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COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY: TECHNOLOGY POLICY '08
18th Annual CFP conference
May 20-23, 2008
Omni Hotel New Haven, CT
http://cfp2008.org/

What should the technology policy priorities of the next administration be?

As the choice of presidential candidates becomes clearer and election year moves towards a comparison of the candidates' platforms on the issues, technology policy is increasingly relevant to the forefront of public debate. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and freedom of speech, topics that were once confined to experts now appear in the mainstream of political issues. We now know that our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time as the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built.
This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is focusing on those issues at the forefront of technology policy this election year. With plenary panels on the "National Security State and the Next Administration" and "The 21st Century Panopticon?" the discussions taking place look towards our present and future priorities.
CFP: Technology Policy '08 is an opportunity to participate in shaping those issues being made into laws and regulations and those technological infrastructures being developed. Policies ranging from spyware and national security, to ISP filtering and patent reform, e-voting to electronic medical records, and more will be addressed by expert panels of technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and activists. The panel topics are listed below and full panel descriptions are available on the conference website.
The CFP: Technology Policy `08 conversation has already begun in the virtual spaces connected to the conference: the CFP community wiki, a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, and this blog. Even if you are unable to attend the conference this year, there are several opportunities to participate remotely. The guiding principles that ought to guide our policies are being debated on the conference blog -- see the 9.5 theses thread for an early example. The Yale Journal of Law and Technology is hosting a call for essays on the priorities of the next administration,. And the Workshop on Activism and Education using Social Networks has already started accumulating resources on the wiki, and will include remote participation during the conference.
Of course, if you can make it, it's even better being there in person. We look forward to seeing you in New Haven on May 20-23.


Eddan Katz
CFP: Technology Policy '08 Program Chair
http://www.cfp2008.org/

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On 25 April 2008, ESA's Jules Verne ATV was used for the first time to raise the orbit of the International Space Station. A 740-second burn of the Automated Transfer Vehicle's main engines successfully lifted the altitude of the 280-tonne Station by around 4.5 km to a height of 342 km above the Earth's surface.
After the ATV Control Centre (ATV-CC) in Toulouse, France, had 'woken up' Jules Verne ATV, the manoeuvre started at 06:22 CEST (04:22 GMT) this morning and provided a 2.65 m/s thrust using two of the ATV's four main engines. Controllers at ATV-CC closely monitored ATV's subsystems throughout the long manoeuvre.
"The Station's altitude naturally decreases with atmospheric drag. Until now this has been compensated for by performing a re-boost using the Russian Progress, the Space Shuttle or by the ISS itself," explains Alberto Novelli, ESA’s Mission Director at ATV-CC. "Today, ATV has successfully demonstrated that it too is able to perform this vital function. Only Progress and ATV can provide this high level of re-boost. ATV is unique due to the quantity of fuel available for such manoeuvres."
The re-boost manoeuvre comes just three weeks after Jules Verne ATV successfully docked with ISS on 3 April 2008 delivering 1150 kg of dry cargo, including food, clothes and equipment, as well as additional supplies of water, oxygen and fuel. Since then, the European ISS resupply spacecraft has been in dormant mode attached to the docking port on the Russian Zvezda module.


Animation of the ISS re-boost performed by Jules Verne ATV


Today's re-boost sets up the International Space Station for the arrival of Space Shuttle Discovery on the STS-124 mission to deliver the Japanese Kibo laboratory. STS-124 is currently targeted for launch on 31 May 2008. Further re-boost manoeuvres using ATV are scheduled for 12 June, 8 July and 6 August.
Jules Verne ATV is scheduled to remain docked to the International Space Station until early August. At the end of its mission, Jules Verne, loaded with up to 6.5 tonnes of material no longer required by the ISS, will undock and then burn up completely during a guided and controlled re-entry high over the Pacific Ocean.


http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMPEISZEFF....html#subhead2

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The anticipated increase of unmanned aircraft in the National Airspace System is triggering safety concerns--and points to a need to set standards, requirements and regulations for flight operations and crew training.
To that end, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Apr. 29-30 hosted an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Safety Forum in Washington, where UAS and human factors professionals identified safety issues and actions that would mitigate risks. The forum follows on the heels of NTSB's first investigation of an unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) accident--the April 2006 crash of a Predator B near Nogales, Ariz., while flying a mission for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). NTSB's review yielded nearly two dozen safety recommendations for FAA and CBP (AW&ST Oct. 22, 2007, p. 38).
UAS are a growing segment in aviation, increasingly used for such non-military applications as scientific research, and support of law enforcement, homeland security and firefighting missions.
The future skies could be filled with crewless cargo carriers flying international routes, very light jets operated remotely in all phases of flight--and importantly, an increased risk of midair and runway collisions involving manned-unmanned aircraft, according to the NTSB.

There are 200 UAS manufacturers and more than 500 aircraft systems now in existence, with 43 countries, including North Korea and Iran, developing them, according to FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute research psychologist Kenneth Williams. In addition, UAS engine power varies, and their size ranges from that of a radio-controlled model airplane to aircraft with a Boeing 737-size wingspan. Duration and mission capabilities also differ widely, and they can be flown by computer or an outside operator on the ground.
The FAA, anticipating a glut of flight requests from prospective UAS commercial operators in the next several years, has assembled a committee to develop regulations. The charter for the committee is signed and the group's first meeting is scheduled for next month, according to Doug Davis, head of FAA's UAS program office. The goal is to develop draft policies for the commercial use of UAS below a specified weight, speed and/or altitude.
"We found several market surveys that indicated that over the next seven to eight years, the preponderance of unmanned aircraft are going to be under 20 lb.," says Davis. "So, clearly, we have a market need that's driving the direction we're taking." The FAA plans initially to restrict small UAS operators to VFR flights and daylight missions. "It's a very conservative approach, to begin with, because we need to minimize the risk, while enabling an opportunity, economically, to take place," says Davis. If all goes well, rules for small UAS could be in place by 2010-11, he added.
The push for such regulations also is being driven by confusion over the distinction between small UAS and hobbyist model aircraft, which FAA traditionally does not regulate. Some operators have tried to bypass the time-consuming certificate of authorization (COA) process for UAS flights by claiming their systems qualify as model aircraft under FAA Advisory Circular 91-57, issued in 1981.
Meanwhile, the FAA is revising its UAS road map, which lays out the near-term path to one day achieving routine file-and-fly operations for UAS in the national airspace. Davis expects a limited release of this revision next month.
The systems currently only can operate in U.S. airspace if they have a COA or experimental airworthiness certificate. Davis said he doesn't expect file-and-fly operations to become a reality until 2020-25.
According to FAA, the agency issued 24 COAs in 2004, 54 in 2005, 107 in 2006, and 85 in 2007.
Janet Dobbs of the interagency committee for aviation policy said the General Services Administration unit will be developing policies for UAS next year. Asked by NTSB officials if federal agencies will increase their use of UAS, she replied, "I believe in my heart of hearts that is the future."
Several civilian government agencies discussed their use or planned use of unmanned aircraft. The Houston Police Dept. will be testing the use of Insitu's Insight system as part of a year-long airborne surveillance project growing out of evacuation route concerns in the wake of 2005's Hurricane Rita.
Police Capt. Thomas Runyan said the 44-lb. Insight--the commercial version of Boeing's Insitu's ScanEagle, which is being used by the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq--will be tested this summer in Houston, although the FAA has barred the craft's flight over populated areas. The testing will be conducted at or below 1,000 ft. in non-urban areas, although the catapult-launched Insight, with a wingspan of just over 10 ft., has a ceiling of 19,500 ft. Another FAA UAS pilot project is being conducted by Miami-Dade police, according to Runyan.
Michael Kostelnik, a former NASA official and retired Air Force officer who now heads Customs and Border Protection's Air and Marine unit in the Homeland Security Dept., said his agency has a long-range plan to acquire a fleet of 20 General Atomics Predator B UAVs. In addition to patrolling the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, he says there are plans to patrol the waters of the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific for drug runners. Kostelnik has expressed a desire to host a UAS summit for all non-military government agencies .
The forum also explored selection, certification and training of the pilots who will "fly"--albeit from the ground--these systems within civil airspace.
The human factors panel explored several training-related questions: Should a person remotely operating an UAS be required to be a licensed and experienced pilot? And, considering the long-duration capability of the systems, in some cases to more than 30 hr., should regulators impose flight-duty time limits on ground crews?
A pilot at the controls of an aircraft must be aware of airplane and pilot performance capabilities, as well as weather, navigation, pilot-controller communications and myriad airspace requirements. Should not the pilots operating a UAS have the same situational awareness in order to operate aircraft safely in civil airspace?
"There's a lack of standardized training," notes Nancy Cooke, adding there is a need to determine the most effective training methods for pilots and their instructors as well as to explore the value of simulators in training. She is professor of applied psychology at Arizona State University, specializing in developing and evaluating methodologies to assess individual and team cognition.
The U.S. Army, for example, requires that UAS pilots be trained in the use of the system. The U.S. Air Force, on the other hand, requires trained pilots of manned aircraft. Mark Pestana, like other human factors panelists, agreed that a UAS pilot should have accrued flight experience. He is NASA research pilot and project manager at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB, with 5,000 hr. of military and civil flight types from supersonic jets to single-engine pistons.
"In general, you can't do seat-of-your-pants flying in UAS," says Cooke. "There is no tactile feedback from the airplaneýýý so it is essential that human capabilities and limitations be considered in systems training."
Pestana pointed out that an in-aircraft pilot has a constant feed of sensory information with which to diagnose flight conditions--visual, auditory and tactile clues. Engine sounds can verify power-setting changes. The feel of controls can indicate air flow changes. Odors alert a pilot to fire or fuel leaks. A pilot at the controls relies heavily on visual clues, such as ability to detect icing.
The UAS pilot is devoid of such sensory awareness. There is a lack of visual acuity. Their limited view from ground console is described by Cooke as "looking through a soda straw." There is also a significant delay between the ground pilot and vehicle response.
Williams says 26.5% of Predator accidents have been attributed to a lack of sensory feedback to ground crews.
Given the duration capability of unmanned systems, fatigue and duty-time limitations are real concerns. There are no hard duty-time limitations, notes Pestana. The general practice is to have a 14-hr. duty day, with 2-hr. shifts followed by 1-2-hr. breaks. This compares to Part 121 transport operations, which calls for a 16-hr. work day with a limit of 8 hr. of actual time in the aircraft.
Williams also points out that there is no clear understanding as to how UAS pilots will interact with air traffic controllers, an issue he believes can be overcome through setting standards and practices.


