Herman: February 2009 Archives

The principle of "lean"  is to focus on value creation for customers, remove waste (including wasted time) and rely on the skills of your staff to improve and change.

Gasification of (unedible) biomass is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy.

The sources of this biomass are by nature (pun intended) distributed geographically. 

Would it not be nice if the efficient conversion of biomass to useful energy/electricity could be decentralized, saving us the energy loss of trucking all this biomass to a big factory and distributing electricty and heat back again? Creating the possibility of cooperative energy companies, owned by the users themselves.

Nexterra aims to create these decentralized systems. They are starting to test 2 MWe systems in a relatively small form factor. 

The purpose of patents is to create a balance. A balance between the need to create a sizable reward and incentive for inventors and investors, and the need to benefit as society from these innovations. More importantly, to create a continuous flow of improvements and innovations building upon each other. That is the motivation to limit patent protection in time. After some years the inventor is deemed to be rewarded and others can use the ideas to create something new.

The current patent system has been designed for physical goods and processes, not for a hyperconnected age where "connect and share" of ideas creates the highest value for society. The abundance of rather ridiculous software patents creates stalemates and patent wars that serve no purpose.

The latest one is reported by Ars Tecnica. As a proof that trouble never comes alone, poor TomTom is targeted by Microsoft in a broad patent lawsuit. The details are available in the article, but the general issue at hand is a proof that software patents currently lead to World War I -like warfare. Old ideas, stalemates and a massive loss to society.

Most people think that hybrid propulsion systems are only useful in cars. The nice thing is that even in boats a hybrid makes sense. Even a tugboat. Ecogeek reports.

Although the ranks of specialists are still dominated by middle aged men (babyboomers and the generation just after them) this will change soon. The student population at the universities has changed dramatically. More than 70 % of the students of medicine currently are female. 

As one professor told me, the girls are usually the best students. Highly motivated, structured and very intelligent.

Most of them are not willing to work 80 hrs per week as an independent. They prefer to get a laborcontract with normal hours and vacations. This will mean the end of the current structure with "independent" specialists.

The second change has been triggered by the Iphone. 

Its intuitive user-interface is very appealing to people in the medical profession. Already several applications are available for daily use, like a stored database of farmaceutical knowledge: drugs, their components, specific effects and side-effects, their application and so on. I am told that many specialists and specialized nurses carry an Iphone with them all the time just for this purpose: immediate, on the spot searches in this immense database.

From males with stethoscopes to females with Iphones.....

Lets do a quick calculation. 

Lets assume the costs increase even more, from the current projection of costs of Euro 2 billion to Euro 2.5 billion. Depreciation time 50 years, interest rate 5 %.

It is estimated by many experts that on average 200.000 people will use this metro-line per day.

This means per user per day: 0,68 Euro depreciation, 1,20 Euro interest (or per year accumulated 50 and 87 mio). Which in real terms will be reduced to 1/3 after 50 years if we assume an inflation of 2 % per year.

If we assume this is interest paid to our own pension funds, so to our children, do you think it is worth the investment? Just look at the map of Amsterdam, see the connection with Schiphol and the big railway hub created in the south of Amsterdam. Think about the required shift in mobility,  from cars to public transportation.

You can be sure many people and many visitors will use this line extensively.

I believe it is very much worth the effort.

The recent turmoil about the rising costs of the new metro-line in Amsterdam (" Noord-Zuid lijn") leads to the usual comments and proposals by critics. More committees and more experts, tougher negotiators who can shift the riscs involved much more to the contractor, and so on.

I don't buy it. Yes, probably you can and should manage these projects better. But the reality of these one-of-a-kind complex projects with a lot of unknowns is that there is a lot of risc. Building infrastructure underground in an old city is in the highest category.

 

In the Amsterdam case, once you made the decision that you need the line and you do not want to tear down houses to be able to build the line, there is no alternative.

You could have tried to get a fixed price contract where there was hardly any risc of cost overruns for the government. I am certain that the contractprice would have been far far higher than the current revised projections: the contractor would have taken margins for every imaginable situation, even the ones that have not materialized and will not materialize.

Unfortunately our chosen representatives usually want to have their cake and eat it at the same time. The cheapest possible costs projection combined with an unwillingness to understand and accept riscs. 

