Peak Tragedy Is Long Past…

Posted on May 18, 2013 by jlredford

… at least in the US.   By peak tragedy I mean a year in which the maximum number of young people died.   It’s sad when old people die, but it’s tragic when the young are taken.  They lose decades of vital and active life, whereas the old are losing years of reduced and often painful existence.

As the population grows, the number of young people increases all the time.  That should cause more young people to die every year.  Yet the rates of disease go down as medicine improves.  Accident rates also go down as machines become safer.   In recent decades even homicide rates have gone down.    Was there a year when the increasing number of young overcame the decreasing death rate?  A year when the most young people died?

So here’s an extraordinary thing – the answer is no.   The absolute number of young people dying has gone down every decade since 1900:

US Deaths In Thousands for People Below an Age

From “Historical Statistics of the United States”
Click for spreadsheet

Even though the population of the country has more than tripled since 1900, the number of people dying before age 35 has gone from 400K to < 100K.  And that’s not even including infant mortality (<1), which would skew the numbers even more. Even the number of people dying before age 55 has been cut in half.   The cause is clear when you look at deaths by age range:

US Deaths In Thousands by Age Range

The greatest improvement was because of the great decline in 1-4 and 5-14 mortality.  Those have dropped from 210K to 9K!  Yet deaths in other young ranges have declined too.   The number of deaths at higher age ranges is finally rising in the last few decades because of the huge population increase, and this would be even more apparent if I included deaths over 65.  Those so outweigh the other ages, though, that the chart can’t be read.   In 2010 over 70% of all deaths are of people over 65.

The US has only kept country-wide records of death rates by age since 1900, although Massachusetts has them back to 1850.   Unfortunately, the Historical Statistics only has data for decade years.  It doesn’t list numbers for the years in between, and so misses a lot of large events that killed young people: WWI (1917-18 116K), the Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918-19 500K),  and WW II (1942-45, 420K).  Also, AIDS has killed ~500K mainly young people in the US since 1980, and may account for the bump in deaths between 25 and 45 between 1980 and 2000.

Still, this is an extraordinary accomplishment.   By this most fundamental measure, life is better now than ever.   At a time when the US is the third most populous country in the world, fewer people than ever are dying for stupid reasons.

Yet the present era seems fascinated by doom.  Books and movies are filled with apocalypse, as is political rhetoric.   Even though the old doom of nuclear war has receded (see last post), the new doom of climate change (in post before that!) is coming on fast.  That still seems too abstract to account for this attitude, though.

It could be just because the US has hit a rough patch in recent years.  It just lost two wars and had a lot of its money stolen by Wall Street. The criminals behind all of those losses are still at large.   Unemployment has been high for five years now, and is not improving.  No one in politics is addressing any of that, or much of anything else for that matter, so people have little hope of progress.  Even at a time of tremendous absolute levels of health, people can still feel grim.

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Peak Nuclear Has Passed…

Posted on May 7, 2013 by jlredford

… for both weapons and power.  Nuclear weapons have been the great looming threat for most of my life. These were devices built to end civilization.  So it’s startling to see how fast they have been declining:

Nuclear Stockpiles

Source: “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories 1945-2010” by Norris and Kristenson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 2010 (click for spreadsheet)

The nuclear arms race was always considered to be madness, and it looks like everyone realized that by about the 80s.  Their numbers peaked in 1985 at about 64,000 and now they’re down to less than a quarter of that. The US stopped increasing much earlier, but the USSR had an overshoot in the Cold War and then a collapse. A few minor states are still working on them, but all the major states and even Israel appear to have stopped their efforts.  The last tests, aside from North Korea, were by India and Pakistan in 1998.

Richard Rhodes has been chronicling their history in a magisterial four-volume series, and brought it up to the present in “Twilight of the Bombs” (2010).  He notes how even the Bush administration was not that interested in them.   They, like everyone else, realized that nuclear weapons are useless for actual military operations.   They’re not even that good for threats, as North Korea has discovered.   He estimates that the total spent on them by all sides since 1945 is about $8 trillion in current dollars.