http://www.aviationweek.com/search/A...8_p0-49999.xml

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As microchips shrink, even tiny defects in the lines, dots and other shapes etched on them become major barriers to performance. Princeton engineers have now found a way to literally melt away such defects, using a process that could dramatically improve chip quality without increasing fabrication cost.
The method, published in the May 4 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, enables more precise shaping of microchip components than what is possible with current technology. More precise component shapes could help manufacturers build smaller and better microchips, the key to more powerful computers and other devices.
"We are able to achieve a precision and improvement far beyond what was previously thought achievable," said electrical engineer Stephen Chou, the Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering, who developed the method along with graduate student Qiangfei Xia. Chou's lab has previously pioneered a number of innovative chip making techniques, including a revolutionary method for making nanometer-scale patterns using imprinting.
Microchips work best when the structures fabricated on them are straight, thin and tall. Rough edges and other defects can degrade or even ruin chip performance in most applications. In integrated circuits, for instance, such flaws could cause current to leak and voltage to fluctuate. In optic devices, they could interfere with the transmission of light. In biological devices, they could impede the flow of DNA and other biomaterials.
"These chip defects pose serious roadblocks to future advances in many industries," Chou said.
To deal with this problem, researchers try to improve the process used to make the microchips. However, Chou said such an approach works only to a point; eventually chip makers will run up against fundamental physical limits of current manufacturing techniques. In particular, the electrons and photons that are used like chisels to carve out the microscopic features on a chip always have some random behavior. This effect becomes pronounced at very small scales and limits the accuracy of component shapes.
"What we propose instead is a paradigm shift: Rather than struggle to improve fabrication methods, we could simply fix the defects after fabrication," said Chou. “And fixing the defects could be automatic -- a process of self-perfection.”
Chou's method, termed Self-Perfection by Liquefaction (SPEL), achieves this by melting the structures on a chip momentarily, and guiding the resulting flow of liquid so that it re-solidifies into the desired shapes. This is possible because natural forces acting on the molten structures, such as surface tension -- the force that allows some insects to walk on water -- smooth the structures into geometrically more accurate shapes. Lines, for instance, become straighter, and dots become rounder.
Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures. This process can't be applied to a microchip, for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points. Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Secondly, the melting process would widen the structures and round off their top and side surfaces, all of which would be detrimental to the chip.
Chou's team overcame the first obstacle by using a light pulse from so-called excimer laser, similar to those used in laser eye surgery, because it heats only a very thin surface layer of a material and causes no damage to the structures underneath. The researchers carefully designed the pulse so that it would melt only semiconductor and metal structures, and not damage other parts of the chip. The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second, because molten metal and semiconductors can flow as easily as water and have high surface tension, which allows them to change shapes very quickly.
To overcome the second obstacle, Chou's team placed a plate on top of the melting structures to guide the flow of liquid. The plate prevents a molten structure from widening, and keeps its top flat and sides vertical, Chou said. In one experiment, it made the edges of 70 nanometer-wide chromium lines more than five times smoother. The resulting line smoothness was far more precise than what semiconductor researchers believe to be attainable with existing technology.
The conventional approach to fixing chip defects is to measure the exact shape of each defect, and provide a correction precisely tailored to it -- a slow and expensive process, Chou said. In contrast, Chou's guided melting process fixes all defects on a chip in a single quick and inexpensive step. "Regardless of the shape of each defect, it always gets fixed precisely and with no need for individual shape measurement or tailored correction," Chou said.
One of the big surprises from this work is observed when the guiding plate is placed not in direct contact with the molten structures, but at a distance above it. In this situation, the liquid material from the structures rises up and reaches the plate by itself, causing line structures to become taller and narrower -- both highly desirable outcomes from a chip design perspective.
"The authors demonstrate improved edge roughness and dramatically altered aspect ratios in nanoscale features," said Donald Tennant, director of operations at the NanoScale Science and Technology Facility at Cornell University. The techniques "may be a way forward when nanofabricators bump up against the limits of lithography and pattern transfer," he said.
Next, Chou's group plans to demonstrate this technique on large (8-inch) wafers. Several leading semiconductor manufacturers have expressed keen interest in the technique, Chou said.
The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research.


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-mdc050108.php

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Interview – If you are looking into the ultimate PC platform, there’s little that can touch an Intel Skulltrail in terms of performance, price and bragging rights. After a much hyped introduction and less than flattering reviews, the talk about Skulltrail has calmed down, but the dual-socket platform is establishing itself as the Ferrari engine for PC. We talked to Josh Smith, chief executive of BioHazard Computers, one of the very few boutique PC builders that is offering Skulltrail PCs at this time to find out who is buying these expensive machines and what works for Skulltrail and what does not.

Josh Smith is one of those guys you want to talk when you have a small fortune to spend on a new PC. There is very little Smith and his team won’t do to make your PC unique. If you are looking into a Skulltrail system, plan on spending at least $11,000 and as much $26,000, excluding a custom paint job. Of course we were interested to find out what experience Smith had with Skulltrail so far and if these systems deliver on the promise of being the ultimate computer system out there. Read the transcript of our conversation below.


TG Daily: What is your overall impression of Skulltrail so far?
Smith: Skulltrail is definitely a different breed, but there is no doubt that it has its place in the high-performance eco-system. Our initial thoughts of Skulltrail, I’m sure, echo those of many consumers: We had hoped for better multi-card/GPU support, such as three-way SLI. The FB-DIMM performance versus standard desktop DDR2 does leave a lot to be desired. If you see a Skulltrail getting bruised a little in some benchmarks, you can generally point fingers at the memory, but the choice of FB-DIMMs is a necessity when looking that the platform server genealogy.


TG Daily: Who is buying Skulltrail systems today?
Smith: The bulk or our Skulltrail customers are prosumers, the blend of the professional and consumer markets, many of which are in the content creation field. Most of our power users fall into this category. Inside this category, we generally see two subcategories or usage models. Group 1 is typically looking for an office workstation at home. It gives them the horsepower they need to run their professional applications at home without the need to return to the office to do additional work on their projects. Group 2 is similar to group 1, and is represented by the SOHO-style customer. To this person, the home and the office are one in the same. Skulltrail hands them the power they need to run professional grade apps necessary for their business while at the same time doubling as a standard PC when not working.


TG Daily: Like a Catchall?
Smith: Yes. The value they see in these Skulltrail systems is that of investment. They do not have large corporate accounts to pay for multiple systems. Instead, they are looking for more of a Swiss-Army PC. Many will argue that Skulltrail is an expensive setup, but that point is really relative. Compared to a standard gaming desktop, Skulltrail is definitely more expensive, but compare Skulltrail to a fully blown 3D rendering/non-linear editing workstation and Skulltrail can look downright cheap. This is where we have seen Skulltrail find it’s niche. The largely unrepresented gap between desktop PC and big workstations.



TG Daily: So Skulltrail is not really the gaming PC many expected it to be?
Smith: Beyond just the prosumer market, we actually do sell quite a few Skulltrail rigs to gamers, but these are the flight sim guys. To them, SLI or Crossfire is not as much of a concern as total monitor output, and when you can slap four video cards into a single system, it makes for a pretty sweet flight experience. Beyond that, with recent updates and packs for Flight Sim X, the sim has become much more multi-core friendly, to the extent that when it is loading objects it can start to pull on all eight cores.


TG Daily: What is the feedback of customers buying these systems?
Smith: Our customers are thrilled with the systems. I believe this is due in large part to our internal sales policies. We work hard to educate our customers and ensure that the system they are ordering is one that will best fit their needs. It makes no sense to sell them a fully equipped Skulltrail if they have unrealistic expectations of what the system will do. Sure, you get a big sale in the beginning but you end up with an unhappy customer. I don’t think I am too far off in estimating that we probably steer just as many customers away from a Skulltrail system compared to the number of Skulltrail systems we sell. But again, it goes back to educating the customer. Eight cores and 16 GB of memory sounds like awesome power for gaming but the benefits Skulltrail provides will be a moot point for most customers if they never plan on multi-tasking or running multithreaded apps. They can choose one of our other high performance desktops for a great gaming experience and put the money they saved back into their pocket or invest it in such things like a 30” LCD or speakers.


TG Daily: Do you think that the scope of Skulltrail is to narrow?
Smith: No, I just think Skulltrail’s scope is misunderstood and many reviews have been somewhat off base in the comparisons they have made.




“Gaming doesn’t begin to tap into Skulltrail’s resources”



TG Daily: Is one processor for Skulltrail enough?
Smith: Well, it makes the configuration process a little simpler, doesn’t it? But seriously: It is not. Customers crave variety and I think everyone always wants to have that Good-Better-Best option. Additionally, I think Skulltrail could benefit from multiple performance offerings as it could broaden its audience somewhat. I don’t think that Skulltrail will ever be a “budget” solution, but lower CPU price options do allow for greater spending on additional components.


TG Daily: You talk about putting cheap Xeons on a Skulltrail board? Does that make sense?
Smith: I believe so, for the reasons mentioned above. Again this can be an issue for marketing support, to better illustrate the options available.


