Mike Poulson is a jack of all trades, with folk artist being one of them. He is the guy
responsible for the metal motorcycle cop sculpture that has given pause to many a
passerby of South 1st. While 2209 S. 1st St. has had many references throughout
the years, it’s most recent being “el Corazón”, Mike, the owner, always
unofficially called it Slackerville.
Slackerville was established in 1979, with the website going on-line in March 2011.
South African history
The good guys were often bad
How the conspiratorial past affects the present day
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
Nationalist poster boy
External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990. By Stephen Ellis. Hurst; 384 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
THE real message of Stephen Ellis’s history of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile—painfully and palpably obvious between the lines—is how the conspiratorial past affects the ruling party to the present day. It makes uncomfortable reading, for it goes some way towards explaining why President Jacob Zuma, a former head of the ANC’s intelligence service in exile, and his comrades now running South Africa find it so hard to embrace the notion that a diversity of opinion and tolerance of dissent must be at the heart of any functioning, decent democracy.
Mr Ellis holds the Desmond Tutu chair at the Free University of Amsterdam and has long scrutinised the ANC. In the late 1990s he was a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which looked mainly into the multiple abuses by the apartheid regime but was notably less keen to examine human-rights violations committed by the ANC against its own people during its exile, especially in its guerrilla camps in Angola, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
“External Mission” is an exhaustive survey of the ANC’s ideological and tactical twists and turns. It begins in 1960, when the ANC was outlawed and driven into exile, and ends in 1990, when Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years behind bars and was drawn into negotiations with South Africa’s white rulers that culminated in the black majority taking over under the ANC’s aegis in 1994.
Whereas Mr Mandela brilliantly handled the transition between his release and majority rule, the ANC’s sporadic and generally feeble guerrilla efforts had almost no role in eventually bringing down apartheid. Labour strikes, home-grown street protests and the refusal of banks such as Chase Manhattan to roll over South African debt were far more effective.
The ever-evolving relationship in exile between the ANC and the South African Communist Party was a constant source of friction and intrigue. Many of the exiles were members of both. South Africa- watchers, such as Mr Ellis, have endlessly sought to identify such allegiances. Mr Mandela, he makes clear, was co-opted onto the Communists’ central committee, yet his chief loyalty was to the ANC. Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Mr Mandela as president in 1999, likewise wore both hats; his father, Govan, was a leading and ardent Communist. But Thabo, though a master at handling the ANC’s Russian backers, never put the Communists first. Both he and Mr Mandela veered into the nationalist (ie, non-Communist) camp, once in power. In 1962 Mandela, still a free man, set off from South Africa to Algeria, Egypt and Ghana to solicit international backing for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the nation”), also known as MK. He returned home in July of that year. Mr Slovo is said to have complained that “we sent [Mandela] off to Africa a Communist and he came back an African nationalist.”
Mr Ellis insists that the high command of MK, came under the direction of the Communists’ central committee. Mr Zuma, a major figure in MK, however, was apparently never a Communist. But he would not have been immune to the sense of paranoia and mistrust that permeated the entire organisation.
Two aspects of the book are particularly disturbing. The first is the extent of violence, including torture, imprisonment (often in solitary confinement), beatings and executions in the ANC guerrilla camps, along with a perhaps understandable reluctance of the party after 1994 to acknowledge, let alone apologise for, such things. As late as 1984, the ANC executed seven of its guerrillas by firing squad and sentenced another eight to death in Angola’s Pango camp. For sure, the apartheid regime did manage to infiltrate such places with informers; Mr Ellis reveals that several leading lights in the ANC in exile had indeed been turned round by the regime’s intelligence services, and some met mysterious deaths on their return to a free country. But most of the trouble in the camps was caused by the refusal of ANC bosses, especially those who were also Communists, to tolerate dissent.
The other worrying disclosure by the rigorously dispassionate Mr Ellis is the manner in which the ANC’s security and intelligence services, during and after the party’s takeover back home, co-opted many of the hard men of the apartheid era’s criminal gangland, both black and white, together with some of the nastier security agents of the white regime itself, including some of the shadiest sanctions-busters. The ANC’s first post-apartheid minister of defence, Joe Modise, was plainly a big-time crook. A culture of corruption clearly permeated sections of the ANC in exile. Back home, with the party in power, it is sadly still rampant. Mr Ellis goes some way to explaining why.
from the print edition | Books and arts
Recommend
10
I found this place while riding my bike a few weeks ago. The sun was at a shadow creating angle. I have been by several times since. The store gets a lot of traffic. I shall have to try one of their pizzas.
