Important Trends in Alternative Energy

Posted on October 8, 2010 by janeforsythe

Breakdown Of Alternative Energy Use in the US

Recently, the U.S. Energy Information Administration released their most recent report regarding the consumption of alternative energy in the United States. While the nation’s complete dependence on fossil fuels is readily apparent in the report, there are signs of progress as well. Nationwide, renewable energy sources accounted for over 7% of the total energy consumption. Within that 7% the main type of renewable energy that was consumed was biomass, meaning the burning of fuels produced from renewable sources such as ethanol production and biodiesel accounting for 52% of the total renewable energy consumed. The biomass sector has seen substantial growth, more than doubling its market share in the period between 2004-2008. The second leading source of renewable energy consumed was hydroelectric power which accounted for 34%. Hydroelectric energy production has remained steady (with minor fluctuations due to water levels) at between 2.2 and 3.6 quadrillion Btu/yr for about 20 years. The leading states as far as hydroelectric power generation were Washington, Oregon, New York, California, Montana and Idaho, although there was some growth in Alabama, Arkansas and New York. Since plans for the construction of new dams is limited, it can be expected that these figures will continue basically unchanged.

However, many other sectors of renewable energy production saw considerable growth. Electricity production from wind saw 5-fold growth from 2004 to 2008 and 61% year-to year between 2007 and 2008. This is due mainly to significant incentives put into place for wind energy production via heavy government subsidies of the sector. Wind energy projects in California, Kansas, Wyoming, Texas, Iowa and Colorado accounted for much of the growth during this period. By the end of 2008, there were 7 states producing at least 1,000 MW of power from wind turbines. Increases in different sectors of renewable energy included the use of geothermal and solar/PV in California and Nevada. California continued to lead the field of renewable energy production nationwide, with active projects in all renewable energy sectors.

While renewable energy accounted for 7% of the total energy consumed in the United States during 2008, it accounted for 9.3% of electricity generation. This difference is due mostly to the consumption of petroleum to power motor vehicles, where a lesser share of renewable sources were utilized. That figure is up from 8% in 2004 representing a 16% increase.

All in all, it seems that renewable energy production is on the rise nationwide. Many states have committed to renewable energy goals, generally striving for about 20% generation capacity by 2020. If growth continues in renewable energy at the present rate, that figure should be well within reach.

Daily Exercise Provides Relief From All Pain

Travis Saunders, MSc, CEP
I came across these incredibly odd Thai physical activity PSA’s earlier this week and had to share them. They are funny, weird, non evidence-based, and more than a little disturbing. But they are still pretty awesome.



Have a great weekend!

Travis

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What we’re self-driving at!

Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.



Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.



To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. Also on the team is Anthony Levandowski, who built the world’s first autonomous motorcycle that participated in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside. The work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History.



Safety has been our first priority in this project. Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control. And we also have a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance. And we’ve briefed local police on our work.



According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half. We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new “highway trains of tomorrow.' These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads. In terms of time efficiency, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting. Imagine being able to spend that time more productively.



We’ve always been optimistic about technology’s ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today. While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting.



Posted by Sebastian Thrun, Distinguished Software Engineer

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Australia faces worst doctor shortage since WWII

The new president of the Royal Australian College of GPs says the national doctor workforce is in crisis.

Professor Claire Jackson says Australia is facing its worst GP shortage since World War II.

She is in Cairns as part of the GP10 conference and says the college is focusing on training more GPs to tackle the crisis.

"We now have a lot more medical students and thankfully a lot more register training positions this year than we did several years ago," she said.

"Our challenge as a college is to make sure all those students and registers get first-class training and support."

Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

A new study demonstrates the power of music to alter our emotional perceptions of other people

By Mark Changizi  September 15, 2009 

Image: Lukasz Laska

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

But music does emanate from our alarm clocks in the morning, and fill our cars, and give us chills, and make us cry. According to a recent paper by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, music even affects how we see visual images. In the experiment, 30 subjects were presented with a series of happy or sad musical excerpts. After listening to the snippets, the subjects were shown a photograph of a face. Some people were shown a happy face – the person was smiling - while others were exposed to a sad or neutral facial expression. The participants were then asked to rate the emotional content of the face on a 7-point scale, where 1 mean extremely sad and 7 extremely happy. 

