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Technology Review: Computer Clusters That Heat Houses

IBM has developed an "on-chip water-cooling system" that allows high-performance computer clusters to heat buildings and provide hot water. The technology also addresses data center energy use (currently very high) because it cools the computers themselves, while providing energy for other uses. Looks like a perfect win-win.

Tags: mit_techreview, energy, heating, computer_clusters on 2009-06-25 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Technology Review: Simpler Data Visualization

Brief article with several useful links on advances in data visualization. Includes discussion of IBM's Many Eyes (complex) and Protovis's tools (easier).

Tags: mit_techreview, data_visualization, protovis, tools on 2009-06-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Technology Review: Blogs: Predictably Irrational: The Symbolic Power Of Money (by Alon Nir)

Fascinating short article, which reports on a new study that suggests that "simply handling money can dull physical and emotional pain." Previous studies show that social exclusion and physical pain share (and trigger) common neural reactions, and it appears "that money and physical pain are linked to one another." The new study looks at this connection "as well as the connection money has to social distress."

Tags: alon_nir, mit_techreview, money, psychology, happiness, pain on 2009-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Technology Review: Converting Garbage into Fuel

Brief article in MIT Tech Review on strides made in gasification processes (turning garbage/ waste into fuel & electricity), in this case *without* using incineration. That last bit is key, since incineration is a huge polluter.

And the new method(s) aren't commercially viable yet:
QUOTE
There may still be hurdles to commercial success. Childress notes that waste gasification may still face problems with local regulations. And companies using similar technologies have failed in the past. Nevertheless, some waste-gasification companies are reporting initial success. For example, Enerkem, based in Alberta, Edmonton, has opened a commercial facility to convert used utility poles into methanol and ethanol. It has signed an agreement with the city of Edmonton to process 100,000 tons of municipal solid waste a year for 25 years, although that's still a relatively small amount compared with other options for disposing of waste.
UNQUOTE

Tags: garbage, waste, waste_management, fuel, mit_techreview, gasification on 2009-05-27 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"Environmental Heresies; The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will soon reverse its position on four core issues," by Stewart Brand

Great article from May 2005, by Stewart Brand, on scientific thinking v romanticist thinking, applied to environmentalism and predictions for the future. Great stuff. It starts like this (and doesn't slow down):
QUOTE
Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
UNQUOTE

Tags: mit_techreview, stewart_brand, environment, ecology, criticalthinking, futurismo on 2009-02-19 -All Annotations (6) -About

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The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces -- romanticism and science -- that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters -- which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion -- is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.
The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it. I would love to see what a cadre of hard-over environmental scientists could do with genetic engineering. Besides assuring the kind of transparency needed for intelligent regulation, they could direct a powerful new tool at some of the most vexed problems in the field.
Now we come to the most profound environmental problem of all, the one that trumps everything: global climate change. Its effect on natural systems and on civilization will be a universal permanent disaster. It may be slow and relentless -- higher temperature, rising oceans, more extreme weather getting progressively worse over a century. Or it may be "abrupt climate change": an increase of fresh water in the north Atlantic shuts down the Gulf Stream within a decade, and Europe freezes while the rest of the world gets drier and windier. (I was involved in the 2003 Pentagon study on this matter, which spelled out how a climate change like the one 8,200 years ago could occur suddenly.)
The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor -- Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore -- have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.
Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia's older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world's atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.

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"Wiki Your Town Council - New effort seeks a database on all U.S. elected officials," by David Talbot (MIT Technology Review)

Article about American Solutions, "a national grassroots group based in Washington, DC, that was founded by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich but describes its Internet effort as nonpartisan, is preparing to launch a site that will, at first, allow people to enter basic contact information on all local officials. Then future users can enter their full nine-digit zip code to find the local officials who represent them."

Tags: wiki, local_government, open_source, politics, mit_techreview, american_solutions on 2009-01-29 -All Annotations (5) -About

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Over the following several months, American Solutions plans to build ways for users to rate the officials on job performance, create social-networking functions around local issues, and let users make free Internet-based phone calls to the officials.
Existing online platforms share data about the more powerful elected officials, such as federal and state lawmakers. Congresspedia allows wiki-style editing of pages about members of Congress, while OpenCongress allows several ways for users to interact, including writing blog posts about specific bills.

And for detailed information about lobbyist activity and campaign contributions, there are sites that track such spending, including one for members of Congress and another covering major state elected officials. Such databases attempt to better organize information that is already available for public scrutiny but is cumbersome to obtain.
Below upper-level elected officials, though, lies a great mass of elected public officials but no central way to find them, share information about them, or approach them online. Search engines only get you so far with, for example, local municipal officials. Assuming you know these people's names, there's still no guarantee that typing them into Google will yield relevant hits. A central site could solve that. Kralik says that the largest such database currently available includes 44,000 elected officials and is accessible through sites such as votesmart.
"It seems useful to aggregate dispersed information about elected officials and make it easy for citizens to find that information," Weinberger says. "And because it's impossible to predict all the different sorts of information that might be relevant, a wiki is a good choice. A wiki is also a good choice because it distributes the chore of building and maintaining a site with ambitions that stretch from the national to the hyperlocal."
"In the best case, communities of engaged citizens develop around the site,"

Efficient Thin-Film Solar Cells - MIT Technology Review

New breakthrough in making solar cells:
QUOTE
Researchers at MIT have unveiled a new type of silicon solar cell that could be much more efficient and cost less than currently used solar cells. (...)

