Futurist

There are 390 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 13 of 39).

Renewables critics sound off :: WRAL.com

Fossil-energy advocates are desperately pleading with the NCGA to revoke our state’s clean energy standards called REPS (Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard). Thankfully, they have an uphill battle as large-scale solar projects become a property-tax bonanza for the rural areas where they get built, instantly boosting the property values without requiring any public infrastructure investment.

I used to be worried about attempts like the Koch-backed American Energy Alliance but not anymore. They are this century’s buggy-whip makers, propping up a rapidly-dying industry: coal.

The writing’s on the wall for dirty-energy producers. Clean energy is kicking their ass and it’s only going to get worse for them. Hey Koch brothers, you have no chance of stopping the clean energy revolution, you’d be better off learning how to take advantage of it.

Raleigh, N.C. — Opponents of renewable energy programs held an hour-long roundtable at the Legislative Building on Wednesday about their concerns.The event was sponsored by the American Energy Alliance, the political lobbying arm of the Institute for Energy Policy, a conservative think tank funded by Charles and David Koch. The event moderator was Tom Pyle, president of the AEA and the IEP, and a former Koch Industries lobbyist.

Source: Renewables critics sound off :: WRAL.com

Trying to follow what is going on in Syria and why? This comic will get you there in 5 minutes.

I was not aware until now of the role climate change has played in the Syrian crisis. Pentagon studies have long argued the destabilizing nature of climate change will lead to increased conflict as people fight over diminishing natural resources. We can expect more of this as our environment continues its collapse.

Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere and all of a sudden, people you’ve never heard of are killing each other on the evening news. Here’s what you need to know about the war in Syria — and it’s not oil or religion. It’s something that we’re all creating together.

Source: Trying to follow what is going on in Syria and why? This comic will get you there in 5 minutes.

Alexander: Do those new chip-based credit and debit cards need protection? – StarTribune.com

I was chatting with the cashier supervisor at the local Large Mart, asking if Large Mart would be going to the new, chip-based credit cards.

“Yeah, we’re going to get those within the next few weeks,” he said.

I nodded. “Well, I’ve been the victim of credit card fraud so many times that I welcome the extra security.”

“The new cards also have security problems,” the supervisor answered. “With the chip cards, thieves can read your cards while they’re in your wallet.”

That was news to me. The chip on my card is definitely a contact card, and any RFID-based credit card would be wide open to the world and truly offer zero security. Fortunately, banks aren’t using RFID, but Near-Field Communication (NFC), and only in some chips (i.e., not in the U.S. at this time). NFC has a range of 2-4 inches, which is about 1/12th the range of an RFID tag. Also, an NFC-capable device does encryption, while an RFID tag would only stupidly transmit static numbers.

So, tl;dr: current chip cards in the U.S. are contact-only, and NFC chips won’t be readable outside of your wallet. Bring on the chipped-card revolution, I say!

Q: Do the new EMV chip credit cards (named after the developers, Europay, MasterCard and Visa) require a protective cover so that they can’t be scanned by nearby thieves, just as RFID (radio frequency identification) cards do? Do other radio frequency ID cards, such as hotel key cards, pose a risk of identity theft?
Jan Sartee,
San Rafael, Calif.

A: There are two types of credit cards using EMV chip technology. One is read by a slot in a point-of-sale ­terminal; the other is read by holding the card near the sales terminal.

If your EMV card requires physical contact inside a reader, its transactions and account information can’t be scanned remotely by thieves. If it is a contactless card, there’s a chance it could be read by nearby spying equipment, although the credit card ­industry says that’s unlikely.

Source: Alexander: Do those new chip-based credit and debit cards need protection? – StarTribune.com

Cold Fusion Heats Up: Fusion Energy and LENR Update | David H. Bailey

A friend forwarded this HuffPost story on cold fusion research and I was surprised to learn that a Raleigh-based company called Industrial Heat is said to have working technology.

Perhaps the most startling (and most controversial) report is by an Italian-American engineer-entrepreneur named Andrea Rossi. Rossi claims that he has developed a tabletop reactor that produces heat by an as-yet-not-fully-understood LENR process.Rossi has gone well beyond laboratory demonstration; he claims that he and the private firm Industrial Heat, LLC of Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, have actually installed a working system at an (undisclosed) commercial customer’s site.

According to Rossi and a handful of others who have observed the system in operation, it is producing 1 MWatt continuous net output power, in the form of heat, from a few grams of “fuel” in each of a set of modest-sized reactors in a network. The system has now been operating for approximately six months, as part of a one-year acceptance test. Rossi and IH LLC are in talks with Chinese firms for large-scale commercial manufacture.

