Herman: March 2009 Archives

" How much is a trillion dollars? If you would have spend a million dollars every day since the birth of Jesus, you still would have hundreds of millions left today."

Wired News dives into the issue of the rating agencies that gave AAA-ratings to toxic products.

At the F2C conference of David Isenberg the classical debate of wireless versus wired has been restarted. In my opinion they are symbiotic.

Look at the simple Baken mobi-law: D x B x Q = Constant, 

D = Distance

B = Bandwidth

Q = QoS

And so if d = Ln D, b = Ln B,  q = Ln Q then d + b + q = c with  c = Ln C => (dbq,e) = c with dbq the vector (d,b,q) and e the unity vector 3^-1/2(1,1,1), normal to the plane of "constant mobility" where you have to compromise between D, B and Q. The constant c will improve, increase with time and technology developments, but will never be large enough to ensure our bandwidth hunger in larger 3G, 4G LTE cells and has a physical ceiling ... so ... there is only one conclusion!! The cell diameter has to become smaller and smaller ... thus one inevitably comes to microcell generated by antennas on/in all our street furniture ... and yes Streetlights (we have over 4.000.000 in the Netherlands! In cities and ... all along our highways!), VDSL cabinets or bus stop (cabinets). In 1999 I said, since people and cars do not want fibres attached to them:

The more broadband applications, the more (mobile)broadband bandwidth, the smaller the cells, the higher the frequencies ... in the end we will have "ether over fibre". 

The Broadband Stimulus package in the USA gets everybody excited and debating how to spend the sizable but relatively limited amount of money.

A wind-only powered speedrecord, over 200 kph (Gas2.org).

Mitsubishi cleverly uses Youtube to create a viral marketing campaign for it MIEV electric car.

When the CD was first introduced, plenty of record company execs hated it. One says, even now, "I thought [the engineers who designed it] could have done something to stop piracy."

Looking back at the CD era, though, it's clear that those little plastic discs were a goldmine. People loved the new format, many repurchased their collections on CD, and prices for recorded music went way up. How did the industry respond to this windfall? By screwing the artists.

Knopper describes how the labels wrote new contracts to cover the new format, contracts which featured larger "packaging reductions" and "free goods allowances." In addition to the deductions, artist royalty rates were reduced. "After labels factored in these newfangled deductions," Knopper says, "typical artists received roughly 81 cents per disc. Under the LP system, artists made a little more than 75 cents per disc. So labels sold CDs for almost $8 more than LPs at stores, but typical artists made just six cents more per record."

Such practices fueled a CD boom that ran from 1984 through 2000, at which point the bottom began falling out of the industry. After two decades of expensive music--and little support for cheap singles--labels had grown fat on pumping out albums with a couple of hits. 

This puts a different perspective on the cries of the record companies that illegal downloading is hurting culture because artists will not get paid for their efforts. Breaking the habit of an addiction to windfall profits is hard but why should have enyone have mercy on them? 

Amsterdam has great ambitions to introduce eletric cars in the city. In 2040 all transport by cars should be electrified.

People tend to rely too much on technology to produce perfect answers. Anybody who designs and engineers technology is aware of the opposite: only with a lot of work and sweat and inspiration we succeed in coercing nature to do as we please, more or less.

DNA traces of an unknown eastern-European woman had been found at almost17 crime scenes, including two murders (including a 22 year old police officer) but also car jackings, unprofessional break-ins and on a bullet fired in a marital dispute. The crimes where spread around a large area including south-west Germany, France and Switzerland.

It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom. (source BoingBoing)

The cotton swabs probably have been contaminated with DNA during their production. The sensitivity of DNA-analyzers has increased to a point where it is really hard to produce cotton swabs that are DNA free.

The Irish police suddenly saw in their statistics a certain Polish driver who was apparently breaking the traffic code all the time. When they saw multiple infringements at the same time at different places somebody started to dig. 