The design combines a highly effective reflector on the back of a solar cell with an antireflective coating on the front. This helps trap red and near-infrared light, which can be used to make electricity, in the silicon.
UNQUOTE

Tags: thinfilm, mit_techreview, solar_power, electricity on 2008-12-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A New Twist on Hydropower - MIT Technology Review

Fascinating report on how a new mechanical device, which "mimics how fish harness energy from water flow," could contribute to the sustainable energy toolkit.

(Since the device is based on mimicking how fish do it, I'm adding the "biomimicry" tag to this article.)

Tags: mit_techreview, hydropower, energy, biomimicry, vivace, vortex_hydro_energy on 2008-12-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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VIVACE: Energy from Slow Currents - MIT Technology Review: Videos

Video demo of how VIVACE works (the device developed to mimic how fish harness energy from water currents).

Tags: mit_techreview, vivace, biomimicry, hydropower, video, energy, vortex_hydro_energy on 2008-12-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"The Brain Unveiled," by Emily Singer (MIT Technology Review)

Stunning imagery of the brain's neural structures. Must-see. Also includes a couple of links to video/ time-lapse imaging.

Tags: brain, neuroscience, neurogenesis, mit_techreview, imagery, video on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Technology Review: 3-D Printing for the Masses

From p.2 of this article:
QUOTE
"Ultimately, I think people will have these [3-D rapid prototyping] printers at home," says Lipson. The idea is that people will pay a nominal amount for blueprints and then download them, in much the same way that music is shared over the Internet now, he says.
UNQUOTE

Exciting, especially in relation to Larry Lessig's REMIX ideas -- see his TED presentation, 11/07, where he talks about culture getting the creative remix treatment. Having RPT technology enter the home-use market means manufacturing will get that same treatment. Interesting days ahead...

Tags: mit_techreview, rapid_prototyping, 3-d_modeling, 3-d_printing, remix_culture, shapeways on 2008-08-05 and saved by 3 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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A Concrete Fix to Global Warming (MIT Technology Review)

A company in Nova Scotia says it has developed a process by which manufacturers of precast concrete products can store 60Ts of CO2 in every 1000Ts of concrete product. This would be factory carbon dioxide (produced by heating the plant, running the machinery, etc.), which would be redirected onto the concrete, and absorbed (sequestered) by it, effectively negating the initial production of CO2. From the article:
QUOTE:
Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.

But Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide. The company takes advantage of a natural process; carbon dioxide is already reabsorbed in concrete products over hundreds of years from natural chemical reactions. Freshly mixed concrete is exposed to a stream of carbon-dioxide-rich flue gas, rapidly speeding up the reactions between the gas and the calcium-containing minerals in cement (which represents about 10 to 15 percent of the concrete's volume). The technology also virtually eliminates the need for heat or steam, saving energy and emissions.
UNQUOTE
One of the comments to the article notes that carbonated concrete wouldn't be good for use in reinforced concrete buildings because the carbonation reduces the alkalinity of the product, and that in turn affects the durability and strength of the rebar/ steel, but that it would work well for sidewalks (and presumably cinderblock type materials?).

Interesting development, at any rate, as concrete production accounts for 5% of the world's human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually.

Tags: mit_techreview, concrete, carbon_emissions, carbon_sequestering, environment on 2008-07-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

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A Canadian company says that it has developed a way for makers of precast concrete products to take all the carbon-dioxide emissions from their factories, as well as neighboring industrial facilities, and store them in the products that they produce by exposing those products to carbon-dioxide-rich flue gases during the curing process.
Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.
Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide.
Work is expected to begin on a pilot plant in the province of Nova Scotia this summer, with preliminary results expected by the end of the year. If it works and is widely adopted, it has the potential to sequester or avoid 20 percent of all cement-industry carbon-dioxide emissions, says Niven. "If the technology is commercialized as planned, it will revolutionize concrete manufacturing and mitigate hundreds of megatons of carbon dioxide each year, while providing manufacturers with a cheaper, greener, and superior product." He adds that 60 tons of carbon dioxide could be stored as solid limestone--or calcium carbonate--within every 1,000 tons of concrete produced.

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"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (p.2) (MIT Technology Review)

P.2 of Kate Green's "the Future of Mobile Social Networking" - fascinating stuff.

Tags: mit_techreview, local_news, location_based_reminders, locative_media, mobile_city, mobile_muse on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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"The Future of Mobile Social Networking" by Kate Green (MIT Technology Review)

"IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data."

This sounds very intriguing...

Tags: location_based_reminders, locative_media, mobile_technology, mobile_city, mit_techreview, local_news on 2008-06-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.
Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.
Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

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MIT students show power of open cell phone systems (MIT Technology Review)

Fascinating report on MIT class project to design software programs for Android (Google) mobile operating system. Upshot? Location, location, location. All but one of the projects involved location-based applications.