What’s more surprising is that peak nuclear power has passed too:

Click for IAEA source

Click for IAEA source

The peak was in 2006, and the world is presently down about 11% from that, to the same level as 1999.

To put this in perspective, the US consumes about 3700 TWh of electricity a year from all sources, or half again what the worldwide output is.  US nuclear plants generate about 750 TWh a year, or about 1/3 of the world’s output.

The total number of reactors has been flat at about 440 since 1995.   Another 60 are supposedly under construction, of which half are in China, but it’s not clear how real all those projects are.  There are only two underway in the developed world, one in Finland and one in France.   Like nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors are only popular among rather desperate countries.

The reason is clear – cost.  Reactors take too long to build and their costs are too uncertain.   You can put up a wind farm or a solar array in a year, and start making money then, but a reactor is just a dead expense for five years, and probably ten.   Then a Fukushima happens and you’re on the hook for managing a radioactive waste dump forever.

It’s too bad, since nuclear has lots of advantages over wind and solar.  It doesn’t clutter up landscapes, it doesn’t endanger desert habitats,  it doesn’t kill birds,  it has a fairly predictable output, and the plant is good for 30 to 40 years.   They just take too long to build and fail too spectacularly.  Wind and solar costs are dropping all the time, and nuclear just can’t keep up.

It reminds me of the race between zeppelins and aircraft.  The zeppelins had longer range and could carry more people, but they were too slow to evolve compared to the much cheaper and smaller aircraft.     In the time it took to build a zeppelin, you could try out three different aircraft configurations.   And then a Hindenberg happens, and the tech is finished.

Yet people are still working on zeppelins (or rather, dirigibles), and there are lots of good ideas for reactors still to be tried.  They’re in a shrinking industry, though, unlike their renewable competitors, and that makes big R&D efforts hard to justify.

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Peak CO2 Has Passed, Except…

Posted on March 28, 2013 by jlredford

for China.  Here’s something that is not perhaps widely noticed:

Chart of CO2 by Region and Year

Source: US Energy Information Administration (EIA), click for spreadsheet

The CO2 emissions from the USA and Europe have dropped substantially since their peak in 2007.  The US is now down about 9% from its peak, to late-1990s levels.  Europe and Japan are down to mid-1990s levels. The developed world is on the right track.

It hasn’t mattered –  China has more than made up the slack.  The savings from the entire OECD is wiped out by one year’s growth in China.  At current growth rates, China will emit about as much in 2013 as the US, Europe and Japan combined.

World Co2 Emissions Percentage

China emits almost as much as the rest of the world excluding the other top emitters.  It’s producing about 7 tonnes of CO2 per capita, about the European average, although it’s getting far less GDP/tonne than the rich Europeans do.   India is on its way up too, but is still in the noise.

Now, the drop for the developed world has been about half due to the global recession, about 40% due to the switch from coal to natural gas, and maybe 10% to efficiency and renewables. The EIA forecasts that emissions will rise again when the economy recovers. However, they’ve been expecting that to happen for a while and their US forecasts consistently over-estimate future increases:

Click for source

Click for source. Every forecast is set lower than the previous year’s

All three of the above factors are not behaving as expected: the recovery is taking longer, gas is coming on very strong, and so are renewables. Germany now gets 25% of its power on average from renewables, peaking up to 40%. I personally get 100% of my electricity from wind sources in upstate New York and Maine, thanks to NStar Green.   I pay an extra 8 cents/kWh, which comes to  $30 to $50 a month.

That’s visible, but minor to a middle-class American household.  It would be crushing to a Chinese family.  Thus they’ve gone for the world’s worst energy source, coal.  Well, maybe it’s not as bad as burning cow dung in an unventilated hut, but it’s close.  It kills miners, ruins landscapes, and poisons the air with sulfur and the land with heavy metals in its ash.  It’s making Beijing uninhabitable:

Beijing, 2013-01-13 (AP)

Beijing, 2013-01-13, their worst day so far (AP)

The US is now exporting coal to China, which seems like a win-win. We get blasted lunar landscapes in Wyoming and super-storms in the Northeast, and they get a poisoned populace. We’ll fix this over-population problem yet!

