May 2009 Archives

Sometimes you need thorough research to confirm what common sense tells you but ideology wants you to ignore.

Conclusion (1): Although DRM has not impacted on many acts permitted by law, certain permitted acts are being adversely affected by the use of DRM.

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is a technology which allows you to communicate wireless with a small chip/processor that (usually) has no battery of its own. The energy in radiowaves directed at the device is used to power the chip. In practice this means that the distance between a reader and a device must be relatively small (or that you can fry the chip when the radio power is too high).

The European Commission has finally published its draft "Guidelines for the application of State Aid rules in relation to the rapid deployment of broadband networks" for consultation (pdf downloadable EC_NGA_guidelines_en.pdf). 

a NGA network is further defined as involving: 

(i) laying fibre to existing street cabinets offering the
prospects of downstream bandwidths of a minimum of 40 Mbps and 15 Mbps
upstream (compared with today's downstream speeds of a maximum of 8 and 24
Mbps for ADSL and ADSL2+ access technologies, respectively); (ii) upgrading
current cable networks to deliver speeds up to and beyond 50 Mbps against the
previous maximum speed of 20 Mbps, using the new 'DOCSIS 3.0' cable modem
standard, or (iii) connecting newly built homes and offices with fibre connections
offering services up to 100 Mbps and beyond.44

... for the purposes of assessing state aid for NGA networks, an area where such networks do not at present exist and where they are not likely to be built and be fully operational in the near future by private investors should be considered to be a "white NGA" area. In that regard, the term 'in the near future' should correspond to a period of [5] years.

Pretty soon laptops will be replaced by what we now call netbooks: powerful (enough for everyday use), low weight, high connectivity, long batterylife and sleek design. 

gt;

[The researchers] found the so-called superbugs---bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics---up to 100 yards downstream from the discharge point into the Huron River. Xi stresses that while the finding may be disturbing, it is important to understand that much work is still needed to assess what risk, if any, the presence of superbugs in aquatic environments poses to humans.

Xi and colleagues found that while the total number of bacteria left in the final discharge effluent declined dramatically after treatment, the remaining bacteria was significantly more likely to resist multiple antibiotics than bacteria in water samples upstream. Some strains resisted as many as seven of eight antibiotics tested. The bacteria in samples taken 100 yards downstream also were more likely to resist multiple drugs than bacteria upstream

For the third time Popsci.com presents the Invention Awards. They state 'It might not be a cure for leukemia or a rocket to Mars, but some unexpected innovations can be almost as profound.' From tanks to eco-friendly insulation, from the world as a webinterface for $350 and 8 months of work to the exoskeleton that took millions of dollars and ten years of work. Check it out for yourself!

The OECD produces a lot of good reports and overviews, if you take the time to read their papers. A treasure of statistics, facts and information, by definition a bit dull. But just look at their latest investigation (OECD - Economic Crisis.pdf) of the stimulus packages our governments have put in place. Three tables which tell a story.

Governments have resorted to spending hundreds of billions in a bid to recover the economy. The spending frenzy has attracted a lot of industries that were under pressure anyway: why not get a bailout as well?

Change copyright law so that "the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement." 

One commenter  describes their proposal as the "Dinosaur Recovery Act". 

"Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."

• First, the stuff we cover with intellectual property rights has certain vital differences from the stuff we cover with tangible property rights. Partly because of those differences, Jefferson, like most of his successors in the United States, does not see intellectual property as a claim of natural right based on expended labor. Instead it is a temporary state-created monopoly given to encourage further innovation.

• Second, there is no "entitlement" to have an intellectual property right. Such rights may or may not be given as a matter of social "will and convenience" without "claim or complaint from any body."

• Third, intellectual property rights are not and should not be permanent; in fact they should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place.

