Jon Penn, a sixth grader at a small private school in Sherwood, Ark., is Exhibit A. When Victory Baptist School's previous network admin jumped ship, 11-year-old Jon decided to help out his mother, the school librarian who suddenly found herself responsible for computer support, by taking the reins.
Jon set to removing viruses from the antiquated machines and installed a firewall and filtering software as a stopgap measure while he looked forward to instituting centralized system management. Along the way he became what may well be the nation's youngest IT guy, and what's very obviously any geek parent's dream come true.
This is a simple but clever trick to using sticky-notes (aka Post-It Notes) from Dave Gray, founder of Communication Nation:
Here's a really funny article on five futuristic inventions we've always thought we wanted but wouldn't really.
I was really surprised to learn a few years ago that when an environmental impact lifecycle analysis is done of an everyday personal printer, the biggest environmental impact turns out not to be the manufacturing of the printer, the ink cartridges, the packaging, or disposal of the electronic waste: the biggest environmental impact actually turns out to be the paper used during printing. Printing less definitely helps. But in addition, consistently printing on both sides of each sheet of paper is an easy and quick way to halve the amount of paper you use.
There's lots of printers that come with the ability to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. A few all-in-one style printers from HP that include this ability are the HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One (about $240), HP Officejet 9110 All-in-One (about $400), and HP LaserJet 3390 All-in-One (about $425). Laser printers tend to be even more of a bonus from an environmental and economic perspective. My mom owns an HP laser printer, and she buys one toner cartridge every couple of years for about $80. Compared to the inkjet printers I've used, that's a lot fewer replacement cartridges.
If you just want a simple printer, without the scanner, copier, fax features of an all-in-one, then two HP products that come with automatic duplex printing are the HP Deskjet 6940dt Color Inkjet Printer (about $120), and the HP Deskjet 6980dt Color Inkjet Printer (about $160).
With any of these printers, it's important that your printer settings are set to use the auto-duplexer. Under Windows XP, go to Settings->Printers and Faxes. Right-click on your printer and choose Printing Preferences. Under the Finishing tab, check Print on both sides, and underneath check Automatic. Then click OK to save your settings.
If you already have an HP printer, and it doesn't support automatic duplex printing, check out this video for a demo of how to manually duplex print.
I found two fascinating looks into the future of customer service and support today:
Still good even 13 years later. I thought it would feel dated, given the whole dot com bubble, and all the changes, but it still feels fresh and relevant.
I’ve used EcoSky, a Portland-based green web hosting company for quite some time, and I’ve been very happy with their services. A recent Sustainable IT article on Greenest Host got me thinking about green web hosting in general.
What is a green web hosting company?
Generally, it is a company that is at least using some form of renewable energy to power their web and mail servers. Some companies may generate that renewable power themselves using solar panels, such as California based Greenest Host, or wind power. Other companies may buy their renewable power from the utilities. Some companies may buy conventional electric power, but then use purchase carbon credits to advertise themselves as carbon neutral. A review of the green web hosting companies I could find through Google found most to be committed to 100% renewable power, with solar and solar/wind combinations to be most common.
What kind of green hosting company do I choose?
While any renewable power web hosting company is going to be greener than the alternate, those companies that have committed to their own on-site renewable power generation, such as solar or wind, are making a long term commitment to green power. They’ve already made the investment in power generation, and there’s little incentive for them to switch to non-renewable power. I think these companies are the best choice, because they are unlikely to revert back to conventional non-renewable power simply to save money or because of a change in ownership. That said, any green hosting company is still a great choice.
A secondary benefit of green web hosting companies is to drive improvements in the energy efficient of web servers. Energy efficiency is of importance to all IT data centers, including web hosting companies, as electricity to power servers and provide cooling is one of their primary operational expenses. Virtually every large IT supplier is now creating energy efficient servers to help meet this demand. Traditional computers use anywhere from 60 to 120 watts (way more for gaming machines), but a computer built to optimize energy efficiency will consume less than 25 watts. Green web hosting companies, because of the higher cost of their electrical power, have even more incentive to find innovative ways to save power.
