SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IN SCOTLAND

Scotland has a large share of the EU’s not-as-yet captured wind, hydro, and tidal energy. Edinborough was the birthplace of Marine Current Turbines, MCT,

which develops turbines driven by tides and ocean currents. While it may seem counter-intuitive, Solar Hot Water heating works well despite the cloud cover. The Scottish Community and Householders Renewable Initiative, SCHRI, offers grants of up to 30% for installation of solar hot water heating systems. See also The Renewable Energy Centre and for a general laudatory discussion Renewable energy in Scotland – Wikipedia.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis on Social Networks

Excerpted from “Social Networks ,” by Nicholas Christakis on The Situationist Blog, which is a blog maintained by The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. The excerpt is long, but well worth reading. Let me first posit this question – why do some communities develop disaster-resilient networks and organizations – and others not?

In social networks, there is an interdigitation between the higher order structure and the lower order structure, which is remarkable, and which has been animating our research for the last five or ten years. I started by studying very simple dyadic networks. A pair of individuals is the simplest type of network one can imagine. And I became curious about networks and network effects in my capacity as a doctor who takes care of people who are terminally ill.

* * *

For example, one day I met with a pretty typical scenario: a woman who was dying and her daughter who was caring for her. The mother had been sick for quite a while and she had dementia. The daughter was exhausted from years of caring for her, and in the course of caring, she became so exhausted that her husband also became sick from his wife’s preoccupation with her mother. One day I got a call from the husband’s best friend, with his permission, to ask me about him. So here we have the following cascade: parent to daughter, daughter to husband, and husband to friend. That is four people — a cascade of effects through the network. And I became sort of obsessed with the notion that these little dyads of people could agglomerate to form larger structures.

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Adam Brown: political scientist/toolmaker

Entirely by happenstance – trying to find a WordPress plugin – we stumbled on the main website for Adam Brown, political scientist extraordinaire. For the geeks among our audience – he’s written WordPress plugins, a House (of representatives) elections predictor,  MediaWiki helper application, and more. Go look.

He’s also the creator of WikiSummary, the Social Science Summary Database, which summarizes academic political science publications.

Oh, and original research about voting, and other aspects of the political process. Interesting stuff.

Electric Vehicles – from EVAlbum.com

A fun visual reminder that electric vehicles, clearly an element of our clean energy future, are already a mature technology, both for those designed as electric vehicles  – and also for retrofits. Here’s a very small (and unreperesentative) sample grabbed from EVAlbum.com, which also has Classified ads , , FAQs and a generous set of categorized links – if you’re thinking about going electric, EVAlbum is a good place to start.

Sahana Talk – multidisciplinary blog

Sahana is an open-source disaster manament tool  – we’re hoping to get a copy on our servers for people to play with in short order. The link will be – sahana.popularlogistics.com (nb: we don’t even have a placeholder up yet).

In the meantime, however TalkSahana is a blog, heavy on user contributions – and just reading posts one can the attention to detail, complexity and difficulty of the database design problem they’ve undertaken.

Don’t Overpack

As S.L.A. Marshall observed shortly after the Second World War, minimizing the “soldier’s load” (literally what each individual soldier must carry) is a military technique which was learned – and sometimes forgotten and painfully re-learned as far back as the Roman Empire. From Army Field Manual 7-92, THE INFANTRY RECONNAISSANCE PLATOON AND SQUAD (AIRBORNE, AIR ASSAULT, LIGHT INFANTRY

), archived at  GlobalSecurity.org

, Section 8-8, Soldier’s Load:

8-8. SOLDIER’S LOAD

The soldier’s load is a crucial concern of the reconnaissance platoon leader. How much is carried, how far, and in what configuration are important mission considerations. The platoon leader should require soldiers to carry only mission-essential equipment. The reconnaissance platoon cannot be overloaded with equipment that covers all possible contingencies. The battalion supply system must be able to deliver contingency supplies. (For more information on load planning, calculating, and management, see FM 21-18.) (Techniques used to assist leaders and soldiers in organizing tactical loads to ensure safety and combat effective are discussed in Appendix D

.)

In other words, only so much can go in a go-bag. If you’re going to need more than that in a disaster, you need to plan further than the go-bag.

Aesthetically-pleasing anti-slip tape: Cool Tools

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools has spotted Aesthetically-pleasing anti-slip tape from Subhead Grip Stickers. While there are many brands of anti-slip tape, some variety in colors and some that also function as conspicuity tapes both bright and photoluminescent, Subhead makes them in cool colors and shapes. And if that makes more people use them where needed, it’ll make things safer and make the world a more beautiful place. Or make the world safer and moke some places and objects more attractive and at least a few worse. Because the possibilities with some of these shapes include aesthetic good and evil. Now it’s up to you.
From Subhead Premium Grip. Via Cool Tools.

SIERRA CLUB KILLS KING COAL

In a decision just made public ( full text PDF ) the EPA has ruled that it will abide by the 2007 Supreme Court decisions and limit carbon emissions from new and proposed coal plants – essentially killing off the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the foreseeable future. According to the Sierra Club “The decision means that all new and proposed coal plants nationwide must go back and address their carbon dioxide emissions.”