The researchers found that music powerfully influenced the emotional ratings of the faces. Happy music made happy faces seem even happier while sad music exaggerated the melancholy of a frown.  A similar effect was also observed with neutral faces. The simple moral is that the emotions of music are “cross-modal,” and can easily spread from sensory system to another. Now I never sit down to my wife’s meals without first putting on a jolly Sousa march.

Although it probably seems obvious that music can evoke emotions, it is to this day not clear why. Why doesn’t music feel like listening to speech sounds, or animal calls, or garbage disposals? Why is music nice to listen to? Why does music get blessed with a multi-billion dollar industry, whereas there is no market for “easy listening” speech sounds?

In an effort to answer, let’s first ask why I was listening to French instructional programs in the first place. The truth is, I wasn’t just listening. I was watching them on public television. What kept my attention was not the meaningless-to-me speech sounds (I was a slow learner), but the young French actress. Her hair, her smile, her mannerisms, her pout… I digress. The show was a pleasure to watch because of thehumans it showed, especially the exhibited expressions and behaviors.

The lion share of emotionally evocative stimuli in the lives of our ancestors would have been from the faces and bodies of other people, and if one finds human artifacts that are highly evocative, it is a good hunch that it looks or sounds human in some way.

As evidence that humans are the principal source of emotionality among human artifacts, consider human visual signs. Visual signs, I have argued, have culturally evolved to look like natural objects, and have the kinds of contour combinations found in a three-dimensional world of opaque objects. Three-dimensional world of opaque objects? Nothing particularly human about that, and that’s why most linguistic signs – like the letters and words on this page – are not emotionally evocative to look at.

But visual signs do sometimes have emotional associations. For example, colors are notoriously emotionally evocative, and arguments about what color something should be painted are the source of an alarming number of marital arguments. And “V” stimuli, such as that yield sign on the street, have long been realized (within the human factors literature) to serve as the most evocative geometrical shape for warning symbols. But notice that color and “V” stimuli are plausibly about human expression. In particular, color has recently been argued to be “about” human skin and the exhibited emotions – which is why red grabs our attention, since it's associated with blushing and blood - and “V” stimuli have been suggested to be “about” angry faces (namely, angry eyebrows).  

Which brings us back to music and the Logeswaran paper. Music is exquisitely emotionally evocative, which is why a touch of happy music makes even unrelated pictures seem more pleasant. In light of the above, then, we are led to the conclusion that the artifact of music should contain some distinctly human elements.

The question, of course, is what those elements are. One candidate is our expressive speech – perhaps music is just an abstract form of language. However, most of the emotion of language is in the meaning, which is why foreign languages that we don’t understand rarely make us swoon with pleasure or get angry. That’s also why emotional speech from an unfamiliar language isn’t featured on the radio!

But there is a second auditory expressive behavior we humans carry out – our bodily movements themselves. Human movement has been conjectured to underlie music as far back as the Greeks. As a hypothesis this has the advantage that we have auditory systems capable of making sense of the sounds of people moving in our midst – an angry stomper approaching, a delicate lilter passing, and so on. Some of these movements trigger positive emotions – they conjure up images of pleasant activities – while others might be automatically associated with fear or anxiety. (The sound of running makes us wonder what we’re running from.) If music were speech-driven, then it is missing out on the largest part of speech’s expressiveness – the meaning. But if music sounds like human expressive movements, then it sounds like something that, all by itself, is rich in emotional expressiveness, and can be easily interpreted by the auditory system.

Regardless of whether music is emotional intonation from speech or a summary of expressive movements – or something else altogether – the new research by Logeswaran and Bhattacharya adds yet more fuel to the expectation that music has been culturally selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human. While it is not easy for us to see the human ingredients in the modulations of pitch, intensity, tempo and rhythm that make music, perhaps it is obvious to our auditory homunculus.

