P2P Foundation. Who takes risks? One of my readers sent me a link to this blogpost by James Wimberley, which talks intelligently about safety nets and their secondary effects (it also has a nifty link to the history of bankruptcy laws in the U.S.). I want to hone in on one aspect he describes, namely how, in spite of people in the U.S. considering themselves entrepreneurial, we are not so much. His theory is that it’s because of a lack of safety net: people are worried about losing their health insurance so they don’t leave the safety of their job. Here’s Wimberley’s chart of entry density, defined as the rate of registration of new limited liability companies per thousand adults of working age, by country: The question of who takes risks is interesting to me, and made me think about my experiences in my various jobs. In fact this dovetails quite well with another subject I want to post on soon, namely who learns from mistakes; I have a theory that people who don’t take risks also don’t learn from mistakes well.
Renewable Energy's Sixty Years Of Broken Dreams, But Keep Those Ideas Coming. This is an excerpt from a Nov. 21, 2011 research note by Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer for JPMorgan Private Bank. You can read the entire note here, and you should, especially if you care about redressing misperceptions that lead to flawed energy policies. His conclusion is that our quest for fossil-fuel replacements has led us to ignore economic (and thermodynamic) realities.
Energy policy too often disregards the art of the possible for a future that may never arrive. The note concludes with one potentially game-changing idea but, like all the ideas before it, should come with the assumption that it, too, will fail. This year, a look at something just as worrying in the long run as the fiscal problems of the West: the search for energy solutions.
Over the last 50 years, a lot of proposed [energy] solutions have not panned out as expected. 1945. How have things turned out? Unfounded expectations lead to suboptimal policy choices. The Resilient Family. Hot Air and the Fracking Jobs Boom. Most major news outlets have done pieces touting the jobs boom associated with fracking. The story goes that allowing this relatively new form of drilling will both lower energy prices in the United States and also lead to an employment boom in the regions where the drilling takes place. And, how do we know there will be a boom? Well, the industry said so. It turns out that the employment boom ain't all it is cracked up to be. The environmental group, Food and Water Watch, released a report yesterday that examined job projections for New York, which is considering ending a ban on fracking. The industry had projected that fracking in western New York would create more than 60,000 new jobs.
Food and Water watch looked at the experience in the adjacent Pennsylvania counties, which allow fracking, and concluded that the potential job gains for New York are one-tenth as large, or about 6,000. In short, for these counties there is not much of an issue of jobs versus the environment. Dan Worth: Wanted: Revolutionaries Ready to Lead the Country's Second Great Rust Belt Recovery. I want to take the opportunity, in my inaugural Detroit post, to write about the rust belt. Now I've been told by no less of an authority than former Governor Jennifer Granholm (see here at 32:00) -- that Michiganders reject the term "Rust Belt.
" Apparently the broad sweep from Detroit to Albany shall now be referred to as the "Green Belt. " And while many may laugh, I want to give my impression as a current resident of a recovered Rust Belt region, that the future of Detroit can be as bright as those who choose to live, work, and play there want it to be.
First off, a disclaimer -- despite spending 10 years of my life in Ann Arbor and Detroit, I am originally, and currently, a Boston native. And though you wouldn't know it from looking around, we were the hub of the original U.S. But as the country grew, and industry transformed, these once great manufacturing towns lost their preeminent positions. But there are bright spots. And the suburbs are still beautiful. The Evolution of the American Dream. Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they overthrow the humans, they lead with the chant, “four legs good, two legs bad!”
By the end, they’ve become human-corrupt, and lead the chant, “four legs good, two legs better!” Just one word changed, and the new and old words both begin with b, bolstering the illusion of continuity and natural evolution. Let’s call such a slowly shifting narrative, simple enough to be captured in a slogan, and designed to help a small predatory class dominate a larger prey class, a Pig Narrative.
The American Dream is a Pig Narrative. For the record, in case you are immediately curious about my politics, I think this Pigs-and-Prey structure of the world is the natural order of things. You can mitigate its effects, but not change it in any fundamental way. The Rate of Change of Pig Narratives Ideally, changes should be so small that the prey barely notices. The 9 American Dream Rewrites. Oil Soars and Natural Gas Withers: But the Energy Singularity is Not Forthcoming.
If you firmly believe higher oil prices will drive energy transition, and the adoption of alternative sources, then do (by all means) feel excited today. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has sold for as much as a 25% discount to Brent oil over the past 9 months, has been slowly filling that gap recently. And, with the announcement today that a major pipeline would further relieve the surplus of WTI at Cushing (taking it away to the Gulf Coast), the discount has closed further.