• Fourth, a linked point, they have considerable monopolistic dangers--they may well produce more "embarrassment than advantage." In fact, since intellectual property rights potentially restrain the benevolent tendency of "ideas . . . [to] freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man," they may in some cases actually hinder rather than encourage innovation.

• Fifth, deciding whether to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series.¹³ Even if one believes that intellectual property is a good idea, which I firmly do, one will still have the hard job of saying which types of innovation or information are "worth to the public the embarrassment" of an exclusive right, and of drawing the limits of that right.

Thomas Macaulay repeated this position in England 30 years later:

"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

I wonder if any politician who is discussing copyright extensions to 99 years or "three strikes you are out" proposals has ever bothered to read what great minds have thought and said...

It has been all over the news: the French government has passed a law (HADOPI) that gives an agency the power to cut off your Internet access if you download illegal content, without a court order or the intervention of a judge.

That is the reduction in our GDP according to the statistics in Q1 2009. People who rely on extrapolation see doom and gloom, others think the bottom is near.

As defined by Twitterati, but probably true for any news source which is online.

{The researcher] found that each of the depleted regions followed a rough bell curve of production; initial production was followed by a steep ramp-up, a plateau near peak levels, and then a consistent decline.

When he applied the same formula to coal data from around the world, the results were startling: the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's maximum estimate for extractable coal is about 3,400 billion tons. Rutledge's calculations suggest just 666 billion tons.

"Auch wenn sich viele Fusskranke zusammentun, laufen sie nicht Weltrekord." (Even when a lot of people with foot diseases work together, they will not run a world record)

The NY Times, but especially its commenters tell us a story about Norway and why it's doing so well, even in these times of financial crisis. Major lessons are that of course the oil wealth helps, but that also smart use of the money, low inequality of wages and good education are key. The oil we cannot copy, but a lot of the other aspects we can.

An interesting slideshow by the NY Times gives an insight into Google's multicultural workforce. Dit you know half of the engineers working in Silicon Valley were born overseas. Google clearly is a great example that diversity works and may even be necessary to compete in the business world of the future.

The first time I have seen him: no arms, no legs, no worries. Being disabled is a mental state...

Economists usually focus on factories to measure productivity. Evolving Excellence points out that one might want to look at other costs too.

So if Chrysler has 40,800 people and only 22,000 of them actually make cars, while the rest are involved in mostly non-value adding other things, that is a problem.  But the really startling number in the filing is that Chrysler has 3,200 dealers which employee 140,000 people. 140,000 people working at dealerships and 22,000 people making cars???  It takes more than 6 people to sell and service a Chrysler for every 1 needed to build a Chrysler.  How bad is a Chrysler if it takes that many people to convince people to buy one, then to keep it running?

"Conclusions: These data demonstrate a dose-response association between sitting time and mortality from all causes and CVD, independent of leisure time physical activity. In addition to the promotion of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and a healthy weight, physicians should discourage sitting for extended periods."

What they discovered is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their offspring sleeping, and there's not a lot the regulator can do about it.

Outside central London that is: in the middle of The Smoke there really are too many networks, with resends, beacons and housekeeping filling 90 per cent of the data frames sent over Wi-Fi. This leaves only 10 per cent for users' data. In fact, the study found that operating overheads for wireless Ethernet were much higher than anticipated, except in Bournemouth for some reason: down on the south coast 44 per cent of frames contain user data.

As part of large budget cuts the hydrogen industry US$ 1.2 billion boost proposed by former president Bush, has been partially axed by the Obama government. The reason, according to Nobel Laureate and Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, is that it's not close enought to being marketable. The Department states that "The probability of deploying hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in the next 10 to 20 years is low". Check out DailyTech for more info and a very long discussion below the article (most of which can be skipped).

Fun to watch.

We all have become used to mobile Internet. When EDGE came along the access bandwidth speeds became acceptable. UMTS and HSDPA have been deployed and LTE is on the horizon, promising even more speed. 