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A Welcome Break From Movie Mayhem

Posted on February 25, 2013 by jlredford
And they even thanked Canada!

And they even thanked Canada!

When I saw “Argo” a few months ago, I was struck by a line at the beginning.  It’s 1979, and there’s a mob outside the fences of the US Embassy in Teheran.  They’re shouting at the building, and rattling the gates.   They won’t hold for long.  Inside, the head of the US Marine detachment tells his troops, “If you shoot anyone out there, everyone in this embassy will die.”

What a refreshingly adult attitude towards violence in a movie!  He’s obviously right, yet in a typical action movie they would blast their way out, and then cling from dangling helicopter ladders firing machine guns one-handedly as their enemies rage below.   Instead, they throw tear gas grenades, and barricade the doors, and manage to hold off the mob long enough to destroy the most incriminating documents.    Most of the personnel are captured, but six are freed due to the courage of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and the ingenuity of CIA agent Tony Mendez.  The rest are freed due to the patience and determination of Jimmy Carter.  Everyone makes it out alive.

In his acceptance speech last night for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, Argo’s writer Chris Terrio said:

And I want to dedicate this to people all over the world who use creativity and intelligence to solve problems non-violently.

No wonder it won Best Picture!  Hollywood people know full well how the violent tropes of movies can manifest in the real world.  They have to stick in one-handed machine gun firing to satisfy the ids of the audience, but it must sicken them.  They stoutly deny that Columbine, and Aurora, and Newtown or any of the now-weekly mass killings have anything to do with what gets portrayed in every single action movie, but inside they have to be worried.

I can only think of one other movie that took this route, “Hotel Rwanda”.   There too one wily man manages to save hundreds in the midst of a nightmarish civil war.   The hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina secretes all sorts of refugees in every corner of his hotel, while continuing to smile at the murderous maniacs outside, and bribing them with whiskey.  When that runs out, he threatens them with war crimes tribunals, and so escapes with all his people in a UN convoy.

These are both true stories (at least within the terms of dramatic license), and I wonder if that helped get them made.   They seem so goody-goody compared to the morality of most movie stories, and yet they happened.   People might scoff at such behavior from a fictional character.   It might make audiences uncomfortable to see people behaving so well, and so much better than they do.   It’s easier to feel superior to the crude John McClane in Die Hard, or the weirdly-accented Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was also nice to see Argo beat the ethically challenged “Zero Dark Thirty”, although it was said to be a more gripping movie.   I haven’t seen it, but I’m sympathetic to Matt Taibbi’s claim that it was Bin Laden’s final victory over America.   Killing everyone in the compound, and then sneaking his body away in the night are not the actions of a strong and self-confident country.   Maybe Hollywood is also sick of the brutal and criminal side of the US that was portrayed in that movie and in most of their product.   Maybe they want a country that prides itself on being fast and funny instead of having the biggest guns and the most vicious commandos.

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The Inspiring “Pale Blue Dot” and the Clunky New Horizons

Posted on February 8, 2013 by jlredford

I recently came across a striking animation of Carl Sagan’s famous passage from his last book “Pale Blue Dot”:

Pale Blue Dot from ORDER on Vimeo.

He’s commenting on this picture, taken at his request by Voyager 1 in 1990 from 3.6 billion miles away:

300px-PaleBlueDot

Earth is the dot in the circle, seen from the edge of the solar system. The colored bands are lens artifacts from sunlight

For those too impatient for video, Sagan is saying:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

That’s the kind of writing that gets you on the Heroes of Science action figure list:

(c) datazoid. Click to see the rest

(c) datazoid. Click to see the rest

Yet I don’t think he’s right. He saw all of humanity enclosed in this 1/12 of a pixel blue dot. But this picture shows that we are NOT limited to this dot. The work of our hands now extends all across the solar system. Our probes have reached every planet. They’ve actually touched Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Titan. The Voyagers have even gone far beyond our local system, and will soon cross the heliopause. They’ll be beyond the influence of the Sun itself. Our bodies haven’t gone there, but our minds and our works have.

That doesn’t make the Blue Dot less precious. It’s still our oasis in an infinite desert. But we’ve ventured out beyond it now, just as Sagan had always wanted.

