Tag Archives: tech

Cloudsourcing: Power Clouds Takes New Approach to Solar Energy

by OmarMLWtombw Posted on October 14, 2013

Building the grid for the solar park in Scornicesti, Romania. Photo: Power Clouds

When it comes to providing energy, a Singapore-based company has its head in the clouds. And they’re hoping it will revolutionize the way energy systems are developed.

Power Clouds is building large-scale solar parks and commercial rooftop energy plants to harness power for remote regions of the world. Beginning with three solar parks in Scornicesti, Romania, the company put its first plant into operation in August, with the third plant scheduled to go into operation in December. Attilio Palumbo, project manager for Power Clouds, says they chose that region based on several factors.

“[We looked at] the country’s social and economic stability, geographical characteristics, weather conditions, the country’s economic support and the population’s energy demand,” he says. “We will soon officially announce the locations of the fourth and fifth plants that will be built.”

In addition to harnessing energy for the region, the company’s unique business model invites outside individuals to become a part of the solution. The solar panels for each project are purchased by outside companies or individuals, who buy a panel (or “cloud”) for $1,200 under a hire-purchase contract. The panel is installed in the solar park, and when the plant becomes operational, the purchaser receives a monthly check from Power Clouds, which essentially rents back the panel from the purchaser.

The agreement lasts for 20 years, and Palumbo claims that, during that time, they will receive back about 400 percent of their initial purchase price.

“The economic returns begin the moment the solar plant goes into operation,” he explains. “Over the first five years, people [recoup] the amount spent on the panel’s purchase, and continue to receive monthly returns for the next 15 years after that.”

He says the monthly revenue generated consists of a fixed fee plus a variable amount based on each plant’s actual energy production. Each solar park takes less than four months to complete, and he says panel purchasers for the inaugural solar park are already receiving financial returns.

Homepage photo credit: morgueFile/pedrojperez

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Cloudsourcing: Power Clouds Takes New Approach to Solar Energy

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Yet Another Front in the War to Make the Web (Almost) Unusable

by Bob Dole Posted on October 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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Sign me up for this Felix Salmon rant:

It might have been the Slate redesign which pushed me over the edge, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just PTSD from Reuters Next. But at this point I will seriously donate a substantial amount of money to anybody who can build a browser plugin which automatically kills all persistent navbars, or “sticky navs”, as they’re also known.

It’s impossible to identify who started this trend, but it has become the single most annoying thing on the news web, recently overtaking even the much-loathed pagination for that title. If you’re reading a story on Pando Daily, then no matter what page you’re on, no matter where you are in the story, the top of your browser window always looks like this:

Click the link for examples if you’re not sure what this is all about. But Felix is right: It’s annoying. It’s evil. It needs to stop. Felix explains why in his post, but what makes navbars even worse is that they’re sometimes paired up with bizarro code that makes it difficult or impossible to cut and paste text using the normal tools that we’ve all used forever. Instead you have to go through the navbar in some weird way. There have been a few cases where I was so flummoxed by what they expected me to do that I finally just went into the page source and copied from there. So far, no one has figured out how to take over a text editor, so that still works.

(And while we’re at it, why do so many sites make it so damn hard to embed their videos? They usually have an embed option, so obviously they want you to embed their videos. But the code they provide is all but impossible to vary in even the slightest way, like aligning it on the right instead of the center, or something like that. I just went through an experience this morning trying to embed a PolitiFact video that almost makes me believe in ghosts. Just stop it, folks.)

This is all part of an ongoing evolution of the web that seems to be based on a desire to make the browsing experience as annoying as possible without quite going over the edge where people just give up on your site. A site that’s a micron short of that is ideal. You want your readers tearing their hair out, but not going ballistic enough to quit entirely. As more and more sites go down this road, it makes the web more a blood pressure raising machine than an information source. But it was nice while it lasted.