Since the 11 March 2011 Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe, the global nuclear civilian power industry has absorbed the negative publicity and is set to grow over the next several decades.
According to a May 2012 report issued by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration, “Nuclear generating capacity additions began in the 1950s and now top 346 gigawatts worldwide. The first nuclear reactor to produce electricity was a very small experimental reactor in the United States in 1951. Currently, 30 countries have nuclear power programs… Plans to add new nuclear capacity in North America and Europe are relatively small in comparison to those in such countries as China, Korea, and India. Projected increased electricity demand in rapidly developing countries coupled with energy security awareness and the desire to limit carbon emissions are contributing to the worldwide addition of new nuclear capacity.”
China currently has 15 operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) that provide roughly 12.5 gigawatts of generating capacity, and another 26 reactors currently under construction that will add another 30 gigawatts to the national grid. According to the pro nuclear industry World Nuclear Association, “additional reactors are planned, including some of the world’s most advanced, to give a five- or six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 60 gigawatts by 2020, then 200 gigawatts by 2030, and 400 gigawatts by 2050.
Now China may be preparing to infiltrate one of the West’s last technological areas of expertise, the construction of nuclear power plants. In the intense struggle for business in the Third World, Beijing may well score against such formerly high profile nuclear exporting companies as Westinghouse, Areva and Rosatomstrpoiekhsport.
Currently, there are 435 nuclear power reactors operating in 21 nations, with a combined capacity of over 370 gigawatt hours. In 2011 these provided 2518 billion kilowatt hours, roughly 13.5 percent of global electricity needs, with another 60+ power reactors are currently being constructed in 14 countries, including China, South Korea and the Russian Federation.
Related Article: Germany’s Nuke Plants Closed, but – Where to Store their Waste?
Accordingly, the potential global nuclear energy power market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which advanced countries felt was theirs to exploit.
Enter China, which could undercut the current Western monopoly.
China has come a long way in advancing its industrial base since the early 1960s, when
Mao Tse Tung advocated that peasants build backyard steel blast furnaces, which Soviet ally Nikita Khrushchev derisively dismissed as ‘samovar capitalism.”
China’s burgeoning industrial base now includes an indigenously developed manned space flight, the third in the world behind the U.S. and Russia.
And now Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Co Ltd. is developing a $476 million civilian nuclear power project that will be the first in the world to put a reactor with fourth-generation features into commercial production.
Proponents of 4th generation nuclear reactors include Bill Gates, whose Terrapower company is collaborating with Chinese scientists on the design and who noted in December 2011, “The idea is to be very low cost, very safe and generate very little waste,” with the reactor design, under study by Terrapower requiring no enriched uranium, as its fuel would be depleted uranium, greatly diminishing nuclear waste output.
Related Article: US Sailors Sue Over Fukushima Radiation
China has already proven the feasibility of its 4th generation reactor concept by bring a small 20 megawatt prototype online in July 2011 after a year of testing.
What is HSNPC constructing? According to HSNPC, the Shidao Bay nuclear power plant, with a designed capacity of 200 megawatts and “the characteristics of fourth-generation nuclear energy systems,” the high-temperature gas-cooled NPP reactor will start generating power by the end of 2017, raising electricity generation efficiency to roughly 40 percent from the current 30-percent level of second- and third-generation reactors.
Why should the West be concerned?
A HSNPC public relations spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if the project is successful, “the reactor’s technology and equipment can be exported to other countries in the future. That will be a great boost to China’s nuclear industry, as a very high percentage of the equipment is produced domestically instead of being imported.”
Originally scheduled to be launched in 2011, the construction of the Shidao Bay NPP was delayed after Fukushima, but in October 2011 China’s government began to reconsider nuclear energy in its efforts to fulfill rising demands, putting the Shidao Bay project through on-site checks in accident prevention and emergency management, with the proposed facility passing government safety inspections.