TG Daily: From your perspective, what is the difference between Skulltrail and AMD’s QuadFX?
Smith: I think QuadFX suffered from multiple flaws. QuadFX seemed rushed and half-baked. I remember that I was at Nvidia’s launch party for the 680i/8 Series GeForce and there was a QuadFX setup there and this was a pre-release at the time. They had the system setup with multiple monitors and they were trying to demonstrate the multitasking capabilities of the system and how you could encode MP3 while ripping a DVD and playing a game. But the system was unstable and kept crashing. A journalist-filled is not exactly the best place to have your hardware go down. In my opinion, QuadFX seemed desperate. It was almost as if AMD was publicly saying ‘well, we don’t have a quad-core and we have no idea when we will get one working. So, in the meantime, here’s a stopgap product’. Beyond that, there were design flaws. The CPUs ran hot. Especially for AMD chips, they were power hungry and to top it off, they couldn’t compete with Intel’s single-chip quad-core offering. We chose not to offer the QuadFX option as we honestly didn’t believe in it.


TG Daily: Does Intel do enough to support the technology of Skulltrail to make the platform a success?
Smith: Intel has been solid with the support we have received for Skulltrail. We have worked closely with many of the key engineers involved with Skulltrail and the teamwork has been great. Just wait until you see our upcoming Rapture system configured for Skulltrail, now that’s a powerhouse! I think there can be some improvement on the marketing side, but without a captive audience, it can be hard to educate beyond preconceived notions.


TG Daily: What about the consumer perception of Skulltrail? Is there a marketing problem?
Smith: The key with Skulltrail is to educate the consumer. If the platform is pushed solely as a gaming platform, it will get trounced. Skulltrail’s extra power is simply not tapped by current games and the use of FB-DIMMs slow it down when compared to standard desktop systems running much faster memory. That being said, it is still a very powerful gaming system, but most of what Skulltrail offers is overkill for current games.


TG Daily: So you wouldn’t recommend Skulltrail as a gaming system?
Smith: Well, I did not say that. The power of a multi-core system is in its flexibility and multi-tasking. Much the same on the standard desktop side, a QX9770 quad-core CPU is a great processor, but if used solely for gaming, it is not the best option. Most dual cores still bench better for gaming when compared to their quad-core counterparts. Where the QX9770 (and QX9775) really shine is in the real world of gaming, not on a gaming benchmark. In a real world scenario, while you are gaming you have antivirus running in the background, perhaps you are also downloading a torrent. The benefit of quad-cores in gaming is that you can do more while you are playing. It wasn’t too long ago that to enjoy a game you had to turn off every other app running on your system to free up resources. Now, gaming can be more transparent, just start the game and play, no prep period of readying your PC for the game’s demands. Take this idea and extrapolate it to 8 cores and you can see why Skulltrail is definitely a powerful gaming rig. But used only as a gaming rig, it doesn’t begin to tap its resources. I think it is unfortunate that for the most part many reviewers still choose to review multi-core systems the same way we used to review and test single core systems, running benchmarks sequentially.


TG Daily: Thank you for your time.


http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37253/135/1/0/

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With Yahoo off the table, Microsoft plans to challenge Google's online-ad juggernaut alone. A behind-the-scenes look at its provocative strategy

On May 3, Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer withdrew his offer for Web giant Yahoo! (YHOO), the No. 2 power in online ads, after the two sides failed to agree on a price. Ballmer had said that the proposed acquisition, which valued Yahoo at $47.5 billion, was the best way for Microsoft to gain the scale necessary to compete against Google for online advertising dollars. Now, after three months of talks, it looks as though Microsoft and Yahoo will be left trying to catch Google on their own, at least for now. And their prospects are grim. "We think Google's the winner," says Clayton F. Moran, analyst with the financial-services firm Stanford Group. "Its two main competitors are separate and floundering."
For Ballmer, however, the game is far from over. Even before yanking the Yahoo offer, he had begun laying the groundwork for a strategy to compete with Google in online advertising. He's convinced that getting the online ad business right is essential to Microsoft's future. The reason: Consumers and businesses increasingly are switching from desktop software like Microsoft's to free online services that do the same things. "We are absolutely committed to be the leading player in that endeavor," Ballmer told employees at a recent gathering.
It may be impossible to catch Google in search advertising. The company dominates the market, taking in 77% of the revenues from those little text ads that show up alongside the results for Internet search queries. Microsoft, after years of trying, is at 5% of U.S. search revenue, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.
But Microsoft has a fighting chance on several other fronts. Perhaps most important is display advertising, the colorful banner and video ads that run at the top or along the side of Web pages. Microsoft is among the leaders in the fragmented field, while Google is a bit player. Although the display market is smaller than search, it's expected to grow faster over the next few years because of a surge in video ads. Market research firm IDC (IDC) figures that by 2012 the display market will double, to $15.1 billion; revenue from search will reach $17.6 billion.
Microsoft makes money in the display business in two ways. It sells ads on its own popular Web sites, such as MSN and Hotmail, and it acts as a broker by placing ads on other companies' Web sites and then splitting the revenue with them. Smaller Web sites use Microsoft because they don't have a salesforce to call on advertisers and ad agencies. And even large players like media giant Viacom have found that letting Microsoft sell some of the space on sites like Comedy Central and MTV can lead to higher revenues. "They can achieve better monetization than we can on our own," says Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman.
It's Lorizio and his 180-person salesforce who are leading Microsoft's fight for this up-for-grabs market—and for the future of Microsoft itself. Their pitch is that, in display advertising, Microsoft has the most sophisticated technology of any company. It can help advertisers precisely target display ads and assess the value of ads even when Web surfers don't click on them.
Microsoft is also making the case that search advertising, Google's gold mine, is overrated. In the months ahead, it plans to introduce new ad technology that it says will demonstrate that to advertisers. "We're going to win with this strategy," Lorizio says.
"BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL"
Google isn't giving any ground. It's pushing hard into the display business, even as it builds on its lead in search. In March the company closed on its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading player in placing banner and video ads on other companies' Web sites. Google plans to combine DoubleClick's display technology with its own technologies—and its broad base of advertisers—to establish a stronger position in the market. "Google now has the leading display ad platform," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the time, adding that together the companies will be able to "dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability, and performance of digital media." Google also bought YouTube, the top video site on the Web, although it hasn't generated much revenue from it so far.
There's plenty of skepticism that Microsoft can make real headway even in display advertising. The company has floundered in the online ad business so far. Besides getting trounced by Google in search, Microsoft has flummoxed consumers with a muddle of online products, including its dueling MSN and Live brands. The Yahoo deal would have more than doubled the size of Microsoft's Web audience, to north of 250 million visitors a month, and tripled its online ad revenues, to $10 billion. Without Yahoo, the company is expected to generate $3.3 billion in online advertising this year, compared with Google's $22 billion. Microsoft has lost $1.5 billion in its online division over the past three years. "They're behind the eight ball," says Charles Di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
"WE'RE VERY PERSISTENT"
Still, Microsoft is a fearsome competitor, with nearly unlimited financial and engineering resources. It has proven its determination to take down upstarts again and again over the years, from the Web browser market to the market for mobile-phone software. "We're very persistent," said Ballmer at a wireless conference last year, "If we don't get it right, we'll keep coming and coming and coming."
Plenty of advertisers would like to see Microsoft succeed, if only to blunt Google. Although they appreciate the effectiveness of Google's search ads, they're nervous about one company dominating the online advertising market. "Competition from an advertiser's perspective is a really good thing," says Rob Master, director of media for North America at consumer products giant Unilever Group.
For Ballmer, this isn't just about taking Google down. Indeed, it's hard to overstate how important it is for the company to master online advertising. While Microsoft is phenomenally profitable today, adding $1 billion each month to the cash hoard from its lucrative software business, it faces a serious long-term threat. The company's fortunes have been built on software that runs on PCs, especially its Windows operating system and its Office word-processing, spreadsheet, and e-mail programs. But that kind of software is beginning to shift online. People with pretty much any kind of computer can go to the Web and use applications for things like word processing and communication. The programs are typically available for free, funded by online advertising. Google is offering a number of these programs, and there are a flock of others doing the same, such as upstart Zoho.
So far, the shift to online software is more of a drip than a flood. The programs often don't work as smoothly as, say, Microsoft Office, and they can require some tech savvy to use. But the shift seems sure to accelerate in the years ahead, and no company has more to lose than Microsoft. If the tech giant doesn't develop a strong ad business to pay for programs it will eventually have to offer online, it will face big trouble. "
Microsoft's biggest fear is that once you start putting Google [software programs on the Internet], then the price Microsoft can charge for its software will erode markedly," says David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. "Just the threat means that Microsoft has to be able to offer advertising as a choice."
That's why there are few jobs more important at Microsoft than Lorizio's. Kevin Johnson, president of the division that includes Microsoft's online operations, says the salesman and his team are "front and center" in the battle for the online ad market. Unlike the stereotypical Microsoftie—a frumpy, maladjusted code freak—Lorizio is every bit the polished professional. He's tall and lean, a gym rat when he's on the road. A salesman at Yahoo before he joined Microsoft in 2005, he favors starched shirts and designer shoes.
MICROSOFT'S FLEDGLING FAN CLUB
When Lorizio deals with advertisers, though, it's clear that his pitch for Microsoft's display technology is resonating with some. In E*Trade's offices, marketing chief Utton has spreadsheets splayed across a conference table when Lorizio comes to visit. Utton loves how Microsoft's analytical tools give him the ability to track the precise effectiveness of his display advertising. He knows, for example, how many people came to E*Trade after clicking on an ad on MSN Money, how many of those people set up brokerage accounts, and even how many became active traders. "It's a math project," he says, as Lorizio grins across the conference table.
Next up on Lorizio's New York tour is MindShare Interaction, a media buying unit of ad giant WPP Group. Microsoft has worked with the company to create a Web site called In The Motherhood, with video programming targeted at new moms. Lorizio stops in to chat with Margaret M. Clerkin, head of MindShare's North America operations, about the show and its advertisers. Microsoft not only manages the ads that run with the show, it also provides the technology for streaming the video and tosses in editorial content from its MSN pages. "They do a different level of customer service than anyone else," says Clerkin.
Over at Viacom, Microsoft has a substantial presence. The two companies cut a wide-ranging $500 million deal in December, which includes Microsoft selling ads on Viacom's Web sites. What impressed CEO Dauman is Microsoft's ability to generate decent ad sales on what's known as "remnant inventory," those rarely visited Web pages deep inside sites. Microsoft uses its Web-tracking tools to find out what individual Web surfers are interested in and then delivers relevant ads to them when they're on Viacom's less-clicked-on pages. The ad space is cheap, but the value for advertisers is substantial. "We don't have the kind of targeting capabilities that Microsoft has," says Dauman. This sort of "behavioral targeting" is becoming more widely used by a number of companies, including Yahoo.
The most provocative pitch from Lorizio and his sales team will come late this summer. It goes like this: Search advertising is vastly overrated. Today, when a Web surfer is looking for a car, he might type "Chevrolet" into Google and then click on an ad alongside the search results. Google gets all the money for that click, even though other marketing efforts, both online and off, probably helped persuade that person to conduct the search. Ideally, an advertiser would know about all the ads that a potential customer sees before he makes a purchase. "They're trying to say that Google's getting too much credit, and there's probably a lot of truth to that," says Curt Hecht, chief digital officer for the media buying giant Starcom MediaVest Group.
PUTTING AD CAMPAIGNS TO THE TEST
Microsoft has been developing a technology that will give advertisers a more complete picture. It's called Engagement Mapping, and 16 advertisers and agencies have been testing it out since February. The technology anonymously tracks cookies, those digital footprints left on PCs by Web sites, to see if a consumer saw display or video ads within a month of making that ultimate click. Then it places values on each related online ad, weighting things like videos more heavily, since they're likely to have more impact. That way publishers and marketers have a better understanding of the effectiveness of ad campaigns and can adjust pricing accordingly. "It's not anti-search," says Brian McAndrews, the Microsoft senior vice-president overseeing the effort. "It's just a better way to measure."
Ben Winkler is a believer. He's director of interactive media at the Ingenuity Media Group, part of ad firm The Martin Agency. He's been testing the Microsoft technology for one of his clients, wireless provider Alltel. The technology, he says, shows that display ads have an impact that had never been clear before. As a result, he plans to advise clients to spend a greater share of their ad dollars on display vs. search ads. "We're taking credit away from search to a high degree," he says.
Google declined to comment on Microsoft's initiative for this article. In the past, the company has said that it doesn't think that advertisers should focus exclusively on the number of clicks on search ads. In fact, it's developing its own tools to give a broader view of all kinds of advertising.
Will all of this be enough to help Microsoft become a top competitor in online advertising? It's not at all clear. Even as Google moves into display advertising, Yahoo presents a serious threat. For all its struggles of late, an independent Yahoo is a potent rival. The Internet portal helped pioneer the display ad business, and analysts say it has a somewhat larger share of the market than Microsoft, thanks to its more than 500 million monthly users. Yahoo also has leading positions in online media segments such as news, sports, and finance. "I still maintain that our great consumer experiences, combined with our leadership on the advertising side, make us truly unique," says Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in an interview.
Ballmer could ultimately turn back to his investment bankers. He may decide that Microsoft needs an acquisition to have a legitimate shot at Google in online advertising. There has been speculation that Microsoft could buy America Online or a social-networking site like Facebook to gain some of the scale it would have gotten with Yahoo. People are convinced that Microsoft and Yahoo will end up together, despite protestations that their talks are over. "I have to believe that they will get back to the table," says Anant Sundaram, professor of finance at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.
But for now, Lorizio and his sales force have to battle with what they have. The New Englander sees himself as the underdog, much like his beloved Boston Red Sox, who were runners-up to the New York Yankees for decades. Ultimately, the Sox defeated the Yanks in 2004 on the way to their first World Series win since 1918. Lorizio thinks Microsoft has the technological firepower and financial wherewithal to persevere just the same way. "I'm here to win," he says.