Now, it’s sad to contrast Sagan’s idealistic Sixties vision of space with that of today.   He was involved with both the Pioneer 10 and 11, and the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, which are the only ones to have gone beyond Pluto.   Only one other probe is due to do so: the New Horizons Pluto flyby.   This was launched in 2006, and will pass Pluto in July 2015.  It’s a technically astonishing mission, traveling faster than any other and having already done good science by asteroid 132524 APL and Jupiter.

Yet everything else about it looks dreary compared to Sagan’s.  Start with the name – it sounds like a corporate morale-building program.   And how does one actually have a new horizon?  Doesn’t the horizon look the same everywhere?  And aren’t there no horizons at all in space?

Then there’s the paraphernalia that it’s carrying: state quarters from Florida and Maryland (where it was built), two American flags, some CDs with names gathered from the Internet, and a Pluto postage stamp.  Compare that with the Pioneer Plaque showing what human beings look like, and the Voyager Golden Records giving the distinctive sounds of the Earth.  By the time of New Horizons, they should have been able to put a record with all the distinctive images of the Earth on it.  At a minimum, they could have done something like the Rosetta Disk, which etches samples of all 1500 written human languages in micron-high letters on a 10 cm nickel disk.

The principal investigator for the mission, Alan Stern, was asked about this:

“When the Pioneer plaques were created, they ended up creating some controversy: they offended some people’s sensibilities dating back to the 70s having to do with the drawings of unclothed human beings, even sanitized as they were. And when the Voyager put plaques on-board, they went through a huge exercise as a result to vette the content…

After we got into the project in 2002, it was suggested we add a plaque and I rejected that simply as a matter of focus. We had a small team on a tight budget and I knew it would be a big distraction. I didn’t want to see us being distracted from the project and find ourselves derailing the project or getting into flight and finding we had some problem and wishing we’d have been more focused during development.”

Small team, tight budget,  didn’t want to offend the rubes, and a complete lack of the PR flare that Sagan had in abundance.   Even the Florida quarter only got in because they wanted to tickle the interest of then-governor Jeb Bush.  They needed to see him because there was radioactive material in the probe in the radio-isotope generator, and thought of the quarter gimmick on the drive up.  These are not people you want doing your branding.

Stern did include one cool thing, an ounce of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes.  Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, but died in 1997.  Stern also put in one really odd bit of gear,  a piece of SpaceShipOne, the Burt Rutan suborbital rocket plane.   He said it is “opening up space in a completely different way to individuals” and that it was a “uniquely American achievement”.   SpaceShipOne and its successors can’t even get into orbit, something rockets have done for almost 60 years, yet somehow they’re inspiring to a guy who is sending a probe to Pluto at 40 km/sec.   Poor Stern must have beaten down by a lot of cancelled projects at NASA.  He actually quit in 2008 over a budget dispute with the widely disliked NASA administrator Michael Griffin, and is now a consultant to Jeff Bezos’ hobby rocket company, Blue Origin.

So from Pale Blue Dot to state quarters, from a vision of the grandeur of the cosmos to deep bureaucratic fights over money.   Sometimes I miss the 20th century.  Not often, but sometimes.

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Lynn Conway, EE and Sexual Pioneer

Posted on January 28, 2013 by jlredford

SSCM_Cover_Page

The latest issue of IEEE Solid State Circuits magazine has a good piece by Lynn Conway about how she changed VLSI design.   In a quite direct way she changed my career too.   In 1979 I was just starting grad school, and working as a research assisstant on a radar signal processing project.   I was lost.  The math involved was beyond me.  As Asimov once noted, everyone has some limit in mathematics, and mine turned out to be maximum likelihood analysis.

But I took a course that fall, “Introduction to VLSI Systems”, taught by Professors John Newkirk and Rob Mathews.  It was based on the book of the same name that described an exciting new approach pioneered by Conway and Carver Mead, then of Xerox PARC.  They had been looking at this new field of chip design, and trying to find a way to simplify and regularize it.   In the mid-70s it was a difficult area, full of obscure and proprietary knowledge.

