I took this image during an almost full moon. I used a tripod and very small aperture. I wish I had a slightly longer zoom lens.
Comeback Kid?
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Is Mexico the Comeback Kid?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MONTERREY, Mexico
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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Visiting Mexico this past week reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from my days in Beirut. It was when a hostess asked her dinner guests during the Lebanese civil war: “Would you like to eat now or wait for the cease-fire?” One of the lessons of both Mexico and Lebanon is how irrepressible is the human spirit — that no matter how violent a country becomes, people will adapt and take risks to innovate or to make profits or get to school or to just have fun.
That is a key reason that Mexico is making something of a comeback these days. Whether it will make it back in a sustainable way is unclear. Mexico still has huge problems: stifling monopolies in energy, telecom and media; a weak K-12 education system; violent cartels; and a corrupt police and judiciary. Together, they will keep a lid on Mexico’s prospects if they’re not addressed, the human spirit notwithstanding.
That said, it’s useful to look at what Mexico has gotten right, despite its problems. The first two had to do with actions by the government — improved higher education and macroeconomic policy. The third happened naturally. It’s when a critical mass of youth “just don’t get the word” — they don’t get the word that the government is a mess or that China is going to eat their lunch or that the streets are too dangerous. Instead, they take advantage of how the Internet and globalization promote individual empowerment and opportunities to start stuff and collaborate on stuff really cheaply — and they just do it. Let’s look at all three.
According to the Inter-American Development Bank: Despite Mexico’s weakness in K-12 education, in the past 10 years, Mexico doubled its number of public education institutions at the postsecondary level, and many are dedicated to science and technology. It now graduates many more engineers. On Sept. 19, The Financial Times reported that “according to Unesco, the number of engineers, architects and others in disciplines related to manufacturing graduating from Mexican universities has risen from almost 0.4 per 1,000 people in 1999 to more than 0.8 today. … The number for the U.S. over the same period has remained roughly flat at 0.6 per 1,000.” That is a reason that Mexico in 2012 became one of the largest exporters of information technology services in the world, approaching the likes of India, the Philippines and China.
As for economics, Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, summed it up in a Nov. 2 speech, when he said of Mexico: “Between 1975 and 2000, there was one crisis after another: in 1976, 1982, 1985-88 and 1994.” But thanks to a series of monetary and fiscal reforms, Fisher argued, the Mexican economy’s vital signs look a lot healthier. “The U.S. deficit is 7 percent of gross domestic product,” said Fisher. “Mexico’s deficit is about 2 percent of their G.D.P.” Meanwhile, he added, America “is growing slowly, weighed down by debt and the pervasive uncertainty caused by our nation’s fiscal imbalances and growing regulatory complexity. Mexico, in contrast, is growing robustly, and, in contrast to their Washington counterparts, Mexican policy makers are demonstrating remarkable commitment to fiscal discipline.”
As for Mexico’s “just do it” generation, I’d put it this way: Monterrey has tens of thousands of poor living in shantytowns. They’ve been there for decades. What is new, though, is that this city, Mexico’s Silicon Valley, now also has a critical mass of young, confident innovators trying to solve Mexico’s problems, by leveraging technology and globalization.
I met a few of them: There was Raúl Maldonado, founder of Enova, which has created an after-school program of blended learning — teacher plus Internet — to teach math and reading to poor kids and computer literacy to adults. “We’ve graduated 80,000 people in the last three years,” he told me. “We plan to start 700 centers in the next three years and reach six million people in the next five.” There was Patricio Zambrano from Alivio Capital who has created a network of dental, optical and hearing aid clinics to provide low-cost alternatives for all three, plus loans for hospital care for people without insurance. There was Andres Muñoz Jr. from Energryn, who demonstrated his solar hot-water heater that also purified water and could cook meat. There was the administrator from Cedim, a start-up university offering a “master’s in business innovation.” And there was Arturo Galván, founder of Naranya, a mobile Internet company that offers a range of services, including micropayments for consumers at the bottom of the pyramid.
“We’ve all been here for many years, but I think that the confidence is starting to happen,” said Galván. “You start to see the role models who started from zero and are now going public. We are pretty creative. We had to face a lot of challenges,” As a result, he added, “we are strong now, we believe, and the innovation ecosystem is happening.”
Naranya is based on the Spanish word for “orange,” or naranja. Why that name? I asked Galván. “ ‘Apple’ was already taken,” he said.