Given China’s unique blend of state socialism and capitalism, officials at Westinghouse, Areva and Rosatomstrpoiekhsport have a right to be nervous.
By. John C.K. Daly of Oilprice.com
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
FOR a month Hugo Chávez has been lying in a hospital bed in Havana after undergoing his fourth operation since 2011 for cancer. Most of the facts Venezuelans have been given about their president’s condition have been sparse and contradictory. But the information minister recently declared that the patient faced “complications as a result of a severe lung infection” and a “respiratory insufficiency”. This hardly suggests that Mr Chávez is likely soon to be restored to full health; rather, he may well be dying.
Mr Chávez’s incapacity poses a constitutional problem for Venezuela, and a political problem for the whole of Latin America. He was due to be sworn in as president on January 10th, but his inauguration was postponed. Fortunately Venezuela’s constitution, which Mr Chávez pushed through in 1999, provides for such a situation. It says, in a nutshell, that if the president-elect’s incapacity is permanent, the head of the National Assembly should take over running the country while a fresh election is held; if it is temporary, the vice-president should step in for up to 180 days.
In any normal democracy one of those two things would now happen. Indeed, Mr Chávez seemed to prepare for this before his operation when he anointed Nicolás Maduro, his appointed vice-president, as his chosen successor. The National Assembly met this week and re-elected Diosdado Cabello, an army chum of Mr Chávez, as its head.
But Venezuela is not a normal democracy. Although Mr Chávez’s legitimacy derives from the ballot box, he is a former army officer who has ruled as an autocrat since 1999. He claims to head a revolutionary regime in which the exercise of power is personal. On January 8th Mr Maduro sent a letter to the assembly admitting that Mr Chávez was not fit to appear before the assembly, but saying that he would be sworn in at an unspecified later date (see article). Since he is already in post as president, this is a technicality, officials insist.
It is true that Venezuelans gave Mr Chávez a clear mandate in October: he won 55% of the vote while his main opponent, Henrique Capriles, got only 44%. But he falsely assured the voters that he had been cured. Would they really have elected a man who was, and is, not able to do the job?
Venezuela cannot afford a prolonged power vacuum. The country faces an economic crisis. Having ramped up spending to win the election, the government ran a budget deficit of 8.5% of GDP last year, according to independent economists. Plugging such a huge gap will require big spending cuts and a hefty devaluation to boost the local-currency value of oil revenues, among other unpopular measures.
Tell the truth, and apply the constitution
The other reason Venezuela needs a real leader is that Mr Chávez’s prostration has given Cuba unhealthy sway over events in the country. Cuba’s influence was already considerable: it provides Mr Chávez with intelligence and security advisers in return for Venezuelan oil. While he is in Havana, the Venezuelan president is under Cuban control. The Cubans appear to have brokered a deal under which Mr Maduro and Mr Cabello—potential rivals—ostentatiously declared their brotherly love and insisted that there was no need for a physical inauguration this week. Just imagine the fuss that most Latin Americans would make about foreign interference were the United States playing the part that Cuba has taken in Venezuela’s internal affairs.
What is missing in all this, as Venezuela’s opposition has repeatedly pointed out, is any independent verification of Mr Chávez’s medical condition. If there were a genuine prospect of his resuming office, Mr Maduro should formally take over until that time comes. If not, a fresh election should be called. Indeed, it would be in the chavistas’ interest to hold such a poll soon so as to capitalise on sympathy for Mr Chávez.
Yet everything suggests that, in defiance of the Venezuelan constitution, Mr Chávez will remain president, even if only in name. That ought to be unacceptable to Venezuela’s partners in the Mercosur trade block, led by Brazil. Last year they suspended Paraguay’s membership after its left-wing president was impeached—constitutionally, albeit with unseemly haste. They should now similarly suspend Venezuela until it adheres to its own constitution. Sadly, when it comes to defending democracy in Latin America, double standards too often trump principles. Treating Mr Chávez like an absolute monarch whose reign lasts until his dying breath is weakening the cause of democracy in the region.