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Yet Another Front in the War to Make the Web (Almost) Unusable

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Can Methanol Save Us All?

by au87rr Posted on October 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the Wall Street Journal today, George Olah and Chris Cox suggest that instead of venting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it causes global warming, we should use it to create methanol:

Thanks to recent developments in chemistry, a new way to convert carbon dioxide into methanol—a simple alcohol now used primarily by industry but increasingly attracting attention as transportation fuel—can now make it profitable for America and the world to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

At laboratories such as the University of Southern California’s Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute (founded by George Olah, one of the authors here), researchers have discovered how to produce methanol at significantly lower cost than gasoline directly from carbon dioxide. So instead of capturing and “sequestering” carbon dioxide—the Obama administration’s current plan is to bury it—this environmental pariah can be recycled into fuel for autos, trucks and ships.

….In Iceland, the George Olah Renewable Methanol Plant, opened last year by Carbon Recycling International, is converting carbon dioxide from geothermal sources into methanol, using cheap geothermal electrical energy. The plant has demonstrated that recycling carbon dioxide is not only possible but commercially feasible.

Olah has been writing about a “methanol economy” for a long time, and he skips over a few issues in this op-ed. One in particular is cost: it takes electricity to catalyze CO2 and hydrogen into methanol, and it’s not clear how cheap it is to manufacture methanol in places that don’t have abundant, cheap geothermal energy—in other words, most places that aren’t Iceland. There are also some practical issues related to energy density and corrosiveness in existing engines and pipelines. Still, it’s long been an intriguing idea, since in theory it would allow you to use renewable energy like wind or solar to power a facility that creates a liquid fuel that can be used for transportation. You still produce CO2 when you eventually burn that methanol in your car, of course, but the lifecycle production of CO2 would probably be less than it is with conventional fuels.

I haven’t kept up with the details of this lately, so I don’t know what Olah means when he talks about “recent developments” in chemistry. Does he mean stuff that’s been in the pipeline over the past decade, or something that’s genuinely new over the past year or two? I’m not sure. I’d be interested in reading a response from a neutral expert, though.

And why did this appear on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, not a place that’s famous for its concern over climate change? Because Olah and Cox are arguing that for methanol to compete in the marketplace, we need to stop subsidizing ethanol unfairly. I’m all for that, and I guess the Journal is too. I’m also on the lookout for anything non-shutdown related to write about. Any port in a storm.

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Can Methanol Save Us All?

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5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off of Climate Change

by Jay Walker Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Global warming could mean big business for controversial agriculture giant Monsanto, which announced last week it was purchasing the climate change-oriented startup Climate Corporation for $930 million.

Agriculture, which uses roughly 40 percent of the world’s land, will be deeply affected by climate change in the coming years. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that warming will lead to pest outbreaks, that climate-related severe weather will impact food security, and that rising temperatures will hurt production for farms in equatorial areas. (In areas further from the equator, temperature rise is actually estimated to increase production in the short term, then harm production if temperatures continue to rise over 3 degrees Celsius in the long term.) Meanwhile, increases in the global population will make it crucial for farmers to be efficient with their land, says UC Davis professor Tu Jarvis. “The increase in food production, essentially, in the future needs to be in yields—output per acre,” Jarvis says, even while weather patterns make farming less predictable or more difficult in some places.

Monsanto, meanwhile, has been gearing up to sell its wares to farmers adapting to climate change. Here are five climate change-related products the company either sells already, or plans to:

1. Data to help farmers grow crops in a changing climate. Climate Corporation, which Monsanto is acquiring, sells detailed weather and soil information to farmers with the stated mission of helping “all the world’s people and businesses manage and adapt to climate change.” This data is meant to help farmers better plan, track, and harvest their crops, ultimately making farms more productive. According to its press release, Monsanto thinks the ag data business will be a $20-billion market, and that farmers using these tools could increase their yield BY 30 to 50 bushels (that’s between 1,700 and 2,800 shelled pounds).