Green Web Hosting Resources:
Directory of Green Web Hosting Companies
EcoSky, true solar powered web hosting
AISO, true solar powered web hosting
Greenest Host, true solar powered web hosting
Smooshy Lab, 100% solar powered,
Ecological Hosting
Eco Web Design, UK based Solar Powered Web Hosting
Dream Host, carbon neutral web hosting
Solar Load by Hosting Direct, wind powered
Tree Center, wind and solar powered
Think Host, 100% wind/solar powered
SustainableWebsites, 100% wind
XERT Communications, Australian based 100% renewable powered
Ilisys, Australian based carbon neutral
Green ISPs
More information
TreeHugger article on several green web hosting companies
Eco Business Links, directory of about 10 green hosting companies
a.k.a. Hacking the Stroller
With three small kids, we have a yard full of strollers. Single strollers, double strollers, even triple strollers - in normal, umbrella, and jogging styles. But we lacked a good double jogging stroller and we lacked a bike trailer. We knew that some bike trailers could convert to become jogging strollers. After a bit of review, we narrowed our options to a Burkey D'Lite trailer or a Chariot Cougar. After reading the canonical comparison between the Burley and the Chariot, we were leaning in favor of the Chariot, especially because we wanted a good walking/jogging stroller - and while biking was important, it wasn't the sole use.
Having bought the Chariot Cougar, we started using it. And living within convenient walking distance of the grocery store, a very regular use of the stroller became visits to the grocery. And which point, you're left with the question of where to put the groceries. The Chariot does have a very nice cargo area on the back of the stroller. It fits about two large bags of groceries, but because the space is narrow, it's not as easy as just putting two bags in. Instead, we end up packing the groceries directly into the cargo area. It works, but then it becomes time consuming when you get home to carry individual items into the house.
The other problem, as I'm sure that every parent has run into with funny (and/or dangerous) results at times, is when the stroller becomes too back-heavy, tipping it back and sending your child into the air (or simply flipping over backwards when you lift your child out.) This can happen with just a heavy diaper bag, never mind with really heavy stuff like quarts of goat milk and jars of baby food packed into the cargo area.
The Chariot is a very adaptable chassis. It can function as a bike trailer, regular stroller, jogging stroller, and even ski stroller. I noticed that the chassis has two square openings used for the jogging stroller, ski stroller, and bike trailer attachments, but that these square openings were not in use when the stroller had just the regular swivel wheels on front. Since these openings were clearly make to handle some weight, they would be strong enough to carry a front cargo tray, right?
I purchased two 4 foot, true 1x1 square rods at the lumber yard, and used some spare lumber to create a cargo tray. The cargo tray will hold three large grocery bags side by side. It's flat, and has sides, so it can hold a variety of other things that need to stay stable - such as in these pictures when it's carrying our dinner and some plates we were borrowing for a party.
The front and rear cargo areas work well together. By providing a little extra weight on the front, even when the rear area is loaded heavily, the stroller will not tend to tip over backwards. The front cargo area, by virtue of its size, lends itself to all kinds of things that you couldn't even consider without it: such as carrying three kids worth of soccer gear, spare clothes, water, and snacks to the park for a morning of soccer.
To build the tray, I first sanded the two 1x1 pieces to take a little off, as the actual tube opening is about 1/16th of an inch less than true 1x1. I put the two 1x1 in place, cut the wood for the bottom of the tray, and then screwed it onto the 1x1s while they were in place. This helped me keep the exact alignment needed. It's a snug fit, and I rely just on friction to hold the tray in place. This seems to work well, although there are definitely holes in the chassis themselves that would lend themselves to a cotter pin if needed.
Between kids and the two cargo trays, I'm way overloading the Chariot, but it doesn't seem to mind at all. (The factory rear cargo area is only rated for 5 pounds capacity, but I've easily put 20 pounds or more in it.) The stroller is very solidly built.
The one downside is going up curbs without a cutout. With weight in the front tray, it can be hard to get enough leverage to get the front end to pop up over the curb. If it is very lightly loaded, you can do it. Otherwise you need to plan your route to take into account curb cutouts.
A Miele vs. Bosch Comparison
In our old house, a 1920 era Bungalow, we had managed to squeeze an 18” wide dishwasher into the kitchen by removing one of the original 1920s kitchen cabinets. There were only two choices for an 18” wide dishwasher: a low end model made by one of the American appliance companies, and a Miele. Having been delighted with our Miele vacuum cleaner, we decided to go with the Miele dishwasher despite its extravagant cost. We were thrilled with our dishwasher purchase, especially after having lived without a dishwasher for several years. Like the vacuum cleaner, the Miele dishwasher excelled in every way at washing dishes: everything always came clean, without any rinsing, it was exceptionally quiet, the dishes were dry at the end (without the energy waste of a heating element), and the dishwasher was very energy and water efficient - so much so that we received a nice rebate from the State of Oregon.
