Zero-combustion Paradigm Approaching: Emissions Standards, Economics Will Push Research

As governments, businesses and scientists work toward creating cost-effective solutions for zero-emissions propulsion technologies, the possibility of a zero-combustion energy production and industrial fabrication model is emerging. Preservation of the natural environment and containment of emissions-induced global climate change both require new technologies that will allow full economic output, including industry and transport, that eliminate the need for combustible fuels.

Many renewable resource technologies currently being employed or explored require the burning of some form of fossil fuel at some stage of the production of the devices that allow for energy generation. Through a series of subtle changes to policy standards, extraction, production and transport of materials, and energy distribution networks, emissions tied to those elements of the production web.

But moving toward an entirely new standard in renewable energy extraction and implementation, we can begin to envision means by which automotive vehicles will actually be self-powering, requiring no fuel per se, and creating zero environmental disturbance aside from the space they occupy and the roads they use.

The zero-combustion standard is now within reach, as versatile revolutionary energy solutions first come online and then are expanded upon. The latest solutions will merge with emerging non-energy-related technologies and be transformed into consumer solutions for battery-like devices powerful enough to extract energy from their environment and power phones, computers, homes and even automobiles and aircraft.

CPF Discussion on Food Supply Security in Africa

As part of the Crisis Policy Forum, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative is now planning an effort to tackle the problem of food supply management and chronic food and water scarcity in Africa. The lessons from this experiment in collaborative research will be applicable in many cases to other situations around the world, and we are open to spurring dialogue in those areas as outgrowths of this ongoing discussion.

Discussion will focus on practical solutions to:

1. Problems related to infusing food supply with enough to feed all those in need;
2. Environmental degradation: i.e. resilience services, ecological measures, ecosystem management;
3. Land use deficiencies: how to improve;
4. Animal and timber poaching;
5. Economic corrosion and instability;
6. Corruption and funding shortfalls;
7. Cooperative measures for extending food supply to conflict-afflicted areas;
8. Overcoming limits of transportation infrastructure;
9. Contagious disease: treatment, education, socio-economic impact;
10. Communications gaps: get relevant anecdotal and researched data to those who can use it.

The goal will be to actually craft calibrated solutions to the seemingly intractable problems related to food security across the diverse regions of the African continent. We hope to use collaborative research, and evolving online commentary to develop innovative practices, including funding options, which local stakeholders can implement in a variety of combinations.

More at Crisis Policy Forum: “FOOD SUPPLY RESTORATION & SECURITY: AFRICA”

Cloud Clarity vs. Shadow Banking

CAN THE BURGEONING INTEGRATED FABRICS OF WEB 3.0 HELP GENERATE A BROAD, SUPER-RESILIENT TRANSPARENCY THAT SAVES INT’L BANKING SYSTEMS?

The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm“, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.

One of the most serious aspects of the current crisis is tied to the widening deficit in the credibility of major financial institutions. The New York Times, for instance, is reporting:

The Federal Reserve not only [has taken] action unprecedented since the Great Depression — by lending money directly to major investment banks — but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers made when the good times were rolling.

“Bear Stearns has made it obvious that things have gone too far,” says Mr. Gross, who plans to use some of his cash to bargain-shop. “The investment community has morphed into something beyond banks and something beyond regulation. We call it the shadow banking system.”

The lesson may be that we have a problem of endemic manipulations, permitted by current regulatory and technological standards. What if it were possible to build into international banking institutions —including but not limited to the manner and volume of transactions engaged in by investment banks— a transparency-insuring mechanism based on the dispersed computing power of an integrated web-based “cloud” matrix?

While a primary function of Web 3.0 must be the innovative enhancement of privacy safeguards, it should become increasingly possible to create broad-spectrum data-screening aggregator applications that allow for the creation of a banking process safeguard fabric. Multiple unique and even competing software analysis platforms could work on the same expansive datasets to help prevent dangerous overdependence on excessively volatile market trends.

Web 3.0 Must Make Information More Free, the Individual More Autonomous

We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged.

Technology is the great economic immune system for industrial and post-industrial societies. It breeds competition, innovation, the expansion of learning and individual potential, opportunity and social mobility, and it spurs the exploration of new directions in thought and production. Information technology is helping to create a global fabric of human ideas, individuals and broader societies, interwoven in a complex web of shared and competing interests and shared and competing freedoms.

The mass convergence of new media, established media, commercial activity, personal communications, event planning and vital services (such as medical, financial, travel and utility), poses an obvious threat to the freedom of individuals to remain unmonitored or unexposed to new risks and new controls. But information serves us best when it is free, when it is untainted by powerful interests, when it moves where it needs to move, finding its level like water.

People move toward information and information moves toward people, in ways that cannot be calculated from a media conglomerate’s boardroom, and which, for better or for worse, do not parallel anyone’s particular bottom-line. Yet major telecoms are planning to stratify web-speeds for paying media giants, and advertisers are looking to recruit bloggers to create specialized information which actually functions like a covert advertisement.