One of the treasures of the Netherlands is the "Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (Social and Cultural Planning Office). The director Paul Schnabel embodies an attitude towards a sober and evidence based view of the world, far removed from hypes and populistic spin. As in his recent speech about pensionfunds in the Netherlands:

Nice: solar powered benches that generate power to provide wifi, and function as night lights.
The bench is made from recycled plastic and recycled aluminum.

The birthrates of Muslim women in Europe--and around the world--have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish- born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, Turkish- born women in Germany had on average two children more than German- born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. [.. ] Sweden's fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by mid century. 

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain's fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and forties-- just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980. 

While the IMF predicts further economic doom and gloom and everybody is still recovering from the giant drop in GDP in Germany, the EC is being slightly less pessimistic.

The end of this recession -- the most severe downturn since World War II -- is finally in sight. This is the clear message from Economic Cycle Research Institute's array of leading indices of the U.S. economy.

What are these indicators? One is the ECRI's U.S. Long Leading Index (USLLI), which has the longest average lead times of any U.S. leading index. Another is the Weekly Leading Index (WLI), which has a shorter lead over the business cycle but is very promptly available. 

It is always interesting to see your own country through the eyes of an "outsider". It becomes even more interesting if the eyes belong to somebody born and raised in the USA.

And while the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. "People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that difference, and on that 52 percent," said Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands whose clients are mostly American expats. "But consider that the Dutch rate includes social security, which in the U.S. is an additional 6.2 percent. Then in the U.S. you have state and local taxes, and much higher real estate taxes. If you were to add all those up, you would get close to the 52 percent."

My friend Colin Campbell, an American writer, has been in the Netherlands for four years with his wife and their two children. "Over the course of four years, four human beings end up going to a lot of different doctors," he said. "The amazing thing is that virtually every experience has been more pleasant than in the U.S. There you have the bureaucracy, the endless forms, the fear of malpractice suits. Here you just go in and see your doctor. It shows that it doesn't have to be complicated. I wish every single U.S. congressman could come to Amsterdam and live here for a while and see what happens medically."

I love simple and clever solutions to seemingly difficult problems. Like how to scan a book and transform the image to digital text..

Scientific American's excellent 60-seconds-science blog has an article on a smart charger for electric vehicles. The concept is based on the fact that if everyone would have an electric car and would plug them in the electricity grid would certainly black-out. Therefore what's needed is a device that can sense when there's sufficient capacity to juice up an electric car and when there's not. This is called a smart charging device. The added benefit of such a smart charging device is, however, that it can create a price-incentive for people. If you want to charge your car immediately, you pay a higher price for the electricity, if you can wait, the price is lower. One can even create an auction-like price setting. The highest bidder gets electricity the fastest. This will regulate prices in a very natural way. Nevertheless, the small discussion below the article already shows that all-electric cars still have a long way to go, because some of the contributors state that car=freedom and that it has to run always, immediately. I do believe this is true, which clearly points us in the direction of hybrid cars (with better batteries then the current ones of course) and combined fuel-cell electric cars. Or in a direction of two cars per family (which is already the case in large parts of the western world): one purely electric and one that can be filled up at a gas (or hydrogen or ethanol or whatever) station in a few minutes.

We all know that sex sells. But how about a girls-site that explores whether America is ready to leave behind their gas-guzzling cars for smooth electric vehicles? The publishers of this site, called EV Grrls, find out just what it takes to end oil and coal addiction in our country and ignite the clean-tech celebration (their own words). Moreover, they state as their motto: EV Grrls drive the cleanest, hottest cars of the future to all the best West Coast parties.  EV Grrls is led by Shannon Arvizu, a clean-tech strategist and educator. She is currently a doctoral researcher at Columbia University and has spent the last two years investigating the field of green cars and green energy for her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation. So far, the first entries on the site focus on the Tesla Model S test drive and party. Not bad, but not very shocking as well. But the concept is fun enough to follow it for a while.