 

And for Amsterdam? The real mistake was the deal with the central government. All cost overruns are for the city, creating a heavy burden (from 300 mio Euro to currently 900 mio Euro or more).

We are witnessing a large real life test. Thanks to a screwup of a record company the new album of U2 is all over the P2P networks. It will be interesting to see the impact.

First on the sale of the new CD which is important for record company, but secondly the impact on the revenue of the band, which is the metric for the musicians. The two are not necessarily correlated.

My prediction? A slightly lower sales figure for the record company, a higher income for the musicans due to higher prices and fully packed stadiums when they make a tour.

Access to (digital) music anywhere increases the value of the live experience.

It will be interesting to follow this particular case.

The power of crowdsourcing: Slashdot readers pick up a giant error. 

Arctic Ice Extent Understated Because of "Sensor Drift"

dtjohnson writes "The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has been at the forefront of predicting doom in the arctic as ice melts due to global warming. In May, 2008 they went so far as to predict that the North Pole would be ice-free during the 2008 'melt season,' leading to a lively Slashdot discussion. Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers. The problem was discovered after they received emails from puzzled readers, asking why obviously sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as ice-free, open ocean. It turns out that the NSIDC relies on an older, less-reliable method of tracking sea ice extent called SSM/I that does not agree with a newer method called AMSR-E. So why doesn't NSIDC use the newer AMSR-E data? 'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.' Turns out that the AMSR-E data only goes back to 2002, which is probably not long enough for the NSIDC to make sweeping conclusions about melting. The AMSR-E data is updated daily and is available to the public. Thus far, sea ice extent in 2009 is tracking ahead of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, so the predictions of an ice-free north pole might be premature."

I do not like professional soccer and its crazy ecosystem. A warped world.

Therefore it is amazing to see a ritual on TV just moments ago.

The players of Fiorentina, losing an important game in their home stadium against Ajax Amsterdam, say gooodbye to their opponents when they leave the field. In two lines, creating a honor guard lane.

I just learned that their trainer has introduced this as a standard in the team, at every game they play at home.

He has earned my deep respect. 

But when you minaturize the fuel cell, everything starts to get solid state and simple. Two recent publications show what you could get. Very interesting way of approaching the technology.

A sugar cubed cell (shown right) and a very, very small chip (shown left)

A friend of mine has a wonderful apartment in Amsterdam with a fiber connection , 100/100 Mbps. He has bought a toplevel wifirouter, N-spec, supporting up to 300 Mbps, to get full bandwidth to his laptops. To his frustration nothing works. The radio signal as seen by the laptops is fine, but no Internet whatsoever.

A befriended radio engineer explained what is the problem. All neighbours in the apartment block have wifi, some more than one access point. Hardly anybody bothers to change anything after the router is unpacked, other than the security settings. The standard setting is channel number 6, out of 13/14 channels available. All these access points are competing with each other on the same channel, creating a lousy signal-to-noise ratio. 

The problem gets worse when you use N-spec routers: they need a lot more radiobandwidth and are more sensitive for interference.

So the solution is to choose a free channel (preferable number 1 [update: if you have an iPhone you better choose channel 1] or 14) or allocate channels between neighbours so as to minimize interference.  

More likely people will start a war by purchasing antennas that amplify the signal strenght. That explains why range extenders and amplifying antennas are so popular in a crowded city like Amsterdam.

Obama has signed off a stimulus package including approx. 7 billion euros to improve the broadband networks in the USA, especially in rural areas.

Our Dutch unions propose plans requiring 7 billion euros to be spent on infrastructure, energy saving and the lot.

And to my utter surprise: nobody, absolutely nobody in the Netherlands  mentions or encourages the 7 billion euros to be injected into the economy by private means. 

The upgrade of our communication infrastructure to fiber (Fiber-to-the-Home) has been started by municipalities and entrepeneurs. The regulators (NMa, OPTA) have set the stage for a massive roll-out by Reggefiber (partly owned by KPN) in a manner which is quite unique and an example for other countries. Providing all of the Netherlands with fiber will require some 7 billion euros just for the physical wires. The rest comes on top.

Rolling out fiber-to-the-home is 80 % labour and 20 % materials. Most of the labour has to be local, and the Netherlands is home to several leading manfucaturers of fiber. There is a lot of proof that an improved communication infrastructure has significant multiplier effects in the rest of the economy.