What’s next? Nuclear Power? Auto emissions?  Carbon Dioxide is Carbon Dioxide, whether from a coal plant, a tail pipe, or the nuclear fuel cycle. Will we see plug in hybids? Plug in hybrids running on biodiesel and methane?  Charged by PVSolar and Wind power? I think it is a matter of when, not if.  Toyota led the way with the Prius – the status car of the decade for people who care about the planet.  New taxis and limos in New York City and elsewhere must be hybrids.  Toyota is capturing the ‘Black Car’ market while Ford, with the Escape hybrid is leading the yellow cab market. In MOTOWN GM announced the Volt, a worthy successor to the EV1, and now Ford announced the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrids.

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ENERGY POLICY & PUBLIC HEALTH

There really is no such thing as “Clean Coal.” Mining coal destroys mountains, and often kills the miners.  Burning coal releases tons of carbon into the atmosphere and the oceans, and even if you could sequester the carbon, burning coal releases other pollutants, including mercury into the biosphere. The mercury makes its way into fish. This is why people, especially children and pregnant women, should not eat a lot of tuna or swordfish.  Wind, solar, geothermal, ocean current, and “negawatts,” on the other hand, really are clean energy.  Offshore wind turbines don’t release pollution. On the contrary, they create artificial reefs, which enhance fish habitat. This is also good for fishermen, the economy, etc.

Coal – Going the Way of Nuclear Power

What killed nuclear power was not Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, or the demonstrations of public opposition such as at Seabrook, NH in the late 1970’s or the Musicians United for Safe Energy concerts in New York, Sept. 19-23, 1979, (both of which I attended).

What killed nuclear power was the realization by the bankers on Wall St. that after an event like Three Mile Island their multi-billion investment very quickly became a multi-billion pile of junk with virtually zero salvage value and a tremendously negative return on investment.

And coal today?

According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory “Historically, actual capacity has been seen to be significantly less than proposed capacity. For example, the 2002 report /of the National Energy Technology Lab, NETL, of the Department of Energy, DOE/ listed 36,161 MW of proposed /coal/ capacity by the year 2007 when actually only 4,478 MW (12%) were constructed.” Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants, NETL, Office of Systems Analyses and Planning, by Erik Shuster, Feb. 18, 2008, pg, 4, 5.

Housley Carr, writing in McGraw Hill’s Engineering News-Record, reported on the impending demise of  “King Coal” Uncertainty Over Carbon has Coal Plants Stymied

with public, regulatory and lender concern growing, many proposed plants are being cancelled. Permits issued for others require offsets for their carbon emissions, while the ones that remain in permitting are being intensely challenged. The U. S. Envrionmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon-dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, the Supreme Court ruled last year, but Congress has failed to give EPA guidelines for a national policy. Three investment banks last month announced guidelines they would use to assess the risks of investment in coal-fired generation in the absense of a national policy. Further, the largest electric utility in Kansas, citing “seismic shifts in the assumptions shaping our industry,” issued a strategic plan that knocks the crown from King Coal’s head.”

Popular Logistics' Recommendations for Surgeon General, Secretary of Homeland Security, and FEMA Chief

Popular Logistics recommends that President Obama appoint Dr. Irwin Redlener as Surgeon Irwin Redlener, M.D.General, William Bratton as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Paul Maniscalco as the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We know all three to be men of intelligence and integrity. All three have strong records of leadership and delivering excellent service. Dr. Redlener and Chiefs Maniscalco and Bratton set a standard against which any nominee could be measured.

bill_bratton2.jpg

We urge that in regard to positions with national responsibility for disaster preparedness, comparison with the outgoing administration’s appointees – some with no experience at all – is useless. We’ve identified three experts with decades of experience taking responsibility for creating services where none existed, making dysfunctional systems Paul Maniscalcowork, and leading adequate organizations to excellence. We have no reservation entrusting our safety and welfare to any of them; indeed, we’re confident that, if appointed, America’s disaster and health prospects will be substantially improved.

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Daniel Bauen. "Instructables" – and the symbiosis of art and engineering

Given our cultural separations – “artists” in one place – “engineers” another – many of us – I’m guilty of this frequently – we forget how intertwined, and sometimes indistinguishable they are. Rather than make the general argument, check out Daniel Bauen, a young Atlanta-based maker and designer of things. You can look at his resume – and some brilliant pieces of work. If anyone thinks they can draw bright lines between the art and the engineering, we might have an interesting discussion. What’s beyond question is that he’s doing marvelous work. Beautiful, practical – and some so fun that I’m tempted to say that he’s a toymaker – who, in order to make what he makes – became an engineerand an artist in the process.

A motorized moving shade system for buildings – that is, roof-mounted solar panels move automatically in order to maximize shade and solar collection: (pictured left); A solar rock spinner – solar-powered when none one feels like pushing it around;

Bauen also – as a student – participated in the design of two bood-drawing devices one for pediatric and one for diabetics, designed to alleviate, if not  eliminate the pain of blood drawing.

There’s more at Daniel Bauen’a personal site and even more at his other site-  Engineerable. Continue reading →