http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...4036492860.htm

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A new lithium-ion battery from A123 Systems could help electric cars and hybrids come to dominate the roads.


It is the quickest electric motorcycle in the world. On a popular YouTube video, the black dragster cycle nearly disappears in a cloud of smoke as the driver does a "burn-out," spinning the back wheel to heat it up. As the smoke drifts away, the driver settles into position and hits a switch, and the bike surges forward, accelerating to 60 miles per hour in less than a second. Seven seconds later it crosses the quarter-mile mark at 168 miles per hour--quick enough to compete with gas-powered dragsters.
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What powers the "Killacycle" is a novel lithium-ion battery developed by A123 Systems, a startup in Watertown, MA--one of a handful of companies working on similar technology. The company's batteries store more than twice as much energy as nickel-metal hydride batteries, the type used in today's hybrid cars, while delivering the bursts of power necessary for high performance. A radically modified version of the lithium-ion batteries used in portable electronics, the technology could jump-start the long-sputtering electric-vehicle market, which today represents a tiny fraction of 1 percent of vehicle sales in the United States. A123's batteries in particular have attracted the interest of General Motors, which is testing them as a way to power the Volt, an electric car with a gasoline generator; the vehicle is expected to go into mass production as early as 2010.
In the past, automakers have blamed electric vehicles' poor sales on their lead-acid or nickel-metal hydride batteries, which were so heavy that they limited the vehicles' range and so bulky that they took up trunk space. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are much lighter and more compact, they're not cost effective for electric vehicles. That's partly because they use lithium cobalt oxide electrodes, which can be unstable: batteries based on them wear out after a couple of years and can burst into flame if punctured, crushed, overcharged, or overheated. Some auto makers have tried to engineer their way around these problems, but the results have been expensive.
A123's batteries could finally make lithium-ion technology practical for the auto industry. Instead of cobalt oxide, they use an electrode material made from nanoparticles of lithium iron phosphate modified with trace metals. The resulting batteries are unlikely to catch fire, even if crushed in an accident. They are also much hardier than conventional lithium-ion batteries: A123 predicts that they will last longer than the typical lifetime of a car.
The battery's promise has made A123 one of the best-funded technology startups in the country, with $148 million in venture capital investments so far. With the funding, A123 has been pursuing an ambitious business plan that calls for it to do everything from perfecting the material to manufacturing batteries and selling them to customers in the auto and power-tool industries.
The A123 batteries for GM's Volt store enough energy for 40 miles of driving, enough to cover daily commutes. (On longer trips, the small gasoline engine would kick in to recharge the battery, extending the range to more than 400 miles.) GM plans to sell the vehicles for around $30,000 to $35,000; the company thinks it can sell hundreds of thousands at that price in the first several years, and J. D. Power and Associates estimates that GM will sell nearly 300,000 by 2014.
Materials Matter
In early 2001, a 26-year-old Venezuelan entrepreneur named Ric Fulop walked into the office of Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science at MIT, without an appointment. "He just showed up and knocked on the door," recalls Chiang. Fulop, who had already founded three venture-backed companies, wanted help starting a battery company, and he knew that Chiang was conducting battery research involving nanotechnology. Chiang himself had cofounded a successful startup in the late 1980s, but he spent most of his time researching nanotechnology and the chemistry of advanced ceramics.
By the fall, Fulop and Chiang, along with Bart Riley, an engineer Chiang knew from his previous venture, had cofounded A123 Systems. The plan was to commercialize one of Chiang's more radical ideas: materials that, when stirred together, would spontaneously assemble to form a working battery. The process promised to multiply energy storage capacity while lowering manufacturing costs.
Chiang's big idea turned out to be a hit with investors. By the end of 2001, a first round of funding had brought in $8.3 million from various venture capital firms. Motorola and Qualcomm, intrigued by the prospect of better batteries for portable electronics, soon added $4 million. But it quickly became clear that a commercial self-assembling battery was years away from reality. The technology "was still pretty rudimentary," Chiang says.
In early 2002, however, Chiang made a surprising discovery that would completely change the company's direction. He had begun to work with lithium iron phosphate, which is nontoxic, safe, and inexpensive, unlike the materials used in other lithium-ion batteries. But it appeared to have some serious drawbacks. It stores less energy than lithium cobalt oxide, the electrode material in conventional lithium-ion batteries, so it seemed unsuitable for use in portable electronics, where energy storage is paramount. Also, it charges and discharges slowly, ruling out its use in high-power applications such as hybrid electric vehicles; even for fully electric cars, which use many more battery cells than hybrids, the material couldn't deliver enough power.
So Chiang started to modify it by adding trace amounts of metals. Soon the material was discharging power at relatively high rates. In mid-2002, he flew to Monterey, CA, to present his findings at a conference. While he was there, a graduate student back at MIT continued running tests. By the time Chiang was scheduled to talk, the material was performing at rates four times those he had come to announce. "At that point, we knew we had something special," he says.
Eventually, Chiang would demonstrate that the material could deliver bursts of electricity at 10 times the rate of those used in conventional lithium-ion batteries. After studying the high-performing material in detail, he determined that it owed its power both to the size of the particles he'd used (less than 100 nanometers) and to the addition of the extra metals. The combination of those factors, he says, causes a fundamental difference in the way the atoms that make up the material rearrange themselves when they receive and release a charge.
In all lithium-ion batteries, electricity is generated when lithium ions shuttle between two electrodes while electrons travel through an external circuit. In Chiang's early experiments with lithium iron phosphate, the parts of the material that contained lithium would separate from those that didn't as the lithium ions moved in and out of an electrode. That changed the crystalline structure of the material, and its performance deteriorated. But, Chiang discovered, when the particles of lithium iron phosphate are small enough--and the electrode has been modified, or "doped," through the addition of other metals--the material's crystalline structure changes far less. As a result, the lithium ions can move in and out faster, without degrading the material. Altogether, Chiang found that the modified material charged and discharged faster than ordinary lithium iron phosphate, and it lasted longer, too.
Extraordinary though the new battery material seemed to be, Chiang realized immediately that it wasn't ideal for portable electronics. There didn't seem to be a ready market for light, compact batteries that delivered large bursts of power. Hybrid vehicles, a natural fit, were only beginning to appear on the market. What Chiang didn't know was that a major power-tool company was working quietly on a new generation of cordless tools, and it was having trouble finding a battery that would meet its needs.

