Shortly after President Obama was elected, he decreed that all Federal Agencies measure the amount of greenhouse gases they use and work to reduce this number. A class example: "That which gets measured, gets improved." At the Department of Energy, they found that Sulfur Hexafluoride, SF6, was the biggest culprit since it had 24,000 times the effect on the atmosphere as CO2. By going after leaks of this gas, used to insulate high voltage experimental machines, they were able to reduce leaks by half and take the equivalent of 200,000 cars off the road. They will continue to go after the worst culprits in classic Pareto style.
New App provides Malibu beach access
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| Monica Almeida/The New York Times |
For years the rich of Malibu have been illegally blocking beach access to the public by refusing to open up access ways and gating off those that exist. According to this recent article: There are 17 public access ways to the Malibu coastline. Under state law, there should be more than 100.
Coming from a country (Australia) and a state (Oregon) where beach access is a public right and expectation I am shocked by this behavior.
There has been a way to find the few gates that work by buying a 300 page guide for $25. Finally technology has come to the rescue. For $2, one can buy an app that shows all the secrets. This includes such gems as which garage doors and No Parking signs are fake.
The home-owners protest that there are no facilities to service these 'interlopers' but I bet they fight the installation of bathrooms and garbage cans on 'their' beaches. I say we all get this app and raid their beaches and show them that according to California law, they must provide access. Who's with me?
Shark Tank and entrepreneurs help each other
When my friends from Coffee Joulies appeared on 'Shark Tank' their sales jumped so high that they are still having trouble filling orders months after the show airing. The millions of viewers of Shark Tank provides tons of free publicity. So why would any of the entrepreneurs bother taking the tough deals offered by the Sharks?
Turns out they have to give up their company either way. According to this recent NY Times article, The standard appearance contract entitles the show’s producers and ABC to 5 percent of the company or 2 percent of future royalties, regardless of whether a deal materializes with a shark. That's quite a deal for ABC and Mark Burnett. In addition to a relatively cheap show to produce, (I wonder if they have to pay the sharks to appear) they get a revenue stream from all these companies whose products get a quick burst of publicity.
Invention to turn text into voice
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| Liat Negrin, an employee at OrCam, wears a device made by the company that consists of a camera and a small computer. Copyright NY Times 2013 |
Here's another great invention. Glasses that have a camera that reads text and translate it into words that are read into your ear. Designed by OrCam for the visually impaired, it is capable of reading any English words and whisper them into your ear.
What I need is the sister device, not yet invented. How about a device that listens to words and projects subtitles under people's faces. Then you can satisfy the hearing impaired.
NYC Bike program finally kicks off
Finally! New York City's bike program has started and it seems to be a success. For now it is only open to the annual subscribers and only 6,000 bicycles are deployed but it will soon expand to the general public and boast 10,000 bikes.
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Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, left, on Monday morning with Michele F. Imbasciani of Citibank, a sponsor of New York's new bike share program. |
Times reporters raced around the city to see which was faster: bike, subway, cab or bus and the results are posted here:
Spoiler alert, the bike beat the subway and bus almost every time, and often the cab.
I've given Bloomberg his share of poor reviews in this blog but, to give the man credit, he pulled off this project and I wish it nothing but success.
Project Manager finds love
I love this video, especially because it stars a Project Manager:
Sixtieth excerpt from 'Twelve Towers': Human Resource Plan
The next day the team assembled and men started to demolish the corner of the palace where the tower was to be situated while others pulled down the rest of the palace and stacked up the stones for later use. Daylight revealed the beauty of the mosaic. Gwilym made a decision to try and rescue as much of this as possible for later use on the tower or for sale to other people. “We may need the extra money for unforeseen circumstances on this tower build.” Gwilym walked around with the calendar, checking off who was working and who was due to come tomorrow for laying out the foundations. He checked the way the crew were doing their jobs and made judgments on their level of various skills. Then he and Fred sat down at an easel with a blank sheet of paper and the network diagram showing all the activities and who was responsible for each and created a new document. “Let’s call this our ‘Human Resource Plan,’ Fred.”
“We’ll list all the roles we have to fill for doing this project: Project Manager, Foreman, Sawyer, Mason, Foundation Man, Laborer, Carpenter, Quarryman, Road-builder. Then we list the names of all the men who fill those roles for us. Some can be used in two or more roles.”
After they had done that, Gwilym took out another sheet of paper. “Some of the men were too happy day before yesterday volunteering for activities. We need to show this in a better way than just their names on activities in the network diagram. I think we’ll get some warning of their overuse if we plot the activities against the people.”
Fred took a large sheet of paper, and wrote the names of the crew on the vertical axis. On the x axis he wrote the names of all the activities. Where they intersected he placed a letter R next to the person who volunteered to take responsibility for that activity. He placed a letter I if the person was involved with the activity. With Gwilym calling out the activities and Fred writing, they were soon finished.
“Let’s add the role of the crew below their names so we can see which roles are overloaded,” said Gwilym. On doing so they saw that the foundation men seemed overloaded at first, then the masons, then the carpenters. That made some sense based on the nature of the work.
To read the entire first draft in one shot, click here:
Efficiently turning Garbage into Energy
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Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times Trash piled nine yards high is converted to heat and electricity at a waste-to-energy incinerator in Oslo. By JOHN TAGLIABUE Published: April 29, 2013
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Oslo is so efficient in converting garbage to heat and energy that it is importing garbage from Sweden, England and Ireland and is even looking to import it from the US.
