Information & Applied Knowledge : 4/14/13

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Google Floats Renewable Energy Data Center Plan

Google tries to use its buying clout to prod utilities to offer renewable energy option.

Google invested more than $150 million in the Alta Wind Energy Center in the Mojave Desert. It’s a way to earn a steady return on Google’s cash and pursue its corporate goal to be carbon-neutral, but its data centers still draw from the local–and dirtier–grid. Credit: Google

Google has spent more than $1 billion in solar and wind energy projects but it ultimately has no control over the fuel that produces the electricity that powers its data centers. Google today is proposing a new tariff to buy renewable energy directly from utilities, a model it hopes will help scale renewable energy for data centers and other big energy consumers.

An easy-to-use EEG cap could expand the number of ways to interact with your mobile devices.

By Susan Young on April 19, 2013

One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project, say researchers in the company’s Emerging Technology Lab, is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices.

Jessica Leber

April 18, 2013

Improved battery life and durability could be big selling points for new phones from Motorola.

In his January earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page complained that our phones died too quickly and broke too easily. On Google’s next quarterly earnings call today, he cited the same concerns and said new products being cooked up at Motorola Mobility would address them. Google acquired for $12.5 billion last May (see “What Ideas Does Google Have Brewing at Motorola?”).

The FBI could use software to help identify suspects, and more advanced techniques are around the corner.

By Tom Simonite on April 18, 2013

The FBI appealed to the public Thursday for help identifying two men shown in pixilated photos and video footage who are suspected of involvement in Monday’s bomb attacks in Boston.

Susan Young

April 18, 2013

Your genome may not change, but your microbiome will.

Sequencing startup uBiome marked its next phase today with the launch of its new sales site where customers can order a swab kit for checking on the bacteria living in their gut, mouth, nose, genitals, or behind the ear.

Tom Simonite

April 18, 2013

Steve Jobs' patent describes an operating system that periodically blocks certain functions until the user views an ad. Credit: USPTO

In 1999, Steve jobs toyed with the idea of launching a free, ad-supported version of the Mac operating system, and in 2008 he filed a patent on a version of the idea. Microsoft considered making an ad-supported version of Windows in both 2004 and 2005. Neither company tried that tactic, but the idea of pushing ads in return for an operating system is soon to get a real try out, in Facebook’s new app for Android phones, Home.

Slumping PC sales and a changing server market are maiming Intel. But its plan to sell services for the home’s biggest screen is a long shot.

By Jessica Leber on April 18, 2013

When Intel lifted the veil from its stealthy media division in February, many outsiders scratched their heads. Why was the chip manufacturer, which has tried and failed to sell consumer products before, trying to launch a TV service, one of the trickiest consumer markets of all?

David Zax

April 17, 2013

Many web services offer an accidental megaphone. They need to protect us from ourselves.

I haven’t used Facebook’s Groups feature, but today brings news that the company is boosting its visibility by adding the section to users’ Timeline pages. On some intuitive level, this bothers me: Groups is about having private conversations among friends and colleagues, reportedly. Yet the Timeline is one of the most visible, public parts of a Facebook user’s page. So what gives?

An International Energy Agency report calls for more research, carbon price, to help renewables compete.

By Kevin Bullis on April 17, 2013

Despite remarkable growth, solar and wind power aren’t making a dent in carbon emissions, says a new report from the International Energy Agency. Coal consumption is growing too fast to offset any gains from renewables.

Cracking Rock to Get More from Geothermal Fields

An enhanced geothermal project fractures hot rocks at unproductive wells, an approach with low financial risk.

Growth in conventional geothermal power last year was a tepid five percent. A recently-demonstrated enhanced geothermal method could squeeze more usable energy from existing wells.

Geothermal company Ormat last week said it connected the first enhanced geothermal well to the electricity grid, adding an additional 1.7 megawatts to the Desert Peak project in the Nevada desert. It’s one of a number of enhanced geothermal projects partially funded by the Department of Energy. The approach used at this project, which increased production by 38 percent, could be replicated to expand production at many other existing wells, says Paul Thompson, director of policy and business development at Ormat.

The Physics arXiv Blog

April 17, 2013

The way we view online recipes reveals how our eating habits change over time, say computational sociologists.

The web has turned out to be a rich resource for foodies. Cyberspace offers almost unlimited recipes, demonstration videos and online grocery stores. And there is no shortage of diet books for those who have overindulged.

Tom Simonite

April 16, 2013

A new class of smarter robots is being readied for the workplace.

Robots like Baxter could have a significant effect on the job market.

A new class of industrial robot is appearing. These robots are smart, affordable, and safe enough to work alongside humans, and they can do many tasks that human workers perform today (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing”). But does that necessarily mean there will be fewer jobs left for humans to do?

Interactions between hundreds of wind turbines make power output difficult to predict.

By Kevin Bullis on April 17, 2013

With wind power getting cheaper, wind farm developers are drawing up plans for farms an order of magnitude bigger than anything around today, some with more than 1,000 turbines. But there’s one big problem: the economics of wind farms depends on accurate predictions of power output, and it is far more difficult to model how such large wind farms will behave.

Ads that follow you from one website to another are increasingly common, but in the rush for more tailored advertising, age-old wisdom may be lost.

By Jessica Leber on April 17, 2013

Proceed with Caution toward the Self-Driving Car

Completely autonomous vehicles will remain a fantasy for years. Until they’re here, we need technology that enhances human drivers’ abilities rather than making those abilities increasingly obsolete.

By Will Knight on April 16, 2013

Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would’ve made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor spit his coffee over the dashboard: I took my hands off the steering wheel, lifted my foot off the gas pedal, and waited to see what would happen. The answer: not much. To a degree, the car was already driving itself. Sensors were busy tracking other vehicles and road markings; computer systems were operating the accelerator, the brake, and even the steering wheel. The car reduced its speed to keep a safe distance from the vehicle ahead, but as that car sped up again, mine did so too. I tried nudging the steering wheel so that we drifted toward the dotted line on my left. As the line approached, the car pushed the steering wheel in the opposite direction very slightly to keep within its lane.

Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center.

By David Talbot on April 16, 2013

New research suggests that data centers could significantly cut their electricity usage simply by storing fewer copies of files, especially videos.

Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick.

By Tom Simonite on April 15, 2013

CrashAlert, created by University of Manitoba researchers, could make it easier to walk and text without smacking into things.

By Rachel Metz on April 15, 2013

The last time you saw someone walk into a lamppost while focusing intently on a smartphone, you probably thought, “That was dumb!” If you were Juan-David Hincapié-Ramos, though, you might have thought, “There should be an app for this.”

First Solar’s strong finances are helping fund innovation and drive down the cost of solar power.

By Kevin Bullis on April 12, 2013

Innovation in solar cell technology has slowed as startups struggle to get a foothold in a tough market and solar panel manufacturers delay purchasing the equipment they need to manufacture more efficient cells. But First Solar, one of the world’s largest solar companies, continues to invest in boosting the efficiency of its solar cells.

Interview with BRAIN Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun

The trickiest thing about the brain mapping project might be that we don’t even know what we’re trying to learn.

By Jason Pontin on April 15, 2013

Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project, which President Obama announced in his State of the Union address in February, will be a decade-long effort to understand the nature of thought (See “Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Matters.”) The project, which inevitably evokes the Human Genome Project, will demand billions in research funding and require the coöperation of many government agencies, universities, and foundations. Miyoung Chun, a molecular geneticist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, has been coördinating communication among those involved since planning began 18 months ago.

Monetizing Your Movements

Data that shows where people live, work, and play is being sold to businesses and city planners, as mobile operators seek new sources of revenue.

By Jessica Leber on April 12, 2013

Rachel Metz

April 12, 2013

It sounds cool, but only a select few such as Ryan Seacrest get to play with Twitter’s music app for now.

It’s not yet available to everyone, but Twitter’s giving a few hints about its forthcoming music app, which the social site is surely hoping will challenge music listening and sharing service Spotify.

Mice tap into their own neural reward circuits with the help of a new optogenetics device.

By Susan Young on April 11, 2013

A microscopic light-emitting diode device that controls the activity of neurons has given researchers wireless control over animal behavior. The tiny device, tested in mice, causes less damage than other methods used to deliver light into the brain, report researchers in Thursday’s issue of Science, and it does not tether mice to a light source, enabling scientists to study behaviors more naturally than is normally possible.

Martin LaMonica

April 11, 2013

Philips seeks to replace florescent tube light with an LED using technology planned for other types of bulbs.

Philips researcher Coen Liedenbaum with a prototype of tubular LED bulb for overhead lighting. Credit: Philips.

Some of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture funds have backed OpenCoin, a startup with a new digital currency called Ripple.

By Tom Simonite on April 11, 2013

The value of a Bitcoin has grown in the four years since the digital currency was invented, but there’s been little interest from mainstream business or technology investors in using it.

The Physics arXiv Blog

April 8, 2013

The risks associated with major IT projects are being vastly underestimated, according to the largest study of global IT projects ever undertaken.

Back in 2003, the US clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss made the fateful decision to upgrade its global IT system. The project was budgeted at $5million and the advantages appeared huge.

As Levi Strauss had grown into a global company, its IT system had become fragmented and antiquated, with different systems in operation in different countries. So switching to a single integrated system seemed eminently sensible. “But very quickly all hell broke loose,” say Bent Flyvbjerg and Alexander Budzier at the University of Oxford in the UK.

The new Facebook-centric Android app for smartphones builds on other efforts to court mobile users internationally.

By David Talbot on April 9, 2013

Facebook Home, a new collection of apps that makes the social network dominate Android phones, might have limited appeal to users already besieged with smartphone options—but it could fit nicely into Facebook’s efforts overseas, where the focus is on capturing first-time users.

The HTC First, which features Facebook’s new Home interface, will appeal only to the most devoted of Facebook users.

By Rachel Metz on April 10, 2013

Do you use Facebook a lot? Like, a lot a lot? If the answer is yes, then the HTC First may be the smartphone for you. It’s the first to include Facebook’s new mobile software, called Home, which attempts to remake the smartphone experience around your friends’ Facebook activity. If, on the other hand, you’re not a heavy user of Facebook, then the First, and its new interface, may leave you rolling your eyes or scratching your head.

Home, which Facebook unveiled last week, hides the array of apps that dominate most smartphone home screens and instead puts Facebook activity front and center. Home runs on top of a newish version of the latest iteration of Google’s Android software, Jelly Bean. It will be available Friday as a free download for a handful of newer Android phones or preloaded on the HTC handset, which I was able to test out.

Home splashes status updates across your entire lock and home screens, making it easy to see and respond to your friends’ posts. It also makes Facebook’s messenger application ever-present with little “Chat Heads” that follow you from app to app and make it easy to keep up conversations.

Home is a big deal for Facebook as it tries to address the fact that its users increasingly access the social network from smartphones and tablets, where ad revenues are more elusive. If Home resonates with these users, they could spend a lot more time on the social network, generating more data to help Facebook improve its ad targeting. For HTC, which has struggled to remain relevant with smartphone buyers, being the first handset maker to include Home from the get-go is a nice coup.

There isn’t that much to say about the First’s hardware. It looks like other nicely designed midrange smartphone, with rounded corners and a soft-feeling plastic back and sides. The only physical indication that there’s anything different about this handset is a tiny Facebook logo on the back, alongside those of HTC and AT&T. It has a 4.3-inch touchscreen and a ho-hum five-megapixel camera, and it generally felt zippy over AT&T’s 4G network. For $99, with a two-year AT&T contract, it’s a decent smartphone.

Turning it on, however, makes clear that this is not your average Android phone. Facebook status updates fill the home and lock screens with text, links, and images; you can either let them rotate on their own or swipe to see the next one. A quick double-tap lets you “like” a post, and you can tap near the bottom of the screen to post a comment.

The coolest part of Home is the tiny, circular “Chat Heads” that appear on the screen when you’re having a conversation via Facebook Messenger or SMS. They conveniently stack on top of each other when you have several conversations going at once, and you can tap on the stack to get back to a conversation, or swipe to move it somewhere else on the screen (they always stick to the margins, though). Chat Heads remain overlaid on any app you’re using, so you can look up directions or check e-mail without having to find your way back to the conversation. This is especially helpful when you need to hunt down information online during a chat.

But Facebook’s Home is not without problems. The first thing I noticed was the age of the status updates—frankly, they seemed pretty stale, with many from several hours ago or even the previous day. Tapping on friends’ user icons to get to their full profile within the Facebook app revealed newer updates that Facebook, presumably, thought weren’t as relevant to me or weren’t appropriate to be displayed prominently on my phone.

Parts of Home also feel needlessly complicated. For example, accessing several main functions requires pressing a finger on a tiny, circular version of your Facebook profile photo that resides near the bottom of the screen (if this is an image of yourself, then you’ll be staring at your own face throughout the day) and then dragging it in a particular direction to select the function. Dragging up, for example, selects Home’s app launcher, which houses your favorite apps and offers shortcuts for posting Facebook status updates. It seemed a shame that Home has relegated all my other apps to oblivion. And wouldn’t it be easier to just let me double-tap or slide my own face downward to update my status?

It also seemed odd that by default Home obscures the network signal, battery icon, and clock at the very top of the screen. For me, this is pretty important information—more important than even a cute photo of my friend’s baby.

Fortunately, you can make some modifications to Home, such as bringing back the status bar and showing the First’s Android lock screen rather than the Home version. You can even turn Home off completely, if you so desire.

Thanks to Facebook Home, the HTC First makes it very easy to see and respond to status updates and carry on conversations with friends. With more than a billion Facebook users out there, no doubt plenty of them will be willing to install Home on their Android phone or buy the First. But I suspect that for the majority of us, the app’s immersive social experience—much less a phone devoted to it—will feel a little unnecessary.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513566/the-first-facebook-phone-a-little-too-much-information

Climate Change: The Moral Choices

The effects of global warming will persist for hundreds of years. What are our responsibilities and duties today to help safeguard the distant future? That is the question ethicists are now asking.

By David Rotman on April 11, 2013

illustration of couple lying on stark beach with smoke stack in background

One of the defining characteristics of climate change is poorly appreciated by most people: the higher temperatures and other effects induced by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will persist for a very long time. Scientists have long realized that carbon dioxide emitted during the burning of fossil fuels tends to linger in the atmosphere for extended periods, even for centuries. Over the last few years, researchers have calculated that some of the resulting changes to the earth’s climate, including increased temperature, are more persistent still: even if emissions are abruptly ended and carbon dioxide levels gradually drop, the temperature will stubbornly remain elevated for a thousand years or more. The earth’s thermostat is essentially being turned up and there are no readily foreseeable ways to turn it back down; even risky geoengineering schemes would at best offset the higher temperatures only temporarily.

It’s a shocking realization, especially given how little progress has been made in slowing carbon dioxide emissions. But it is precisely the long-term nature of the problem that makes it so urgent for us to limit emissions as quickly and radically as possible. To have a decent chance of meeting the widely accepted international goal of keeping warming at or below 2 °C, emissions need to be cut substantially over the next few years. By 2050 they must be reduced by half or more from 2009 levels.

The mismatch between when we need to act and when many of the benefits will accrue helps to explain why climate change is such a politically and economically thorny problem. How do you convince people and governments to invest in a far-off future? Clearly, it is not a problem that can easily be addressed by most politicians, given the immediate and pressing needs of their constituents. Because it involves defining and understanding our responsibilities to future generations, our action (or inaction) on climate change falls squarely into the realm of moral and political philosophy.

Over the last few years a small but growing number of writers have begun to wrestle with some profound questions. What ethical guidelines should economists follow when evaluating today’s costs against future benefits? How should we weigh uncertainties, including the risks of catastrophic changes wrought by global warming? Would geoengineering be ethical? How does climate change affect our perception of the world and our future role in it? The conclusions they’ve reached are nuanced and can turn on esoteric definitions of terms such as “justice” and “moral good.” But their reasoning often provides keen insights into today’s most pressing policy questions.

Things Reviewed:

  Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World 
John Broome
 W.W. Norton, 2012
Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering
Clive Hamilton
 Yale University Press, 2013  
A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change 
Stephen M. Gardiner
 Oxford University Press, 2011

Future Value
In Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, John Broome, a moral philosopher at the University of Oxford, explains the methods and arguments that help us understand the ethical implications of global warming, and he demonstrates why this reasoning can offer useful insights into how we should act. Trained in economics at MIT, Broome is particularly interested in assessing the ethical judgments made by economists. “Economists recognized, say, 50 years ago that economics is based on ethical assumptions,” he says. “But a number of them seem to have forgotten that in recent decades. They think what they do is somehow in an ‘ethic-free zone.’ And that plainly isn’t so. And climate change makes that obvious.”

One of the most controversial issues in economic analysis of climate-change policy is how to weigh the cost of implementing changes now against the benefits that future generations will realize—or the harm they will avoid. It might be supposed that we should do everything we can possibly do now, but that would probably be wrong, suggests Broome, since extremely radical action would have such negative consequences for those alive today that the effects would be felt for generations. Broome wrestles with how to balance these factors in an ethically responsible way, concluding that economists are, in general, right in adopting so-called cost-benefit analyses to evaluate actions on climate change. But he stresses that the ethical assumptions underlying such analyses are critical—and that economists often ignore or misunderstand them.

Even if people are richer in the future, climate change might reduce the quality of their lives.

A standard tool in cost-benefit analysis is what economists call the discount rate, which makes it possible to apply a value today to an investment that won’t pay off until some future date. In Broome’s example, if the discount rate is 6 percent per year, you could buy a given amount of rice now, but you should pay 94 percent of that price today if it were to be delivered in a year or 83.06 percent if it were to be delivered in three years. The basic idea is that people will be richer in the future as economies keep growing, so a given amount of a commodity or money will have less value than it has now. The higher the discount rate, the less value is assigned to a future commodity.

The way economists calculate discount rates has enormous implications for energy policy. In 2006, Nicholas Stern, a prominent economist at the London School of Economics and former chief economist of the World Bank, published “The Economics of Climate Change,” an influential report that called for immediate and significant spending (he has more recently called for even larger investments; see “Q&A with Nicholas Stern.”) Stern used an unconventionally low discount rate of 1.4 percent, which led him to place a high value on the future benefits of today’s investments to address climate change. He was immediately attacked by a number of academic economists. Most notably, William Nordhaus of Yale University published A Question of Balance, in which he argued that the appropriate discount rate should be about 5 percent. Nordhaus thus concluded that spending to deal with climate change should be much more gradual, and that much of it should be delayed for several decades.

Typically, economists calculate the discount rate by using money markets to determine the expected return on capital. The reasoning is that the market is the most democratic means of assigning value. But while that practice might work well to account for the value of commodities, Broome argues that calculating the discount rate for action on climate change is far more complex. For one thing, the conventional method doesn’t fully account for the possibility that even if people are richer in the future, climate change might reduce the quality of their lives in other important ways—and thus it underestimates the value of current investments. Broome ends up supporting a rate similar to Stern’s.
But his larger point is, more simply, that even such quantitative economic evaluations need to fully incorporate moral principles.

The discount rate is a matter of the value of future people’s benefits compared to our own. More than anything else, it determines what sacrifices the present generation should make for the sake of the future. This is a moral matter.

Broome also ponders the implications of how we think about extreme risk. Most people accept that it is worthwhile to invest in avoiding a particularly onerous outcome, even if it is not a likely one. That’s why we buy fire extinguishers and home fire insurance, even though a fire is unlikely. But how should we value the ability to avoid a catastrophic outcome that is very improbable? Some leading economists have begun arguing that heading off even the remote chance of such outcomes should be the main object of climate-change policy. Not surprisingly, Broome calls for using moral principles to evaluate just how bad various outcomes could be and how much we should concentrate on avoiding them. That means making difficult decisions about the value of human lives and of natural systems; it also means calculating how “bad” it would be if climate change reduced the size of the human population. “Deciding whether it will be very, very bad takes ethical analysis,” he says.

Broome’s focus on the reasoning of economists is not arbitrary. Economists have “largely been in the driver’s seat” in guiding governments’ policies on climate change, he says. “But they don’t always get their ethical foundations right.” By not fully accounting for people’s future well-being and such difficult-to-quantify values as the beauty of nature, Broome says, many economists have seriously underestimated how much we should be spending now to address climate change.

What Would God Do?

In his 2010 book, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia, argues that it is already too late to stop many of the dire consequences of global warming and that we’re almost sure to make it far, far worse.

After that book was published, Hamilton says, he became convinced that the “growing gap” between the widely accepted scientific evidence for the dangers of global warming and the lack of any political progress toward addressing the problem would increase the pressure to view geoengineering as a feasible option. He expects it to become “the dominant issue in climate-change discussions within the next five to 10 years.” So in his newest book, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, Hamilton takes a critical look at various geoengineering proposals, such as the use of sulfur particles or manmade materials to partially block the sun (see “A Cheap and Easy Plan to Stop Global Warming.”) He is highly skeptical of any such schemes to rejigger the earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change and deeply suspicious of the motivations of many of its advocates.

Hamilton uses the term “playing God” to describe the hubris of some of the people suggesting geoengineering. He doubts we would be very good at it, or very fair in applying a technology that would be likely to harm some people and help others. Perhaps most damning, he says that it raises moral problems—and strains common sense—to propose using such risky measures because we have failed to tackle climate change with existing technologies.

If humans were sufficiently omniscient and omnipotent, would we, like God, use climate engineering methods benevolently? Earth system science cannot answer this question, but it hardly needs to, for we know the answer already. Given that humans are proposing to engineer the climate because of a cascade of institutional failings and self-interested behaviours, any suggestions that deployment of a solar shield would be done in a way that fulfilled the strongest principles of justice and compassion would lack credibility, to say the least.

In Hamilton’s thinking, geoengineering is the latest example of our hope that “techno-fixes” will rescue us from global warming. He points to large—and, he says, largely fruitless—investments in carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a way to negate the emissions from burning coal and writes that the “false promise” of CCS has contributed to a “lost decade in responding to climate change.” The problem is not only that such “energy miracles” are unlikely to work as advocates hope but that the prospect of them presents a moral hazard, tempting people to persist in risky actions without expecting dire consequences. What’s more, says Hamilton, relying on techno-fixes ignores the underlying economic, political, and ethical failures that have produced the climate-change crisis in the first place.

More broadly, Hamilton emphasizes the “astonishing ethical implications” of climate change over the long term—and of what would-be geoengineers are proposing. We’re at “a historical point,” he says. “We need to reopen the question of who we are as a species and what kind of a creature we have become.” Yet the attentive reader will note that Hamilton doesn’t rule out geoengineering in the future, if the situation becomes desperate. Rather, he calls on us to examine the economic and political motivations of geoengineering advocates and to understand that trying to engineer the climate reflects a misplaced faith in technology’s ability to solve political and social problems.

We have barely begun to grapple with the moral issues related to climate change.

In A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen M. Gardiner reaches similar conclusions after a far different type of analysis. Unlike Hamilton, Gardiner, a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, has little interest in the players and politics behind geoengineering. Instead, he rigorously analyzes the moral justifications for considering the technology.

In particular, he questions the simplistic reasoning that since geoengineering could turn out to be the “lesser evil” in some future climate emergency, we should be researching it now to understand the technology and its risks. That argument conceals many ethical challenges, he contends. Is it ethical of us to expect a future generation to take on the dangers and costs of geoengineering because we have failed to address climate change? And wouldn’t a large research push on geoengineering just increase the unfortunate possibility that it will be used?

Crosswinds

Though they reflect very different interests and objectives, these books, taken together, begin to shed light on why climate change has been such a difficult problem to address and even define. After all, if it is fundamentally a moral issue, then simple economic or technology-based solutions will understandably fall short.

What’s more, climate change poses particularly tough moral problems. The title of Gardiner’s book refers to the convergence of three separate moral “storms,” or “obstacles to our ability to behave ethically.” The biggest is the way future generations are at the mercy of current ones —what he sometimes calls generational buck-passing. The others involve the different impacts of climate change around the world and among different populations, and the prospect that theoretical uncertainties in areas such as intergenerational ethics and climate science will make it difficult for us to act. Gardiner spends nearly 500 pages trying to map the crosswinds of these storms, concluding that “it will not be easy for us to emerge morally unscathed.”

Still, a clear first step would be to acknowledge the moral issues associated with climate change and the likely need for some painful decisions. Gardiner rightly points out that much of the public debate is dominated by “technological and social optimists” who argue for “win-win” solutions that will allow us to address the problem without any economic sacrifices or hard ethical choices. Might green energy simply solve the problem, not only for us but for future generations? We’re beginning to know the answer; a clean-tech revolution hasn’t come close to happening, in part because it would necessarily mean making difficult choices. What’s more, says Gardiner, clinging to that hope obscures the real reasons we need to do something about climate change:

More generally, the current focus on the green energy revolution rationale puts pressure in the wrong place. The dominant reason for acting on climate change is not that it would make us better off. It is that not acting involves taking advantage of the poor, the future, and nature … The green revolution claim runs the risk of obscuring what is at stake in climate change, and in a way that undercuts motivation. The key point is that we should act on climate change even if doing so does not make us better off: indeed, even if it may make us significantly worse off. If we hide or dilute the moral issues, then this important truth is lost, and the prospects for ethically defensible action diminish.

We have barely begun to grapple with the moral issues related to climate change. Indeed, few are even likely to accept the basic role that ethical issues should play in our policy decisions, and certainly our responsibilities to the distant future are seldom part of the public debate. But given the convincing evidence climate scientists have presented that our actions over the next several decades will have direct consequences for generations who will live many years from now, we must consider the moral dimensions of our response. As Gardiner puts it at the end of his book: “The time to think seriously about the future of humanity is upon us.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/513526/climate-change-the-moral-choices

A Startup’s Nanowire Ink Lifts Solar Cell Efficiency

Sol Voltaics plans to make a nanowire-laden ink to boost solar panel efficiency using a rapid manufacturing process.

By Martin LaMonica on April 10, 2013

Ink filled with microscopic semiconductors called nanowires could make solar power cheaper by boosting the efficiency of solar panels by 25 percent, without adding much cost to manufacturing, says Sol Voltaics, a startup that has raised $11 million, and which this week announced its intention to commercialize the ink.

The ink is based on two advances from Lund University in Sweden. Professor Lars Samuelson demonstrated that nanowires can improve the efficiency of solar cells, and he developed a new way to manufacture nanowires that could make them practical to use.

Increasing solar cell efficiency is one of the most effective ways to reduce the cost of solar power, since it can lower the cost per watt of solar panels as well as reduce installation costs, because fewer solar panels would be needed (see “Alta Devices: Finding a Solar Solution”).

Lund, Sweden-based Sol Voltaics plans to develop equipment to produce nanowire ink, and then sell it to existing manufacturers. The ink is expected to boost efficiency by helping solar cells absorb more sunlight.
Research in making nanowires for solar photovoltaics has been going on for years, but fabricating nanowires has never been done in an economical way (see “Nanowires Suck Up Light from Around Them” and “How to Double the Power of Solar Panels”). Nanowires are usually grown on a substrate in a batch process that is too expensive for large-scale production.

The Lund University team lead by Samuelson has developed an alternative method that does away with the substrate. It starts by vaporizing gold to produce aerosol nanoparticles, which flow into a tube-shaped furnace along with two other gases. The gold serves as a seed that catalyzes a reaction with the gases to form gallium arsenide nanowires. In a paper published in Nature last December, the Lund researchers said that the process, called aerotaxy, can grow gallium arsenide nanowires 20 to 1,000 faster than batch deposition methods. By controlling temperature and reaction time, they can control the dimensions of the nanowires, which is key to optimizing their performance for solar cells.

Brian Korgel, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, says aerotaxy “has the potential to be scaled to a continuous process.” Making large volumes would overcome one of the biggest technical challenges in scaling up gas-phase nanowire production, he says.

In a separate paper in Science earlier this year, the same researchers at Lund University showed that arrays of these nanowires made with the aerotaxy method improved the efficiency of indium phosphide solar cells by 13.8 percent by trapping more light.

The next step for Sol Voltaics is to demonstrate that the effect also works on silicon solar cells, the most common type, says CEO Dave Epstein. After it does that, it intends to develop equipment to manufacture the nanowires. He estimates that the ink would add one or two cents per watt to production costs—it currently costs less than 75 cents per watt to make solar panels. “It only takes one gram of nanowires to cover a square meter of a silicon solar panel, so they only need a very small amount of material,” he says.

“Every indication is that even if there will be an additional cost, the increased efficiency will far outweigh the cost,” says Alf Bjørseth, the founder of REC Solar and an investor in Sol Voltaics.

If the nanowire-ink-on-silicon approach is effective, the company plans to begin small-scale production in 2015. It expects to need $50 million—much less than a full-scale solar factory—to produce at commercial scale, since it’s only selling an add-on product.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513396/a-startups-nanowire-ink-lifts-solar-cell-efficiency

The Facebook Phone Is Finally Here, but Who Wants It?

The appeal of Facebook’s new phone software may be limited to hardcore users.

By Rachel Metz on April 4, 2013

The Facebook Home lock screen, shown here on a device apparently belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, features images posted by Facebook friends.

On Thursday morning, Mark Zuckerberg stood smiling in front of a crowd of journalists and employees at Facebook’s headquarters and put months of rumors to an end. “Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone,” he said, referring to long-swirling speculation that the social network was secretly developing a device to rival the iPhone. He immediately clarified, adding, “More accurately, we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great, simple, social device.”

Zuckerberg proceeded to unveil an app called "Home" that takes over the home and lock screen of Android smartphones, essentially building functionality around the social network. Home’s “cover feed,” for example, fills the home and lock screens with status updates from Facebook friends, which you can double-tap to “like.” Notifications shown on these screens include a picture of the friend who posted each of them, and Facebook messages and SMSs turn into “chat heads”—headshots that float in bubbles on a phone’s display, making it easy to carry on conversations while using apps.

Home will be available for free download on April 12 and will initially be available on just a handful of smartphones that run the latest versions of Google’s Android software. There actually will be a “Facebook phone,” too: The HTC First, which comes with Home integration and runs on AT&T’s network. It will also be available April 12, and will cost $100 with a two-year wireless service contract.
The app makes a lot of sense for Facebook, and fits in with its much-mentioned “mobile first” strategy. But now that the Facebook phone is here, it’s not altogether clear how many of its billion-plus users will really want it.

Home, as Zuckerberg and several other Facebook executives made clear, makes your phone about people, rather than about apps. So, if you set it as your default home screen, it’s always there, showing full-screen status updates from your friends all of the time. Even if you spend a lot of time using Facebook on your phone—and you probably do, since as Zuckerberg pointed out, about a quarter of the time we spend on our phones is devoted to checking Facebook and Instagram—Home is a big change.

Ramon Llamas, a mobile analyst at research company IDC and self-described Facebook lurker, doesn’t see himself using Home immediately. But he does believe it will appeal to “Facebook fanboys and fangirls”—those already checking Facebook on their smartphones many times a day. “There are some avid users out there who are going to be like, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t mind upgrading to that,’ ” he says.

Home comes with some innovative features. The “chat heads” feature presents people you’re sending messages with through Facebook or via SMS as little bubbles that you can move across your smartphone’s display, and they appear atop any app you open. This makes it easier to switch back and forth between, say, getting a map to the movies and letting your friend know where to meet you by the theater. Because of this sort of easy access, Gartner analyst Brian Blau expects many regular Facebook users to give the app a try.

But since Home doesn’t offer an easy way to toggle back to the built-in Android home-screen experience, it might be offputting to those who already like the Android experience as it is.“Just as there are a number of Facebook fanboys and fangirls, there’s also a terrific number of Android fanboys and fangirls,” Llamas points out.

Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, thinks it could be a tough sell for another reason. While Home will make it easier to share information with friends, it will also allow the social network to collect more data about what you’re doing on Facebook. And since Facebook depends on user-targeted ads for revenue, eventually, Home will include ads, too.

“That presents the biggest obstacle to success for this experiment: Facebook’s objectives and users’ are once again in conflict. Users don’t want more advertising or tracking, and Facebook wants to do more of both,” Dawson said in a statement.

Regardless, Home won’t even be available to everyone for a while. At the start, it will only be built into the aforementioned HTC First, and available for download on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, and Samsung Galaxy Note II (it will also work on the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 when those are available). A version of Home for Android tablets is coming in a few months, Facebook says. There is no sign that an app like Home will be made available for iPhone users.

At least one benefit to all the data Facebook will gather is that Zuckerberg will quickly discover how many of them “Like” his update to the modern smartphone.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513341/the-facebook-phone-is-finally-here-but-who-wants-it

Pages

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Google tries to use its buying clout to prod utilities to offer renewable energy option.

An easy-to-use EEG cap could expand the number of ways to interact with your mobile devices.

Improved battery life and durability could be big selling points for new phones from Motorola.

The FBI could use software to help identify suspects, and more advanced techniques are around the corner.

Your genome may not change, but your microbiome will.

Slumping PC sales and a changing server market are maiming Intel. But its plan to sell services for the home’s biggest screen is a long shot.

An International Energy Agency report calls for more research, carbon price, to help renewables compete.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

An enhanced geothermal project fractures hot rocks at unproductive wells, an approach with low financial risk.

The way we view online recipes reveals how our eating habits change over time, say computational sociologists.

Interactions between hundreds of wind turbines make power output difficult to predict.

Ads that follow you from one website to another are increasingly common, but in the rush for more tailored advertising, age-old wisdom may be lost.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Completely autonomous vehicles will remain a fantasy for years. Until they’re here, we need technology that enhances human drivers’ abilities rather than making those abilities increasingly obsolete.

Storing video and other files more intelligently reduces the demand on servers in a data center.

Currencies designed to fix perceived flaws in Bitcoin could lead to competition that makes the idea of digital “cryptocurrency” stick.

CrashAlert, created by University of Manitoba researchers, could make it easier to walk and text without smacking into things.

First Solar’s strong finances are helping fund innovation and drive down the cost of solar power.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

The trickiest thing about the brain mapping project might be that we don’t even know what we’re trying to learn.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Data that shows where people live, work, and play is being sold to businesses and city planners, as mobile operators seek new sources of revenue.

It sounds cool, but only a select few such as Ryan Seacrest get to play with Twitter’s music app for now.

Mice tap into their own neural reward circuits with the help of a new optogenetics device.

Philips seeks to replace florescent tube light with an LED using technology planned for other types of bulbs.

Some of Silicon Valley’s best-known venture funds have backed OpenCoin, a startup with a new digital currency called Ripple.

The new Facebook-centric Android app for smartphones builds on other efforts to court mobile users internationally.

The HTC First, which features Facebook’s new Home interface, will appeal only to the most devoted of Facebook users.

The effects of global warming will persist for hundreds of years. What are our responsibilities and duties today to help safeguard the distant future? That is the question ethicists are now asking.

Sol Voltaics plans to make a nanowire-laden ink to boost solar panel efficiency using a rapid manufacturing process.

The appeal of Facebook’s new phone software may be limited to hardcore users.