Their approach entirely clicked with me.  I could really see how I could do this.  The main feature of the course was to actually design a chip and have it built, and I came up with a nice idea – a self-testing memory.   Add some logic to a standard RAM so that it could do its own reads and writes to verify its operation.   This is routine now, but quite novel in 1979, since logic design in the old style was so hard.

They also devised an astonishing new way of building these chips.  All the students would submit their designs over this new thing called the Arpanet.  A server would take each design, check it, and translate it into an input file for an e-beam mask-making machine.   All the designs were put onto one set of masks, built at an HP fab, and returned only five weeks later.  It was an automated network-centric foundry service, a forerunner of Internet commerce, done in the days of 300-baud modems.  This Net stuff was good for something besides email and SF-Lovers Digest.

People went wild with their design approach.  Just at my school there were three major innovations in the next couple of years:

  • Prof. Jim Clark built the first Geometry Engine, a four-way SIMD floating point unit that is the ancestor of modern GPU chips.
  • Prof. John Hennessey built one of the first RISC microprocessors, the MIPS I, which was later spun off into MIPS Technology.
  • Prof Abbas El Gamal worked out how to route programmable logic, and became a founder of the FPGA company Actel.

Today it’s known as the Mead-Conway Revolution.

I’ve had occasion to meet Carver Mead in the years since then.   He’s been a tremendous figure in the field, but always had time for curious young engineers.   I never met Conway, though.  She got second billing on the book, and seemed quite retiring compared to the ebullient and charismatic Mead.

It turns out there was a reason for that – she was born a boy. From childhood she had felt like a girl in a boy’s body.   She did marry and have two daughters, but it didn’t last.  By age 30 in 1968 she couldn’t stand it any more, and started undergoing sex-change operations in Mexico.   At that time she was working at IBM.  In fact, she had been on one of their advanced programs, the ACS supercomputer.  She had devised an elegant means of issuing instructions when their operands were ready instead of just issuing them in sequence  This is now known as out-of-order issue, and is used everywhere.

Her brilliance didn’t save her.  When IBM management discovered that he was becoming she, they fired her immediately.  She  changed her name, left her family, and restarted her life from nothing.   She worked as a contract programmer, then did processor design at Memorex, and a compressing fax system at Xerox PARC.

The ACS project was a failure, and so was the Memorex computer, and the fax system.  She had three strikes against her when she joined the System Science Lab at PARC.  Her bosses, W. R. Sutherland and Wes Clark, could see her talents though.   Her failures had given her an insight that more successful designers lacked – that knowing how things worked at both the low level of transistors and the high level of processor architecture gave one a synergistic advantage over those who only understood one or the other.   If both fields could be simplified enough so that one person could grasp them, great gains were possible.

She first started learning about MOS design in the mid-70s, when Mead was trying to spread the news about this amazing technology within the research community.   They worked together on it for several years.   They wanted to simplify the layout design rules – the rules that express how close the wires and transistors can be to each other when laid out on a chip – down to the point where they could fit on one page.  Only then could students keep enough of them in mind to do a successful design.  Likewise they wanted simple rules for sizing transistors to make reliable circuits, and to have a way to describe the layout in a standard way so that it could be built at any foundry.

She didn’t do much more at PARC after the courses and the book came out.  She worked on the Strategic Computing Initiative at DARPA in the early 80s, and then became a prof at the University of Michigan.   She retired from there in 1999.    That was also about the time that Michael Hiltzik, an LA Times reporter, was working on his book about PARC, “Dealers of Lightning”.    She came out to a few friends, and then Hiltzik published a big article about her in the LA Times magazine – “Through the Gender Labyrinth”.

It was liberating.  She finally married her boyfriend of 15 years, Charlie, and had facial feminization surgery to reduce the Adam’s apple and brow ridge.   She has become a spokesperson for trans-gender activism.   Her website is packed with material on her own career and trans issues.   Her life with Charlie looks to be a pleasant one filled with their hobbies, whitewater rafting and motocross, and pictures of their cats and of their rural place in Michigan.