Gasoline Prices
I think this article understates the war risk premium built into pricing.
Why Are Gas Prices Are Suddenly So High? Blame the Refineries
It’s been an unusually expensive winter for drivers. Instead of dropping like normal during America’s chilly travel lull, average gas prices have marched up to around $3.80-a-gallon. That’s noticeably higher than at this time in any of the past five years, even though the price of oil isn’t much different than it was, say, last February.
It’s always hard to pin the price at the pump on any single variable, but in a short post today* the Energy Information Agency takes a stab at explaining the run up. Their theory: blame it on the refineries.
Refiners have kept gasoline production relatively low for the past twelve months, but a recent series of shutdowns everywhere from Philadelphia to Port Arthur, Texas, have made capacity particularly tight.* Some of these outages were just for standard annual maintenance planned well in advance. Others took the market by surprise. But in any case, they’ve driven up the cost of gas versus the cost of crude oil (a difference known as the “crack spread”). In sum: supply’s down, which has meant higher profits for the refiners still churning out product, as well as higher prices for motorists.
For a visual guide, see the chart below. The price of oil (GREEN line) hasn’t moved all that much since November, while gasoline prices (all other colors) have shot up.
The good news is that, as refineries finish fixing themselves up and come back on line, supply will come up and prices will go down.
Then again, who knows. Maybe by then we’ll be talking about another crisis in the Middle East driving up the price of oil.
______________________
Saving the EV Industry?
Lithium-Air Batteries: The Saviour of the EV Industry?
By Joao Peixe | Mon, 25 February 2013 22:33 |
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In 2012 electric vehicles experienced their best sales year ever in the US, however they still only sold fewer than 10,000 (less than 0.1% of new car sales). Hybrids, such as the Toyota Prius, on the other hand have become a popular choice.
The difference is the that hybrids can recharge their batteries whilst on the move, yet EV drivers suffer from range anxiety, knowing that if their battery runs out before they arrive at a recharging station, then they will be stranded. This inability to recharge themselves means that EVs are dependent on their battery capacity, and the most popular battery used at the moment is the lithium-ion battery.
Now on paper the lithium ion cell can store just more than 400 watt-hours of energy per kilogram, but in reality the figure is around half of that. In order to remove the range anxiety and entice more people to buy EVs, battery technology must improve to offer a density of around 800 watt-hours per kilogram, at least. Lithium-ion batteries are unlikely to ever produce this performance, especially at a reasonable price.
Related article: Lithium Ion Batteries Causing Big Problems for Aviation Industry That means that a new battery technology must be considered, and to be a perfect source of energy it would hold the same energy per kilogram as the petroleum that it is designed to replace. Petrol has an energy density of around 13 kilowatt-hours per kg, which after all of the energy wasted in the combustion process converts to around 1.7 kW-hours per kg.
There does actually exist one battery technology that can compete, and it is even older than lithium-ion technology. Lithium-air batteries can theoretically deliver 12 kW-hours per kg. it was first proposed in the 1970’s, yet has never met with as much success as lithium-ion cells due to the difficulty of building a lithium-air cell which can be recharged thousands of times. The typical motorist would expect to travel around 100,000 miles before they need to replace the batteries, and that means around 3,000 charges at least. At the moment lithium-ion batteries can handle that with relative ease, lithium-air batteries cannot. But with more focus on lithium-air technology, especially now that lithium-ion cells have been receiving such negative press, then maybe a breakthrough can be made.
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
Thoughts on Apple
THE FINANCIAL PAGE EYING APPLE
BY JAMES SUROWIECKI
MARCH 4, 2013
PRINTE-MAILSINGLE PAGE
KEYWORDS
APPLE; SAMSUNG; TABLETS; TECHNOLOGY; PETER MISEK; SMARTPHONES; BIZPAGES
Not long ago, Apple was almost universally venerated. It was the most profitable tech company in the world, and commentators predicted that it might be the first trillion-dollar company in U.S. history. What a difference a few months make. Since September, the stock has tumbled thirty-five per cent, losing more than two hundred billion dollars from its market cap. January’s earnings report disappointed investors, and analysts are cutting earnings estimates. Now there’s a deluge of forecasts stating that Apple is “in big trouble,” “losing its cool,” and just plain “doomed.” And it’s not only pundits: the activist hedge-fund manager David Einhorn has capitalized on the crisis by pushing the company to hand over its giant cash reserves to shareholders.