When we moved into our new house last Fall, we were again faced with purchasing a dishwasher, This time we had more options, because we were looking for a normal 24” width dishwasher. After reading Consumer Reports, we decided to go with the top ranked model: a Bosch. It was still, relatively speaking, an expensive, high end model, but it had received a glowing review by Consumer Reports, and it was less costly than the equivalent Miele.
We waited with great anticipation for the new Bosch to arrive and get installed. We loaded dishes into it, and washed them, and lo’ and behold, we had sparkly clean dishes. We just didn’t have that many sparkly clean dishes. Strangely, the 24” wide Bosch seemed to hold less dishes than the 18” wide Miele. That didn’t seem like it could be possible, so I figured that I needed more practice loading the Bosch.
Well, after a week of practice, I’d had it with the Bosch. Yes, the dishes were definitely clean, but they always came out wet, and even with practice, we still weren’t getting very many dishes in there.
I checked out prices of the Miele, and called the friendly folks at Standard TV and Appliance to see if I could return the Bosch. Even though the Bosch dishwasher had been installed and in use for several days, they still graciously took it back and refunded our money. I ordered the Miele, and a week later we had the 24” Miele installed.
Sure enough, it was clearly obvious that the Miele could hold much, much more than the Bosch. How much can the Miele how? Why can it hold so much more?
I took a few photos of our Miele one morning after having run a particularly large load of dishes. You should know that we have three young kids, so we have an abundance of small plates and bowls – way more than adults or older kids would go through in a day.
Here’s what was in the Miele:
Bottom rack:
Middle rack:
Top rack:
In short, there were 55 non-utensils items in the dishwasher ranging from a very large colander to very small kids bowls, and 41 utensils.
I believe there are three reasons that the Miele can fit so much more. First, the tines that hold plates on the bottom rack are much closer together than on the Bosch, or other ordinary dishwashers. I believe Miele can accomplish this because the dishwasher is so effective at cleaning that it can still get all the dishes perfectly clean even with less room between the plates. Second, the cutlery goes on a third rack, at the top of the dishwasher, instead of taking up valuable space on the bottom rack. Third, the middle rack has two fold down arms. I think these arms are meant primarily to help hold wine glasses steady when washing those kinds of glasses, so that they don’t rub against each other. But the shelves function equally well for holding small bowls and plastic food storage containers. In fact, they are especially good for the kinds of small plastic items that normally get flipped over during washing and fill with water. When placed on those fold down shelves, the small plastic items are held in place by the cutlery tray, so they don’t move around or flip over.
The end result of all this extra capacity is that we can do less dishwasher loads (saving money, water, and energy), as well as be able to fit pots and pans that would otherwise end up having to be hand washed. By comparison, if you take the same number of plates that would fill the Bosch’s space-inefficient bottom rack and put them instead in the Miele’s bottom rack, you’re left with enough room in the Miele for two to three large pots.
Oh, and the Miele gets all the dishes perfectly clean, and the dishes are dry at the end, and it's very quiet.
I highly recommend this dishwasher - as far as I can tell it's the ultimate dishwasher.
An article in The Independent talks about the massive bee disappearance spreading all over the world. A few quotes from the article:
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
Via Rebecca's Pocket, Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources.
I only got as far as the first resource, a search engine called Clusty that aggregates the results of several big search engines. I found it to be surprisingly effective - it turned up a large number of hits for several times that I've never seen list in Google's results.
Last year I received a bonus from work, and discussed with my friend Gene the things I was thinking about spending it on. He suggested getting a handheld game console, as a way to get back into gaming, which we both used to enjoy. He saw it as a way for him to use his down time waiting for planes, waiting for his partner when going out, and so forth.
It sounded really fun, and I was heading down the path of getting one when I realized that I had none of the kinds of downtime that Gene had. I have no time that isn't used for something.