Did her sexual turmoil contribute to her creativity?  It looks that way to me.  Getting kicked out of IBM allowed her to connect with the fountain of innovation at PARC.   If she had succeeded with ACS, and if they had left her alone about her sex reassignment, she probably would have been shuffled off onto yet another S360 project.  Failing at IBM and Memorex was good for her, so long as she learned about what went wrong.  Failing at being a man was also good for her, in that she converted physically to the woman that  she had been inside.    Failing can succeed, so long as it lets you find your true place in the world.

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Big Data Comes to Politics

Posted on January 10, 2013 by jlredford

amoreperfectunionx803The January 2013 issue of MIT’s Technology Review has an interesting article on the Big Data techniques used by the Obama and Romney campaigns in the US 2012 election: “A More Perfect Union” by Sasha Issenberg.  No, this is not the already familiar story about Narwhal vs Orca, the cellphone apps the campaigns used to aid their workers, and the total fiasco that Romney’s Orca turned out to be.    Instead, it’s a description of how the Obamans created detailed models of all 180M eligible voters in the United States.   They call it micro-targeting.  They used polls, commercial data bases and voting records to model three parameters of each person:

  1. Will they vote?
  2. Which way will they vote?
  3. How firm is their preference?

The goal was to maximize the vote swing from mail, email, TV ads, phone calls, and most importantly,  visits by campaign volunteers.   They constantly updated their models based on polls, early voting, and results from fund-raising appeals.   They tried A/B comparisons where they would send different messages to random groups of voters in order to fine-tune the message.

They ultimately called the vote with uncanny precision on a county-by-county basis.   Even Nate Silver only did things  state-by-state, but the Obamans had 54 people working on these analytics in their Chicago office.

The Romney campaign’s approach was different.  Instead of optimizing the swing of individual voters, they optimized the pundits.  That is, they looked at the effect that each issue of the day had on TV news, newspapers, and Twitter feeds.   They too fine-tuned messages to improve their hit rate.  This explains a lot – many had wondered why they would beat the drum so loudly on some message (E.g. Jeep is moving jobs to China!) that was just untrue.  Their algorithms said it worked so they cranked it up.

Unfortunately, they optimized the wrong thing.  There’s no necessary connection between press coverage and voting.  No wonder they thought they would win.  It’s all reminiscent of the infamous polling failure of 1948, where telephone polls predicted that Dewey would beat Truman even though a lot of Truman voters didn’t have phones.   The consistently horrible US economy gave them a real opportunity to recapture the White House and Senate, and instead they lost ground everywhere.

The article doesn’t describe how the models were created, but statistical inference is an area of huge mathematical research these days.    It’s driven by several new things:

  • The existence of gigantic data sets from sensors and Net traffic
  • Vast computing power in the Cloud to compute things like the weighting factors of Bayesian inference.
  • Monetary incentive from advertising

It’s now used routinely for optimizing hits by search engines and for targeting advertising, but it also interesting for things like  speech recognition and translation.  You can now find subtle patterns in data sets far too large for any person to look at.

It was inevitable that these techniques would come to politics.  The author, Issenberg, thinks it’s a good thing.   It shows a respect for voters, a care for what they each think.   She has written a book about it called “The Victory Lab: the Secret Science of Winning Campaigns”.

I’m less sanguine.  When someone targets you, that means they want to shoot things into you.  I don’t like to be told that my behavior is easily modeled, true though that may be.   Modern cognitive science is showing us that all kinds of decisions that we think are consciously made are actually controlled by a vast range of subconscious effects.    This irks me.  I want to be a free citizen, not a probabilistic factor graph.    Maybe these sort of techniques will fail once enough people become aware of them.

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“MIT Rising”, But Not Because of Startups

Posted on December 29, 2012 by jlredford
Ash Martin, not really a typical MIT student (Photo Jesse Burke)

Ash Martin, not really a typical MIT student, since he dresses for style, not function (Photo Jesse Burke)

The November issue of Boston magazine has an article “How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World” by Chris Vogel.  It talks about how MIT students are better dressed these days, more articulate, and more out-going.  In fact, they’re actually hip, as witness this fellow who “plays water polo and has tattoos”.