And all this without spending tax-payers money.

Are there losers in this plan? Yes, the cable companies. 

But if you look closely you will find that most of the cash generated by these companies is sent out of the country, sometimes even with some extra cash from the tax-authorities (loss compensation). And they have a history of milking the company, not of investing in our economy.

So why is no politician or talkshow proud of this fact?

This week there is a worldwide conference in Barcelona on mobile communication.

A visitor reports that one of the messages of the conference is " Mobile broadband is the only serious alternative to bring broadband to the people - forget about Fiber to the Home/Curb etc.".

The last message shows how often lobbyists speculate on the fact that most people and especially politicians do not understand the laws of physics.

Debunking is easy: the message might be usefull for sparsely populated rural areas, but more than half of the worlds population lives in cities.

Do the math yourself.

- all bandwidth provided by an antenna is shared by everybody within the area its covers

- all the wireless data sent to and from the antenna must be transported to the Internet to be of any use (backhaul)

- this transport must be done with a fixed line (fiber) given the amount of data and the distances to be covered

So in Amsterdam we once did the math with some politicians.

- suppose you have an antenna which supports 100/100 Mbps, shared 

- suppose you share this with 5 families (radio engineers will start to laugh because it is hardly feasible to create this, but lets assume it just for the sake of argument)

- than you need 85.000 antenna's + 85.000 fiber backhaul connections

- for which you have to pass every house and open every street, so why not go all the way fiber?

- suppose you share with 25 families? It reduces the number of backhaul fibers

- at that point you start to dilute the capacity significantly, which translates in wide swings of speeds depending an user behaviour, like in the old days with cable

- this raises the question quickly how futureproof the investment would be? How soon before people start to get irritated, before applications arise which hit the ceiling? How soon before you want your own fixed line back?

Remember the early days of DSL. People started to share their expensive DSL-line with their neighbours using wifi. One year later this trend was gone: people were fed up with the hassle and the limitations. They bought their own line.

It always amazes me how inventive we can become once we really start to put our hearts and minds into solving a problem. Like this: shock absorbers in a car kill motion energy. Motion energy from wheels moving up and down. Why not regenerate the energy back to the propulsion system? 

More and more prototypes and real commercial vehicles are presented that use an unusual configuration : 2 steering/tilting wheels in front, one in back. The Piaggio MP3 is to be credited with kicking off the trend, but others are following. There is a logic to it: 3 wheeled vehicles are stable and much safer than motocycles. 2 Wheels in front means more rubber in contact with the road, which leads to better steering and braking. 

Some Dutch guys have applied this concept to an electric e-assist cycle. 

They identify the challenges.

"The high-energy efforts are focused on overcoming the technical barriers associated with commercialization of PHEV batteries, namely:

• Cost - The current cost of Li-based batteries (the most promising chemistry) is approximately a factor of three-five too high on a kWh basis. The main cost drivers being addressed are the high cost of raw materials and materials processing, the cost of cell and module packaging, and manufacturing costs.
• Performance - The performance barriers include the need for much higher energy densities to meet the volume/weight requirements, especially for the 40-mile system, and to reduce the number of cells in the battery (thus reducing system cost).
• Abuse Tolerance - Many Li batteries are not intrinsically tolerant to abusive conditions such as a short circuit (including an internal short circuit), overcharge, over-discharge, crush, or exposure to fire and/or other high temperature environments. The use of Li chemistry in these larger (energy) batteries increases the urgency to address these issues.
• Life - The ability to attain a 15-year life, or 300,000 HEV cycles, or 5,000 EV cycles are unproven and are anticipated to be difficult. Specifically, the impact of combined EV/HEV cycling on battery life is unknown and extended time at high state of charge (SOC) is predicted to limit battery life."

Econmaster has compiled a graph of the economic decline in the EU, USA and Japan.

It shows how hard the Japanese have been hit. Ouch.....

Many experts believe that biomass  (or more specific biowaste plus specific non-edible crops that do not compete with food production) can produce a massive amount of renewable (bio-) gas. In quantities that can make a very large impact on mobility.

Recently several studies were released that all point in this direction.

The first on is a report of the Energy Transition Task Force in the Netherlands called "Biomass; Hot Issue Smart Choices"(3.4 Mbyte). The report tries to take a balanced view, given the fact that the biofuel craziness in the USA (subsidizing corn farmers to produce ethanol) has raised serious doubts on the ethics and viability of biofuels. 