It made me realize that if I was thinking about bringing anything new into my life, then its impact on time would need to be the primary criteria. If I brought in anything new, it would either need to have a 1 to 1 replacement of time spent on something else, or it would actually need to save me time. But it couldn't require me to find new time, because there just isn't any. (Three children under age four, full time work, attachment parenting...you get the picture.)
Enjoyment or satisfaction, traditional criteria for a purchase would have to be secondary to time. If something had immense enjoyment but required me to find time for it, then I wouldn't actually get to use it, and so I would never realize the enjoyment benefits of it.
A handheld gaming console might be fun, but since it would take time I don't have, there's no point. An MP3 player might be fun, and it would simply replace time I already spend listening to the radio, so it's a better decision. (Although there is some up front time cost to organizing mp3s, playlists, etc.) I haven't been able to find any good examples of something you can buy that brings you enjoyment and saves you time. But if you have any ideas, let me know, because half a year later, my bonus is still sitting waiting for me to spend it. It turns out that this time criteria is a pretty strict filter, because I still haven't bought anything.
I've been pondering how technology impacts the culture inside in a corporation, such as HP. While I was in my Sustainable Business MBA program, I wondered if technology could create a set of systems conditions that would foster a bias towards a more democratic and participative workplace, and that that bias would then shape a company to become more environmentally and socially responsible.
I'm still pondering that question. It seems clear that outside the corporation, Web 2.0 is having a cultural impact that is biasing our culture as whole towards greater transparency and participation. And in parallel with that, we see that corporations are increasingly adopting environmental and social responsibility as part of their corporate strategy. But what's happening inside the corporation?
I don't have the answer to that yet, but I did give myself my own reading list as a sort of self-created study at home class. Here's my list:
AskPablo has a wonderful post on Triple Pundit about calculating the "well to wheel" efficiency of automobiles:
With gasoline prices as high as they are many people are concerned about vehicle efficiency. Other people who are concerned about their impact on the future of our climate care about vehicle efficiency as well. Where does the energy that we put into our cars actually go? And what is the overall efficiency of a car?
I believe that Pablo's post does much to illustrate the various impacts on fuel consumption, and I highly recommend it.
However, I think Pablo does miss out on one key calculation of efficiency. The point of driving anywhere is generally to get you from Point A to Point B. But note carefully that the purpose is to get YOU the driver (or the driver and passengers) from Point A to Point B, and not the vehicle. We rarely drive just to move our car from one place to another.
So to get a true efficiency calculation, we need to add in the amount of work done to move the car separately from the work to move the person. A simple way to do this is to use the percentage of the mass of the payload compared to the mass of the car. I couldn't find gross vehicle weight for Pablo's car, a Toyota Matrix XR, online, but let's assume that it is 2500 pounds. Then let's assume that the average driver is 175 pounds and that, for the sake of this calculation the overwhelming majority of trips are single occupancy trips. With those three assumptions, we see that the driver makes up only 7% of the total mass being moved from one place to another. Therefore 93% of the work being done is to move the car from place to place, while only 7% is to move the person from place to place. (To be totally accurate, we should probably separate out the impact of mass from the impact of drag coefficient, but I'll leave that to Pablo since he is more skilled than I.)
So while Pablo calculates a well-to-wheel efficiency of his car at 19.9%, I think the true efficiency is closer to 1.3%: 19.9% vehicle efficiency * 7% payload-vehicle efficiency.
That's really astounding: 98.7% of the energy input is really a form of waste. No wonder bicycles are one of the seven wonders of a sustainable world.
Yahoo's carbon-neutrality is a smart investment from Sustainable IT.
I loved this book promo website based entirely on dryerase markers:
(thx CN)
If I can just get the refrigerator magnets away from my children while they're sleeping, I'm sure I could do something cool too.
It was exciting this morning to realize midway through an interesting post on Enterprise 2.0 (i.e. the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise environment) that I was actually reading the blog of Harvard Business School faculty Andrew McAfee. If discussion of blogs and wikis is making it into mainstream business education, that's pretty cool. Hurray for HBS for incorporating this into their curriculum.
But the topic of the post was, unfortunately, the perception the MBA students had, based on prior work experience, that those who use Enterprise 2.0 tools heavily, "will be perceived as not spending enough time on their 'real' jobs":
So I should have been less surprised when my students talked about the negative perceptions associated with E2.0 contributions. They were likely just relating how these contributions would have been seen in their former companies. In environments that value 'busyness' enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don't have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don't want to be seen as not busy enough.