What they’re really excelling at, though, is starting companies, far more  than Harvard graduates.   Harvard has recently opened something called the Innovation Lab in its business school, which aims to get Harvard students to be as entrepreneurial as their geeky counterparts down-river.  The article describes all the ways MIT encourages this, from the Innovation Prizes, to networking and mentoring, to student clubs, to various Entrepreneurship Centers.  It claims that MIT grads started 5800 companies between 2000 and 2006, nicely stopping the statistics before the Great Recession.   Somehow all this churn is the Wave of the Future.

Well, we’ve seen this movie before.  The New Economy in the ’90s was going to revolutionize all business, with its novel ideas about young people working for free, sorry, for stock, on technologies that no oldster could understand.  There were a few good ideas that came out of all that – mail-order books and movies with good ways to preview them, a way of directing advertising towards people who were interested in a product, and a way of sending out music without Mob distributors taking a cut – but there were thousands that weren’t good and cost a several hundred billion in mis-allocated investments.

Now a similar story is playing out, even though the great success of Web 2.0, Facebook, is already clearly crooked.    The same dreams are dangled in front of young inventors:  fame, riches, independence, quick success.  The people doing the dangling, venture capitalists, are desperate for anything new, since they have to justify their own salaries to their superiors.  As do tech reporters!

The traditional sources of jobs for the creative young, like academia and corporate R&D, are in dire straits these days.   They can’t make the grand claims that the VCs can, have little money, and prefer to hire desperate foreign students and H-1Bs anyway.

So what does it say about the state of innovation these days that the hucksters are skimming off the best and brightest?  After all, most startups fail.  They often fail morally too, with their founders having to lie for money and having to fire their friends.  Is this what young people have to look forward to in their careers?  They should be spending their best years solving important problems, not raising money.

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“Chasing Ice” – Big Science Adventure

Posted on December 5, 2012 by jlredford

You’ve probably heard that climate change is melting the Arctic, but it’s another thing to see it happening in front of you:


Or to see what it does to an icescape:

Canyon cut by meltwater into a Greenland glacier, June 2009 (c) James Balog

That’s why James Balog, a well-known nature photographer, founded the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007.   He wanted to show people directly what climate change was doing to the earth.   Greenland has seen three times the temperature rise of the overall earth, and it is melting at twice its normal rate.   The EIS mission was to place time-lapse cameras on glaciers all over the Arctic and see what happened to them over the course of years.  He was backed by National Geographic and the NSF, and had science advice from the University of Colorado.

He has now turned his work into the movie “Chasing Ice”, which I had the pleasure of seeing recently.  It’s full of striking images.  It goes easy on the standard shots of stranded polar bears, and concentrates on the fantastic forms of melting ice.    There’s a bit too much of Balog himself, including a painful scene where he cries on finding a broken camera.   Their initial setup didn’t work all that well, and most of the pictures were lost.

Yet there’s also a striking bit where he’s standing in front of a melting glacier, holding up a tiny flash card from a camera.  “This holds a record of a lost landscape,” he says.  “That will never be seen again in the history of civilization.”  Once these glaciers go, they’re not coming back.   CO2 levels will not come down again so long as billions of people are still burning stuff.

I also got to see a presentation at MIT by Adam LeWinter, who was the main engineer on the project, and installed a lot of the cameras himself.    The cameras were Nikon D200s installed inside Pelican cases.  These are tough plastic briefcases used to ship electronics, and I’ve carried them through airports myself.  He added a 5W solar panel and a control board to trigger the camera when it was light.   In a better world commercial cameras could be hacked to do this, but not in this one.   The control boards failed on the first version, causing the loss of a year of images in many locations.    Lots also got knocked over by storms, in spite of being tied down with guy wires.   He showed a picture of one with a padlock on it and said “Many of them were in places no human being had ever gone before, mainly because there would be no reason to.  Still, we  padlocked them because, you know, bears.”

His biggest adventure was in Greenland.  He and another guy camped near a glacier  hoping to see a calving event.  That’s where an ice cliff breaks off and falls into the sea.    They sat there and watched and shivered for three weeks as ice very, very slowly oozed downhill.  One night a storm ripped away one tent and smashed the other, so they could only crawl inside.   Then there was a rumble, and a five-mile-wide iceberg the size of lower Manhattan cracked off and sent a tsunami out into the Atlantic.   Chunks of ice five hundred feet thick broke away and flipped over in front of them.  It was the first time anyone had ever filmed one!