Tags: mit_techreview, mit, android, cell_phones, mobile_technology, locative_media on 2008-05-13 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Multimedia guide helps tourists track down remains of Berlin Wall with GPS - MIT Tech Review

- It's too bad this isn't a guide that you can download, and instead is a guide / gadget that you have to rent. "The hand-sized minicomputer, to be introduced May 1, is linked to global positioning satellites mapping the wall's former path."

The underlying idea could be great -- downloadable walking tour guide, with many enriched features (interviews, newsclips, etc.). But not if it means renting the actual gadget, without some sort of online accessible aspect.

Tags: mit_techreview, tourism, guide, berlin, berlin_wall on 2008-04-28 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The hand-sized minicomputer, to be introduced May 1, is linked to global positioning satellites mapping the wall's former path.

Boasting a headset and a touch-screen, it features a colorful map of the city that can zoom in and out, showing the users where they are. The route of the former barrier between East and West Germany is marked in red while a yellow line guides the visitor from one wall section to the next, calculating the distances via GPS in meters.
The city government commissioned the multimedia guide as part of a bigger project to improve existing memorials to the wall, most of which were torn down after Communist East Germany collapsed and the border was opened in 1989. The project is scheduled for completion by Aug. 13, 2011, the 50th anniversary of the wall's construction.

Apart from guiding tourists from one wall memorial to the next -- among them the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie and the mural-covered East Side Gallery -- the digital assistant gives information about 22 historically significant spots along the wall's route.
At a memorial for the people killed while trying to escape, users can click an icon that lets them see and hear Juergen Litfin talk about the death of his brother Guenter -- shot by border guards Aug. 24, 1961 and said to be the first of at least 125 people killed trying to make the perilous crossing.
Passing through the Brandenburg Gate, users can listen to and watch U.S. President Ronald Reagan peering over the wall as he made his famous 1987 speech challenging then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ''tear down this wall!''
Starting on May 1, the wall guides can be rented at five booths located throughout the city. They cost between euro6 and euro15 (US$9.50 and US$24) depending on how long visitors want to keep them.

The ''Walk the Wall'' guide comes in German and English, but manufacturer Antenna Audio is planning to offer it in other languages as well.
It took a team of historians and computer experts one year and euro500,000 (US$797,000) to develop the current software, said Rosemarie Wirthmueller, Antenna Audio's managing director for Europe, but as of now there are no concrete plans to use similar GPS-connected devices in other cities.

Antenna Audio, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications Inc., also offers digital tour guides for 450 museums and archaeological sites across the globe, but none of them come with GPS so far.

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Filtering Internet Content - MIT Tech Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog

Clay Shirky was right when he emphasized "filtering" in that WorldChanging interview. But as Kristina Grifantini, the MIT Tech Review blogger, puts it, is "hand-holding" during search really the way to go? (I think NOT.)

Tags: mit_techreview, socialmedia, filtering, content, conversations on 2008-04-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Study finds gap between editors and readers in ground rules for online conversations - MIT TechReview

Fascinating study regarding the discrepancies between what MSM professionals believe and what its reading public believes. The latter think that anonymous comments are ok; that journalists/ authors participating in online conversations with readers is ok; and that expressions of personal views by journalists are ok. The 'professionals' believe the exact opposite. Hmmm.

Tags: mit_techreview, socialmedia, socialtheory, conversations, media, newspapers, blogging on 2008-04-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good
journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online
conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
Online Journalism Credibility Study released Tuesday
by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds
Journalism Institute at the University
of Missouri
Some 70 percent of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose
their identities would support good journalism, while only 45 percent of the
public did. Similarly, 58 percent of editors said letting journalists join
online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36
percent of the public agreed.
''There's some indication that readers are looking for something more online.
Whether it's information about our expertise, our knowledge, our background,
I'm not really sure.''
Editors and readers also agreed on the desirability of depth, such as links
to content published elsewhere and databases or other information visitors can
explore on their own.

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Technology Review: Consolidating Your Web Banter

MIT Tech Review reports on Seesmic's purchase of Thwirl; this bookmark is page 2 from that article. I find this bit especially useful:
QUOTE:
"The past five years or so have seen a massive proliferation of user- generated content," says Bret Taylor, founder and CEO of FriendFeed. Tools that aggregate this information have been around for years, but so far they haven't been very good at filtering useful content from less-useful content. "Our theory is that people you know are the best filters for information," he says.
UNQUOTE
- This relates to my previous questions/ thoughts on filtering apropos the Clay Shirky/ Jon Lebkowsky interview in WorldChanging.

Tags: mit_techreview, twitter, friendfeed, thwirl, seesmic, filtering, socialcomputing on 2008-04-10 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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3-D Modeling Advance - MIT Technology Review

- Interesting report on Make3D, a (new) web service "that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model." What I'm especially interested in is how this could be used for an idea I had around a retail application (more on that some other time!), which stalled because the "magic juice" or "potion" was missing. This could well be one key ingredient of same, though...

Tags: 3-d_modeling, mit_techreview, visualization on 2008-03-07 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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