Boo for companies valuing busyness over collaboration.
My friend Dave said to me today "TwitterVision is how God must feel":
This morning I discovered Communication Nation, a blog on communication, by XPLANE:
Communication is one of the most important skills anyone can have, in business and in life. As individuals and as a species, I believe we will be happier and more productive if we can improve our ability to communicate. This blog is dedicated to that effort. Join the conversation!
That got me thinking about some of the more significant influences on my own thinking about communication and information design. In roughly reverse chronological order:
Open the Future has an excellent post on "Stop Disasters", a game whose goal is "to reduce the harmful results of catastrophic natural events -- the disaster that gets stopped isn't the event itself, but its impact on human life".
Like a miniature version of SimCity, the Stop Disasters game features a tile-based game where it is up to you to build disaster defenses, create housing and hospitals, and disaster mitigation infrastructure, all within a limited financial budget and time.
I played one disaster scenario (tsunami), and enjoyed it, although I unfortunately failed to save 62 lives. I look forward to improving my game and playing the other scenarios.
It would be wonderful to see some games around global climate change, environmental sustainability, peak oil, and water shortages.
I just had to get one more post in today. Here it is, a universal waterproof case for your PDA, smartphone, Treo, Blackberry, or what have for you...for about a $1. And here's a tip to simplify the installation instructions: buy unlubricated!
The Green Grid's whitepaper shows that only 30% of data center energy consumption is actually for value-adding IT equipment, while the remainder is for facilities and infrastructure.
The Green Grid is a consortium of eleven major IT companies, including AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun, and VMware (via Sustainable IT). They have published three whitepapers on environmental data center topics. One of those is Guidelines for Energy Efficient Data Centers (pdf).
After starting to read the whitepaper, I think they are missing their biggest energy saving opportunity by trying to solve the efficiency problem backwards.
In one section of the white paper, they talk about "system design issues that commonly reduce the efficiency of datacenters" including:
Continue reading "The Green Grid: Guidelines for Energy Efficient Data Centers" »
A recent feebate (wikipedia, better definition) proposal would use price signals to achieve overall water savings without artificial restrictions on usage:
Garden-lovers could ignore Canberra's water restrictions if they are prepared to pay for the privilege, under a proposal being considered by the Commonwealth. The voluntary scheme would allow households to use as much water as they liked, but for a significantly higher price. The extra revenue would then be given back to customers who use less water as a reward for their efficiency.
Here's an article on creating a new title: Chief Sustainability Officer. An excerpt from the start of the article:
The Internet Age spawned a new C-level title: CTO, or chief technology officer. The case for hiring a CTO was clear: The business-technology tides were turning quickly and dramatically, and traditional, old-school C-level execs really weren't equipped with the tech savvy to make sure their organizations were keeping pace and staying competitive.
Well, we've entered a new age, the next logical step to follow the Internet Age. Some might call it a Green Age; I prefer referring to it as an Age of Sustainability.
The original business case for Chief Sustainability Officer came via Rick Walker at GreenBiz. Read on for a few excerpts:
I just discovered Sustainable IT, a blog on green information technology. Some recent posts include:
A Eureka magazine article on the SolidWorks World event had some interesting tidbits about the link between design and sustainability:
Among the highlights of the event were several presentations on sustainability and its link with engineering design – including a discussion on the role that CAD should play in this.
Anna Jaffe, co-director of the Vehicle Design Summit, revealed that this worldwide collaboration between engineering students to develop sustainable cars has already resulted in four pre-prototypes – one inspired by the Sinclair C5 – with plans to take one design on into crash testing and production. The four pre-prototypes came out of the Summit held during the summer of 2006 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 55 student engineers from 21 universities spent 8 weeks coming up with four designs: one human/solar/electric powered, and the others powered by biofuel, fuel cells and straight electric. Jaffe then revealed revealed that VDS 1.0 is to be followed by VDS 2.0, in which design will be “distributed all round the world” with the goal of producing prototypes of a car capable of 200 mpg, 150 mile range, 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds and 120 mph top speed in 8 months. Up to 40 pre-production prototypes are to be built for crash testing in two years.
