on the other hand, not extremely revolutionairy as well. And nowadays, who doesn't claim to be sustainable? Well, at least I do like the design...

Melting

Posted by Marjolein | December 01 | 2008 2:02 PM | permalink

Is it art? Is it activism? Or both: this man hands out flyers for the Red Cross in Buenos Aires.

"The handout urged readers to minimize their impact on the globe by using public transportation, conserving water, reusing plastic bags, and buying energy-efficient appliances. Much of the Argentinian Red Cross budget goes to aiding victims of natural disasters such as floods, droughts, and heavy snowfall- disasters generally attributable to global warming. The half-melted man is an attempt to make their plight visible by sitting in a gruesome puddle of himself."

Via: Inhabitat