Powerful Start
In 2003, representatives of Black and Decker met with Fulop and A123's CEO, Dave Vieau, and told them that they wanted to make cordless power tools that would perform better than tools plugged in to the wall. A123's material seemed like a perfect fit. In short bursts, it can deliver more power than a household circuit. And it had other features that would be attractive on a construction site. It could be recharged quickly (to 80 percent of capacity in 12 minutes or less), and unlike batteries made with lithium cobalt oxide, it could survive harsh treatment without catching fire.
That, at least, was the theory. When Fulop and Vieau first met with Black and Decker, they had only a model of a battery cell, half a gram of material, and a PowerPoint presentation. What Black and Decker needed was a company that could produce millions of batteries. "There was a lot of emphasis on the material, but what we had to learn how to do is to engineer the complete cell," Chiang says.
Within a year of signing its initial agreement with Black and Decker, however, A123 had produced a commercially feasible battery. By November 2005, its first products were coming off assembly lines in Asia. In less than three years, the company went from building a demonstration battery the size of a coin to building 50-meter-long coating machines and 28,000-square-meter factories run by hundreds of employees. By 2006, customers were buying its batteries in a new line of professional tools sold by Black and Decker. In short order, A123 was manufacturing batteries at the rate of millions a year.
Charging Up Cars
Meanwhile, GM was rethinking its technology strategy as Toyota began to dominate the hybrid-vehicle business. A hybrid uses a battery only part of the time, relying on a gasoline engine for much of its power. GM decided to develop a car that would allow its customers to stop using gasoline entirely for most daily driving. But to pull it off, the automaker needed a high-performance, reliable battery. And for that it turned to A123.
GM knew that it wanted to use lithium-ion batteries because of their storage capacity, says Denise Gray, GM's director of energy storage systems. But it also knew that existing technology wouldn't do the trick. Though a lithium-ion laptop battery might survive 500 complete charge-and-discharge cycles before its capacity fades, no car owner wants to buy a new battery every 18 months. According to A123's projections, however, its batteries should be able to deliver more than 15 years' worth of daily charges. And in addition to being safer than other lithium-ion batteries, A123's operate at a lower temperature, which makes it simpler to pack hundreds of them together into a large battery pack, Gray says.
Where A123's power-tool batteries are cylindrical, the battery it developed for the Volt is flat, to save space and more efficiently dissipate heat. The cells have been assembled into complete battery packs, which are T-shaped and nearly two meters long. This spring, the batteries will be bolted into vehicle prototypes for road testing. And later this year, A123 plans to increase production of the batteries to meet anticipated demand. The first cars powered by A123 technology could be rolling off assembly lines in 2010. (GM is also testing batteries from another company, and may use batteries from either or both companies.)
If the Volt is popular, electric cars could finally start to take off--and that could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and petroleum consumption. A recent study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests that electric vehicles similar to GM's car could eliminate billions of tons of greenhouse-gas emissions between 2010 and 2050. A study by General Electric indicates that if half the vehicles on the road in 2030 are electric-powered, petroleum consumption in the United States will shrink by six million barrels a day.
And batteries like A123's could have repercussions far beyond the Volt. Even cars with internal-combustion engines are being engineered to rely more on electricity: the simplest examples involve batteries recharged by souped-up alternators that would allow a car to shut off its engine when it approaches a stoplight and restart when the driver hits the accelerator. In conventional hybrids, versions of A123's batteries can deliver as much power as nickel-metal hydride batteries at one-fifth the weight. The new batteries could also benefit plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a standard electrical outlet. Indeed, A123's batteries may be used in a plug-in version of the Saturn Vue hybrid SUV that's due out in 2010.
Whatever their design, future cars will be likely to rely much more on electricity. "We're not there yet," Chiang says. "There aren't Volts all over the place. But the potential to have a big impact, both on the oil supply issue and greenhouse gases--I didn't imagine that we'd be able to do that. Certainly not when I started working on batteries."



http://www.technologyreview.com/read...batteries&pg=1

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Aims to stretch Moore’s Law


IBM Labs is taking water cooling to another level–and pumping water into each layer of a semiconductor via pipes as thin as a human hair.
On Thursday, IBM said that its researchers–along with Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin–demonstrated a prototype that integrates a water cooling system direction into 3-D semiconductors. In a nutshell, IBM is pumping “tiny rivers of water” into the stacks of circuits and components. The research team was led by Thomas Brunschwiler, project leader at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory.
If all goes well, IBM predicts that it can advance Moore’s Law into the next decade and cut the electric bill of data centers, which are power intensive. IBM’s news is the latest in a bevy of green data center announcements.
Here’s the IBM explanation:
These so-called 3-D chip stacks — which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another — presents one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits.
This follows IBM’s leadership in advancing chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment a year ago, which shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
In English, IBM is taking cooling to the root of the energy problem–the semiconductor. In theory, IBM is dissipating heat at the chip-level so you won’t need as much air conditioning too cool them.
Among the key points of IBM’s experiment:[LIST][*] IBM’s scientists piped water through a 1 by 1 cm test vehicle, consisting of a cooling layer between two dies or heat sources. The cooling layer is 100 microns in height and has 10,000 vertical interconnects per cm2. [*]IBM cools chips with ‘tiny rivers’ of H2O The water pipes are hermetically sealed to prevent electrical shorts. IBM likened the system to a human brain where neurons are firing, but don’t interfere with blood vessels. [*] These water cooled layers were produced with current manufacturing methods except for the tools needed to etch and drill the interconnections. [*] To assemble the layers, IBM’s team developed a thin-film soldering technique. [*]The next step for IBM is to optimize cooling systems for smaller chips and more interconnects. There’s no word on when this research may actually make it into a product.



http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9031

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A team led by MIT students has just completed and successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world—one they think has the potential to revolutionize energy production in both industrialized and developing countries around the world.

The system consists of a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000—creating heat so intense it can melt a bar of steel.
To demonstrate the system's power, Spencer Ahrens, who just received his master's in mechanical engineering from MIT, stood in a grassy field on the edge of the campus this week holding a long plank. Slowly, he eased it into position in front of the dish. Almost instantly there was a big puff of smoke, and flames erupted from the wood. Success!
Burning sticks is not what this dish is really for, of course. Attached to the end of a 12-foot-long aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.
Someday soon, Ahrens hopes, the company he and his teammates have founded, called RawSolar, will produce such dishes by the thousands. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce.
"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence, and it was just completed," says Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design—the rights to which he has signed over to the team.
Wood credits the students who built this dish, as an independent project that started in January, with making significant improvements to his original design to make it a practical and competitive energy producer. "They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it" he says. "They just leapfrogged ahead of everybody."
Ahrens explains that "making it simple is the trick. Complex is easy." Even something as simple as buying the high-grade bathroom mirror proved frustrating and time consuming: Ordinarily the factory that makes the glass, accustomed to dealing with huge construction projects, will only accept orders for a full traincar-load or more—80,000 pounds worth. But Ahrens persuaded them to make an exception by explaining that this prototype could open up a whole new market for the industrial glass company, which has suffered from the current downturn in housing.
So they agreed to sell him 4,000 pounds of the stuff—still 15 times more than he needed. After the students pooled together several thousand dollars to purchase the case of glass, delays in actually getting the glass made, shipped, silvered, and delivered to the site ended up postponing the project's completion, originally hoped for in January, until just this week.
One of the keys to making an inexpensive design was something Wood discovered by accident as he built a variety of solar dishes over the years: Smaller really is better. Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area.
MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class this project first took shape last fall, says that "I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen. And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."
Pelly adds that "I've looked all over for solar technology that could scale without subsidies. Almost nothing I've looked at has that potential. This does."
The team, led by Ahrens, also includes Micah Sze (Sloan MBA '08), UC Berkeley graduate and Broad Institute engineer Eva Markiewicz, Olin College student Matt Ritter, and MIT material science student Anna Bershteyn. Various other students also helped out over the course of the semester.


http://web.mit.edu/mitei/education/s...olar-dish.html

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Cost effective devices expected on market soon

Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun's energy that could allow just that.
The work, to be reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel "solar concentrator." "Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges," explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.
As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell "by a factor of over 40," Baldo says.
Because the system is simple to manufacture, the team believes that it could be implemented within three years--even added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50 percent for minimal additional cost. That, in turn, would substantially reduce the cost of solar electricity.
In addition to Baldo, the researchers involved are Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Timothy Heidel, all graduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Shalom Goffri, a postdoctoral associate in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.
"Professor Baldo's project utilizes innovative design to achieve superior solar conversion without optical tracking," says Dr. Aravinda Kini, program manager in the Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, a sponsor of the work. "This accomplishment demonstrates the critical importance of innovative basic research in bringing about revolutionary advances in solar energy utilization in a cost-effective manner."
Solar concentrators in use today "track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain," Baldo and colleagues write in Science. Further, "solar cells at the focal point of the mirrors must be cooled, and the entire assembly wastes space around the perimeter to avoid shadowing neighboring concentrators."
The MIT solar concentrator involves a mixture of two or more dyes that is essentially painted onto a pane of glass or plastic. The dyes work together to absorb light across a range of wavelengths, which is then re-emitted at a different wavelength and transported across the pane to waiting solar cells at the edges.
In the 1970s, similar solar concentrators were developed by impregnating dyes in plastic. But the idea was abandoned because, among other things, not enough of the collected light could reach the edges of the concentrator. Much of it was lost en route.
The MIT engineers, experts in optical techniques developed for lasers and organic light-emitting diodes, realized that perhaps those same advances could be applied to solar concentrators. The result? A mixture of dyes in specific ratios, applied only to the surface of the glass, that allows some level of control over light absorption and emission. "We made it so the light can travel a much longer distance," Mapel says. "We were able to substantially reduce light transport losses, resulting in a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells."
This work was also supported by the National Science Foundation. Baldo is also affiliated with MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
Mapel, Currie and Goffri are starting a company, Covalent Solar, to develop and commercialize the new technology. Earlier this year Covalent Solar won two prizes in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The company placed first in the Energy category ($20,000) and won the Audience Judging Award ($10,000), voted on by all who attended the awards.