Oops. Apparently many policemen could not decipher the structure of the polish driver licenses. Instead of the name of the person they had entered the polish word for "driver" in the field for name.

Some time ago the online media were reporting on the Buma Stemra vs. Suplacon case. The company Suplacon was ordered to pay copyright fees for allowing employees to listen to radios at their workstation. Over the years it has been established in several cases as a reasonable position: if music is played openly and it creates a commercial benefit (like in a restaurant improving the atmosphere) money is made and the creator of the music should get a slice of the pie. The argument gets thin in a work environment, but again there are a lot of precedents.

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn't the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city's voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

Now, three homes and a garden may not sound like much, but others have been quick to see the potential. A group of architects and city planners in Amsterdam started a project called the "Detroit Unreal Estate Agency" and, with Mitch's help, found a property around the corner. The director of a Dutch museum, Van Abbemuseum, has called it "a new way of shaping the urban environment." He's particularly intrigued by the luxury of artists having little to no housing costs.

Paris appears to be determined to support electric propulsion. Not just for scooters, but also for cars. Look at the map on their city page with charging stations....

Où sont les bornes de recharge pour véhicules électriques? Consultez la carte et trouvez les bornes sur la voie publique, dans les parcs souterrains de la ville ou dans les stations service. Des bornes pour les deux-roues ou les poids-lourds électriques existent également. 

Shipping contributes about four percent of global emissions from burning fossil fuels, about double the emissions from aviation.

But the industry is less visible to most people than aviation and only very recently faced limits on some of the pollutants in funnel emissions, particularly nitrogen oxides (called NOx) and sulphur dioxide.

Just a few kilometres from one of the busiest ports in the world, a Singapore firm says it has the answer that can help the shipping industry clean up its act.

Ecospec says it has invented and tested a patented method that removes planet-warming carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and soot from ship exhausts.

The intensive trials, which would have taken place at Rolls-Royce's Derby facility, would have involved the engine being powered by both ordinary kerosene and the alternative fuels, and operated through its full range of power settings, including idle, acceleration, take-off and cruise.

(Source: Clean Technica) 

Technology, Entertainment, Design started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

"Pamela Anderson has more prosthetics in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled."

The large scale deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home
networks in urban areas with highrise MDU's has led
to significant improvements in materials and processes.
The similarity between highrise MDU's and large office
buildings raises the question if full fiber LAN networks
could be an alternative for hybrid CAT/fiber based
LAN's. A comparison has been made for a greenfield
situation in a relatively small office building. The Fiberto-
the-Desk (FttD) solution shows a significantly lower
CAPEX and lower OPEX. The consumption of energy is
lower. The FttD solution with a star-topology has
several important advantages with regards to security,
management of the network, and future bandwidth
upgrades

Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.

Google has disclosed some interesting facts in their submission to the New Zealand government regarding take-down-notices. 

In its submission, Google notes that more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.

It would be naive to underestimate the possibilities of abuse or a rule. 

Everybody is discussing how the financial sector should be structured in the future. It is wise to start with the basic "utility" functions: funds transfer between parties (payments), and middle man between those who have saved and those who need to lend money. 

The idea was to enable users to send minutes to family members in rural areas, who weren't otherwise able to buy prepaid phone cards. However, Kenyans quickly came up with other uses. "Lots and lots of people were using it as a surrogate for currency," Eagle said. "[You] could literally pay for taxi cab rides using cell phone credit."

Safaricom realized a huge opportunity and started a mobile payment service called M-PESA. To call M-PESA a success would be an understatement, according to Eagle. "Within about a year, (Safaricom) became the biggest bank in East Africa." Today you can use your phone to pay for cab rides and electricity, to get money out of ATMs without owning an ATM card or even having a traditional bank account.

Eagle shared another striking example of the transformative power of mobile payments during his ETech talk. Rural communities used to have to pay a lot of money upfront in order to get a modern well capable of providing clean drinking water. Now, there are companies that install these wells for free, complete with an integrated cell phone payment system. Want some water? Just pay as you go with your M-PESA account.

Superficially unrelated is the observation (again by GigaOM) that Ebay is transforming itself to a payment provider: Paypal is growing so fast it will become the biggest revenue generator of Ebay. Om predicts they will change the name Ebay soon to Paypal.

Thanks to Vincent Dekker we can see how MIT's Fluid Interface Lab has come up with a wearable "sixth sense" computer. You have to watch the video to see how inspirational and creative they have been. This may very well be the pointer everybody needed to go to the next level of user interfaces.

The current crisis has given us new words, billions and trillions. Numbers so large they lose their meaning.  A report of the Asian Development Bank (identified by the analyst at Telco 2.0) puts it in perspective.

For anyone who wants proof that sharing creative material will add to our culture, here it is.

The freedom of press is restricted to those that have a press, is an old saying.

Why not make bikes from wood? Light, strong and you can create a lot of shapes.

A Japanese toilet in a ski-resort. It's meant as a marketing gimmick for a coffeebrand. 

Researchers at the the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT) in Pfinztal, German, have created a substitute for plastic for injection moulded components.  

The cellulose industry separates wood into its three main components -- lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose," ICT team leader Emilia Regina Inone-Kauffmann told DPA. "The lignin is not needed in papermaking, however. Our colleagues mix that lignin with fine natural fibers made of wood, hemp or flax and natural additives such as wax. From this, they produce plastic granulate that can be melted and injection-moulded."

As Wall Street firms prepare 2009 technology budgets; a good portion of spending will undoubtedly be focused on reducing data latency. Faster processors, refurbished data centers, new routers, more bandwidth and greater capacity are all needed to manage the industry's growing data volume and the requirement for lower latency. With data latency now measured at millisecond intervals and trading strategies for different asset classes -- options, futures and FX -- now moving aggressively toward algorithmic trading, technology organizations are searching for the best and brightest multi-thread developers to program the fastest and newest technologies in order to stay ahead of the markets. Hardware acceleration, multi-core processing, complex event processing, virtualization and every type technology in the data-latency sensitive lifecycle are being squeezed for every last millisecond of speed.

In the category  "Lies, damned lies and statistics".

We have touched on the subject of Network Neutrality (NN) before. We all sense without words what is right and what is wrong when your operator starts interfering with your broadband connection but that is not adequate for lawyers and judges. They need written laws.

While other startups are working to grow oil-rich algae to make biofuel, it has proven difficult to do cost effectively or in large enough quantities to be useful. Companies face the difficulty of maintaining productivity rates as temperatures change, distributing nutrients throughout the pond and keeping contaminants -- including other algae strains- out. Algae tends to grow fairly thinly on the surface of a pond, with top layers choking lower layers out, and distributing light and nutrients can be energy- and cost-intensive. "Everyone thinks they can grow algae because they've seen it in an aquarium," Walsh said. "But it's been a real challenge."

Wikileaks is a website where leaked documents can be found. An internal presentation of the Carlyle Group (a large private equity investment firm) on the global crisis was published over here. Looking back it is stunning nobody wanted to see the signs. 

A good education lasts a lifetime. As a MSc. I like to see numbers and raw data supporting a claim, order-of-magnitude calculations and references, the basic physics. They give me grip and the ability to discriminate clever "spinning" from honest efforts.

- energy costs : Euro 2,87

- electrolyser  :  Euro 0,51
- facility costs, overhead :  Euro 0,20

- pipelines and storage  :  Euro 0,30
- compressors and energy :  Euro 0,41
- trucking :  Euro 0,25     

- stations : Euro 0,42

There are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

As Robert Pirsig once wrote in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", we humans have an innate ability to recognise quality when we see or hear it. In art, love, music and many other aspects of life. The amazing thing is that we all sense more or less the same, but have a hard time trying to define this quality: words fail us.