Segmenting the web further by charging for the permission to let end-users access your servers via the highest bandwidth is a direct assault on media freedoms and access to information. It is also an attempt to ensure that most web traffic ensures at least 3 separate payments to the telecom for a single event. This attack on Net Neutrality —tied to the basic freedom of the press— runs contrary to the real promise of Web 3.0 and media hyper-convergence.

Deceptive or manipulative advertising formats are not inherently an attack on web freedoms, but they do pose a threat to the equality of access individuals may have to quality information as such. This means consumers may actually opt to create or to frequent services that shy away from those practices, which may in many cases be closed services or “gated communities” that provide their audience with a self-image of privilege, though their main function would be to limit the flow of information.

Neckband Senses Nerve Impulses, Reconstitutes Speech Not Spoken

The news may best be stated as smart neckband makes “telepathic” chat possible. But it is more appropriate to say that a group of cunning neurological researchers and engineers have found a way to tap thought about speech and recreate speech, even where the person in question chooses not to utter a word, or is unable to.

The new device does not actually achieve telepathy, but it does appear to tap into the specific impulses that would create specific sounds through the vocal chords, allowing it to recreate those sounds, and achieve speech where no words are spoken. The end-user will have to “train” both mind and voice to work with the device, to produce the highest level of accuracy.

In an on-stage demonstration, seen in the following embedded video from YouTube, there appears to be significant delay in this early version of the technology, but it’s ability to capture the colloquial word-choice and the manner of speaking of the individual are surprising.

The device detects impulses intended to stimulate muscles in the throat that manipulate the vocal chords to create the desired sound memes that make the words intended to be spoken. If the neckband detects these impulses, but the individual does not actually speak, then the effect can be a “silent” conversation, where only the person on the other end of the connection hears anything, and those in one’s environment are none the wiser.

This could have applications for business or for journalists, who may have a use for communicating verbally while in an environment where their ability to speak aloud is limited for a given time period. It could also allow for more private communications in public places, or more importantly, give voice to those suffering from muscular, throat or neurological disorders, depending on the individual case.

The same technology has been applied to a system that allows thought about words to command an electronically-equipped wheelchair, giving new mobility and versatility to those suffering severe or total paralysis. Other medical applications could help develop new treatments for a number of muscular disorders which impair speech.

The ability to use “thought-control” to produce speech, or to reconstitute a physically-inhibted speech ability, is a powerful, if unexpected level of integration of the physical individual into the phenomenon of digital hyper-convergence. Neurological signal capture may also allow thought-control to radically transform informational media and online services, depending on the technology an individual uses to interact with those media.

The Ambient presentation of the voiceless speech neckband —branded ‘Audeo’— includes mention of a powerful, though at this date perhaps clumsy potential use for the technology: Ambient suggests that the neckband could be used to dramatically enhance the value of online information searches.

For instance, voice-enabled map searches could allow someone to “ask” —through voiceless speech and remote speech recognition— an online service how to get to a given place, or what address to go to, and receive in response a physical or audible response to that voiceless search query.

In a way, this would appear to “enhance” human intelligence, by giving access to the collective wisdom of the world wide web. But as with all such advances, it is important to recognize that certain technological “enhancements”, while they expand our access to information, do not actually expand our basic personal abilities, and to distinguish between potential complements and limitations to those abilities.

• New Scientist: “Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat”
• New Scientist: “Thinking of words can guide your wheelchair”

Green Economy: Resilience Services Will Meet Opportunity & Urgency

The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of our civilization).

More efficient management of water, better testing, diversification, distribution and self-sustainability of crop varieties, energy resources that do little to disrupt the natural environment but seriously impact the more harmful tendencies of our economic activity, sustainable transport (increasingly shifting toward the low-emissions and emissions-free standards), each play a vital role in the emerging resilience economy.

What we are building into the global economy, in the same present tense, are both severely damaging extensions of now primitive industrial methods and also the antidotes or successors to those practices. As one after another city, province, region or state, begins to view its own natural habitat as an economic asset, resilience services and the goal of self-regulating elasticity become key market-altering forces, on both the conceptual and practical levels.

New technologies may go a long way to helping us serve the resilience interests of local and international markets, in ways that remain difficult to envision. The first wave of such technologies will likely be those that supplement energy production and reduce demand for high-polluting carbon-based fuels, while advances in overall efficiency and resource-light information distribution will continue to reshape economic output in favor of resilience and sustainability.

Transport habits may change, or standards for fuel-use (partly driven by escalating costs of burning fossil fuels), while energy-efficient modes of production may allow a vast expansion of industrial productionin clean-fuel transport and the necessary support infrastructure.

HotSpring is planning research communities that will take the technical riddle of how to make the zero-combustion, zero-emission drive mechanism that fits this vital new economic outlook. Our focus on the green economy will be tied to the quest for daring, responsible, practicable advances that help us reduce the negative impact of industrial-scale human activity on the natural environment.