So why the sudden fall from grace? There were a few missteps: a tepid launch for the iPhone 5, followed by the Maps fiasco. And Steve Jobs’s absence is obviously preying on people’s minds. But there’s a more concrete reason: Apple’s competitors are finally doing a better job of making the kinds of phones that customers want. The most notable of these is an oversized phone dubbed “the phablet”—Samsung’s Galaxy Note is the leader in the category. The phablet is bigger than a traditional phone, smaller than a tablet, and as ungainly as its name—too big to fit comfortably in your pocket and cumbersome for making calls. In the U.S., the phablet is still very much a niche product, but overseas, particularly in Asia, sales exploded in the second half of last year. And, unfortunately for Apple, there is no iPhablet. The analyst Peter Misek, a managing director at Jefferies & Company, told me that he had been an Apple optimist until last fall. “We assumed, as Apple did, that a buyer of a smartphone would also be a buyer of a tablet, so you’d have one device for mobility and one for surfing the Net,” he said. “But what we’re finding is that, especially in lower-income areas, people can’t or don’t want to buy both. So they’re buying the one device that combines the two.” This means that phablets are eating away at both iPhone and iPad sales. And Misek’s research suggests that Apple won’t be able to release a phablet until next year.
The bigger concern behind the phablet phenomenon is that Apple may be losing ground in the global market. In the U.S., where the company is dominant, more than fifty per cent of consumers already have a smartphone, so being a big player in emerging markets is crucial to keeping profits rolling in. That’s where Apple has some handicaps: it doesn’t have a phablet and it doesn’t have a low-cost version of the iPhone. Misek also points out that in much of the world iPhones aren’t as attractive an option as in America, because there isn’t as rich an ecosystem of content and apps surrounding them.
These are serious problems, and shareholders are undoubtedly in for a bumpier ride than they’re used to. Still, the company’s fundamentals are simply too good to justify panic. Its cash hoard is bigger than the market cap of almost every company in the S. & P. 500. It makes the world’s two best-selling phones. The U.S. market may be maturing, but it’s still immensely lucrative and far from tapped out, and Apple is the market leader in both smartphones and tablets. It’s also by far the biggest maker of tablets worldwide. Unlike its competitors, it also does an exceptionally good job of turning sales into profits: in 2012, according to one study, Apple accounted for sixty-nine per cent of all profits in the world mobile-phone market. That doesn’t sound like a company whose stock deserves to trade at a price-to-earnings ratio well below the market average.
Of course, to keep thriving, Apple has to keep innovating, and much of the anxiety about the company stems from a concern that it may finally be “hitting a wall” in that department. But, over the years, predictions that the great ideas engine was grinding to a halt have been surprisingly common. When Apple started opening retail stores, BusinessWeek ran with the headline “sorry, steve: here’s why apple stores won’t work.” The iPod was initially seen as just an overpriced MP3 player, and the iPad’s launch was greeted with a good deal of ridicule. And even when Jobs was running things there were recurrent complaints that Apple was “getting lazy.” Past performance is no guarantee of future results: just ask Motorola and BlackBerry. But the fact that Apple’s epitaph has been written before should make us skeptical of this most recent death knell. Failing to build a phablet or a cheap phone may well have been mistakes, but they’re fixable mistakes. Analysts are all but certain that Apple will bring out a cheaper iPhone this summer, and the company has already proved adept at starting with an expensive product and then making cheaper versions: think of the way the iPod gave birth to the Shuffle and the Nano, or the new iPad mini. More important, there is still plenty of new ground for the company to break. It’s widely thought that Apple’s next big move may be a television that’s fully integrated with its other devices—not just a new product but a new product category. Misek, though cautious about Apple’s future (he has a hold recommendation on the stock), thinks that such a product would lead consumers to lock themselves inside the walled garden of Apple products for years to come.
Over time, Apple has succeeded despite (or because of) its disregard for the conventional wisdom about what works in technology markets: it has built hardware and software, kept its platform closed, had long product cycles, and emphasized quality over price. It’s always been the proverbial bumblebee: it shouldn’t be able to fly but it does. A wobble in flight is all it takes for people to proclaim its inevitable crash. ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/03/04/130304ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2M11vTxPN
Suzuki and Hydrogen Cells
Suzuki Starts Production of Hydrogen Cell Car Battery
By Jen Alic | Sun, 24 February 2013 00:00 | 2
It was only a year ago that Suzuki Motor Corporation (7269:JP) started a joint venture to develop hydrogen fuel-cell systems for vehicles, and now it’s starting production.
