Stanford Students Design Recyclable Laptop with Autodesk Inventor Software
Modular Computer Simplifies Electronics Recycling, Reduces Electronic Waste and Disassembles in Two Minutes
SAN RAFAEL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has named a class of Stanford University graduate students as Autodesk Inventor of the Month for October for developing a prototype of the recyclable Bloom laptop.
The Bloom laptop is the project of a team of students from Stanford and Finland’s Aalto University who were given the task to create a recyclable consumer electronics product that makes electronics recycling a simpler, more effective and engaging process for consumers. The students used Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Inventor Publisher software to help develop and refine the innovative laptop during the school year. Creating 3D digital prototypes of the hardware components inside the laptop aided in creating a readily accessible laptop design that is also easy to disassemble.
Does a Green Speed Bump Block the Road to Energy Independence?????? In this remarkable and remarkably unwelcome opinion piece, my good friend Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry, explains why the subsidization of green technologies that are dependent on rare earth elements should not be justified as pathway toward energy independence, and in fact, could actually make the US more dependent on foreign energy related imports.
Over the past few months, industry and government officials in the U.S. and Japan have been increasingly alarmed as China, which has a near-monopoly on rare earths, has reduced its exports of those elements by some 40 percent. Adding yet more anxiety to the situation are projections about a possible shortfall in the supply of these elements. London-based Roskill Consulting Group, a research firm that specializes in metals and minerals, recently predicted that demand for rare earths could outstrip supply as soon as 2014. Rare earths are important because they have special features at the quantum mechanics level that allow them to have unique magnetic interactions with other elements. A myriad of “green” technologies — from electric and hybrid-electric cars to wind turbines and compact fluorescent light bulbs – depend on rare earths. And there are no cost-effective substitutes for them.
Clinton’s willingness to question China about rare earths is indicative of just how seriously the U.S. is taking the rare earths issue. But it also underscores a fundamental miscalculation by the U.S. and other countries when it comes the reconfiguration of their automotive fleets.
Over the last few years, a growing number of environmentalists and national security hawks have teamed up to denounce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Their solution: all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Those vehicles, they insist, will help the environment while reducing oil imports from countries in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
While that vision appeals to certain segments of the political class and to a myriad of subsidy-seeking corporations, the push to build more electric and hybrid cars will simply result in the U.S. trading one type of import dependence for another.
Those vehicles might cut oil consumption but they will dramatically increase America’s thirst for rare earth elements. And therein lies a crucial choice: We can continue to rely on the liquidity, price transparency, and diversity of the global oil market, the biggest market in human history. Or we can choose the “green” route. And in doing so, we will have no choice but to rely on the market for lanthanides, which is rife with smuggling, has no price transparency, and depends almost wholly on a single producer, China.
The Chinese control about 95 percent of the global market in rare earths, a group of 17 elements that includes scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides, the elements that occupy the second-to-last row of the Periodic Table. The most famous of the lanthanides is probably neodymium, a critical ingredient in the high-strength magnets used in motor-generators in hybrid cars and wind turbines.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a perfect example of what happens when a government is both ideologically driven and therefore not intelligence-driven, and when a government lacks a strategic analytic model that can clearly demonstrate how what might be good for one part of the system is bad for other parts of the system. This is called system INTEGRITY. Not only is the US bankrupt, according to the last Comptroller General to brief Congress on the subject in 2007, David Walker, but what the US government is borrowing and spending on in our name makes no sense at all from a public interest point of view.
by Greg Palast for Truthout/Buzzflash
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tonight, my dog Pluto and I watched the PBS ‘Frontline' investigation of BP, “The Spill.”
PBS has uncovered a real shocker: BP neglected safety!
Well, no shit, Sherlock!
Pluto rolled over on the rug and looked at me as if to say, Don't we already know this?
Then PBS told us – get ready – that BP has neglected warnings about oil safety for years!
That's true. But so has PBS. The Petroleum Broadcast System has turned a blind eye to BP perfidy for decades.