Nano-chemical Computation Heralds New Era in Molecular IT

Scientists have achieved the goal of creating a nano-scale “chemical brain” that can transmit instructions to multiple (at present as many as 16) molecular “machines” simultaneously. The new molecular processor means that nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.

The BBC reports that:

The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a “logic device”.

They each resemble a ring with four protruding spokes that can be independently rotated to represent four different states.

One duroquinone molecule sits at the centre of a ring formed by the remaining 16. All are connected by chemical bonds, known as hydrogen bonds.

The structure is just 2 nanometers in diameter, and can produce 4 billion different permutations of chemical transmission of “information”. This allows for a far more efficient distribution of information than a traditional binary circuit.

The researchers say the structure of the “chemical brain” was inspired by the activity of glial cells in the human brain. Glial cells are non-neuronal “glue” or connective cells. In the brain, they are estimated to outnumber neurons by 10 to 1 and assist in chemical transmission of neural signals. Their ability to transmit signals in parallel, or to multiple tangent cells at once, reportedly gave rise to the 17-molecule duroquinone design.

In recent years, the ability of research teams and engineers to keep pace with “Moore’s law” —which predicts that computing speed (by way of the reduction in size of processing units or the increasing density of circuits possible in a given space) will double roughly every 18 months— has been tested, due to heat-diffusion constraints and the related energy bleed.

Nano-chemical processors would enable an entirely new structure for the smallest-scale computing circuits, and could lead to serious advances in the nature and capabilities of microprocessors, which are far larger in size and could therefore contain many times more circuits than at present.

The researchers have reportedly already moved beyond the initial 17-molecule design, capable of processing 16 instructions simultaneously, to devices capable of 256 simultaneous transmissions. They are also designing a molecular device that would be capable of up to 1024 simultaneous transmissions.

• BBC: “Chemical brain controls nanobots”
• Wikipedia: “Glial cell”
• Intel: “Intel Opens First High-Volume 45nm Microprocessor Manufacturing Factory”

Cloudscape Computing: the Dispersed Matrix as ‘Infinite’ Computing Platform

As the web moves into a more mature stage of its adolescence, the beginnings of an all-media platform, computing has begun to move to the “cloud” format. Cloudscape computing means that software, files, private accounts and processing power are dispersed over an extensive array of machines across the world.

“The Cloud” is the world wide web, and the nature of cloudscape computing can provide significant, if surprising, returns in security and accessibility. Dispersing, via dedicated encryption, the bits that compose a given file over an array of servers, with some redundancy, can make it more difficult to hack into any actual file or file storage device.

And, where cloudscape storage and computing come into play, there is a genuine motivation for large organizations, or for the pressures of the vast consumer and advertising marketplace, to push for ever more accessibility (wirelessly, in mobile telephony) to online material, which could have a positive effect both in fomenting further innovation, broadening the array of services available and bringing prices down.

Cloudscape computing does have its shortcomings, or its risk areas, but all in all, it is one of the commercial practices most likely to push into new terrain in mobile and wireless web access. With that, however, comes the serious means of market control it may lend to web-based software giants like Google. As always, the freedom of content access, generation and distribution is a paramount concern.

The real change of dynamic in computing connection time and browsing tendencies, comes with the types of services that can be made available by way of dispersed or distributed document and database hosting. More dynamic websites, more graphic-intense visual content, higher processing speeds, software applications that require zero installation and zero hard-disk space, accessible-from-anywhere desktop publishing suites and content-management technologies, are just a few.

Cloudscape computing requires a level of impeccability in encryption and programming that goes beyond what has been required in consumer computing to date. But this demand is also a challenge that will help promote new exploration of the potential benefits of more complex, more flexible, more resilient encryption paradigms.

We will only begin to see real benefits of distributed computing capacity, for the average end-user, when instant document-transfer encryption stands have advanced far beyond what we now enjoy, layered and impromptu in ways that will require one or two orders of magnitude more processing speed (and bandwidth) than is now commonly available.

Electronic Paper Makes Reading a More Diverse & Flexible Experience

Researchers at MIT have been working for years now on a wide range of variations on the changeable visual text formats that might replace many of the backlit screens we now use to read and interact with electronic documents. ‘Electronic paper’ refers to a number of these technologies, able to reproduce encrypted files in visual text form, as if they were computer monitors, some touted as having “the look and feel” of real paper.

The benefits of this advance are various:

1. paper is an ancient technology whose ease of use is difficult to match, one of the pillars of civilization;
2. electronic paper may help eliminate the strain on forest environments that comes from increasing consumption of paper worldwide;
3. the texture of paper makes viewing a document less challenging to the eyes;
4. adding touch-response makes it possible to read “on-screen” with the feeling of flipping pages, visually and physically;
5. advances in storage capacity mean being able to store huge amounts of readable text and images in a very small space

The potential for streamlined storage and portability of large amounts of reading material is one of the most important functions of the e-paper phenomenon. The ability to not only store thousands of books, or hundreds of magazines with full-color imagery, or to view video or even browse the world wide web, from a paper-thin device, makes exploiting the resources of the information age a far more comfortable experience for the everyday commuter, or news reader.