The potential of biomass/biowaste is estimated as being very interesting.

Secondly the National Grid of the UK has produced a report that shows that UK biowaste could supply 50 % (18.000 million cubic meters) of the residential natural gas demand in the UK. The efficiency of injecting cleaned bio-methane into the gasinfrastructure is much higher than powering electricity plants which produce 70 % waste heat. Investments needed: 10 billion pounds. Quite competitive with other renewable sources.

At the same time researchers are publishing progress in converting cellulose (a non-edible waste product) into liquids for biofuel or a fully functional process to convert cornstalks in to biogas and energy..

And for anybody who likes to tinker himself: "Build your own algae bioreactor to produce biofuel"

Apparently the new management of the NS (National Rail in Holland) understands this concept. This morning in peak traffic several senior managers of the NS walked through my Intercity, talking to everyone about how the service was perceived, asking about problems and suggestions. 

A good start, keep it up.

[Pelosi graph]

Americans always loved their VW Beetles. So it comes as no surprise that a producer of golfcarts, facing a downturn in orders tries a new tack by producing conversion kits for VW Beetles to E-Bugs. Fun and business at the same time.

Source : Zoomilife

This graph demonstrates that consumers dominate Internet traffic, not businesses.The peak is in the evening.

The yearly graph shows a marked increase of traffic, starting in the summer at the same time the credit crisis was erupting in full force. In 6-7 months time a jump from 400 Gbps peak to nearly 650 Gbps peak. KPN told me they see a similar increase in traffic in their core network.

One possible explanation, other than people searching in the Internet for more information? More spare time to watch Youtube movies because work pressure eases off with the reduction in economic activity.......

The traditional newspaper business is under pressure.  With the rise of Internet, an increasing number of TV channels and more communication facilities people has more choice where to get information. The early erosion was in the 2 bread-and-butter revenue streams: advertisements to buy and sell stuff (now taken over by the likes of Ebay and Marktplaats and Craigslist)  and advertisements for personell (Monsterboard and other job-boards). The trend hass accelerated now that other advertisement spending is dropping.

Some people are asking for a bail-out, Sarkozy floats plans for mandatory "free" newspapers for youngsters. 

In my opinion, all these measures are looking backwards, trying to shore up an old business model against the tide.

Luckily  there are others who look forward: the NY Times has released an API to search through their database. Om Malik has an excellent article on the potential of this new approach.

In my opinion the NY Times gets it: connect and share is the name of the game .

We tend to focus on the development of alternative drive systems for cars, but there is a lot going on in two-wheelers. I like the outrageous designs that are cooked up, vibrating with power and speed. I like the fresh and uninhibited approaches: let's try it all, even hydrogen powered fuel cells in motorcycles. Zoomi Life tracks a lot of these developments, here are a few.

A hydrogen fuel cell motor cycle built by college students:

Testing the all electric racer.

For communication technology nothing beats optical transmissions over fibers. The inherent capacity of light is incredibly high. The limiting factor nowadays is the electronics: as soon as you convert light to electrical signals you have to slow down. So researchers around the world are working on all-optical processing of information to bypass this limit.

NetworkWorld reports on a big step forward. It is already well known how to encode 64 channels of 10 Gbps into one wavelenght, totaling 640 Gbps per wavelenght over 1 fiber. Demultiplexing the channels requires optical processing which was a problem until now. The researchers have solved this problem with a clever and small optical waveguide. They estimate that this technology will hit the market in 2012.

We will need it: more Fiber to the Home will put great strain on the backbones.

More and more organizations have gotten wind of the fact that Big Content was trying to get their infamous anti-piracy laws injected into this agreement, bypassing national lawmakers and representative bodies. After all, it is very difficult NOT to ratify a complete body of international agreements which have been negotiated between many countries. If you reject the agreement, you must reject it in total and face the economic damages.

 

So many groups have tried to get more information  on the state of the negotiations, so national and EU-parliaments can influence the negotiations before being confronted with a binary decision. No such luck. A worrying fact.

Ars Technica has an excellent overview of the state of affairs.

Apparently GM (and other manufacturers as well) has some 100 fuel-cell cars on the road for testing. See the video  (Source Ecogeek)