http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html



MIT's solar concentrators

A Q&A by the MIT research team led by Marc A. Baldo, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, on solar concentrators.
What did we do? We demonstrated a large improvement in the performance of low-cost solar concentrators. Our new devices increase the power obtained from solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the sun. Our results are at least a factor of four better than previous results.1
Why is this important? The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power. The major impediment to widely deployed solar-power systems has been cost. Unsubsidized solar electricity is over three times as expensive as the average grid prices for electricity derived from conventional energy sources, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Dramatic cost reductions are needed. Clean, renewable electricity at affordable prices would be an attractive alternative to conventional electricity and the related fossil-fuel dependence, greenhouse-gas emissions and peak-time grid constraints.
What is a solar cell? Solar cells transform sunlight into electricity by using a semiconductor device, typically made of silicon. Solar cells are packaged into solar panels, which can be installed on rooftops or large fields. The solar cells are typically some of the most expensive parts of an installed solar panel.
What is a solar concentrator? Solar concentrators collect light over large areas and focus it onto smaller areas of solar cells. This increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell. Solar concentrators can reduce the cost of solar power since more electricity is obtained per solar cell, and fewer solar cells are needed.
What is wrong with existing solar concentrators? Conventional solar concentrators track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain. Solar cells at the focal point of the mirrors must be cooled, and the entire assembly wastes space around the perimeter to avoid shadowing neighboring concentrators.
What is our technology? Our devices are based on a concept from the 1970's that was largely abandoned: the luminescent solar concentrator (LSC). Our version of this device consists of a piece of transparent glass or plastic plate with a thin film of dye molecules deposited on the face and inorganic solar cells attached to the edges. Light is absorbed by the dye coating and reemitted into the glass or plastic for collection by the solar cells.
Why did LSCs fail in the 1970's? Two reasons: the collected light was absorbed before it reached the edges of the glass or plastic plates, and the dyes were unstable.
What precisely did you do to reduce loss of the collected light? We borrowed some ideas from lasers, introducing what is known in lasers as a four-level system. In practice, we added a small concentration of an extra dye that collected all the absorbed light from its surrounding dye molecules. We also introduced a new class of dye molecules, known as molecular phosphors, that are extremely transparent to their own light emission.
What about stability? We tested one of our devices and found that it was stable (to 92 percent of initial performance) for three months. This isn't good enough yet for products but we are confident that the technology developed for organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) in televisions will be portable to this application.
When will these concentrators make it into production? The technology is being further developed for commercialization by Covalent Solar, a company being spun out of MIT by three of its inventors: Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Shalom Goffri. The team believes that it could be implemented within three years.
References
1. Currie, M. J., Mapel, J. K., Heidel, T. D., Goffri, S. & Baldo, M. A. High-efficiency Organic Solar Concentrators for Photovoltaics. Science. In Press.




http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/s...-faq-0710.html

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QuantumSphere Inc. will report at Semicon West in San Francisco that its nanoparticle-coated electrodes can make hydrogen an economical alternative to natural gas and gasoline.

By increasing the surface area of conventional electrodes by more than 1,000 times, the company claims that electrolysis could soon be the least-expensive way to produce hydrogen for industrial and consumer applications. In addition, electrolysis creates no greenhouse gases, whereas making a pound of hydrogen from natural gas produces 4 pounds of greenhouse gases.
"Electrodes coated with our Nano NiFe [nickel-iron] catalyst take the clean-energy economy another step forward," said Kevin Maloney, president and CEO of QuantumSphere (Santa Ana, Calif.). "Eventually, I envision a distributed hydrogen economy with different-sized electolyzers for different applications--from small home units to refuel your car, to medium-sized generators for manufacturing, to giant, industrial-sized units that replace today's steam-reformation units."
The biggest producers of hydrogen today are oil refineries, which use steam reformation to strip hydrogen atoms from natural gas molecules (CH4) and use them to upgrade oil--that is, add hydrogen atoms to today's thicker oil, making thinner, lightweight oil. Refineries require lightweight oil because they were designed years ago when the top layers of oil fields were being pumped. Today, crude oil is thicker because it is pumped from the bottom of the well, and therefore needs to be thinned by adding hydrogen.
Historically, upgrading oil by adding hydrogen using electrolysis has been more expensive than steam reformation using natural gas. QuantumSphere's nanoparticle-coated electrodes aim to make the electricity powering electrolysis less expensive than the natural gas powering reformers.
"Oil today is much heavier than it used to be, and it gets a little heavier every day as resources get used up," said Glenn Rambach, a researcher at QuantumSphere. "Historically, using natural gas in reformers has been cheaper than electricity for electrolysis. But with our nanoparticle electrodes, we believe that getting hydrogen from water with electrolysis can be less expensive than stripping it from natural gas."
Eventually, QuantumSphere wants consumers to be able to recharge fuel cells for their car in the garage. The company also claims to be able to lower the cost of the fuel cells themselves by using nanoparticle-coated steel electrodes in place of today's expensive platinum electrodes. However, until fuel-cell-powered cars are available, the company plans to concentrate on near-term applications that retrofit existing applications with nanoparticle-coated electrodes.
According to QuantumSphere, applications that could profit from retrofitted electrodes coated with its nanoparticles include making ammonia for fertilizer, making electrodes for batteries, and enhancing thermal reactions like those in the catalytic converters in a car's exhaust system.
"Whether it's electrolysis, fuel cells, batteries or catalytic converters, the more surface area you have, the higher the ability there is for those reactions to take place," said Rambach. "We can offer all these applications over a thousand percent increase in surface area simply by coating normal electrodes and membranes with our nanoparticles."
QuantumSphere's nanoparticle-coated electrodes can be used today to retrofit existing electrolyzers for higher efficiency, and the company plans to also offer retrofit nanoparticle-coated membranes for fuel cells and catalytic converters. In each device, the extra surface area can be used to boost the efficiency of the device, or to keep the efficiency constant while boosting the output. For example, QuantumSphere claims that at 85 percent efficiency, its nanoparticle-coated electrodes will increase hydrogen gas output in electrolysis systems by 300 percent.
"We are satisfying current market needs by supplying standard electrolysis plates coated with our nanoparticles that greatly improve their efficiency or output--you can have the same efficiency but with greater volume output, or higher efficiency at the same output level," said Rambach.
Today, the company claims that hundreds of millions of kilograms of hydrogen are produced annually at an average cost of $3 to $5 per kilogram, but that costs can be drastically cut just by switching to its nanoparticle-coated electrodes.
Batteries are also being targeted by QuantumSphere, which has a deal with a major battery manufacturer to offer zinc-air batteries later this year that outperform alkaline disposables by boosting power by 320 percent.
"We are launching a military-grade zinc-air disposable battery with one of the world's largest battery manufacturers this fall, with a consumer battery version due in January of 2009," said Maloney.
QuantumSphere currently manufactures nanoparticles of iron, silver, copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese, for users who want to formulate their own coatings. Its precoated stainless steel electrodes are only available coated with nanoscale nickel-iron.
QuantumSphere also recently acquired Energetics Inc., which plans to incorporate nanoparticles into its proprietary membrane technology for lithium-ion batteries.



http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/sho...8808678&pgno=1

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Imagine trying to figure out how your car's power train works from just a few of its myriad components: It would be nearly impossible. Scientists have long faced a similar challenge in understanding cells' tiny powerhouses -- called mitochondria -- from scant knowledge of their molecular parts.