At MIT’s Electronic Paper project, the fundamental challenge regarding e-paper is stated as follows:

Books with printed pages are unique in that they embody the simultaneous, high-resolution display of hundreds of pages of information. The representation of information on a large number of physical pages, which may be physically turned and written on, constitutes a highly preferred means of information interaction.

A key element in the quest for a less massive, but more flexible format for text reading, i.e. electronic paper, follows: “An obvious disadvantage of the printed page, however, is its immutability once typeset.” This is a major issue when relating to informaton that is not necessarily transcendent or in itself immutable, and commercial applications, as well as everyday news and information uses for paper, make it attractive to create an alternative that is precisely mutable, or rather, programmable, modifiable, able to be updated when the information itself has changed.

MIT’s Technology Review explains the hardware that makes e-paper work, in devices like Amazon.com’s ‘Kindle’ reader:

At the front of the screen is a layer of transparent electrodes. Below it are millions of microcapsules containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles, and below them is a layer of nearly a million more electrodes. A negative charge on one of these bottom electrodes pushes black particles to the top, and a positive charge does the same with the white ones. Each microcapsule acts as a pixel that can thus be made to appear black, white, or gray.

The gist is to achieve ease of use, visual stability, paper-like quality, and high-resolution text imaging, in a device that allows for interactive navigability and mass storage. Amazon.com has added a wireless download functionality that is designed to promote spontaneous purchase and on-the-spot access to e-paper-ready e-books sold through its store.

In October 2005, Sentido.tv reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, “told a London audience that the static format of paper would be replaced by paper-thin digital wireless devices which would be constantly downloading huge amounts of information from the internet. He predicted we would all be connected all the time, within 10 years.” Electronic paper provides some brave new frontiers for niche media to grow their markets exponentially, with new editorial methods and distribution mechanisms never before possible.

If e-paper and wireless internet meet in the coming process of hyper-convergence of media, we will find that text is at once ‘liberated’ and ‘filtered’, and we will need to implement mechanisms that ensure consumers have as much access, on a permanent and private basis, to information as with the standard purchase of a book, which sits comfortably in one’s home, in one’s private space.

This issue of privacy is vital to the entire question of electronic information, because of the fact that a press that is free to produce and distribute according to its own editorial choices tends to produce far more reliable information and helps protect the rights of individuals. A lack of privacy in the media sphere, by contrast, would have a chilling effect on what sorts of content some major media outlets would be willing to provide.

The standard for e-paper should also be maximum possible user-enabled modification (a standard that is the rule in paper publishing: readers can write, cross out, highlight, rewrite and reproduce section by section, by hand, and at will, what is meaningful to them, by their own standards, and without paying a licensing fee). The problem of technical specifications as minimum requirements for accessing information continues to be a nuisance in computing and web-browsing, but would be far more severe if there is a massive migration of text publishing from printed pages to e-paper.

Customization is essential to the long-term success of e-paper as a new, beneficial medium for authors, publishers, web-content providers, bloggers and readers alike. E-paper essentially constitutes an event horizon after which information may be fundamentally changed and questions of accessibility, credibility and longevity (conservation of format and re-accessibility), become central to the question of informational freedoms.

• MIT: “Electronic Paper project”
• E Ink Corporation: “Lower Power, Electronic Paper Displays” [commercial site]
• MIT Technology Review: “Amazon Kindle: The online giant hopes it’s created the ipod of digital books”
• eMedia Wire: “Self Published Book Achieves Top 1 Percent Sales Rank at Amazon.com’s Kindle Book Store”
  
• Washington Square News: “New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn’t replace my old book” [opinion]
• Sentido.tv: “GATES ANNOUNCES PLANS TO REPLACE PAPER WITH SILICON”

Man Facing Leukemia Invents Nanotech Cancer Treatment

When John Kanzius found himself facing aggressive and debilitating chemotherapy treatment for advanced leukemia, seeing the effect the treatment had on fellow patients, he decided to find a better way. Kanzius had worked for decades with radio technology, and understood that radio waves could pass harmlessly through the body. He also knew they could heat metal even at low frequencies.

He decided to try to find a way to embed metal into the malignant cells, so they could be targeted by simple radio waves, leaving the surrounding tissue healthy and intact. An obvious part of the problem would be obtaining and directing metal particles small enough to fit into cancer cells. The biggest challenge, however, would be finding a way to inject a large enough number to have the desired effect, without inadvertently loading healthy cells with the targeting conductive particles.

The Los Angeles Times reported of Kanzius:

Awake in bed one night in 2003, as the clock ticked past 2, Kanzius pulled himself from beneath the covers, leaving his sleeping wife, Marianne. He staggered down a flight of stairs, grabbed some copper wires, boxes, antennas and Marianne’s pie pans, and began building a machine.

For months, Kanzius tinkered, using the pie pans to create an electronic circuit, often waking Marianne with his clanging. By day, he sent her out with supply lists: mineral mixtures, metals, wires.