The audience asked a lot of good questions:

  • Q: How long can these cameras keep going?  A: They take about 8000 pictures a year, and the shutters are good for 150,000.  The images have to be taken off manually, but we’ve got funding and local support to do that.
  • Q: How about thermal imaging?  A: Coming up!  Along with LIDAR to measure distances.
  • Q: What do you use for image processing?  A: Intense.  The clips in the movie only include the pictures taken at local noon in order to keep the shadows from jerking around, but the scientific releases have everything. [The EIS site doesn’t actually have any glacier videos on it, so they may be holding them back until the scientists involved can get some papers out of it.]
  • Q: What are you all doing now?  A: James Balog is putting together educational materials based on this for raising climate-change awareness in schools.  [His knees were ruined in the course of the project, so no more glacier hiking for him].  The director, Jeff Orlowski, is busy promoting the movie.  I’m still running the image collection service for EIS, but am now doing some volcano work for the Army Corps of Engineers.    [This is a dude with serious thrill issues!]

The movie has made the short list of 26 films for the Best Documentary Oscar.   It’s beautifully shot, and has an important subject, but it also sure looks like it was a great adventure.

 

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Why Did Car Companies Cave on CAFE?

Posted on October 13, 2012 by jlredford

Car companies have been complaining about fuel economy standards ever since they began back in the 1970s.  All through the 80s, 90s and Zips they’ve managed to block increases in the standards, by spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about their effect on safety (small cars will kill you!), on competitiveness (the Japanese will eat all the jobs in Michigan!)  and desirability (big Americans like big cars!).

Yet last year they rather meekly submitted to new standards that will cut fuel consumption by 40% by 2026.   The standard for medium cars will rise from an EPA window sticker mileage of 21 mpg to 34.  Why did their attitudes change?

There are a couple of obvious reasons:

  • The US had just bailed out GM and Chrysler to the tune of tens of billions, and at major political risk to the Obama administration.   Complaining about new rules would seem … ungrateful.
  • The Prius showed that high mileage was feasible and popular in a reasonably-sized car.
  • Gasoline really is getting expensive.  At $3/gallon, a 21 -> 34 mpg change saves $5500 over 100K miles, and saves $7200 at the current $4/gallon.   As a direct consequence, people really are buying more efficient cars.

Yet I wonder if there’s a more interesting reason – the car companies want that $7200 for themselves.   If they can  charge you $3000 more for a car that gets enough better mileage to save $7200, they win and you win.  And air quality wins, and CO2 emissions, and US energy security.  That extra money could go to better technology and good work for American engineers and workers, or it could go to Venezuelan oil companies, or Saudis, or Iranians, or worst of all, Canadians.

So now everyone is thinking seriously about mileage, and unsurprisingly it’s getting better everywhere.  It turns out that there are lots of ways to improve the efficiency of standard engines, like optimizing valve timing and fuel ignition.  ArsTechnica is running a good series on this: “More bang, less buck: How car engine tech does more with less”.    There are now a number of non-hybrids at 40 mpg: the Ford Focus, the Chevrolet Sonic, and the VW TDI Passat.   The hybrid advantage is shrinking!  Mazda has actually sworn off them, and will get all its gains from improving the standard system.  The 34 mpg standard will not be all that hard to meet.

That alone is not enough.  The climate scientists say that we have to get CO2 emissions down by 80% by 2050 to avoid catastrophic warming.  That would correspond to 105 mpg.  And even that is achievable!  The EPA now has a mileage standard for all-electric and plug-in hybrids: MPGe.  It assumes that one gallon of gasoline corresponds to ~34 kWH of electrical energy, which is the actual chemical energy content of gas.   A lot of the electrics are already there, and the Ford CMAX Energi plug-in is now there too.  Actual US gasoline consumption is down about 7% from its peak in 2006 according to the EIA.  Cars won’t be what kills us.

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