As of this morning, WTI soared to $102.00 as Brent has fallen closer to $110.00. Accordingly, the full impact of the higher global price of oil is now about to be visited upon North America. If you are a signatory to the new Natural Gas Revolution, you probably believe the extraordinary discount of North American NG to world oil prices suggests our economy’s on the verge of a grand switch, from oil to natural gas. As much as I believe in market forces I’m also a believer in market failures.
Cognitive Biases in Times of Uncertainty. We live in a world of increasing pressure and uncertainty, driven in large part by digital technology infrastructures. These marvelous infrastructures bring us unprecedented connectivity and opportunities to better ourselves. That is a core paradox of our life in the 21st century: our new infrastructures create both opportunity and pressure. The pressure comes from intensifying competition as people previously marginalized in our global economy master these infrastructures and compete for jobs and markets that were previously secure franchises.
More importantly, the pressure also comes as those in the core of our economy cling to practices and institutions that were designed for another world and struggle to remain successful in a world that requires new practices and institutions. What's our reaction to this? Risk/reward perceptions How did we get on this path? Time horizons shrink - the rise of the short-term What's the consequence of this risk/reward bias? But it gets even worse. IBM Tech Trends 2011 Highlights Biz Analytics Needs.
Okay, you know that the cloud and better mobility management are going to be two of the top tech trends in just about anyone's survey. And IBM's latest report verifies this. But what you probably didn't know is how important analytics will play. IBM interviewed more than 4,000 IT pros from around the world and consolidated its results here. Of the key technologies surveyed, analytics was the most widely adopted (90%) with half of those not currently using it planning to do so within the next two years. Developers who want to grow their analytics skills set need to focus on Open source platforms like Apache Hadoop.
Moreover, analytics was named as the most in demand area for software development in the future. Is that enough about analytics? When the 2011 Tech Trend survey respondents were asked which skills they needed to develop and/or deploy business analytics solutions, here is the resulting tag cloud of answers. Here Comes Solar Energy. Hotelling's Rule meets Moore's Law? These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner.
Via www.nytimes.com I don't agree with a lot of what Krugman says, and I have no idea (yet) whether what he says here is right (get it? Krugman? Right?) Last week while on my travels through the Internet, I came across Biome Smart Terrarium. A terrarium, by the way, is a miniature landscape with plants (and animals). I am fascinated by these micro worlds. Typically, I would look at the beautiful pictures and move on. But what got my attention was the fact that this Terrarium was controlled by an iPad or a smartphone. Tony Fadell with his thermostat and his startup Nest have already kicked off the ultimate home makeover. What is Biome and how does it work? Biome is a flora terrarium that works a little like a live tamagotchi, and it is the brain child of product designer Samuel Wilkinson. As I wrote in my recap of last week’s GigaOM RoadMap conference, to me connectedness is a transformative force, and this terrarium is an embodiment of that force.
He has come up with some astonishing designs, such as Plumen, an energy-saving light bulb, that has been drawing praise from around the world. New Slow Tech 7 / 7Biome6_SamuelWilkinson. The original Cray supercomputer In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Prior to this century many supercomputers really were a different animal entirely, sporting specialty chips and software. But the industry turned to commodity chips in the early 2000s. Now, to meet the demands of exascale computing at low power, chip makers are taking inspiration from the cloud computing and mobile industries.
ARM tries supercomputing on for size As the Supercomputing 2011 show gets under way in Seattle, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, ARM and others are announcing new silicon to power the machines we rely on for science, climate prediction and high-end simulations in industries that range from oil production to car design. Accelerator chips advance in supercomputers. The abandonment of technology. Right now the Space Shuttle Discovery is in orbit for the last time, and docked with the International Space Station (ISS). On its return to Earth the orbiter will be decommissioned and displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Just two more shuttle flights, Endeavour in mid-April, and Atlantis in late-June, are scheduled before the shuttle program is brought to and end. Toward the end of last year I came across an interesting post about the abandonment of technology by Cameron Locke. A couple of months later on I read an article by Kyle Munkittrick who argues that the future is behind us, or at least that our current visions of the future are outdated compared the current technology: The year is 2010.
I’ve been thinking about these two articles ever since, and Discovery’s last flight brought these thoughts to the front of my mind. The future is already here and we may be standing at a crucial decision point in our history. Big problems, unaddressed. Steve Jobs, the Unabomber, and America's love/hate relationship with technology. As the extraordinary tide of tributes to the life and work of Steve Jobs poured in these past few weeks, I couldn’t help wondering how Ted Kaczynski was taking the news.
Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison for conducting a murderous terror campaign he’d hoped would overthrow the kingdom of technology. There can be no more dramatic testimony to the failure of that campaign than the orgy of eulogies accorded Jobs. Still, beneath their obvious differences, there’s a connection between Kaczynski and Jobs, not between them personally but between the archetypes they’ve come to represent. The emotional reactions to Jobs’ passing made it abundantly clear that for many of us he’d come to symbolize the hopeful, life-affirming potential of the technical arts, in the process buttressing our faith in technology as a vehicle of human progress.
That’s a vast overstatement, I think, but it does speak to the incongruity I’m driving at here. Related: Lucy. BERG presents Tomorrow’s World: The near future of citizen science | Fiona Romeo. On Wednesday night I had the privilege of speaking at BERG’s Tomorrow’s World, an evening of talks about the near-future of software, culture, networks and things. Here’s a longer, better referenced version of what I said then. It’s my contention that the near future of science is all about honing the division of labour between professionals, amateurs and bots. (Please note that I’m not a scientist so this is speculation for BERG and friends, informed by conversations with scientists and explored through my own team’s digital science projects at the Royal Observatory.)
The first of those projects, Astronomy Photographer of the Year, is an annual competition and exhibition, which is powered by Flickr. Fighting Dragons of Ara (NGC 6188 and 6164) by Michael Sidonio (Australia) It’s extraordinary what amateur astronomy photographers can capture now with their own – albeit expensive – kit. Big Andromeda galaxy (M31) by xamad How does it work? Astrometry.net Comet Holmes 11/20 by paranoidroid Hmmm. You probably recall the stories and, well, I may have even written one or two of them, including the requisite quotes from Google spokespersons.
They were about the spirit of innovation at Google Labs, and whether or not the model of trying a plethora of new projects simultaneously and let Darwin decide the victor, was a smart way to construct a viable service. The lessons, as Google would teach them, went something like this: There are many different ways to build great products, and there's no way to know in advance which way is the best. Whenever possible, Google leans toward "openness," which involves as many of its target consumers as possible... wait a minute.
What am I doing babbling on about it, when I can let Google's own history speak on its own behalf? Survival of the fittest An example of top-down innovation at Google is its Translate technology. The core business of the company, the Google engineers wrote, is innovation. It's a small world after all... Flatland. My Cultural Landscape. Occupy to Self Manage. Beyond Consensus or Majority: Notes about Decision-Making in a Leaderless Movement. The Anthropologists’ Hour. Regional, Local, and Sustainable Sourcing. Shared ownership vs. peer to peer rentals. Grand Strategy Annex - Social Gift Exchange. The Third Law of Geopolitical Thought. Next In Line for Implosion: Pension Plans. U.S. Government Confirms Link Between Earthquakes and Hydraulic Fracturing at Oil Price. [MOD][KERNEL] Deep Idle. Doug Smith: One Way Journalism Paints Flawed Picture Of Poverty.
Against Simplification - Norman Manea. Climate Change Evaporates Part of China's Hydropower. Highlights from SenSys 2011. Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. The Shadow Superpower - By Robert Neuwirth. Claremont Graduate U's Youtube on the Wikistrat "grand strategy competition" Metamarkets Blog » Blog Archive » The Sting of Hive: Distilling Speed from Hadoop. New book by Dean Baker: Making Markets Progressive. HIVE 2011: Feedback Without Frustration - Scott Berkun. Three Deep Videos and a Roundup. Save NYC Food Trucks, Grassroots Campaign to End Metered Parking Ban of New York City Food Trucks. Aviation Weeks complete Imagining the future technology list. Reasons To End Factory Farming.
Authority Creates Stupidity. Open Source ALL the Things! - News. Social Strategies That Work. How Great Companies Think Differently. Architectural Control as a Managerial Paradox. Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect. First step toward a general method of creating artificial self-replicating materials of arbitrary structure and composition starting with Structural DNA seeds and tiles. Aviation Week lists potential technologies in Imagining the Future. Status Report: <i>Liars and Outliers</i> Biofuels, Speculation Blamed for Global Food Market Weirdness | Wired Science. Computing power: A deeper law than Moore's? Processing.org. My New Book Project: “Breaking the Page” Ben Michaelis, Ph.D.: Stuck? 3 Tips to Help You Get Out. Why we need an open-source geocoding alternative to Google. Open Access Week.
Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation - Ben W. Heineman, Jr. Solar Power is getting cheaper and getting grid stabilized with natural gas. Why the World May Be Running Out of Clean Water. First Look: The Web's Most Ambitious Personal Data Project, Singly, Goes Live Today. Why the Current Crop of Twentysomethings Are Going to Be Okay. The Nutrient Levels In Our Food Are Declining. How things work: cubelets, littlebits, others. Wireless Spectrum Should Be Reallocated. US Broadband in Maps, Graphs, and some Bars.