In a video interview about the acquisition, Monsanto vice president of global strategy Kerry Preete told TechCrunch: “We think weather patterns are becoming more erratic, it places a huge challenge on farmers with their production. We think a lot of the risk can be mitigated out of weather impact through information,” Preete said. “If you know what’s going on every day in the field, based on climate changes, soil variations that exist, we can really help farmers mitigate some of the challenges that impact their yield.”

2. Insurance for when it’s too hot, cold, dry, wet, or otherwise extreme outside. Climate Corporation currently sells both federally subsidized crop insurance and supplemental plans that pay out additional benefits when crops go awry. While federal insurance repays farmers up to the break-even point for a failed crop, Climate Corporation insures the lost profits as well. Monsanto says it will maintain this insurance business.

Though the broader insurance industry is concerned about losses due to major natural disasters occurring more often as the result of climate change, insuring crops is less risky because payouts for a damaged crop season a generally smaller than those for dense, damaged urban areas, according to Gerald Nelson, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.

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5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off of Climate Change

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Obamacare Isn’t the First Program to Have Opening Day Headaches

by Robert Michaels Posted on October 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s easy to get alarmed about the widely-reported problems with the Obamacare website. People can’t log in; can’t create accounts; and have to endure crashes and software failures once they do finally get on. It’s a mess. And it’s an embarrassing mess.

At the same time, it’s easy to overreact. Today, Stephanie Mencimer reminds us of what it was like during the early days of the Massachusetts program that served as a template for Obamacare:

After the law went into effect in Massachusetts, state offices were totally overwhelmed by the number of people clamoring to sign up for insurance, or what the state’s Medicaid director dubbed the “stress of success.” Lost paperwork, computer glitches, confusion over who was eligible for what, and not enough staff to handle the workload meant that in those early days, consumers could wait several months after submitting an application to finally get coverage….In the first two months, only 18,000 of more than 200,000 potentially eligible people had successfully signed up through the connector, according to Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who helped design the Massachusetts system and served on the Connector board.

….But guess what? Eventually the kinks got worked out and people got covered. Enrollment opened in October 2006, and by the deadline for getting mandatory coverage, July 1, 2007, the Boston Globe reported, 20,000 more people had signed up for insurance on the exchange than the state had expected—12,000 of them in just the two weeks before the deadline. Total enrollment went from 18,000 in December 2006 to 158,000 a year later, says Gruber.

Read the whole thing for more. None of this means that we should be dismissive about the technical problems with the exchanges. At the same time, most of the state programs are already working pretty well, and the federal program is slowly but surely getting better. There’s still plenty of time to sign up; phone banks are accessible in addition to the website; and the navigator program is just starting to get underway. Within a few weeks, things will be working tolerably well and people will begin signing up in large numbers. By January 1, we’ll likely have millions of satisfied customers signed up via the exchanges, and the early hiccups will be forgotten.

And look at the bright side: for all of Obamacare’s problems, it’s already working better than Congress. And unlike Congress, it’s almost certain to get better.

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Obamacare Isn’t the First Program to Have Opening Day Headaches

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How Population Genetics May Help Explain Economic Growth

by deqc16rl Posted on October 7, 2013

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok links to a short post today by a couple of researchers who study the transmission of ideas throughout history. Their conclusion is that the speed of diffusion depends on a country’s “genetic distance” from the source of the idea, and when I first read this I thought they were using genetic distance as a metaphor of some kind. That is, they were measuring the distance between various cultures, and the math happened to be similar to the math for measuring the genetic distance between human population groups, so that’s what they called it.

But no. The two researchers, Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, are literally talking about population genetics:

Measures of average differences between vectors of allele frequencies (different genes) across any two populations provide a measure of genetic distance….The goal of this approach is not to study any genetic characteristics that may confer any advantage in development….On the contrary, they are neutral: their spread results from random factors and not from natural selection. For instance, neutral genes include those coding for different blood types….Instead, genetic distance is like a molecular clock — it measures average separation times between populations. Therefore, genetic distance can be used as a summary statistic for divergence in all the traits that are transmitted with variation from one generation to the next over the long run, including divergence in cultural traits.