His early-morning experiments would lead him to one of the nation’s top cancer researcher centers, and earn the support of a Nobel Prize winner.

After his cancer appeared to go into remission, he was re-diagnosed with a more aggressive form of cancer, and given less than one year to live. Further aggressive treatments put the disease into remission, and two years later, Kanzius continued research into building his tumor-burning machine. He had tested crude versions of the device on hot-dogs and other meats, and found that the burning was targetted. For human tissue, it would need to be far more precise.

He obtained a patent for his machine, and began to seek help in manufacturing the device. He would need nanoparticles that could be made to attach to cancer cells only, reliably. His doctor put him in touch with Dr. Steven A. Curley, an oncologist specializing in more invasive radio-frequency cancer treatments.

Curley was able to obtain state of the art nanoparticles (1/75,000th to 1/100,000th the width of a human hair) from Richard Smalley, a Nobel-prize winning chemist experienced in nanoparticles, also suffering from cancer, and took them to Kanzius to test whether they would heat enough to yield the desired targetted burn effect. They did.

Smalley was astonished by the news when it reached him, and asked colleagues at Rice University to team with Curley and Kanzius and make the treatment a reality. Shortly before succumbing to his cancer, Smalley urged Curley to promise he would continue the work, reportedly saying “Nothing has the potential to help people, to help patients, more than this.”

As research progressed, it was discovered that Kanzius’ system may also be effective in separating hydrogen atoms from water, making it a good candidate for the basis of a technology to extract hydrogen from salt water for use as a fuel.

The nanoparticle radio-frequency cancer treatment Kanzius developed is now progressing through the various stages of research it must pass before it can be tested in human beings. But Kanzius’ innovative thinking, daring and commitment to his vision have made it likely the system will become a standard option for treatment of some hard-to-combat cancers, in the coming decade.

• LA Times: “Sending his cancer a signal”
• Wikipedia: “John Kanzius”

Hyper-convergence: the Coming State of Media Arts & Services

HOW TV, INTERNET, TELECOMMUNICATIONS, RFID & COMMERCIAL SERVICES WILL CONVERGE TO CREATE NEW SOCIAL SPHERE, SECURITY RISKS

For some time, we have heard speculation that the user-centered logic of the Internet medium will persuade old-guard media powers to embrace the model, and we will see a convergence of online, print, radio and televisual media, in one integrated system. Media integration will likely go far beyond that, so security has to be the watchword as technology invades personal space and our attempts at a ‘pursuit of happiness’.

At present, the movement favoring net neutrality —or equal access to online content— may be the segment of media markets and public consciousness most aware of the issue and its implications for the nature and quality of information and information access. Net neutrality is the premise that connection providers should not be permitted to take any actions that influence users’ access to online information or content providers’ access to the public.

Cable companies and ISPs are seeking the power to charge for a stratified web-traffic format, where those who pay a special fee will be granted higher degrees of bandwidth not available to any other content providers or customers, even though they already charge for connection and connection speed at both ends of the service. This is what convergence should not be, if it is to benefit consumers and favor the free press.

Hyper-convergence is a term that seeks to explain the integration of a broad array of services and personal information management tools into the multimedia web. It refers to the blurring of the barriers between online activity and real-world effects, which will present major security concerns.

New technologies can make hyper-convergence into a landmark moment for consumers and can increase access for many to events, information and resources that might otherwise be more difficult to access. But they can also increase in dramatic ways the risk to which we subject sensitive personal data.

RFID —Radio Frequency IDentification— is one of the most controversial and well-debated new technologies whose implementation could both expand the scope of hyper-convergence in powerful ways and also subject the individual to unnecessary and ill-advised long-term risk of identity-theft or fraud.

RFID-enabled smart chips can help integrate products, services, personal information and personal space, into a fluid information environment, but plans to implement global networks of “broadcasting” or “active” RFID chips means that one may all-too-quickly let slip sensitive personal information, without technological standards catching up to the severe exigencies of this new security risk.

Biometric data is another, related problem area. Touted as a security enhancement measure, the implementation of even narrowly-construed, isolated biometric readings, poses a major, lifelong personal security risk for the individual.

Unlike a Social Security number, a signature, an account number or a credit card, an iris pattern, a fingerprint, one’s genome, blood-type and facial structure —all of which various biometric security scanning systems propose to read or sample for ID purposes—, cannot be changed. And if they could be, it would present a major security risk for the system attempting to enhance its security by such means, because of the presumption that the use of such information is inherently safer.

Permitting one’s private biological data to propagate across an online network, or into state-run databanks, or databanks run by multinational firms, is to surrender a part of one’s identity, for all time, to the idiosyncracies and shortcomings of the system, at which one must take into serious consideration the supposed value of a potential commercial or procedural convenience.

But services and media are combining, and that makes sense. The logic of synthesis shows that connecting ideas, fields of study, geographical locations, cultural oddities, people and access to information, increases understanding and breeds a more fluid social reality. TV, Internet, mail, messaging, voice communication and purchasing processes, will increasingly combine to blur the line between virtual and lived-in physical space.

The challenge will be building systems that allow the individual to maintain all existing freedoms and natural barriers against fraud and identity theft, while facilitating access to that ever broader range of media and services.

Green Investment Boom Gets Traction: Fund Promises $10 Billion for Clean Energy

The private investment fund Ceres, a group of institutional investors, has promised to devote $10 billion to investment in clean energy sources. The news comes as 3 of the world’s major oil companies call for coordinated policy on how to face climate change, constrain emissions, and a couple of months after 150 global corporations asked for a major boost in subsidized research into transitioning to clean energy technologies.

The Financial Times reports “A group of nearly 50 institutional investors has pledged to invest at least $10bn (£5.1bn) in environmental technologies and to incorporate ‘green’ standards in investment decisions”. The fund’s president, Mindy Lubber, said during the press conference at UN Headquarters in New York, “This action plan reflects the many investment opportunities that exist today to put a dent in global warming pollution, build profits and benefit the global economy”.

The cost of the climate change burden is increasingly on the minds of corporate leaders, financiers and investors, and the glittering potential of economic windfall in pioneering the green economy is catching the eyes of investors and political leaders. Bio-ethanol, a crop-based fuel source, considered cleaner than fossil fuels, and having the benefit of being a renewable fuel source, has shown tremendous potential for financial growth.

The Daily Green reported yesterday that:

Today, Deer & Co. reported $5.2 billion in first-quarter profits, 55% higher than expected, because it is providing farm equipment to farms that are making record investments.

Monsanto, the maker of genetically modified corn and soy seeds, saw its stock jump nearly 200% in a year, as its sales grew 36%.

Mosaic, the world’s largest phosphate fertilizer producer, saw its profit quadruple.

Chemical giant DuPont saw its corn sales volume increase 52% recently, and expects double-digit earnings growth in 2008.

The value of the U.S. farm economy is expected to hit a record in 2008, $144.1 billion, 38% above the 10-year average.

There are serious drawbacks to increasing reliance on ethanol: burning organic materials or extracts also emits carbon, albeit in lower doses; food prices have been soaring across the world as a result of shifting agricultural production to meet demand for bio-fuels; land-use policy may not keep pace with the rush to exploit the economic boom ethanol presents; worldwide, arable land and water for irrigation are already severely strained, not able to meet food production needs in a sustainable way.

So it is of paramount importance that new funding is being offered for new research into potential alternative methods of truly “clean” energy, meaning fuel sources or electricity production methods that require no combustion and emit no harmful toxins or heat-trapping gases into the environment.

In July 2006, Sentido.tv [a project of Hot Spring's publisher], reported that:

The global wind-generation resource has been estimated at 72 terawatts, 40 times the entire global demand for 2000. Eliminating peat bogs and other highly vulnerable ecosystems from that resource potential will cut into the global capacity, but at 40 times demand, or 20 times or even at 10 times, there is clearly room to work with.

Finding the right combination of resources, in terms of cost-effective construction and maintenance, infrastructure development and ugrading, and stabilizing the role of consumers in both production and usage (solar and wind energy permit fitted individual homes to become production mechanisms expanding grid potential), will allow for the creation of a far more efficient and by extension, economically viable and sustainable energy market. This could be extended to a global scale, if investment accurately discerns and follows opportunity.

• Financial Times: “Oil groups urge clarity on tackling emissions [inset: Green energy to get $10 billion boost]“
• Guardian: “Investment fund giants demand 90% reduction in carbon emissions”
• Daily Green: “Want Real Economic Stimulus? Jump-Start the Green Collar Economy”
• Quipu Economic Forum: “The 12-year Sea Change, the Green Economy”
• Ceres: “Investors and Environmentalists for Sustainable Prosperity”
• Quipu [from EPI]: “Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008″
• Sentido.tv: “WORKING OUT THE KINKS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY’S GREATEST PROMISE”
• Ceres: “Climate Investment OpEd by Ceres President Mindy Lubber in Pensions & Investments magazine on 9/19/05″

Dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch

HUMAN BEINGS HAVE BECOME SO INFLUENTIAL IN NATURAL PROCESSES THAT SCIENTISTS NOW WORRY NATURE HAS LOST VITAL RESILIENCE MEASURES

At a meeting of European scientists, in Stockholm, Sweden, the man who coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe the new geological epoch in which human influence dominates natural processes, announced that the term has gained acceptance in a growing number of fields. The real import of the term, and of its increasing relevance to what science is showing about the effects of human civilization on the environment, globally, is that ecological information is increasingly vital to implementing human ambitions in a responsible and sustainable way.

Paul J. Crutzen, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, wrote in the year 2000 that:

The name Holocene (”Recent Whole’) for the post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years seems to have been proposed for the first time by Sir Charles Lyell in 1833, and adopted by the International Geological Congress in Bologna in 1885 (1). During the Holocene mankind’s activities gradually grew into a significant geological, morphological force, as recognised early on by a number of scientists. Thus, G.P. Marsh already in 1864 published a book with the title ‘Man and Nature’, more recently reprinted as ‘The Earth as Modified by Human Action- (2). Stoppani in 1873 rated mankind’s activities as a ‘new telluric force which in power and universality may be compared to the greater forces of earth” [quoted from Clark (3)]. Stoppani already spoke of the anthropozoic era. Mankind has now inhabited or visited almost all places on Earth; he has even set foot on the moon.

The Financial Times, of London, is reporting “The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.” Other effects will have a lot to do with crop resilience, soil fertility, elasticity of habitats vital for species on which our sustenance environment —the realm of ecosystems and resource production that feeds our species and its habits— depends.

The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch in geological history brings with it numerous challenges and opportunities. In terms of transitioning sweeping economic models and trends to sustainable methods, there is a vast opportunity to expand the potential output of the global economy, but meeting the challenges that create this opportunity will require massive amounts of ingenuity and investment.

A group of 21 leading scientists and researchers has published its study of the geological timescale topic in the GSA Journal, concluding that the fundamental shift to a human-altered geological environment occurred at the beginning of the 19th century. What is now occurring, however, is that awareness of the potentially severe impact of 200 years of rampant industrial expansion, resource exploitation, urban construction and terrain remodeling appears to have reached a tipping point, after which science cannot ignore the human element in the natural world, i.e. ecological impact.

That study specifically notes that human activity has led to fundamental alterations in sediment layering, soil quality, geological patterning, the biological habitat and its flora and fauna, as well as the obvious impact on the breathable atmosphere. Specifically:

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena, summarized as follows. [...]

Humans have caused a dramatic increase in erosion and the denudation of the continents, both directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude [...]

Carbon dioxide levels (379 ppm in 2005) are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times and at any time in the past 0.9 million years [...]

The projected temperature rise will certainly cause changes in habitat beyond environmental tolerance for many taxa (Thomas et al., 2004). The effects will be more severe than in past glacial-interglacial transitions because, with the anthropogenic fragmentation of natural ecosystems, ‘escape’ routes are fewer.

Resilience mechanisms are eroded, and the natural environment is less able to adapt suitably to changes within its sometimes competing ecosystems. The study also cites evidence of increasing levels of species extinction, and the growing likelihood of a major wave of mass extinction, directly related to human activity.

“Scientists are building computer models that give a view of the whole ‘earth system’ in the Anthropocene era. These are beginning to show the hot spots or Achilles’ heels in Earth’s defenses against catastrophic change, said John Schellnhuber, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia”, also according to the Financial Times.

If we are to continue expanding our technological abilities, our industrial production, our standard of living, and the integration of human society across the planet (with the fuel demand and resource-stress this implies), then there will need to be a major change in the way in which policy-makers, private enterprise, consumers and markets generally, conceive of the human effect in the natural environment.

That change in consciousness will allow for a new approach to funding and producing major technological innovations that will make it far easier to gracefully slip away from reliance on carbon-based combustible fuels. That will, however, be only one thread in the fabric of advances needed to help human industrial civilization outpace its own capacity for mass resource depletion.

• Geological Society of America: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene”
• Financial Times / MSNBC: “Scientists warn of a new Anthropocene age”
• About.com Geology: “Introducing the Anthropocene”
• Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie: “Anthropocene” [article that coined the term]
• Resilience 2008: “Resilience, Adaptation & Transformation in Turbulent Times” [Conf., Stockholm 14-17 April]
• Albaeco, Sustainability School: “Masking Environmental Feedbacks”

Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

BOOK REVIEW & INTRODUCTION TO ONGOING HOT SPRING DISCUSSION

Ecologist and researcher Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, has issued the 3rd installment of his ‘Plan B’ books —Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008)—, which lay out the most vital research underlying and the most optimal means of meeting the need to transition to a sustainable economy that not only works in harmony with natural system, but also helps to reverse the excesses of the existing industrial model.

The alterations to the Earth’s climate that are resulting from centuries of burning fossil fuels, rich in carbon and which release unnatural amounts of carbon-dioxide into the environment, are presenting current and future costs that have not been integrated into pricing models:

When Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his ground-breaking study in late 2006 on the future costs of climate change, he talked about a massive market failure. He was referring to the failure of the market to incorporate the climate change costs of burning fossil fuels. The costs, he said, would be measured in the trillions of dollars. The difference between the market prices for fossil fuels and the prices that also incorporate their environmental costs to society are huge.

The roots of our current dilemma lie in the enormous growth of the human enterprise over the last century. Since 1900, the world economy has expanded 20-fold and world population has increased fourfold. Although there were places in 1900 where local demand exceeded the capacity of natural systems, this was not a global issue. There was some deforestation, but overpumping of water was virtually unheard of, overfishing was rare, and carbon emissions were so low that there was noserious effect on climate. The indirect costs of these early excesses were negligible.

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal—the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change—can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, themarket is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.

As economic decisionmakers—whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers—we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions—so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value nature’s services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern forfuture generations. 

A major factor in the challenge now facing human civilization is how exactly to continue to exploit the benefits of a market model, while we make sweeping industrial transitions away from fossil fuels, and ‘program’ the market to learn to account for these vital, and incomparably valuable, considerations. Lester Brown’s latest book is, as is custom with his work, a relentless and committed examination of the problem in its most vital detail, coupled with real solutions and a strategy for overcoming the global challenge of moving to a climate-safe economy.

• Earth Policy Institute: Eco-Economy Updates (plus data & translation links)
• Earth Policy Institute: Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
• Earth Policy Institute: The Earth Policy Reader
• Sentido.tv: Informes de Eco-economía, en español
• Sentido.tv: Lester Brown presents Plan B 2.0 at Google (video)

Raindrops New Source of Low-Intensity Clean Energy

A new study has shown that raindrops can be used to produce electricity. The key is the mechanical energy of the raindrops, meaning the energy contained in their motion and in the way that force is diffused when striking a given type of surface.In this case the surface is PVDF (polyvinylidene diflouride) plastic, which is able to release a charge when temporarily “deformed” by mechanical activity, such as being struck by a moving object. A sheet of PVDF just 25 micrometers thick (1,000 = 1 milimeter) receives the impact of raindrops, and the effect is the release of energy, which can be harvested and turned into electricity.

Romain Guigon, from the research institute CEA Leti-Minatec in Grenoble, France, says the research shows that “even in the most unfavorable conditions, the mechanical energy of the raindrops… is high enough to power low-consumption devices”, but the study does not specify how well circuitry retains a minimum charge sufficient for regular functioning.

While circuitry is a vital issue related to this potential technological advance, it may also be worth looking at what uses there might be for such tools as the PVDF sheets that gather energy to the system’s electrodes. Careful adjustment of the study’s initial presumptions could lead to powerful new supplementary energy applications, saving battery life or eliminating the need for ecologically unfriendly battery systems altogether.

• Discovery: “It’s Raining Energy. Hallelujah!”

The 12-year Sea Change, the Green Economy: How Do We Get There?

Quipu Economic Forum :: Between the years 2008 and 2020, we are likely to see a still unimaginably sweeping shift away from fossil fuels and high-contamination modes of powering our economy. The transition will have a political component, but will be driven mostly by cost concerns, resource scarcity, and public demand for cleaner air and responsible climate policy, a demand which is not ideological in nature.

The long-term overhaul of the global economy, to bring it in line with what would be a responsible climate policy, will be more gradual, and has for some time now been taking its first halting steps toward acquiring momentum. But wealthy countries, ostensibly the most dependent on carbon-based fuels, also enjoy the conditions that permit broader flexibility in fuel resourcing, namely an economic cushion and variety in the marketplace.

It is often necessary to assess economic trends in emotional terms, or to use a new catch-phrase in social awareness and economic undercurrent analysis, to locate the ‘tipping point’, after which momentum becomes reality. This idea is attractive to those who want the market to ’set’ the rules, i.e., design-in public consciousness and cost-considerations based on ‘what the market will bear’.

This last idea is often used to justify the notion that a commonly talked-about direction is the inevitable direction: not for reasons of a grand conspiracy nor because one company will profit from its point of view taking hold, but because if the known ideas dovetail with real economic momentum, then investors find some measure of stability. Instead of blaming the ‘perfect storm’ of unforeseen events for a given failure, they believe they’ll be able to cite something like a ‘perfect groupthink’, with a delightfully positive outcome.

The problem is: groupthink as is well known is not a grand scheme brought into being by the best and brightest minds to achieve the most good for the largest number of people or interests; it is a way in which deferring to incomplete ideas bandied about in an echo-chamber leads to poor decision-making, hands bound, intellectual traps and the failure of policy to meet the moment.

So, how do we meet the moment? What tools can we apply to the problem in order to bang out a solution? Obviously, we are talking about a complex array of problems, with an even more complex array of causes, and we need to adjust to a new cosmology in which we think openly about the possibility that this ‘complex array’ will not only condition us, but is also what will be required of us, going forward.

We need to integrate into daily activities a complex array of daring attempts at streamlining and building efficiency; we need to develop new information systems that give us not only access to new and evolving knowledge about our environment, but also a means of reacting at the right time to the right signs of trouble; we need to make sense of what seems to have no bearing on our personal experience, so that we don’t take the ill-fated route of so much of human history, and decide we can build a good history on the frail foundations of our own personal experience.

It may take a village, it may take a movement, it may take sudden bursts of popular awareness, or it may simply be a question of letting people —who are already very much concerned that we handle our ecological responsibilities with care— be heard.

On 30 November, the AP and the Washington Post reported that officials from 150 global corporations, worth more than $4 trillion in market capital, have signed a petition urging strong action to mandate emissions cuts and reduce global carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2050. Change is coming to our economic structures, likely through the evolution of techniques, and not ideology; our best hope is to take the change seriously, early, and to act to be in the best possible position by 2020.

Any suggestions?