Now, an international team of researchers has created the most comprehensive "parts list" to date for mitochondria, a compendium that includes nearly 1,100 proteins. By mining this critical resource, the researchers have already gained deep insights into the biological roles and evolutionary histories of several key proteins. In addition, this careful cataloging has identified a mutation in a novel protein-coding gene as the cause behind one devastating mitochondrial disease. A full description of the work appears in the July 11 print edition of the journal Cell.
"For years, a fundamental question in cell biology has gone largely unanswered -- what proteins function in mitochondria?" said Vamsi Mootha, an associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Harvard Medical School assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the study. "By creating a comprehensive list, we now have a valuable resource that has already helped enhance our understanding of mitochondrial biology and disease."
Mitochondria, found within the cells of all eukaryotes from yeast to humans, are miniaturized organs ("organelles") well known for their role in providing cellular energy. They have also been implicated in a wide range of normal and disease processes, including diabetes.
Although mitochondria have their own genome -- a vestige from their days as free-living bacteria -- the vast majority of the critical mitochondrial proteins are derived not from their genome, but rather from the nuclear genome. However, even with the wealth of genome sequence data now available, scientists have struggled to identify which genes encode the roughly 1,200 proteins that make up a functional mitochondrion.
Researchers from the Broad Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital worked together to address this problem.
"The technologies and analytical methods for measuring proteins on a large scale are really transforming what we can learn about human biology," said Steve Carr, director of the Proteomics Platform at the Broad Institute and a co-author of the Cell paper. "By applying them to mitochondria isolated from fourteen different mouse tissues, we've completed one of the most comprehensive proteomic analyses of any organelle to date."
As a result of their analyses, the researchers identified a total of 1,098 mitochondrial proteins to form a compendium they have named "MitoCarta," and which is available to the entire scientific community. Notably, about one-third of this inventory has not been previously linked to the organelle.
To shed light on the functions of the newly uncovered mitochondrial proteins, the researchers compared the proteins' corresponding gene sequences across hundreds of species, from humans and fish to fungi and bacteria. "Proteins with similar roles often share similar histories, meaning they're gained or lost together during evolution," said Mootha. "We decided to use this tendency to our advantage to decipher how some mitochondrial proteins work."
By examining the organelle's proteins through this evolutionary lens, the researchers uncovered a striking pattern. A group of key mitochondrial proteins, known to be absent in yeast but otherwise present among eukaryotes, are actually missing from several other single-celled species. In organisms that have them, including humans and other mammals, these proteins contribute to a boot-shaped, multi-protein structure, which forms the gateway to a critical step in the energy-generation process. By virtue of these proteins' shared -- and unusual -- past, Mootha and his colleagues were able to identify several additional proteins that are also associated with this crucial mitochondrial structure, known as complex 1.
In addition to offering insights into mitochondrial biology, these discoveries also paved the way for a breakthrough in understanding mitochondrial disease. For decades, doctors have diagnosed patients with deficiencies in complex 1 function. These disorders affect about one in 5,000 newborns, are genetic in origin, and are lethal in the first few years of life. Yet for many cases a culprit gene cannot be found. However, thanks to MitoCarta and its corresponding evolutionary analyses, the researchers and their collaborators at the University of Melbourne and Royal Children's Hospital in Australia identified a mutation in a novel gene, called C8orf38, as one cause of complex 1 disease.
"Our finding underscores the power of this protein catalogue to open new vistas on disease," said Mootha. "It promises to shed light not only on rare metabolic diseases, but common diseases as well."
This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.




http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/powerhouse-0711.html

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A new very efficient wireless Technology?

It is a very simple Close Proximity Wireless Transfer technology which will allow you to transfer high-resolution video, music, pictures just by touching two devices together to automatically initiate transfer of files.
According to the different manufacturers, this new technology should allow a high speed transfer of large data files, and achieving a theoretical transmission rate of 560 Mbps and an effective value of 375 Mbps.

Sony Corporation, Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, Hitachi Ltd., Victor Company of Japan, KDDI Corporation, Kenwood Corporation, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), Nikon Corporation, Olympus Imaging Corporation, Pioneer Corporation, SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD., Seiko Epson Corporation, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, Toshiba Corporation today announced an agreement to form a consortium to develop specifications for interconnecting products using “TransferJet” a new interoperable wireless transfer technology that enables rapid transfer of high resolution video, music and images. The “TransferJet Consortium” (www.transferjet.org) plans to promote a wide range of products and services incorporating TransferJet technology with the aim of accelerating its adoption throughout the consumer electronics industry.
TransferJet wireless technology enables a high speed data transmission rate of 560Mbps, while eliminating the need for complex setup and operation. Directly touching two compliant electronic products together allows files to be transferred automatically, without the need for an access point. For example, touching a TV with a digital camera enables photos to be instantaneously displayed on the TV screen. Alternatively, downloaded music content can be easily enjoyed by touching a mobile phone to a portable audio player. TransferJet can be used as a universal interface across all consumer electronics devices.
The “TransferJet Consortium” will develop specifications and guidelines ensuring interoperability between products incorporating the technology, establish licensing schemes and administer the use of the TransferJet logo. The Consortium will also promote the advantages across industries and to consumers. Through these initiatives, the Consortium will aim to create and expand the market for TransferJet products.

"TransferJet Consortium" Members (as of July 17 2008 )

• Sony Corporation ("TransferJet Consortium" Administration)
• Canon Inc.
• Eastman Kodak Company
• Hitachi Ltd.,
• Victor Company of Japan
• KDDI Corporation
• Kenwood Corporation
• Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd (Panasonic)
• Nikon Corporation
• Olympus Imaging Corporation
• Pioneer Corporation
• SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD.
• Seiko Epson Corporation
• Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
• Toshiba Corporation[/I]

via engadget

Thanks Boo, good stuff

TransferJet: A new very efficient wireless Technology?

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A fuel cell is a power generation device that converts chemical energy into electricity with very high efficiencies and without the undesirable side-effects of combustion, flame, noise or vibration. Fuel cells constitute one of the most promising clean energy technologies currently under development and have recently received dramatically increased research funding in light of concerns about global warming and fossil fuel dependency.&nbsp; The fuel cell has the potential to serve a wide range of applications, from stationary power to substituting traditional automotive combustion engines, to a means to power laptop computers, cell phones and PDAs.&nbsp; The worldwide market for the hydrogen fuel cell is estimated to reach $11 billion by 2013, and the automotive engine application looks particularly promising.
As a potential substitute for the combustion engine, fuel cells have already demonstrated the ability to convert chemically stored energy directly into electricity with two to three times greater efficiency than the traditional combustion engine converting fossil fuels (gasoline) into power.&nbsp; Furthermore, a fuel cell running on hydrogen and air creates water as the only byproduct (the hydrogen and oxygen molecules combine to provide the electricity).

Challenge
The key to making a fuel cell work is a catalyst, which is a metal that facilitates the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. The most common but expensive catalyst is platinum. Currently, the amount of platinum catalyst required per kilowatt to power a fuel cell engine is about 0.5 to 0.8 grams, or .018 to .028 ounces. At a cost of about $1,500 per ounce, the platinum catalyst alone would cost between $2,300 to $3,700 to operate a small, 100-kilowatt two- or four-door vehicle – a significant cost given that an entire 100-kilowatt gasoline combustion engine costs about $3,000. To make the transition to fuel cell-powered vehicles possible, the automobile industry needs something better and less expensive.

Solution
An alternative catalyst solution that demonstrates great promise is using lower cost metals at the nanoscale to replace platinum. Palladium is a first example, as it resembles platinum chemically, is extracted from copper-nickel ore, and is already used as catalyst material in the catalytic converters of automobiles. It is 75% less expensive than platinum, and when used at the nano scale in direct methanol fuel cells, palladium has demonstrated an increased power density of 45%. This power enhancement is due to the improved selectivity of the palladium catalyst and the additional surface area in nano scale materials--more particles are on the surface that can chemically interact, translating to a dramatic efficiency improvement of the catalytic reaction. Thus, using nano scale palladium is both less expensive and leads to better performance. Additionally, work is underway with Cobalt and Nickel, each of which can potentially achieve these results at even lower costs.



Methanol Fuel Cell / Hydrogen Fuel Cel


Methanol Fuel Cell

(1) Methanol and water enter.
(2) Methanol reacts with anode catalyst, releasing electrons and protons.
(3) Electrons flow through the circuit producing energy.
(4) Protons move through fuel cell membrane.
(5) Air flows in. Oxygen combines with protons and electrons on cathode catalyst to form water.
(6) Catalyst contains QSI-Nano® metals, reducing the need for expensive platinum by 30-50%, while increasing power.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell



This animation shows the process that goes on inside an individual hydrogen proton exchange membrane fuel cell.

• The red Hs represent hydrogen molecules (H2) from a hydrogen storage tank.
  
• The orange H+ represents a hydrogen ion after its electron is removed.
• The yellow e- represents an electron moving through a circuit to do work (like lighting a light bulb or powering a car).
• The green Os represent an oxygen molecule (O2) from the air, and the blue drops at the end are for pure water, the only byproduct of hydrogen power.