In cooperation with UK-based Intelligence Energy, Suzuki’s SMILE FC this week cut the red tape on their first small-scale production facility for manufacturing air-cooled fuel cell systems and revolutionizing the hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle.
Next to come is a larger-scale production line to further commercialization of the product.
According to an Intelligent Energy press release, “the partnership, materialized through SMILE FC System Corporation, represents the next stage in high volume production of fuel cell systems with associated reduction of manufacturing and assembly costs as well as improved cycle times and enhanced product quality.”
Related article: Lithium Ion Batteries Causing Big Problems for Aviation Industry
The production line is in Yokohama, Japan, and the end product promises to be affordable. The production line uses semi-automated technology developed by Intelligent Energy.
Who else is in on the game? Toyota, BMW, Daimler, Ford and Nissan. They’re behind Suzuki, however, with 2015 as a target date for the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. BMW and Toyota are collaborating to develop fuel cell systems, while Daimler, Ford and Nissan have a three-way deal to commercialize their own fuel cell electric vehicle technology.
What this joining of forces among some of the car industry’s top forces suggests is that they see a future in electric vehicles—even if the market doesn’t see it just yet.
By. Jen Alic of Oilprice.com
Google Glass
Google Glass? You have to applaud their vision
Though wildly ambitious, Google’s augmented reality headgear is equipped to transform everyday life
Share 125
John Naughton
The Observer, Saturday 23 February 2013
Google founder Sergey Brin wearing a pair of Google glasses at the the Diane von Furstenberg show during New York fashion week. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
A few weeks ago, the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, spent four days in Cambridge as the Humanitas visiting professor in the university’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, where I work. Afterwards, one of the questions I was most frequently asked by people who hadn’t been around for his visit was: “Was he wearing the glasses?”
This was interesting because it suggested a surprisingly wide awareness of something that – until recently – many people would have dismissed as a typical example of leading-edge uselessness. It’s Google Glass, an R&D project aimed at developing an “augmented reality head-mounted display”. It comes from the same Google lab that has produced the self-driving car and, in a way, belongs in the same category of insanely ambitious projects. But just as the car looks like becoming a reality, so too do the glasses. In fact, if you’re a software developer and live in the US, you might just be able to acquire a prototype from the project’s website, in return for $1,500 and some original ideas for applications of the technology.
In its current incarnation, the Google Glass headset (not to be confused with Google Goggles, incidentally) looks encouragingly geeky. It consists of a tiny Android computer built into the right-hand arm of a spectacles frame. The computer’s display takes the form of a small prism that sits in the peripheral vision of the wearer’s right eye. A tiny camera mounted in the frame conveys to the computer everything in the user’s field of vision.
The device is activated by voice commands, as in: “OK glass, record a video.” Or: “OK glass, take a picture.” This is illustrated by a stirring promotional video that manages to be both informative and beyond parody. It shows attractive Google persons – ie slim, athletic twentysomethings from California – doing everyday things such as skydiving, swinging on trapezes, aerobatics, arcane martial arts, rollercoaster rides etc and using their headsets to record these routine episodes in their busy lives.
Such videos this will doubtless revive sceptical commentary about leading-edge uselessness. “So,” said one unimpressed (female) viewer of the video, “you can record videos, take pictures, do Google searches and access satnav information.” What was left unsaid, but clearly implied was: “So what?”
That’s the wrong question. If this technology really works in the messy real world where wireless connectivity is always flaky, then people will find good uses for it. Even now, it could be a boon for people whose short-term memory is poor or deteriorating. Being able to keep a visual and aural record of one’s daily life might be helpful, as anyone who has an elderly parent in a nursing home will readily testify. It might also be useful for assisting technicians trying to diagnose problems miles away from base, or for medics performing unfamiliar surgical routines in distant locations. And these are just obvious applications.
What endears the Google Glass project to me is that it’s the latest instalment in a long and honourable tradition in computer science. It goes all the way back to one of the great luminaries of the business, Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in networked computing and the design of graphical user interfaces. (In December 1968, in San Francisco, he gave a live demonstration of what networked computing could do that had a profound influence on the people who built the internet and much of the technology we use today.)