January 9, 2013
WHY THE FEDS SHOULD HAVE BEEN TOUGHER ON GOOGLE
Posted by John Cassidy
If you live in west Chelsea or visit the area on a regular basis, Tuesday was your lucky day. Partnering with a local business-improvement organization, Google announced that it would be providing free outdoor wi-fi to an area extending from the West Side Highway to Eighth Avenue, which incorporates part of the meatpacking district, the Fulton Houses, and much of the gallery district. In a press release, Google said that the area would be the first “wired neighborhood” in Manhattan and the biggest contiguous wi-fi network in the city.
That is the “good Google”—the Google that even today, as a global corporation with a market valuation approaching a quarter of a trillion dollars, declares in one of its mission statements: “You can make money without being evil.” Until recently, the Internet giant appeared to be largely living up to its principles. With its nifty free products—such as search and e-mail, Google Earth, and the Android operating system—and its willingness to invest in exciting technologies of the future, such as driverless cars, home-help robots, and real-time economic statistics, the company had managed to avoid much of the criticism that bedeviled dominant technology companies of previous generations, such as I.B.M. and Microsoft.
Google’s latest p.r. (and legal) triumph came last week, when the Federal Trade Commission, after spending a year and a half examining its business, gave it the gentlest of slaps on the wrists for indulging in some anti-competitive practices, and, crucially, found the company not guilty of biasing its search results to hurt competitors. At least for now, the ruling removes the possibility that Google will meet the same fate as I.B.M., A.T.&.T. and Microsoft, which were each subjected to onerous anti-trust investigations after falling foul of U.S. regulators. Eventually, the government forced Ma Bell to break itself up. I.B.M. and Microsoft got off more lightly, but the investigations hobbled them for many years.
Anti-trust cases are complicated, and the Google case is no exception. But the more I read about the settlement, the more I think that the government has gone too easy on Google. As technology giants go, Google may be a pretty benign one, although that is becoming increasingly debatable. (In addition to hobbling some of its competitors—actions recognized but excused by the F.T.C.—it is an aggressive user of offshore tax havens, which it exploits to save billions of dollars in taxes.) But whatever one thinks of Google, the fact is that it’s a quasi-monopoly in the search market and should be treated as one. That is where the settlement fell down.
Rather than formally recognizing Google’s enormous market power in search, and putting the company on notice that its actions will be closely scrutinized going forward, the F.T.C. dismissed the most important complaints about its behavior as the whining of competitors. With the exception of eliciting promises from the company to stop “scraping” content from other sites, grant its advertisers more flexibility, and license its patents more readily, the government gave it a green light to carry on exploiting its dominant position in search as it sees fit, with the sole proviso that it must be able to come up with a plausible explanation—not a persuasive explanation, mind you—of how its actions benefit customers. In an online economy that is increasingly dominated by a handful of “platform” companies that are seeking to establish market positions as dominant as the one Google enjoys, this light-touch approach sets a dangerous precedent.
What was needed, in the first instance, was a clear statement from the F.T.C. that Google is a monopoly or quasi-monopoly. Back in 1999, during the Microsoft anti-trust case, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued such a statement, and overnight it changed how Microsoft was perceived. With close to seventy per cent of the U.S. search market, more than ninety per cent of the European search market, and more than ninety-eight per cent of the fast-growing mobile market, Google’s economic power is obvious and palpable to anybody involved in online commerce. But as far as the U.S. government is concerned, this fact remains unacknowledged.
The second thing that the F.T.C. should have done is register more concern about the way Google manages its search engine, which is an essential utility in the online ecosystem. Now, under anti-trust law being a monopoly isn’t a crime: the courts recognize that a successful firm may rightfully earn a position of market dominance. What is illegal is for a company such as Google to use its monopoly position in one market to extend its position of dominance into an adjoining one. This, of course, is where Microsoft got into trouble. The government accused it of trying to leverage its Windows monopoly into the market for web browsers, by, amongst other things, insisting that computer manufacturers pre-install its own Internet Explorer.
Google hasn’t been accused of doing anything so blatantly anti-competitive, but during recent years it has changed the way it presents search results to favor its own businesses and disadvantage competitors. Perhaps the most commonly cited example is airline tickets. Today, if a user asks for information about airfares between, say New York and Miami, the first non-sponsored link he (or she) sees is a box of flights provided by Google’s own online-booking service. The links to Orbitz and Expedia come below the Google link.