Internet Keeps Growing! Traffic up 62% in 2010

Whether it’s Hulu, or 85 million-plus daily tweets or millions of photos being uploaded to Facebook, Internet traffic keeps growing and growing. That’s not going to change any time soon, mostly because the Internet is now becoming a crucial part of our daily lives. In some parts of the world, it’s hard to escape the ‘net, so to speak. Soon, thanks to the mobile Internet revolution, a massive new majority is going to join the Internet.

Data from research firm Telegeography shows that Internet traffic has grown 62 percent in 2010, after logging a handsome 74 percent growth in 2009. The growth in traffic is coming from non-mature markets likes Eastern Europe and India, where traffic growth between mid-2009 and mid-2010 was in excess of 100 percent. Telegeography notes:

The regions experiencing the fastest growth in international Internet traffic between mid-year 2009 and mid-year 2010 were Eastern Europe and India/South Asia, where average traffic growth exceeded 100 percent, and the Middle East, where traffic rose just under 100 percent. Even relatively “mature” markets are still growing rapidly: western European international Internet traffic increased 66 percent, and the U.S. and Canada’s international Internet traffic climbed 54 percent.

This means the carriers, who added about 13.2 Tbps of new Internet capacity in 2010, will have to keep beefing up their networks. In comparison, carriers added 9.4 Tbps of capacity in 2009 and 6 Tbps in 2008. Compare that to 2002; we have indeed come a long way! (The chart below is from our archives.)

That said, the networks are not evenly divided. The capacity is still in abundance in larger, more mature markets, but less so in newer markets such as Africa. This will be changing soon, especially as we see deployment of new cables in those regions.

This new capacity in non-mature markets, when married to growth in wireless networks and easy availability of cheap smartphones, is going to turn the Internet on its head. A good indication of this shift can be foreseen in the growth of mobile social networking in India. As Telegeography notes:

The number of mobile social network users in India is expected to reach around 72 million by 2014, driven by the reduced cost of smartphones and the launch of 3G services, according to the latest research from Analysys Mason. The number of online social network users in India has grown by 43% to approximately 33 million unique users as of July 2010, with India emerging as the seventh largest market globally. According to the report, the increased number of social network users is driving the number of mobile social network users (around 10 million in 2009), representing around 2.2% of the total number of mobile subscribers.

This has to factor into Facebook’s future plans. Now imagine a repeat of this in Africa! You get the gist.

Graphene Just Won Two Guys The Nobel. So What The Hell Is It?

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By Sam Biddle on October 6, 2010 at 6:20 AM

Today, two professors won the Nobel prize for physics “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”. The Nobel is the Olympic gold of science. But what isgraphene, and why did it earn these guys over a million bucks?

Some Nobels in physics are (relatively) straightforward. In 1935, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. A huge deal, of course, but something you can understand by 11th grade. But today’s award – presented to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov – is for a two-dimensional material. A what? Not exactly high school stuff. So let’s break it down.

Graphene is, put most simply, five carbon atoms – the same stuff in your pencil – arranged in a hexagon. (Fun fact: the pair started their work with graphene by peeling off layers of actual pencil lead with scotch tape). This doesn’t sound like anything special, except for the fact that, as Geim himself explains, “Everything in our three-dimensional world has a width, length and height. That was what we thought, at least.” Geim and Novoselov’s work expands our understanding of materials that don’t have any of these dimensional properties, because they are only one atom thick. They are lacking an entire dimension.

It’s hard to imagine – but that’s sort of the point. The duo’s work is on the frontier of an entire class of stuff that we’re only just now starting to be able to conceive of. Geim himself says he has no idea the extent to which a material such as graphene could be useful. But we do know that it is super cool. Despite (or rather, because of) its measly two-dimensionality, graphene is the strongest and thinnest substance in the known universe, can be stretched like rubber and is impregnable by liquid or gas. It also conducts electricity, allowing it to (someday) beat the pants off the copper and silicon we use in, well, pretty much everything. Still unimpressed? A layer of graphene could hold up a truck atop a pencil. You don’t look so great now, do you, neutron.

So what’s next? “Optimists say we are entering a carbon age. Even pessimists argue only that the impact will be somewhat less,” says Geim, who is, naturally, excited: “I hope that graphene and other two-dimensional crystals will change everyday life as plastics did for humanity.” So we’ll have to wait and see, but still – job well done, gents.