What motivated Engelbart from the outset was a passionate belief that computers had the power to augment, rather than replace, human capabilities. Machines, he believed, should do what machines do best, thereby freeing up humans to do what they do best. And this idea of “augmentation” has inspired a good deal of research in the decades since Engelbart embarked on his mission to change the world.
Many years ago, for example, an MIT student named Steve Mann used to risk ridicule by walking round with what he called “wearable computing” kit, much of it looking like something by Heath Robinson. Over the years, the kit became smaller and the software (much of it written by Mann) became slicker. And the geeky student became a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto.
It’s too early to say whether the glasses will become transformative. They may turn out to be something that only appeals to early adopters and gadget freaks. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And if Google produces a version that can accommodate my bifocals, why, I might even buy them.
Lone Cypress at Pebble Beach
I took this picture last January during a trip to Carmel. We stayed at the Carmel Highlands Inn which is located just south of Carmel, along the Pacific Coast Highway. Since the tree was backlit, I used the adjustment brush in Photoshop Elements to bring out the color of the tree trunk, branches and foliage.
Sounding Ominous
North Korea: Preparing for War
By Jen Alic | Thu, 21 February 2013 23:02 | 4
The latest in the North Korea drama is the release of a video portraying US President Barack Obama and American troops going up in flames. But it’s not just cheap and cheesy rhetoric by a new leader who wants to be taken seriously: North Korea is preparing for a war because the US has been preparing for an offensive.
Earlier this month, we were regaled with a similar video, this time portraying a US city being attacked by North Korean missiles. Before that, in December, North Korea launched a satellite, and its official news agency declared a “Nationwide preparation for an all-out great war for national reunification.”
Earlier this week, satellite images indicated renewed activity at a North Korean nuclear site where a test was launched in early December. On 12 December, North Korea launched a long-range rocket putting a satellite into orbit. This is a major success for North Korea and few others have achieved it. (South Korea responded by successfully launching its own satellite into orbit for the first time in late January.)
Related article: DPRK Test Nuclear Weapon Destined for Iran
The Obama administration’s stated policy on North Korea—the one for public consumption—is “strategic patience”, but there’s nothing patient about this policy. On the public platform, the media finds it amusing to jest about the careful and seemingly unserious US response to North Korean provocations. Behind the scenes, however, the US has been working up to an offensive since the death of Kim Jong-il a year ago—with Washington hedging its bets that the succession comes along with enough instability to open an window of opportunity for regime change.
Pyongyang’s activities since then have been those of a country on edge, and this is why:
• The first joint military exercises between the US and South Korea since the death of Kim Jong-il suddenly changed their nature, with new war games included pre-emptive artillery attacks on North Korea
• Another amphibious landing operation simulation took on vastly larger proportions following Kim Jong-il’s death (the sheer amount of equipment deployed was amazing: 13 naval vessels, 52 armored vessels, 40 fighter jets and 9,000 US troops).
• South Korean officials began talking of Kim Jong-il’s death as a prime opportunity to pursue a regime-change strategy .
• South Korea unveiled a new cruise missile that could launch a strike inside North Korea and is working fast to increase its full-battery range to strike anywhere inside North Korea.
• South Korea openly began discussing asymmetric warfare against North Korea.
• The US military’s Key Resolve Foal Eagle computerized war simulation games suddenly changed, too, simulating the deployment of 100,000 South Korean troops on North Korean territory following a regime change.
• Japan was brought on board, allowing the US to deploy a second advanced missile defense radar system on its territory and the two carried out unprecedented war games.
• It is also not lost on anyone that despite what on the surface appears to be the US’ complete lack of interest in a new South Korean naval base that is in the works, this base will essentially serve as an integrated missile defense system run by the US military and housing Aegis destroyers .
Related article: China Decides that South China Sea Oil is a National Asset
The bottom line here is that the US and South Korea have gone on the offensive, and this is prompting a flurry of activity by Pyongyang, which will now put even more effort into its nuclear program.
While it is perhaps more amusing to paint a portrait of Kim Jong-un as an eccentric attention-seeker, and while there is an element in Pyongyang’s actions that is about solidifying stability at home, what this is really about is North Korea’s belief that an invasion is imminent.
A move on North Korea would also be in line with the Obama administration’s Asia-Pacific strategic shift, which has the US Navy bringing old forward bases back online across region, from Thailand and Vietnam to the Philippines and Australia.
By. Jen Alic of Oilprice.com
Passing Through . . . . 