Clearly, this isn’t as egregious as what Microsoft did, which effectively removed Netscape from the desktops of new Wintel computers. People looking to book a flight can still choose to click on Orbitz or Expedia, rather than Google’s service. But in favoring Google’s own products, it clearly undermines the company’s claims that its search algorithm is driven exclusively by popularity and usefulness. Until recently, at least, Orbitz and Expedia were far bigger and more popular than Google’s travel site.
Rather than castigating Google’s actions, or, at the least, making public some concerns about them and promising to monitor them in the future, the F.T.C. absolved the company of any ill intent. “Although some evidence suggested that Google was trying to eliminate competition, Google’s primary reason for changing the look and feel of its search results to highlight its own products was to improve the user experience,” Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C.’s chairman, said in a statement. In reply to which, I can only quote John McEnroe: You cannot be serious. If there is a single person out there who really believes Google puts its own airfares above the link to Expedia because it improves “the user experience,” I would be surprised.
In fact, I suspect that even Leibowitz doesn’t believe this. A few sentences on in his statement, he got closer to the truth, remarking: “While not everything Google did was beneficial, on balance we did not believe that the evidence supported a FTC challenge to this aspect of Google’s business under American law.” That is a much finer point. In the absence of obvious pecuniary harm to consumers, it is risky to bring an anti-trust suit, especially against a company as rich and lawyered up as Google. Rather than pointing to specific instances of price-fixing, price-gauging, or exclusionary contracts—the sort of evidence often presented in such cases—the government would have had to rely on the vaguer argument that Google’s actions were stifling competition and innovation, which would eventually hurt consumers. A judge might not have bought it.
But even if the F.T.C. decided it was unlikely to prevail in court, there was no reason for it to buckle completely and to close down its investigation of the search engine. Indeed, sound public policy demanded it register a continuing concern. One of the dirty little secrets of the new economy is that it doesn’t operate anything like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Far from being just one powerless competitor among many, companies like Google and Facebook and Apple have immense leverage, which investors demand they exploit to the maximum extent possible. In Google’s case, it can make or break the businesses of rival online companies, particularly smaller content providers. Of the few restraints on its behavior, perhaps the most effective is a fear of incurring the government’s wrath, which could ultimately lead to the firm being regulated like an old-economy utility.
In saying case closed, the F.T.C. has removed the threat, at least for the next four years. I am not surprised this has led to suggestions that Google, with its twenty-five-million-dollar lobbying campaign and its close links to the Democratic Administration—company employees donated heavily to the Obama campaign and, just last month, its chairman, Eric Schmidt, was rumored to be in line for a cabinet post—rolled the competition watchdog. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. But the settlement, coming from an Administration headed by a President who likes to quote the great trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt, should have been tougher.
Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty.
A new charging algorithm could extend battery life for the first all-electric, battery-powered locomotive in the US.
Batteries for Norfolk Southern Railway No. 999, just like automotive batteries, are rechargeable until they eventually die. A leading cause of damage and death in lead-acid batteries is sulfation, a degradation of the battery caused by frequent charging and discharging that creates an accumulation of lead sulfate.
Engineers increased the cell capacity of lead-acid batteries like those that power Norfolk Southern Railway No. 999 by 41 percent and the overall battery capacity by 30 percent. (Credit: Michael Bezilla/Penn State)
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In a recent study, the researchers looked for ways to improve regular battery management practices. The methods had to be non-destructive, simple, and cheap—using as few sensors, electronics, and supporting hardware as possible while still remaining effective at identifying and decreasing sulfation.
“We wanted to reverse the sulfation to rejuvenate the battery and bring it back to life,” says Christopher Rahn, professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State.
Rahn, along with mechanical engineering research assistants Ying Shi and Christopher Ferone, cycled a lead-acid battery for three months in the same way it would be used in a locomotive.
They used a process called electro-impedance spectroscopy and full charge/discharge to identify the main aging mechanisms. Through this, the researchers identified sulfation in one of the six battery cells.
They then designed a charging algorithm that could charge the battery and reduce sulfation, but was also able to stop charging before other forms of degradation occurred.
The algorithm successfully revived the dead cell and increased the overall capacity. The researchers, who report their results in the current issue of the Journal of Power Sources, then compared the battery to a new battery.