Kishore Boyalakuntla, SolidWorks’ national technical manager for analysis products, made the point that SolidWorks (or any other leading edge CAD tool) is already of great assistance in designing for sustainability. Minimising weight, designing for repairability and disassembly and optimal choice of materials are all improved by using advanced CAD and FEA.
I saw that MIT Press has made their book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software available online for free download.
I thought there were some interesting chapters:
Just how many milliamphours are in a AA battery? A D battery? Want to convert that battery powered lamp to something more powerful?
You need the wikipedia article "list of battery sizes", which gives not only the capacity of each kind of battery and battery chemistry, but also the dimensional size and variety of names it is known by. A very handy reference!
I love Tourfilter, which allows me to see which of my favorite bands are coming to town, and to see affinity information so that I can find out what other bands I might like to see. I don't know what the source of their data is, but it's one of the first sites that has had so many small local venues and bands listed.
I love studying the etymology of words and phrases, and so I was very excited to discover the Online Etymology Dictionary.
I love Amazon's NowNow service, despite having some concerns over the the implications of the service (see's Salon.com's article I make a $1.45 a week and I love it.) For more on how the service works, read the Wikipedia article on Mechanical Turk, the backend system that lets people compete to do mini work projects.
Here's a recent question I asked: is there software that will allow me to use my Treo 650 as a remote control for my computer?
I received three useful answers in just a little while.
I really dug this video on web 2.0 (thanks Erin!) It was a clever overview of Web 2.0 in less than 5 minutes.
Since reading The Singularity Is Near (and then later Accelerando), I’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence. I was intrigued by one of final messages of the clip about teaching the machine and neural networks.
Though there have been many advances in artificial intelligence, the method of creation of a human-equivalent intelligence is still very much in debate. Do we design it through a top down approach? Do we use Darwinist natural selection of neural networks in iterative simulated competition to evolve it over time? Or, as I think the video hints at, does it emerge naturally over time through our own collective contributions in linking, tagging, generating, and using content?
A good friend recently started teaching at Portland State University. One class she's teaching has a segment on bridge building, and it sounds fun. Luckily anyone can have fun too, by downloading West Point Bridge Designer, free award-winning software that lets you design a bridge, load test it. There is an annual contest associated with it, and this year's content starts January 3rd. The goal is to build the minimum cost bridge that will pass the load test. I've been having a blast designing bridges and trying different techniques to minimize the cost.
I tried to start building a bridge without using a template, and it turns out to be harder than you might think. (Well, engineers might know its hard.) After about two hours of collapsing bridges, I gave up and decided to use a template. Once I had done a few templates, then I was able to try a few free form bridges. My best bridge so far cost only $197K to build. The winning entry last year was a bridge that cost $155K to build.
Informed For Life uses a sophisticated statistical analysis of risk factors that includes both National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) ratings, as well as analysis of fatility data. They recommend driving vehicles that rank 70 or less (below average risk). Some 2007 vehicles at the safe end of the spectrum include (less points include lower risk): Hyndai Entourage (51 pts), Kia Sedona (51 pts), Honda Odyssey (57 pts), and Subaru Legacy-4dr (61 pts). At the other end of the spectrum include vehicles such as the Ford Escape Hybrid (166 pts), Subaru Outback-4dr (146 pts), and the Buick Rendezvous (161 pts).
My 2005 Honda Pilot does fairly well, at below average risk, at 83 points.
Even though I've spent some time looking at peak oil, I don't bring it up in conversation or posts frequently. It's not that I doubt peak oil at all. (In fact, most of my retirement money is invested in companies based on assumptions about a peak oil world.) Rather, the problem is that the information about peak oil is so alarming and so extreme, it's impossible for other people to accept.
I recently emailed an associate and noted blogger (who has posted on a number of sustainability issues) why she hasn't posted more about peak oil. She said that she posted once, and then was ridiculed by a noted, respected, and seemingly intelligent author and Wired magazine contributor for buying into peak oil.
After hearing that, I felt compelled to post more about peak oil, even if that meant being ridiculed myself. Peak oil is the sort of thing which you ought to at least be informed about, even if you reach different conclusions than I do.
From Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash, here is a snippet of the factual and yet hard to grasp economic impact of peak oil:
Simmons predictions are downright tame compared to what other analysts in the world of investment banking are preparing themselves for. For instance, in April 2005, French investment bank Ixis-CIB warned, "crude oil prices could touch $380 a barrel by 2015."
