Phi Beta Iota: We think very highly of Wolfram Alfa and its creator Stephen Wolfram. Below is the beginning of a conversation about what it would take to lower sea levels and keep them constant so Singapore among other countries, need not worry, at the same time that we leverage solar power to desalinate water and create hydrogen energy.
WE ASKED:
What is the volume of sea water that would have to be desalinated and withdrawn for aquifer replenishment, deforestation, de-desertification, and general land use, to keep sea level at a constant? Discussion: the intersection of solar energy and water purification, desalination, and splitting to produce hydrogen power and oxygen is now reaching a tipping point. We are very close to a price point where it makes sense to actually lower the ocean and restock our clean water, doing this on a world wide basis, a Manhattan Project to create 1000 massive water desalination and power plants world wide.
From accommodation to cars, the internet is turning us from consumers into providers and challenging established business models. We talk to Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon – the largest Wi-Fi company in the world – and profile two more pioneers, from TaskRabbit.com and BlaBlaCar.com
In 2006, serial entrepreneur and investor Martín Varsavsky – inspired by a conviction that he could cloak the world in free Wi-Fi by encouraging people to share their home connections – founded Fon in Madrid. The company is now the largest Wi-Fi network in the world, with almost 12m hot spots in more than 100 countries.
“My general thinking at the time was that we live in a world in which benefits are only accrued through economic growth and the endless consumption of resources, and that there have to be other ways that are of more benefit to people,” he says. “Why should everyone have their own car when most of the time they are not using them? Think of a marina full of boats. How frequently do those boats go out?”
Today, it has been argued that the sharing economy – which is perhaps best defined as a way of sweating underutilised assets, by building communities around them and turning consumers into providers – has the potential to reboot businesses across most economic categories. Indeed, Forbes magazine recently estimated that total revenues for the sector could top $3.5bn this year, with growth exceeding 25%. However, when setting up Fon, Varsavsky became convinced that people needed a nudge or financial incentive before they'd happily share their assets.
Scientists Achieve Solar Hydrogen Production Breakthrough
A newly published study reveals how scientists used a solar cell and a photo anode made of a metal oxide to achieve a solar hydrogen production breakthrough.
The experts were able to develop a rather elegant and simple system for using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Click on Image to Enlarge
This process, called artificial photosynthesis, allows solar energy to be stored in the form of hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be used as a fuel either directly or in the form of methane, or it can generate electricity in a fuel cell.
One rough estimate shows the potential inherent in this technology: At a solar performance in Germany of roughly 600 Watts per square meter, 100 square meters of this type of system is theoretically capable of storing 3 kilowatt hours of energy in the form of hydrogen in just one single hour of sunshine. This energy could then be available at night or on cloudy days.
The map below depicts geo-tagged tweets posted between May 4-5, 2013 in the New York City area. Over 36,000 tweets are posted on the map (click to enlarge). Since less than 3% of all tweets are geo-tagged, the map is missing the vast majority of tweets posted in this area during those 24 hours.
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These visuals are screenshots of Harvard’s Tweetmap platform, which is publicly available here. My colleague Todd Mostak is one of the main drivers behind Tweetmap, so worth sending him a quick thank you tweet! Todd is working on some exciting extensions and refinements, so stay tuned as I’ll be sure to blog about them when they go live.
The more one shares, the more one undermines a future patent application and a system that encourages privatization [profit for the few, suffering for the many]
Charles Davis
Al Jazeera, 3 August 2013
EXTRACT:
Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the Economic Espionage Act of 1995 makes it a federal offence punishable by up to 15 years in prison for someone to “knowingly” deliver a “trade secret” into the hands of a foreign government or institution. As written, that means even if someone had the most honest of intentions – hey, maybe people outside of America get cancer too – they would still be considered a spy for letting a scientific secret cross a body of water. If that secret is ever disclosed, it will be disclosed on corporate America's terms. And it will make someone a lot of money.
Consider the case of Hua Jun Zhao. A researcher at Wisconsin Medical College, Zhao was recently accused of stealing several vials of a potentially cancer-fighting compound he was working on with the intent of passing it on to a university in China, allegedly as his own work. If true, Zhao certainly committed a crime – theft – and perhaps intended to commit academic fraud. But when the FBI came knocking, the $8,000 in missing goods was treated as espionage. Zhao, according to the bureau, was a spy.
In a press release, the FBI alleged that the Chinese native used his position to “illegally acquire patented cancer research material and to have taken steps to provide that material to Zhejiang University in China”. Among the goals served by his arrest, the bureau stated, was protecting America's “competitiveness in an age of globalisation”. By law, the espionage case had to first be approved by a top official at the Justice Department.
How to turn the US-Mexican border into a war zone [profitable for the few]
Todd Miller
al Jazeera, 3 August 2013
The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown “explosion-resistant” tower, 10 metres high and 3 metres wide, directly in the centre of the spacious room that holds this annual trade show. From a platform where, assumedly, a border guard would stand, you could take in the constellation of small booths offering the surveillance industry's finest products, including a staggering multitude of ways to monitor, chase, capture, or even kill people, thanks to modernistic arrays of cameras and sensors, up-armored jeeps, the latest in guns, and even surveillance balloons.
Although at the time, headlines in the Southwest emphasised potential cuts to future border-security budgets thanks to Congress's “sequester”, the vast Phoenix Convention Center hall – where the defence and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border security wasn't about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to “immigration reform”, no matter what version of it did or didn't pass Congress. And it looks like they were absolutely right.
All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could help thwart massive attacks and fireball-style explosions. A border like the one just over 161 kilometres away between the United States and Mexico, it seemed to say, was not so much a place that divided people in situations of unprecedented global inequality, but a site of constant war-like danger.
Below me were booths as far as the eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering through a militarised border zone with a Hollywood flair.
To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what such a drone would be used for. “To see what's over the next hill,” he replied.