“We desulfated it, and we increased its capacity,” says Rahn. “We didn’t increase it all the way to brand new. We weren’t able to do that, but we did get a big boost.”
Related Article: Revolutionary Improvement Increases Lithium Ion Battery Capacity by 300%
The researchers increased the cell capacity by 41 percent and the overall battery capacity by 30 percent. Even better results might have occurred if sulfation were the only aging mechanism at play, but the researchers found other factors reduced capacity, as well.
“Some of the other cells we identified may have had a water loss issue,” says Rahn. “And for these types of batteries, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Other mechanisms that can damage lead-acid batteries include positive electrode corrosion, irreversible hard sulfation, positive electrode softening or shedding, electrolyte stratification, internal short-circuiting, and mechanical damage.
The researchers are now developing alternative models to replace the electroimpedance spectroscopy model that would allow charging right up to, but not past, sulfation in batteries where sulfation is not yet present, hoping to prevent it from occurring in the first place.
“You would charge as fast as you can and right when you see gassing starting to happen, you ramp down and reduce the current charging,” says Rahn. “It’s still related to degradation, but it’s not really a rejuvenation project anymore.”
Penn State and Norfolk Southern, which operates 21,000 route-miles in 22 states, began developing locomotive No. 999 in 2008 to evaluate the application of battery technologies for railroad motive power, with particular interest in energy savings and emissions reduction. The US Department of Energy funded the study.
By. Jennifer Swales
The U.S. government announced this week it was issuing a request to see whether or not there was any competitive interest in leasing more than 100 square miles of an area off the coast of Long Beach, N.Y., for wind development. Plans spelled out by the New York Power Authority could open the door for 350 megawatts of renewable energy for area consumers. The federal government said the measure was part of the Obama administration’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that envisions a diverse resource base. Political intransigence over a federal budget deal, however, nearly brought the fledgling U.S. wind energy sector to a standstill.
NYPA proposed a site about 11 miles off the coast of Long Beach for a wind farm the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management stated could expand to 700 MW. The agency said it was looking to determine whether or not there was enough interest in the commercial project to issue a lease on a competitive basis, or go ahead with a non-competitive lease for 127 square miles offshore.
U.S. lawmakers, in a last-minute deal, averted sending the national economy over the so-called fiscal cliff with deep budget cuts and high tax increases. Including in the congressional debate was the fate of a federal tax credit for wind energy. Some in the industry worried over the fiscal package to the degree that they stopped hiring as negotiations pushed into the final hour. With a deal in hand, however, wind developers can start moving forward on the late season wind-energy push by the Obama administration.
Related Article: Are Wind Subsidies the Best Use of Taxpayers Cash?
The BOEM in mid-December announced it received a request from the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to research a wind-energy lease area off the state coast. That same month, the regulator determined that was nothing in the way of an offshore wind project planned by the North American division of Norwegian energy major Statoil. Their plan would cover about 22 miles offshore Maine and generate 12 MW from a pilot program for four floating offshore wind turbines.
The production tax credit salvaged by U.S. lawmakers means wind energy would be competitive with natural gas because of a 2.2 cent credit per kilowatt hour. An investment tax credit gives smaller wind projects a significant break on costs. But utility company Xcel Energy complained the tax credit does little to benefit consumers, saying it may break away from the American Wind Energy Association for how it handled itself during fiscal debates. Nevertheless, state leaders on the U.S. east coast said the tax credit breaths much-needed life into the burgeoning wind energy sector.
Last year, this column noted there was “nothing blowing in the U.S. wind energy sector,” at least offshore. But for onshore developments, wind energy in 2012 made up more than 40 percent of the new electrical generating capacity in the United States, compared with 30 percent for conventional resources. The cost for wind energy, meanwhile, is down more than 20 percent since 2008. Though it may be 2014 before new wind energy comes on stream, the AWEA said the tax credit “will allow continued growth of the energy source that installed the most new electrical generating capacity in America last year.”
By. Daniel J. Graeber of Oilprice.com
Last February scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, released the findings of a study that claimed that around four percent of methane was escaping into the atmosphere as natural gas was being extracted from a field in Denver.