$380 a barrel is roughly $14.50 a gallon. It's easy to see why people have a hard time buying peak oil. And remember that most everything we buy, use, or consume has been manufactured and made its way to use using fossil fuel energy. In fact, for every calorieof food energy we consume, ten calories of fossil fuel energy went into bringing that food to us. This means that not only should we expect the price of gasoline to rise 5x over the next ten years, but we should expect the price of everything we buy and consume to rise about 5x over the next ten years. And unless your ten year income plan includes a 5x increase in available cash, then expect to consume a lot less...
The difficulty with "solving" peak oil is that two things are happening simultaneously: oil consumption (demand) is increasing by 2-3% per year, while oil extraction rates (supply) is decreasing by 3% a year or more. While people look to fixes like oil sands, natural gas, and liquified coal, the issue is that these fixes aren't enough even to maintain existing consumption of fossil fuels, let alone the relentless increase in demand.
Read on if you would like to read a few quotes and facts on peak oil from a presentation at a major IT manufacturer.
Continue reading "Peak Oil - the biggest news you haven't heard" »
I just finished reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. I’ve already posted twice (parallel processing, timing of singularity) about the book, so clearly it is a thought provoking book. There has been some controversy of the risks and benefits, and I especially liked Bill Joy’s back cover comments about the book:
“Ray’s optimistic book well merits both reading and thoughtful response. For those like myself whose views differ from Ray’s on the blanace of promise and peril, The Singurity is Near is a clear call for a continuing dialogue to address the greater concerns arising from these accelerating possibilities”.
For those of you that don’t know, this book explores the idea that exponential growth in computing power will lead to artificial intelligence equal to human intelligence somewhere around 2020 to 2030. And because artificial intelligence is on an exponential growth curve, within a short period of time (ten to twenty years), artificial intelligence will vastly exceed human intelligence.
From this, there are all sorts of related impacts, such as accelerating progress in nanotechnology and genetic manipulation. I think the first half of the book is great fun, but it really starts to drag around the second half as Ray spends huge quantities of pages on extremely esoteric and meaningless exploration of the theoretical limits of computational power in rocks, the solar system and the galaxy and spends countless pages exploring how our civilization will expand our computing power at the speed of light. Sure, it could be interesting to spend ten or twenty pages exploring these way-out concepts, but Ray spends hundreds of pages on these topics towards the end of the book. He also repeats the same concepts dozens or hundreds of times towards the end of the book.
But don’t let that negative criticism keep you away. If you read only the first two chapters, it will be worthwhile, and an exciting, mind-blowing ride.
I’m still reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. In it, Ray discusses at length the exponential progress in computational power of computers. He talks about the limitation of ever faster processor speeds because voltage rises as a square of the increase in clock speed. When power consumption is a concern (for cooling, for space, for ecological concerns, for heat dissipation), then the drive towards more computational power must be met through other methods. The two alternative methods to increased processing power are more efficient work (i.e. getting more computationally done with each clock cycle), and increased parallel processing.
I think the dual-core processors from Intel and AMD are just the leading edge of this. As a grad student studying computer science way back in 1994, it seemed to me that while dual processors may have some usability advantages (i.e. your PC doesn’t ground to halt just because your virus scan is running), application developers have little incentive to write parallel processing code when they have just two processors available. That’s because they can gain more by focusing on creating efficient single-process code than they can by having two processors available but running into the overhead associated with parallel processing and programming.
But that picture changes when you have four or more processors available. Then the speed to be gained from parallel processing vastly exceeds that which can be gained merely from writing efficient single processing code. So if we look to the future of PC processors, we should expect most gains in performance to come from additional cores rather than from increased clock speed. That means that if processors continue on a curve of doubling performance at least every two years, and we assume only modest increases in clock speed and efficiency of work, we should see quad core processors by sometime in 2008 or 2009, and eight core processors by sometime in 20010 or 2011. That will truly be the age of parallelism.
I’m reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil. While I’ll post a full book review later, I wanted to share a few thoughts about his basic calculations concerning when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligent.
On the one hand, I agree with the basic calculations. Ray Kurzweil uses a base value of 10^16 calculations per second (cps) needed to mimic human intelligence based on functional equivalence, I’m more inclined to believe the 10^19 cps based on physical structure simulation. That’s because I have a hard time believing that we’re going to design something more elegant than nature. (Look at Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry, which provides scores of examples that demonstrate that nature is still way ahead of us when it comes to effective solutions to real world problems.)