If the broadcast had come six months before the Gulf blow-out, after the 2005 BP Refinery explosion in Texas, after the 2006 Alaska pipeline disaster, after the years of government fines that flashed DANGER-DANGER, I would say, “Damn, that Frontline sure is courageous.” But six months after the blow-out, PBS has shown us it only has the courage to shoot the wounded.
Fishphone: Enter 30644 as the phone number. Text ‘fish' then a space, then the name of fish. You will receive health & enviro info as well as green to red alerts on the health status of seafood. The service is run by BlueOcean.org
Our objectives are simple. We want Royal Dutch Shell executives to act at all times in accordance with Shell General Business Principles which include the claimed core principles of honesty, integrity, openness and respect for people in all of Shell’s dealings.
This is surely not an unreasonable ambition given that the principles were devised by Shell, are promoted by Shell and are supposedly current and binding on all Shell operations everywhere. In other words, we are only asking Shell executives to do what they already claim to be doing.
The plain fact is that if Shell executives had abided with the SGBP, scandals such as the reserves fraud involving blatant deceit and cover-up, the preventable Brent Bravo deaths which flowed from the Shell “Touch F*** All” safety culture on North Sea Platforms, and the more recent PR humiliations arising from outrageous examples of greenwash advertising, could not have occurred.
We do not believe that it is morally acceptable that Shell executives are indemnified so that even if they cheat, deceive and cover-up serious misdeeds, treating shareholders and the public as gullible fools, they are still able to walk away as winners. In the case of Sir Philip Watts, with a severance package/pension pot reportedly worth $18.5 million USD. We think that this is disgraceful situation at odds with all ethical norms including the SGBP and will continue to say so on this website.
The SGBP is being been used as a PR tool to promote undeserved confidence in the scruples and honesty of Shell senior management. For example, the SGBP featured in the Form 20F Declarations filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission thereby generating confidence in the proven reserves volumes which had been inflated i.e. were false.
While Shell execs continue to make pledges of ethical trading which they flout, we will continue our humble efforts to expose their hypocrisy and we welcome the support of others who like us are not prepared to put up with such deception.
DATES: Thursday, November 4, 2010 8:30 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.
ADDRESSES: St. Regis Hotel
923 16th Street and K Street, NW
Washington, DC
Telephone: (202) 638-2626
[6450-01-P]
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, Disposal Subcommittee
AGENCY: Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy
ACTION: Notice of Open Meeting
SUMMARY: This notice announces an open meeting of the Disposal Subcommittee.
The Disposal Subcommittee is a subcommittee of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (the Commission). The establishment of subcommittees is authorized in the Commission’s charter. The Commission was organized pursuant to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (Public Law No. 92-463, 86 Stat. 770) (the Act). This
notice is provided in accordance with the Act.
Thirty-six years ago, Ray Anderson bootstrapped a carpet company called Interface. He maneuvered it though the challenging years, and by the 1990s he was a major player, which also meant he was a preeminent contributor to the take/make/waste production system of the carpet industry. “We were digging up the earth and converting it to pollution,” he says.
Anderson devoted his company to “Mission Zero,” a vow that within five years it would “only take from the earth that which can be replenished by the earth, take not one fresh drop of oil in an oil-intensive industry, and do no harm.” The results: Greenhouse emissions declined 82 percent, fossil fuel use dropped 60 percent, water use declined 77 percent, while sales increased 66 percent and profits doubled. Interface realized $400 million in “avoided costs” in pursuit of zero emissions, which paid for the entire transformation.
Anderson's green business model is classic: Costs come down as innovation–inspired with missionary zeal–goes up, products become better, talent is attracted to your company for its moral and emotional enterprise, and the marketplace perceives the good that you do as reflective of the goods that you make. Most important, Anderson's real-life model presents an irrefutable challenge. As he says, “If something exists, it must be possible.”
I = P x A x T1 is Paul & Anne Erhlich's Environmental Impact Equation where Impact = Population multiplied by Affluence multiplied by Technology. The revised equation is I = P x A / T2.