Now that same group has studied the gas production techniques of a field in Utah and discovered that around nine percent of the methane gas extracted at the gas field was leaking into the air. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, far more so than CO2, and its escape during the production process of the natural gas now challenges the claims that burning natural gas produces far fewer emissions and is better for the environment than coal.
The shale boom has led to a huge increase in natural gas production and as prices have fallen significantly many utilities have been converting their coal power plants to run on cheap gas. The gas industry has claimed that this transition has helped cut US greenhouse gas emissions across the country because gas releases far fewer carbon emissions than coal.
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It turns out that whilst burning the gas is cleaner than coal, the extraction process releases large amounts of dangerous greenhouse gases.
Whilst the NOAA and University of Colorado only looked at isolated cases, the Environmental Protection Agency suggests 2.4% of total natural gas production was lost due to leakage in 2009.
BusinessGreen.com wrote: “NOAA scientists and industry partners are now analysing emissions from the production, gathering, processing, long-distance transmission and local distribution of natural gas, as well as collecting field data from across the US, and are expected to submit an initial study for publication by next month.”
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com
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By Ingrid Wickelgren | January 4, 2013 |
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By Maria Konnikova
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., Copyright © 2013 by Maria Konnikova.
“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition.”
Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new.
In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days you’d likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you’d probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, you’d be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.
Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so. All through high school, he’d been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn’t sure why he did it. He didn’t care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Fosbury looked just as ridiculous as they thought he would (and his inspirations sounded a bit ridiculous, too. When asked about his approach, he told Sports Illustrated, “I don’t even think about the high jump. It’s positive thinking. I just let it happen”). Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympic team—let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American and Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.
With his unprecedented technique, dubbed the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978 no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and cumbersome in comparison. Why hadn’t anyone thought of replacing it earlier?
Fosbury wasn’t even a particularly talented jumper. It was all in the approach. Imagination allows us to see things that aren’t so, be it a dead man who is actually alive or a way of jumping that, while backward, couldn’t be more forward-looking.
Keep Your Distance
One of the most important ways to facilitate imaginative thinking is through distance. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” a case that comes quite late in the Holmes-Watson partnership, Watson observes:
Author Maria Konnikova. Courtesy of Margaret Singer and Max Freeman.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. I remember that during the whole of that memorable day he lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. For my own part I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence appeared to be interminable.
Forcing your mind to take a step back is a tough thing to do. It seems counterintuitive to walk away from a problem that you want to solve. But in reality, the characteristic is not so remarkable either for Holmes or for individuals who are deep thinkers. The fact that it is remarkable for Watson (and that he self-admittedly lacks the skill) goes a long way to explaining why he so often fails when Holmes succeeds.
Psychologist Yaacov Trope argues that psychological distance may be one of the single most important steps you can take to improve thinking and decision-making. It can come in many forms: temporal, or distance in time (both future and past); spatial, or distance in space (how physically close or far you are from something); social, or distance between people (how someone else sees it); and hypothetical, or distance from reality (how things might have happened). But whatever the form, all of these distances have something in common: they all require you to transcend the immediate moment in your mind. They all require you to take a step back.
Trope posits that the further we move in distance, the more general and abstract our perspective and our interpretation become; and the further we move from our own perspective, the wider the picture we are able to consider. Conversely, as we move closer once more, our thoughts become more concrete, more specific, more practical—and the closer we remain to our egocentric view, the smaller and more limited the picture that confronts us. Our level of construal influences, in turn, how we evaluate a situation and how we ultimately choose to interact with it. It affects our decisions and our ability to solve problems.
In essence, psychological distance accomplishes one major thing: it engages System Holmes. It forces quiet reflection. Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control. Children who use psychological distancing techniques (for example, visualizing marshmallows as puffy clouds) are better able to delay gratification and hold out for a larger later reward. Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity. Individuals who employ distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of their more immersed counterparts. And those who take a distanced view of political questions tend to emerge with evaluations that are better able to stand the test of time.
About the Author: Ingrid Wickelgren is an editor at Scientific American Mind, but this is her personal blog at which, at random intervals, she shares the latest reports, hearsay and speculation on the mind, brain and behavior. Follow on Twitter @iwickelgren.More »
Passing Through . . . . 