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In recent CR interview of Sorkin, Sorkin brought out the "crazy" idea of one thing Apple can do with its $117 Billion in cash. Buy Sprint and enhance its network to support the last mile.
Why do first base coaches in baseball carry stop watches?
In major league baseball games, I have noticed that the first base coach routinely has a stop watch. Why? What in the world is he timing? How long it takes the first baseman to chew a pack of sunflower seeds? Seriously - why?
Smart-grid metering was vulnerable, says Dan Rueckert, associate VP for compliance, security and risk at consulting firm Black & Veatch.
"We've advised some utilities to stop metering activities until systems are upgraded, and we have stopped a few projects until it was done," Rueckert says. "There are a lot of checks and balances."
fac: the article should make it clear that the smart grid proper extends well beyond residential distribution systems, and includes the surveillance and supervision of all aspects of the gross electric grid, including generation, transmission, distribution, and the control rooms and data centers where each of the latter are managed or converge ...
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Yahoo News -- "An engineering professor, Behrokh Khoshnevis, at the University of Southern California, is really thinking big: He has figured out a way to build housing with a giant 3D printer. The apparatus, instead of being the size of your typical laser printer, would actually be somewhat bigger than the house it would build through a concrete layering system called Contour Crafting.
The professor explained the process in a speech at the TEDx conference, which you can watch above. (Start at 4:30 to see the animation demo.) In the video, the professor demonstrates how the machine lays down a concrete foundation, puts up walls, even inserts wiring and plumbing, and eventually constructs an entire building, which Professor Khoshnevis says can be completed in less than a day. (All that's left to add are doors and windows.) Robotics could even be used to add details like tiles, says the professor."
MP: The 3D printing revolution has just begun. We can expect hundreds and probably thousands of more examples like this in the future, as this amazing, innovative, game-changing technology revolutionizes manufacturing, construction, and our entire world.
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From Marathon Oil --"Safe, cost-effective refinements in hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking), horizontal drilling and other innovations now allow for the production of oil and natural gas from tight shale formations that previously were inaccessible. This animated video introduces you to the proven techniques used to extract resources from these shale formations in a safe, environmentally responsible manner."
Great animation of the drilling technology that is responsible for America's revolutionary, game-changing, shale-based energy bonanza, the "energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down."
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Transmission is Key Link to Renewable Energy Future
Carl Dombek | EnergyBiz | Aug 12, 2012
Large portions of the country will not meet their renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandates, primarily due to lack of adequate transmission. That message was delivered to FERC and state commissioners at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ (NARUC) summer committee meetings in Portland, Ore. “There are some very significant constraints for why it’s going to be difficult to meet RPS targets,” Sharon Reishus, senior director of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), told the FERC/NARUC emerging issues collaborative on July 22. “The two major ones are transmission-related and cost-related.”
“The two major ones are transmission-related and cost-related.”
The "plan" here in the islands is to build windmills on another island and then transmit electricity underwater to Oahu. As if it were outrageously expensive enough to start with........
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The cantankerous Jerry Coyne, in a recent post, takes issue with popular
“science-lite” books that offer superficial analyses of and solutions to social problems or—most disturbing to me—superficial descriptions of scientific work.
This is a recurring bugaboo for scientists. It springs from a deeply rooted attitude that science journalist Deborah Blum aptly described here.
So what authors have committed crimes against science, according to Coyne? What are some of the faulty, superficial best-sellers? He obliges:
To me, these include books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (a page-turner, but one that left me cold), Jon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (with its unfortunate concentration on group selection) and The Happiness Hypothesis, David Brooks’s execrable The Social Animal, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct (funded and vetted by the Templeton Foundation), and all of the books and writing of the now-disgraced Wunderkind Jonah Lehrer.
Gladwell receives the lion’s share of abuse from Coyne and his readers pile on. Then something interesting happens: A mystified Gladwell shows up to defend himself. His exchanges in the comment thread are worth reading, especially this bit from him:
I have to say that I find some of the hostility here towards my work a bit puzzling. As anyone who writes for a living knows, it is very difficult to write about science in a way that satisfies all audiences. You have to choose who you want to reach–and if you aim at the left side of the continuum it is almost inevitable that you will alienate someone on the right side of the continuum. (And vice versa). I have chosen, for better or worse, to be “popular” science writer, which necessarily entails sacrificing some degree of complexity for accessibility.
This is an explanation that should resonate with science writers whose aim is to reach a lay audience. But it’s probably not going to sway Coyne and I don’t think it addresses what David Dobbs, a science writer I’ve long admired, raised last week. Ed Yong succinctly captured its essence:
I’m sure there are wide ranging views on how to accomplish this. Personally, what I have found is that the more politicized and emotionally charged an issue–such as climate change–the less appetite there is for conveying complexity and nuances.
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