http://www.qsinano.com/apps_fuelcell.php

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Prominent Australian academic Economist Professor Ross Garnaut was commissioned by the right-wing, pro-Coal, State and Federal Governments of Australia to review the economic impacts on Australia of climate change; to also examine this in an international context; and to recommend policy options.
“In the U.S. Caribbean, scientists say an average of 50 percent of the coral was lost.”
The Garnaut Review Draft Report was published recently and has made headlines in Australia ever since. This pro-Coal Australian Climate Change Report is of major importance because Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and if you include the CO2 from these exports, Australia’s annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution (47 tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year) is about 10 times that of China (5) and over 40 times that of India (1).
The Garnaut Report is GOOD in that it indicates (albeit inexplicitly) a serious climate change situation; the need to act now; and a “Cap and Trade” Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to encourage uptake of clean energy options.
However the Garnaut Review is fatally BAD in that it IGNORES crucial major considerations e.g. the need to cease coal mining and export; the human cost of coal burning (coal burning pollutants kill nearly 5,000 Australians annually); the “true cost” of coal-based power that is 4-5 times the “market cost”; the latest advances in low cost solar technologies; the urgent need to IMPLEMENT clean technologies; the massive ecosystem and economic damage NOW (notably to the Arctic, Antarctic, tropical forests, ocean fisheries, tropical agriculture and the ALREADY DYING coral reefs; and the urgent need to REDUCE atmospheric CO2 from the current 387 ppm to a safe and sustainable level of no more than 350 ppm as advocated by top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen and colleagues.
Unfortunately the right-wing, pro-Coal Australian Government Terms of Reference for the Garnaut Review included the following disastrous position, quote:
“The weight of scientific opinion that developed countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2050 against 2000 emission levels, if global greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are to be stabilised to between 450 and 550 ppm [effectively carbon dioxide, CO2] by mid-century”.
However the literature cut-off for the latest (2007) IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (on which Professor Garnaut heavily relies) was 2005 and climate science is moving rapidly. Thus it has been recently reported by top coral experts in the top scientific journal Science that above about 450 ppm CO2 (26 years’ time at current rates) the world’s coral reefs – including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – will start dying because of ocean acidification as well as from bleaching due to photosynthetic symbiont expulsion from increased ocean temperature. Top coral scientists say the “tipping point” for world coral death is in the 450-500 ppm atmospheric CO2 zone (Sources: Coral Reefs Under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, Corals and crustaceans in distress, Exeter scientist warns: the carbon crisis is lethal for coral reefs and Australian Rudd Labor Government plans to kill Great Barrier Reef? ; see: also the latest 2007 IPCC Synthesis Report) .
The world temperature increase is discontinuous and so is the increase in ocean acidity. World coral species are ALREADY DYING at the world’s current atmospheric CO2 concentration of 387 ppm. A 270-contributor Report on the world’s coral from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service (NOAA) says that nearly half of the coral reefs in areas from the Caribbean to the Pacific “are not in good condition and are continuing steadily on a long-term decline … even remote reefs are showing signs of decline” ; a major bleaching and disease event in 2005 devastated coral reefs across the Caribbean. In the U.S. Caribbean, scientists say an average of 50 percent of the coral was lost. Some areas lost 90 percent of their coral; a 1997 report in Nature estimated that the resources and economic benefits derived from coral reefs are worth $375 billion a year; and scientists who study the medical benefits of coral reefs say there are about 20 compounds in clinical trials derived from the corals themselves or the many organisms that depend on them.
“The Garnaut Review leaves one with a series of paradoxes.”
Further, atmospheric CO2 concentration will reach 500 ppm in. 46 years’ time at current rates assuming no acceleration of CO2 accretion in the atmosphere due to “positive feedback” effects (500-385 = 115 ppm; 115ppm/2.5ppm per year = 46 years). At 500 ppm there is huge damage to the ocean phytoplankton system (crucial for ocean food chains and for global temperature homeostasis (balance) by sequestering CO2 and for light-reflecting cloud formation through production of cloud-seeding dimethylsulphide) and the Greenland ice sheet melts with a huge attendant circa 7 meter sea level rise (see: James Lovelock “The Revenge of Gaia”, Penguin, London, 2006 and Reduced mixing generates oscillations and chaos in the oceanic deep chlorophyll maximum).
According to top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen (Head, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, member of the prestigious US National Academy of Science) and 8 UK, French and US colleagues:
“Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ~3 deg-C for doubled CO2, including only fast feedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is ~6 deg-C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 450 +/- 100 ppm, a level that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.”
The Garnaut Review recognized “risks” to economies and to peoples and biodiversity:
“The weight of scientific evidence tells us that Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change. The risks can be substantially reduced by strong and early action by all major economies … We will delude ourselves if we think that scientific uncertainties are cause for delay. Delaying now will eliminate attractive lower-cost options. Delaying now is not postponing a decision. To delay is to deliberately choose to avoid effective steps to reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels.”
Professor Garnaut reviewed the science, the economics and then came up with a “Cap and Trade” Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to commence in an initial form in 2010. The ETS involves selling CO2 polluters tradeable licences, thus making pollution more expensive and favouring non-polluting alternatives (geothermal and ultimately solar-dependent renewables such as solar, wind, wave and tide power). However his scheme (Cap uncertain) involves returning 50% of the licence fees to domestic consumers and 30% to business in an extraordinary subsidy of “dirty” power. The remaining 20% will be spent on Research and Development for “new” alternative technologies, notably the “coal-burning with carbon capture and storage (CCS)” favoured by Professor Garnaut.
“If the world were to follow this course then the Planet biosphere is doomed.”
The Garnaut Review leaves one with a series of paradoxes. The “Cap” is set at a CO2 level that will kill off the Great Barrier Reef at best (at 450 ppm CO2), devastate the planet at worst (550 ppm CO2) and, in between these posited extremes, kill off the phytoplankton system and hence ocean life as well as irreversibly melting the Greenland ice sheet with huge attendant sea level rise (500 ppm CO2). While Professor Garnaut follows Sir Nicholas Stern in decrying climate change as “the greatest market failure ever seen”, he insists on an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) “market mechanism” (albeit subverted with gigantic State subsidies) to fix the problem and rejects any State implementation or State subsidy of renewable energy.
The Garnaut Review also FAILS to take seriously the impact of factors such as from human values (altruism, responsibility, respect for the irreplaceable ecosystems and species, respect for human life) to purely selfish considerations of peak oil. Thus a 2008 CSIRO report “Fuel for Thought” says that supply/demand problems due to “peak oil” may see petrol prices increase in 10 years to $8/L from the present $1.70/L whereas even an ETS carbon price of $40-$100/tonne would only add 10-25 cents/L to the price of petrol.
The Garnaut Climate Change Review is a highly flawed Report that IGNORES major realities – it does not merely ignore an Elephant in the Room, it IGNORES a HERD of Elephants in the Room. The most important reality it completely IGNORES in its prescription of CONTINUED fossil fuel-based pollution of the atmosphere is that at 387 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) the Earth has ALREADY passed “tipping points” for major ecosystem devastation, notably the complete loss of Arctic sea ice and the death of the world coral reefs that support 25% of ocean organisms and are economically worth $375 billion annually.
If the world were to follow this course then the Planet biosphere is doomed.
Well, you might say, it is all very well to criticize but would the reviewer of the Garnaut Review do?
Here is a succinct science- and needs-based Alternative Plan. The Garnaut Review (514 pages) indicates that a favoured (but long-term, expensive, undeveloped, only partially effective at best and uncertain) Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology yields power at about the same price (6 c/kWh) as EXISTING wind power technology. To replace Australia’s 92% fossil fuel-based, 50GW (50 billion Watt) electricity-generating capacity with wind power at $2 per Watt would cost 50 billion W x $2/W = $100 billion. However the existing “capacity factor” (reflecting ACTUAL electricity generation in practice) is about 50% (50 W capacity generating only about 250 TWH/year rather than the 500 TWh expected if there was 100% capacity) and if we assume a much lower 20% “capacity factor” for wind power then the realistic actual replacement cost would be $100 billion x 50/20 = $250 billion.
Of course that scenario is merely one “boundary condition” (one extreme in the range of the possible) and the actual “mix” and rapid uptake path could involve a combination of the following (Garnaut Review 2006 estimates of cents/kWh in parentheses): geothermal (9), wind (6) and concentrated solar (20) as alternatives to brown or black coal (3) or the uncertain, HYPOTHETICAL proposition of brown or black coal with combined Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Carbon Capture and Storage CCS (6-7) PLUS the latest, very low cost Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic technologies already being implemented around the world.
Crucial matters (not considered in the Garnaut Review) are the human cost of fossil fuel- or coal-based power generation (5,400 and 4,900 annual deaths, respectively, at a cost at $5 million person i.e. of $27 billion and $25 billion, respectively, per annum); the morbidity costs (6 times greater); and the “true cost” of coal-based electricity (estimated to be 4-5 times the “market cost”) (see: Yarra Valley Climate Action Group, Ontario Study Identifies Social Costs of Coal-Fired Power Plants and Pollutants from coal-based electricity generation kill 170,000 people annually). Further, major reductions in costs of Concentrated Solar (Solar Thermal) Compact Linear Fresnel (CLFR) technology developed by Ausra mean that this could supply 90% of the US grid and auto fleet energy needs with cost estimates competitive with the “market price” gas-fired power plants and as low as 8c/kWh (see: Ausra study: Solar Thermal Can Give Us Energy Independence, Ausra moves to mass-produce solar thermal and First U.S. Solar Thermal Power Manufacturing Plant Lands in Nevada). Other current renewable technologies already approaching the “market price” of coal-based power include US balloon-based solar collector for PV cells and the latest dye-based and CIGS non-silicon thin films (See: Cheap solar power poised to undercut oil and gas by half, How the Numbers Stack Up and Ausra Building First U.S. Production Facility for Thermal Solar).
The only “non-market support” that pro-renewable energy “PURE free marketeers” need from Government is (a) legal and legislative action over fossil fuel-burners who are killing an estimated 5,400 Australians annually from the effects of fossil fuel burning pollutants i.e. recognition of the 4-5 times greater “true cost” of coal-based power generation and (b) gross production feed-in tariffs for renewable producers as in Germany and Spain and recommended as “more accurate” by Professor Garnaut who concludes (p437) : “A feed-in tariff based on gross metering is thus a more accurate means of pricing these benefits [as compared to "net metering"].”
Of course those “NON-free-marketeers” who believe in use of taxes for the common good (as in hospitals, schools, emergency services etc) would like to see major Government intervention for urgent provision of low-cost, non-polluting, non-homicidal renewable energy options consonant with the prescription by top US climate scientist Dr Hansen and his colleagues of REDUCING atmospheric CO2 from a dangerous current concentration of 387 ppm to a safe level of no more than 350 ppm.
IN SUMMARY, the pro-Coal Garnaut Climate Change Review Draft Report is seriously flawed through grievous and extraordinary omissions. The Garnaut Review is fatally bad in that it IGNORES crucial major considerations e.g. the need to cease coal mining and export; the human cost of coal burning (coal burning pollutants kill nearly 5,000 Australians and 170,000 world-wide annually); the “true cost” of coal-based power that is 4-5 times the “market cost”; the latest advances in low cost solar technologies; the urgent need to IMPLEMENT clean technologies; the massive ecosystem and economic damage NOW (notably to the Arctic, Antarctic, tropical forests, ocean fisheries, tropical agriculture and the ALREADY DYING coral reefs and the urgent need to REDUCE atmospheric CO2 from the current 387 ppm to a safe and sustainable level of no more than 350 ppm as advocated by top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen and colleagues. Even the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is seriously flawed by the absence of a non-biocidal “Cap” and the use of most of the licence fees to support business and domestic use of “dirty” energy.
The realistic and economic solutions to the Climate Emergency facing the world are urgent implementation of a NON-carbon energy economy using the cheap, advanced solar, wind and geothermal technologies already being implemented worldwide – and coupled with re-afforestation and biochar addition to the soil to return the atmospheric CO2 concentration to a safe and sustainable level of no more than 350 ppm.



http://green-blog.org/2008/07/13/pro...stralia-world/