While the author seems to believe there is progress on AI, I have to ask if that feels true. Computers don’t feel smarter to me. They have incrementally improved between 1986 and 2006, but are they smarter? About the smartest thing my computer does is remember which menu items I click on frequently and hide the ones I don’t click on. That’s not smart, that’s a simple usage algorithm. The smartest thing the web has done is recommend products that I might like based on purchasing habits. That is pretty smart, but is it surprising? (In later chapters the author does lament the trend of downplaying the contribution of AI by classifying previously hard problems as simple algorithms.)
We’ve replaced the 640K DOS memory limit with the 100mb Outlook Exchange server limit at my company. Is email smarter? No, it has just grown in capability.
The technology innovations that amaze me are people driven, not computer driven. Wikipedia harnesses the power of people, not computers. Ruby on Rails is the brainchild of a few outstanding hackers. But it is still a pretty simple application of rules.
I do think we’ll hit that singularity though, but it’ll be with brute force, not because we’re clever engineers and can implement functional equivalence better than nature can.
But even though it will be through brute force, I still think we’ll hit it earlier than Ray believes. That’s because Ray posits that the singularity will occur only when the technology is a billion times more power than a single human brain. The mistake is thinking that we must exceed so radically the brain capacity of humans. I think that innovation comes not from mass of brain power, but from concentration of brain power. The really big ideas come from a few brilliant people. Are those brilliant people a million times smart than you or I? Or are they just a dozen times smarter, and by virtue of that concentration of brain power in one mind, capable of having the critical mass needed to achieve breakthroughs.
In other words, I think that those first few AIs that are brought online will exceed our intelligence, and rapidly design the next generation of themselves, and proceed at a pace far exceeding our own capability to follow. Ray believes that the hardware technology necessary to simulate human comparable AIs will existing somewhere around 2020, the software by 2030 and the singularity (exponentially spirally increases in machine intelligence) will occur by 2040. My timeline is somewhat different. I think the hardware will get there between 2020 and 2025, and the software will immediately follow. (If you have followed my technology projections spreadsheet, you’ll know that you can predict when technology uses such as mp3 sharing, internet phone calling, and videostreaming occur by hardware capability, not software. The trend appears to indicate that if the hardware exists, out of the great masses of humanity, the software will arise more or less spontaneously.)
The singularity will then occur within just a few years (i.e. by the late 2020s) as machine intelligent greatly increases the exponential acceleration of technology and solves the truly difficult problems (nanotechnology, effective gene manipulation) that we’re making only slow progress with. My estimate is that we reach the singularity at least 10 years before Ray's best estimate, even though my estimate starts with the assumption that we need to do a neuron-interaction and behavior level simulation.
Central Desktop, a collaboration software company, recently wrote an article on why email is still the most widely used collaboration tool. That article, which focused on the good aspects of email, reminded me of a systems analysis on collaboration system adoption (197KB PDF) I wrote in 2003 as part of a look at wiki adoption in corporations. In that paper, I propose a number of interventions to improve adoption that include, not surprisingly, extensive use of email as part of the collaboration workflow and change notification. In other words, take advantage of the things email does well (it is "front and center" in the users mind) rather than trying to replace what is already entrenched in the broader work environment.
I recently read Rebecca Blood's canonical The Weblog Handbook. This book provides prescriptive instructions on how to author your weblog, find your audience, maintain a sense of balance, and respect the culture and etiquette that have developed over time.
Continue reading "Book Review: The Weblog Handbook by Rebecca Blood" »
I've always wanted a portrait (vertical oriented) display. It freequently seems as though I have more horizontal desktop space than I need, and not enough vertical space. Then it occurred to me: why not stand up my widescreen laptop on its side, and use an external keyboard and mouse. Here's the result:
When I saw Bruce Sterling at SxSW two years ago, I thought he was a great speaker, even though I frequently have issues with his column in Wired magazine. Alex Steffen of WorldChanging has a post on Bruce's keynote address at SxSW earlier this month that's about the future we're building and our responsibility in shaping that future.
Alex Steffen quotes Bruce:
Alex goes on to say:
