Shell Exec Says Oil Companies Might Become Carbon Capture Ones

An expert from Shell says that oil companies, with their deep knowledge of geophysics, are well-suited to pioneer carbon capture and storage technology.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 9, 2013

Why It Matters

Carbon capture and storage could help reduce emissions, but it will require huge resources.

Dirk Smit speaking today at the EmTech conference at MIT.

Oil companies’ expertise in geophysics might be invaluable in addressing climate change and other civilization-scale challenges, according to Dirk Smit, vice president of exploration technology at Royal Dutch Shell.

Speaking on the sidelines of MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference today, Smit described a future in which fossil fuels provide a smaller fraction of the world’s energy needs—not because the world will run out of them but because a range of factors, including improved technology and concerns about climate change, make alternatives to fossil fuels more competitive.

Fossil fuels will certainly not run out anytime soon. Advances in deep sea drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” are opening up large new fossil fuel resources, providing enough natural gas to last, theoretically, 230 years.

And while it might seem like an odd reversal for oil companies to get into the business of reducing emissions, Smit believes oil companies could play an important role. He said their expertise in geophysics and in managing extremely large-scale operations could be key to both addressing water scarcity and helping to capture and store carbon dioxide to limit climate change.

Smit’s job is to use technology to help oil companies find and extract ever more oil and gas by better understanding what happens underground. But if countries get serious about preventing climate change, much of what the oil companies discover will need to stay underground, according to a recently released report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see “Technology Is Moving Too Slowly to Make Climate-Change Target”).

Smit says that Shell’s efforts to understand geophysics could play an important role in such a scenario. And if it is necessary to pump carbon dioxide underground to deal with climate change, he says, no one has a better head start on knowing how to do this than oil companies. He notes that there are still big questions about carbon capture and storage, or CCS—including how long the carbon dioxide can be stored. But Shell’s experience in characterizing reservoirs could help answer those questions. “Shell doesn’t have all the answers,” he says, “but it’s not starting from scratch.”

Shell also has experience injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide underground as part of its efforts to extract more oil. And it is already developing some large-scale CCS projects (see “Can Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands?”). The scale of CCS needed to make a dent in carbon emissions would, however, need to be on the same scale as the oil and gas industry’s current operations in extracting and transporting fossil fuels.

Earlier this month in a speech for the Oil & Money Conference in London, Shell’s CEO Peter Voser pointed to CCS—along with biofuels and natural gas for transportation—as a promising area for Shell. He said, “I’m not suggesting these opportunities will be easy, but they could be the bedrock of our future competitiveness.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519436/shell-exec-says-oil-companies-might-become-carbon-capture-ones/

Memory Is Inherently Fallible, And That's a Good Thing

Neuroscientists Daniela Schiller says every time you recall a memory, it changes, and that can be a useful thing. 

Susan Young

October 9, 2013

How much can you trust your memory? Not a whole lot, according to Daniela Schiller, a Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist. To a packed audience at MIT Technology Review’s 2013 EmTech conference on Wednesday, Schiller explained how research in her lab and others is uncovering how memories are tweaked each time they are recalled.

“This decade is the time of a revolution in the way we perceive memory,” Schiller told attendees. For the previous century, the accepted view was that once captured and stored in neural circuits in the brain, a memory could be retrieved but could not be rewritten. In that view, every time an experience is relived, it is the same, over and over.

Now, however, researchers understand that that the process of recalling a memory actually changes it. “Each time you retrieve a memory it undergoes this storage process,” Schiller told me over the phone the day before EmTech. That means the memory is in an unstable state, rewritten and remodeled every time it is retrieved.

“We don’t really remember the original; we remember the revised version,” she said.

So how much can we trust our memory? Probably less than most of us do. “Every day we create false memories,” said Schiller. Which means we put way too much faith in memory in the legal system. “You can influence eyewitness testimony just by investigating an event,” she said. And when you disagree with your spouse about the details of an event that happened 10 years ago, you both could be wrong.

But there is a positive side to our moldable memories. The memory of traumatic events plague many lives and can even lead to psychiatric illness. The new understanding of memories means they can be “updated.” Schiller says that if you block the memory storage process, you might be able to eliminate the memory. Or, if you recall a painful memory in a context of positive emotion, the tenor of that negative experience could change. “We aren’t a slave to our past,” said Schiller. “If you are stuck with a bad memory, it is just one version; it’s not exactly the truth and you can revise it,” she said (see “Repairing Bad Memories”).

So how can we know the reality of a memory? Look to art, said Schiller. “Art has a very intimate relationship with memory,” she said. “The only way to keep memories as they are … is to carve them into a story or art form that captures the original emotion.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520156/memory-is-inherently-fallible-and-thats-a-good-thing/

Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet

A Microsoft researcher proposes “big data due process” so citizens can learn how data analytics were used against them.

• By David Talbot on October 9, 2013

Why It Matters

Facebook, Twitter, e-commerce sites, and many other online sources are gathering and aggregating personal data.

Data divide: Kate Crawford speaking today at the EmTech conference at MIT.

Data analytics are being used to implement a subtle form of discrimination, while anonymous data sets can be mined to reveal health data and other private information, a Microsoft researcher warned this morning at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.

Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, argued that these problems could be addressed with new legal approaches to the use of personal data.

In a new paper, she and a colleague propose a system of “due process” that would give people more legal rights to understand how data analytics are used in determinations made against them, such as denial of health insurance or a job. “It’s the very start of a conversation about how to do this better,” Crawford, who is also a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, said in an interview before the event. “People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination—a form of data redlining.”

Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together

OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities.

• By Rachel Metz on October 9, 2013

Why It Matters

As more devices emerge that can connect to the Web, we’ll need new technology to make these devices easier to use and able to connect to each other.

Open sesame: OpenRemote’s software can connect and automate all kinds of devices. You can use its software to design a custom device controller.

If you buy several Internet-connected home gadgets—say, a “smart” thermostat, “smart” door lock, and “smart” window blinds—you’ll likely have to control each one with a separate app, meaning it exists in its own little silo.

That’s not how Elier Ramirez does it. In his home, an iPad app controls his lights, ceiling fans, and TV and stereo. Pressing a single button within the app can shut off all his lights and gadgets when he leaves.

Ramirez can tap a lamp in an image to turn an actual lamp off and on in his apartment, and at the same time he’ll see the picture on the tablet’s screen go dark or become illuminated. Ramirez also set up a presence-sensing feature that uses his cell phone to determine if he’s home (it checks whether or not he has connected to his home Wi-Fi network). This can automatically turn on the lights if he’s there. Ramirez runs the whole setup from a small computer in his home.

EmTech 2013: One Way Twitter Could Make Money: Instant Replays (With Ads)

Twitter could replay specific ad-supported replays of TV content that people you follow just tweeted about.

David Talbot

October 9, 2013

As it plans for its first stock offering, how will Twitter make more money?  One idea aired this morning at EmTech, MIT Technology Review’s annual conference on emerging technologies, after a talk by Deb Roy, Twitter’s chief media scientist. His MIT spinout company, Bluefin Labs (see “A Social Media Decoder”), was bought by Twitter this year.

Many people tweet about exciting moments during televised sports games, but people seeting the tweets might have missed the action on TV.  In response to a question from Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review’s publisher (and conference emcee), Roy replied: “In the example I showed you with ESPN and the basketball clip, a very natural thing one could do is insert a pre-roll piece of advertising [so that] along with a clip you just missed on TV, there could be a piece of sponsorship. That could be revenue shared between ESPN and Twitter.”

Already Twitter has been forging agreements under its Amplify program, which lets content owners distribute programming in Twitter feeds with ads embedded. Last month Reuters reported that the NFL was making a similar-sounding deal with Twitter, providing sponsored Tweets with sports highlights.

Presumably, as this strategy evolves, Twitter users could start to see very specific sponsored tweets closely married to a piece of TV content that someone they followed just tweeted about.  The targeting of such sponsored tweets could be further refined using insights about the users’ interests, gleaned from his tweets, the profiles of people he follows, and other sources (see “A Taste of Future Twitter Technologies”).
 

But that’s just an educated guess. Twitter is in its pre-IPO quiet period, and we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520121/at-emtech-how-twitter-will-make-money/

Want to Speak Dothraki? Duolingo Can Now Help

Language-learning site Duolingo will let volunteers build courses for languages like Arabic, Russian, and even Dothraki. 

Rachel Metz

October 9, 2013

Since last year, Duolingo has offered free online lessons in a smattering of languages—currently, just six of them, including English, Spanish, and French—through which users learn while also translating texts on the Web. The company often gets requests for more languages, but it’s time-consuming and costly to add each new one, and many of the ones users want won’t bring in much revenue, which comes from companies paying Duolingo for its text-translation services.

Now Duolingo is hoping to quickly ramp up the number of courses it offers without breaking the bank by rolling out a language incubator that allows volunteers to add all kinds of new tongues, ranging from widely-spoken ones like Arabic and Chinese to lesser-known ones like Kichwa to fictional ones like Elvish and Dothraki, that other users can then learn for free.

Duolingo cocreator and CEO Luis von Ahn says that Duolingo will allow people to apply to serve as volunteer moderators for each language, and the startup will choose a moderator who can then choose others to help contribute to the language course. Based on the company’s user base, which includes 10 million people—26 percent of them in the U.S.—the site is likely to have plenty of volunteers.

In theory, this could make it much faster to add each language. Von Ahn says it currently takes one paid person four months to add each language to Duolingo (a course, he says, is meant to give a user an intermediate-to-high understanding of a given language). Yet he suspects one or two moderators, working with five or six volunteers, may be able to complete a new language course in about a month. He expects about 10 languages, including Chinese and Russian, to be added within the first four or five months of the incubator’s life.

I’d guess it will be hard to maintain quality, at least initially, though it’s certainly possible that, similar to Wikipedia’s slow rise as an acceptable knowledge source, Duolingo’s crowd-sourced language Incubator will become an acceptable way to learn. Von Ahn obviously can’t know for sure how well it will work at this point, but he says Duolingo will be able to measure factors like how much of each course users complete, and if they return to the site.

He says the moderators will use Duolingo’s existing language-course blueprint, which starts with some basic words, concepts, and phrases and moves on from there. He says that while the languages Duolingo staff have added to the site include exercises where users translate online texts, this won’t initially be a part of the crowdsourced language courses.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520001/want-to-speak-dothraki-duolingo-can-now-help/

Twitter Datastream Used to Predict Flu Outbreaks

The rate at which people post flu-related tweets could become a powerful tool in the battle to spot epidemics earlier, say computer scientists 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 9, 2013

Back in 2008, Google launched its now famous flu trends website. It works on the hypothesis that people make more flu-related search queries when they are suffering from the illness than when they are healthy. So counting the number of flu-related search queries in a given country gives a good indication of how the virus is spreading.

The predictions are pretty good. The data generally closely matches that produced by government organisations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US. Indeed, in some cases, it has been able to spot an incipient epidemic more than a week before the CDC.

Chemistry Nobel Goes to Work that Could Help Make Cars More Efficient

Nobel Prize for Chemistry celebrates detailed simulations of combustion. 

Kevin Bullis

October 9, 2013

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three researchers who developed powerful computer models that have been used, among other things, to model combustion.

Computer models have become essential to improving the efficiency and emissions of internal combustion engines, gas turbines, and other equipment that depends on combustion. For example, they allow researchers to make subtle changes to the shape of pistons to ensure that fuel and air mix properly and burn cleanly, and at just the right rate. Or to understand how it’s possible to enhance efficiency by burning more than one fuel (see “Exploding Engine Could Reduce Fuel Consumption” and “Swiss Researchers Make an 80-mpg Hybrid”).

The awardees are Martin Karplus, of Université de Strasbourg and Harvard University, Michael Levitt from Stanford University, and Arieh Warshel from the University of Southern California.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520111/chemistry-nobel-goes-to-work-that-could-help-make-cars-more-efficient/

Ditching the Transmission Allowed Honda’s Accord Hybrid to Hit 50 MPG

Honda’s Hybrid Accord uses electric motors in lieu of all but one gear.

Kevin Bullis

October 9, 2013

Honda says it has found a way to improve the efficiency of hybrids—and in all likelihood significantly lower the cost to build them. For its new Honda Accord Hybrid, which goes on sale across the U.S. at the end of the month, it’s done away with the car’s transmission.

Hybrids could help automakers meet fuel economy regulations, but their sales are limited by high costs, which are as much as $5,000 more than conventional cars. It may eventually be possible to reduce the price gap to zero, according to a spokesperson from Honda.

A Cure for Urban GPS: a 3-D Antenna

GPS readings in cities and indoors can be terrible. One startup has found a novel solution.

• By Tom Simonite on October 9, 2013

Why It Matters

More and more technology relies on GPS location readings, but the technology remains unreliable in dense urban areas.

Round receiver: This soccer-ball-size antenna can allow more accurate GPS readings by distinguishing signals that have come directly from a positioning satellite from those that have bounced off buildings.

A new antenna design being tested by the U.S. Air Force could make GPS significantly more reliable and able to function in dense urban areas where GPS accuracy is weak. It might even allow the technology to work indoors in some cases.

Good GPS readings are hard to get in cities because of the multipath phenomenon: signals from positioning satellites bounce off buildings and other structures. That confuses GPS receivers, which calculate their location by knowing exactly how long it took for signals to arrive from satellites overhead.

NSA’s Own Hardware Backdoors May Still Be a “Problem from Hell”

Revelations that the NSA has compromised hardware for surveillance highlights the vulnerability of computer systems to such attacks.

• By Tom Simonite on October 8, 2013

Why It Matters

That a government agency has purposely sabotaged computer hardware makes the challenges of the tactic more relevant than ever.

In 2011, General Michael Hayden, who had earlier been director of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, described the idea of computer hardware with hidden “backdoors” planted by an enemy as “the problem from hell.” This month, news reports based on leaked documents said that the NSA itself has used that tactic, working with U.S. companies to insert secret backdoors into chips and other hardware to aid its surveillance efforts.

That revelation particularly concerned security experts because Hayden’s assessment is widely held to be true. Compromised hardware is difficult, and often impossible, to detect. Hardware can do things such as access data in ways invisible to the software on a computer, even security software. The possibility that computer hardware in use around the world might be littered with NSA backdoors raises the prospect that other nations’ agencies are doing the same thing, or that groups other than the NSA might find and exploit the NSA’s backdoors. Critics of the NSA say the untraceable nature of hardware flaws, and the potential for building them into many systems, also increases the risk that intelligence agencies that place them will be tempted to exceed legal restrictions on surveillance.

First 3D Movies From a Single Pixel Camera

Single pixel cameras are revolutionising imaging. Now researchers have built one capable of tracking a moving object and creating a 3D film of its motion 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 8, 2013

Single pixel cameras are taking the world of imaging by storm. These counterintuitive devices have the ability to photograph an entire scene in 3D and at a resolution of choice using a single pixel. Some versions do not even need a lens. These resultant images are entirely free of the optical aberrations that lenses can introduce; indeed the entire scene is always in focus.

Today, Gregory Howland at the University of Rochester in New York State and a few pals take this new technique even further. These guys have built a single pixel camera capable of making 3D images, used it to create a video images and even to track a moving object for the first time.

Cleaner Long-Haul Engines Guzzle Diesel or Natural Gas

Companies are developing powerful engines that can run on natural gas together with diesel.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 8, 2013

Why It Matters

Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner than diesel, but uncertainty about future prices make shipping companies reluctant to switch.

Cheaper freight: This GE locomotive can run on both diesel and natural gas.

Technology that allows diesel engines to instead run primarily on natural gas could provide a economical way for railroads and shipping companies to shift their vast transportation systems over to natural gas.

Such a shift could lower greenhouse gas emissions, since natural gas when burned emits 15 to 20 percent less carbon dioxide than diesel. It could also save shippers money and lower the cost of shipped goods, since the natural gas boom in the United States has made natural gas far cheaper than diesel (see “Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map”).

Navigating Planet Ad Tech

A guide for marketers

• By MIT Technology Review Custom on October 7, 2013 | In partnership with Digilant

The allure of ad technology is simply the promise that, at long last, we can present the right online ad, with the right message, to the right person. For the right price.

Big Data lets us identify audiences more accurately, calculate their value, and send them customized messages instantly. This is a boon to marketers and publishers.

But it has also become something of a headache.

The crowded field of players is frustrating to navigate. And because marketers are now under pressure to reorient their strategy toward targeted, data-driven customers, they have to actually understand all of the new ad technologies out there.

“No one can afford not to know the technology, because it’s technology and analytics together that will determine if the process is working,” says Ed Montes, CEO of Digilant, a marketing technology company.
Many of the ad technology companies are training media buyers to use to use their management platform and then analyze and bid on their own.

“Teaching people to fish is better for the ecosystem than selling fish,” says Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, a large ad exchange.

An understanding of technology is also essential for publishers who want to be paid what they are worth. Only by understanding the technology can a publisher give marketers valuable specifics such as when and where an ad was posted, and the demographics and geographical distribution of the people who viewed it.

“The thing I hear from a lot of people is that the situation would be a lot better if the system were a lot simpler—more transparent about who does what, who gets paid what for what, and who contributes what looks like success,” says Tom Hespos, founder of Underscore Marketing, which develops, manages, and measures media programs for health and wellness brands.

Ultimately, marketers and publishers want to maximize ROI on advertising. And now they have tools of which previous generations of ad men and women could only dream.

But the trick is to understand how the ad technology industry can translate the digital breadcrumbs left by consumers into real-world results.

Navigating Planet Ad Tech is a new report that breaks down and demystifies the players in the ad technology sector, clearly communicating their value propositions, business models, and histories to help marketers ask the right questions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519991/navigating-planet-ad-tech/

Can Oculus Rift Turn Virtual Wonder into Commercial Reality?

Oculus Rift has heavyweight developer support, and millions of dollars of crowdsourced investment. But many of the old challenges to this new technology remain.

• By Simon Parkin on October 7, 2013

Why It Matters

If the remaining challenges can be overcome, virtual reality could revolutionize the computer interface.

Visionary device: Sergey Orlovskiy, CEO of Russian game maker Nival, uses the developer version of Oculus Rift

“This technology is going to revolutionize the way we live, learn, work, and play.”

Palmer Luckey’s tone is evangelical, persuasive, and also somehow familiar. His ardent belief that virtual reality headsets are set to alter humanity’s technological horizons is reminiscent of 1990s, when the film Lawnmower Man painted in somewhat crude pixels a vision of the future in which virtual reality (VR) dominated life. The vision quickly disappeared, not only from our movie screens but also from our cultural understanding of where technology might be taking us. Although for a few short moments our world seemed poised to retreat into the dark realms of possibility inside a helmet lined with tiny screens, soon enough that came to be seen as little more than the stuff of science fiction, like flying cars and ubiquitous jetpacks.

Obama Climate Adviser Leaves, Presumably For Something Less Hopeless

With no hope for climate legislation, all Obama can do is wait for EPA regs. No wonder his climate adviser is leaving.

Kevin Bullis
October 7, 2013

Several news outlets are reporting that Obama’s top climate adviser, Heather Zichal, is stepping down in the next few weeks. She’s been advising Obama since 2008, and took over the top climate and energy post from Carol Browner in 2011.

It’s not at all remarkable that she’s leaving–professionals can rotate through Washington pretty quickly, and it looks like her best days may already be behind her.

Zichal’s main accomplishment is helping to craft the energy plan that President Obama announced in June. Part of the plan has to do with promoting innovation, but with Congress in deadlock, as evidenced clearly now by the government shutdown, there’s little chance that the White House would have much chance with new legislation, such as for promoting R&D.

Other than that, the plan basically involves waiting around for EPA to issue regulations on power plants (see “Will Obama’s Climate Policy Spur New Energy Technologies?” and “Obama Orders EPA to Regulate Power Plants in Wide-Ranging Climate Plan”). Not much action there. It will take years, especially for the regulations on existing power plants. So it’s not surprising she’s leaving now to find something else to do.

A White House statement confirmed the reports, but did not say what Zichal is planning next.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519986/obama-climate-adviser-leaves-presumably-for-something-less-hopeless/

Where The Health Dollars Go

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519981/infographic-most-expensive-health-care-technology/

Algorithm Writes People’s Life Histories Using Twitter Stream

If you tweet about your life, a new algorithm can identify your most significant events and assemble them into an accurate life history, say the computer scientists who built it 

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 7, 2013

Twitter allows anyone to describe their life in unprecedented detail. Many accounts provide an ongoing commentary of an individual’s interests, activities and opinions. 

So it’s not hard to imagine that it’s possible to reconstruct a person’s life history by analysing their Twitter stream.

But doing this automatically is trickier than it sounds. That’s because most Twitter streams contain news of important events mixed up with entirely trivial details about events of little or no significance. The difficulty is in telling these apart.