Their hypothesis is that populations that are genetically more distant are also culturally more distant and are therefore more resistant to trading and adopting each others’ cultural traits. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, the epicenter was in Great Britain, so the adoption of new technology was strongly influenced by the genetic distance of different populations from Britain. Sure enough, they claim that was the case. The chart on the right shows the effect of genetic distance from Britain on the adoption of machine technology. It starts out fairly modestly, rises to a high level by 1913, and then declines as technology finally diffuses everywhere.

In a sense, this comes as no surprise. Genetic distance is pretty obviously correlated with both physical distance and cultural distance, so you’d expect that it might also correlate with the spread of ideas as well. Path dependence and deliberate policy (for example, colonial rules that deliberately inhibited the spread of technology) can then account for most of the rest. Spolaore and Wacziarg’s conclusion:

In sum, we find considerable evidence that barriers introduced by historical separation between populations are central to account for the world distribution of income….These results have substantial policy implications. A common concern when studying the persistent effect of long-term history is that not much can be done today. But if a major effect of long-term historical divergence is due to barriers, there is much room and scope for policy action. Populations that are historically farther from the frontier can benefit from policies that specifically aim at reducing barriers to exchange and communication.

Needless to say, “reducing barriers” is a two-edged sword. But it’s an interesting proposition nonetheless.

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How Population Genetics May Help Explain Economic Growth

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The Obamacare Website Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

by HJMRebecca Posted on October 4, 2013

Mother Jones

Ezra Klein is blistering today about the continuing problems with the federal website used to sign up for Obamacare:

The Obama administration doesn’t have a basically working product that would be improved by a software update. They have a Web site that almost nobody has been able to successfully use….Overwhelming crush of traffic is behind many of the Web site’s failures. But the Web site was clearly far, far from prepared for traffic at anywhere near these levels. That’s a planning flaw….Part of the problem, according to a number of designers, is that the site is badly coded, which makes the traffic problems more acute.

….The Obama administration did itself — and the millions of people who wanted to explore signing up — a terrible disservice by building a Web site that, four days into launch, is still unusable for most Americans. They knew that the only way to quiet the law’s critics was to implement it effectively. And building a working e-commerce Web site is not an impossible task, even with the added challenges of getting various government data services to talk to each other. Instead, the Obama administration gave critics arguing that the law isn’t ready for primetime more ammunition for their case.

I’ll stick to what I said a couple of days ago: these problems will all get fixed fairly soon and then everyone will forget about them. At the same time, I’ll concede that the problems appear to be considerably bigger and deeper than I’d expected, even given the complexity of what HHS had to do. Underestimating demand is one thing, but some of the problems on the federal site make you wonder if it underwent any testing at all before it was launched. These aren’t skeevy little bugs that only show up under weird circumstances. They’re failures of basic functionality. It really does appear to be a cockup.

But this too will pass. It’s an embarrassment, but a short-term one. At least, it better be.

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The Obamacare Website Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

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The Real Lesson From The Flaming Tesla Video

by jackman0022 Posted on October 3, 2013

Mother Jones

Yesterday afternoon, a Tesla Model S burst into flames on Washington State Route 167 outside Seattle. The auto blog Jalopnik quickly posted a video of the luxury electric car engulfed in a ball of fire and smoke. Tesla later noted that the fire hadn’t been spontaneous; the car had been hit by a metal object that damaged the battery pack. The car’s alert system detected a failure and told the driver to pull over, the driver wasn’t injured, and the fire never spread to the passenger compartment. Even so, at the close of the stock market yesterday, Tesla’s share price had fallen more than 6 percent (UPDATE: It dropped another 5 percent this morning).

The sell-off may have resulted from the video, from a ratings downgrade released the same day by an R.W. Baird stock analyst, or both. Either way, the experience shows how hard it can be for companies to stake their success on radical innovation. Behind investors’ (unfounded) hand-wringing over electrical fires or production hiccups is their unease over the basic fact that nobody has ever built anything like a Tesla before.

That Tesla has come this far—the value of its stock has increased six-fold since the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car Of The Year—partly reflects the savvy of its co-founder and CEO Elon Musk. But it’s also a classic illustration of the value of federal subsidies, such as the $465 million loan that Tesla received from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2010. When you’re trying something really awesome and new, sometimes you need a little help from taxpayers. Just look up the early history of Google and Apple. Yet Musk, a self-described libertarian, has loudly criticized federal subsidies. I take a closer look at this sort of disconnect, which is pretty common in Silicon Valley circles, in my story in the September/October print issue, now online.

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The Real Lesson From The Flaming Tesla Video

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So Far, the Obamacare Rollout Looks Pretty Normal to Me

by Larry Daichea Posted on October 2, 2013

Mother Jones

I got an email today from a regular reader asking why I didn’t seem to be much worried about all the glitches in Tuesday’s Obamacare rollout. And it’s true: I mentioned it briefly yesterday but didn’t treat it like a big deal. Why?

I can’t say for sure. But the answer probably lies in my background. I’m not an expert in rolling out massive software systems or anything, but I have been involved in dozens of big software launches in my life. And every one of them has gone exactly the same:

  1. Lots of smart people work really hard for a really long time.
  2. The launch is late anyway.
  3. When it does happen, the product has a bunch of bugs.
  4. Sometimes the bugs are really serious. If so, everyone panics and works their asses off for a while to fix them. Pretty soon, they get fixed and everyone moves on to whatever’s next on the crisis agenda.
  5. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So….I dunno. I’ve seen this movie too many times before. Traffic on the Obamacare sites will settle down pretty quickly, and that will take care of most of the overloading problems. The remaining load problems will be solved with software fixes or by allocating more servers. Bugs will be reported and categorized. Software teams will take on the most serious ones first and fix most of them in short order. Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked.

I might be wrong. I’ve been involved in a few rollouts that featured really serious bugs that took a long time to work out. It’s certainly possible that one or two states will fall into this category. But I doubt it. Technologically speaking, nothing that happened yesterday surprised me, and I don’t expect anything in the next month to surprise me much either.

UPDATE: A friend with more experience than me in this particular kind of software development emails to explain in more detail why the Obamacare rollout glitches are probably not very serious:

It’s because this exact product has been built thousands of times….It’s a bunch of forms on top of a bunch of conditional SQL. Nothing new, or innovative, or especially challenging. The problems are simply because of the scale, and with Google and Facebook and Twitter and the like, we’ve figured out how to do web-scale pretty well.

The “bugs” will be in the Java and SQL code, and they’ll be easy to fix. Everything else is just web-scale infrastructure, memcached and database tuning, load balancing, edge routing, nuts & bolts stuff. I’ve never been worried about it at all, because it’s just plain been done so many times before. Not exactly uncharted technological waters.

For what it’s worth, I’ll say this: If there are still lots of serious problems with these websites on November 1, I’ll eat crow. But I doubt that I’ll have to.

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So Far, the Obamacare Rollout Looks Pretty Normal to Me

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Open-Access Champion Michael Eisen "Sets Free" NASA’s Paywalled Mars Rover Research

by Teofilnpc Posted on September 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Wait, did science publishing maverick Michael Eisen just borrow a tactic from the late internet whiz kid Aaron Swartz?

Why yes, he did.

The headline for my new profile of Eisen wasn’t meant to be taken literally. As I explain in “Steal This Research Paper! (You Already Paid for It.),” Swartz was indicted by the federal government for trying to do just that: He’d gained access to MIT networks to “liberate” millions of copyrighted scientific papers, most of them bankrolled by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies. Swartz and others in the open-access movement believed that the public should be able to view publicly-funded research without forking over stiff access fees to science publishers. Seems like a no-brainer, huh?

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Open-Access Champion Michael Eisen "Sets Free" NASA’s Paywalled Mars Rover Research

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