Source: Cold Fusion Heats Up: Fusion Energy and LENR Update | David H. Bailey

Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous – The Washington Post

A good opinion piece on why America needs more than just STEM education.

Twenty years ago, tech companies might have survived simply as product manufacturers. Now they have to be on the cutting edge of design, marketing and social networking. You can make a sneaker equally well in many parts of the world, but you can’t sell it for $300 unless you’ve built a story around it. The same is true for cars, clothes and coffee. The value added is in the brand — how it is imagined, presented, sold and sustained. Or consider America’s vast entertainment industry, built around stories, songs, design and creativity. All of this requires skills far beyond the offerings of a narrow STEM curriculum.

Source: Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous – The Washington Post

Map of Triangle-area Google Fiber huts

Google Fiber in the Triangle

Google Fiber in the Triangle


A News and Observer story alerted me to the recent approval by Raleigh City Council of 10 Google Fiber hut sites in the city. A quick look at the city council minutes showed me where they were. I took a few minutes this afternoon to map these sites onto Google Maps to get a better look at where Google Fiber might soon be deployed.

The result is this Google Map. I have since added the four sites in Cary and one in Morrisville which have already been approved. I searched for approval of sites in Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Garner but as far as I know these municipalities have not yet approved their sites. If someone learns that this has changed, please give me a heads up and I will add these sites to my map.

The upright Google Fiber bunnies signify fiber hut locations, while the horizontal bunnies indicate where conduit permits have been requested. I’ve also put an icon on Raleigh’s proposed Google FiberSpace at 518 W. Jones St in Glenwood South area.

The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker

Here’s a terrifying story on the Cascadia Fault, which is overdue for an earthquake so devastating it will almost assuredly destroy Seattle. I love The New Yorker’s expert, in-depth writing.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Source: The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker

Amazon backs NC’s 1st large-scale wind farm | News & Observer News & Observer

Remember last year when I wondered why Amazon would suddenly start collecting state sales taxes even though it had no presence in the state? The N&O’s John Murawski reported yesterday that Amazon is investing in a giant wind farm in eastern North Carolina. Boom, there’s your “unspecified investment.”

With the estimated $20-$30 million Amazon is now collecting in sales taxes, Amazon’s wind farm is not only powering 60,000 homes, it’s also powering teacher salaries.

The world’s largest developer of wind-energy farms has teamed up with online retail giant Amazon to build a major wind farm in coastal North Carolina.Amazon, which is building a network of wind farms and also testing Tesla storage batteries, announced the project Monday. The Amazon Wind Farm US East, to be built in Perquimans and Pasquotank counties, will power the online retailer’s cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, as part of a corporate goal of achieving energy sustainability.

The sprawling 34-square-mile wind farm will start with 104 turbine spires rising from the state’s eastern flatlands. The $400 million energy project will be built by Spanish wind farm developer Iberdrola Renewables and will start generating electricity for Amazon’s data centers in late 2016.

Source: Amazon backs NC’s 1st large-scale wind farm | News & Observer News & Observer

Broadband Speeds Are Improving in Many Places. Too Bad It Took Google to Make It Happen. | MIT Technology Review

MIT’s Technology Review magazine praises Google Fiber for spurring broadband investment.

State and local governments had done little to disrupt the status quo or push ISPs to invest in upgrades. And governments also showed little interest in subsidizing, let alone fully paying for, a better infrastructure themselves. (There was money allocated to broadband investment in the 2009 stimulus bill, but it went mainly to wire underserved areas rather than lay fiber.) On the municipal level, most cities still had building regulations and permit requirements that, inadvertently or not, tended to discourage the laying of new line, particularly by new entrants. And in many cases, even if cities were interested in building or operating their own high-speed networks, state laws barred them from doing so. The result of all these factors was that the United States, slowly but certainly, began falling well behind countries like Sweden, South Korea, and Japan when it came to affordable, abundant bandwidth.

Five years later, things look very different. The United States is still behind Sweden and South Korea. But fiber-to-the-home service is now a reality in cities across the country. Google Fiber, which first rolled out in Kansas City in the fall of 2012, is now operating in Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, and Google says it will expand next to Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with another five major metro areas potentially on the horizon. The biggest impact, though, has arguably been the response from big broadband providers.

Source: Broadband Speeds Are Improving in Many Places. Too Bad It Took Google to Make It Happen. | MIT Technology Review