Why don't we import their technology and burn our own garbage?
Post Office Project coming to an end
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Ruth Burns checks incoming mail at a Postal Service remote encoding center in Salt Lake City. CHRIS DETRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MAY 03, 2013 BY RON NIXON |
I always thought that local post office clerks looked at envelopes and determined what was written there to deliver it to the right address. So poor handwriting meant that the local clerk had to work a little harder. But according to this article, the Post Office has for years been using optical character recognition to determine addresses from people's handwriting.
Starting with a success rate of 35%, these machines have built up to a 98% success rate for hand-written addresses. That means that the 55 centers that used to do this work have been downsized to one center in Salt Lake City that deciphers all the mail that the computers can't handle.
With 700 people reading an image every 90 seconds 24/7/365, they have replaced the local clerks figuring everything out themselves. Efficiency, but at a cost. Now that the local people aren't doing this work, we get mistakes made by people 200 miles away choosing the most likely address.
Just like when my college cafeteria job switched from knowing the names of those who were permitted to eat to running cards through a scanner, the human element is lost. But it sure beats paying an extra penny per letter right? Or does it?
Danes rethinking Welfare State
According to a recent NY Times article, the people of Denmark are rethinking their welfare state. In this most generous of welfare states, the common people are asking if work ethic is being undermined.
The article examines a welfare mother who has been receiving $2,700 a month for the last 20 years.
Some of the benefits of this system boggled my mind.
- Free health care
- Free university education
- Students are entitled to six years of stipends, about $990 a month, to complete a five-year degree
- Hefty payouts to even the richest citizens
- Parents in all income brackets get quarterly checks from the government to help defray child-care costs
- The elderly get free maid service if they need it, even if they are wealthy
- Short work hours
- Long vacations
- Lengthy paid maternity leaves
- A de facto minimum wage approaching $20 an hour
- 9 percent of the potential work force have lifetime disability status
How do they pay for this? First of all there is a marginal tax rate of 56.8% on incomes greater than $80,000. Yikes! But the system is still not sustainable as the population ages.
The work force has far more older people to support. About 18 percent of Denmark’s population is over 65, compared with 13 percent in the United States.
Only 3 of Denmark’s 98 municipalities will have a majority of residents working in 2013. This is a significant reduction from 2009, when 59 municipalities could boast that a majority of residents had jobs.
This system has to change. Already there are signs of frugality creeping in: The unemployed used to be able to collect benefits for up to four years. Now it is two. Still a long way from the six months we get in the US.
Will this country, like many US states and municipalities, cut costs before they go broke?
Electric car batteries smooth out power distribution
In a previous post I discussed the use of home water heaters to store excess electricity generated by wind farms. The problem is simple, Electric companies want to deliver to a constant demand of power at 60 cycles per second. But with wind and solar power generation being up to the whims of mother nature, supply is not so constant.
An unexpected solution to this is the growing numbers of electric cars that are plugged in to charging units during this unstable time. With the addition of a small gadget, these cars can send electricity back into the grid when needed. While the cars will still charge, they will do so in fits and starts, evening out the peaks and valleys of the power supply.
Why should electric car owners do this? Presumably it would take a little longer to bring the cars up to full charge and, if you unplug it after it has just discharged some power, you may be starting off with less than a full charge. The answer, as always, is money. Cars with the gadget added will earn $5 a day. That adds up to $1,800 a year for a gadget that costs $400.
This won't work until there are a lot of electric cars out there with this capability but pilot programs are starting up. Pretty cool, huh?
Electric Taxi Experiment
New York want to experiment with replacing their fleet of yellow cabs with electric versions in a continuing effort to make the city greener. As this article presents, they will start this week with six but hope to convert 1/3 of the fleet by 2020.
Since NY cabbies want to maximize the time they spend driving during their shift, the Limousine commission needs to encourage these drivers to make up for the 60 - 90 minutes they will be charging their cabs. They have done that by reducing the daily rental rate and allowing them to decline fares that put them out of range of charging units when they are nearing the end of a charge.
The big surprise I received when reading this article is that a typical cab only drives about 100 miles in a typical day. Since the car goes 80 miles on a charge, only one charge a day is expected.
One cabbie suggested placing charging units near restaurants with bathroom facilities so that the drivers can be efficient during their charging times.
It seems like a better solution would be to have 23 cabs for every 24 drivers and allow them to switch out one per hour with the car they are driving on a regular schedule. But maybe drivers are particular about which car they use.
Cool wheelchair-accessible car project
For those who are wheelchair-bound and don't want to spend a fortune for a wheelchair accessible van or hassle their friends and family to drive them around, here is a neat option for driving around town.
It only goes 25 miles per hour and has a range of 45 - 60 miles. But some advantages are that it only costs $25,000 and runs on electricity. But the big plus is the convenience. You simply wheel yourself in, harness up, grab the handlebars and drive. You can park at right angles to the curb so that you can wheel right out onto the sidewalk. So for running errands around town, the Kenguru is perfect.
The story behind the story is how this came to be. Stacy Zoern, who was wheelchair-bound and had just totaled her $80,000 van was Googling wheelchair vans and came across this company in Hungary who had just lost their funding. She made friends with the owner, got some financing and now they are being made in America.
Next up is a slightly larger one that will accommodate an electric wheelchair so that Stacy can finally have her own version.
Automatic Sheet Music Turner
Watching my son's concert last night I was surprised that the musicians still had to turn their sheets of music by hand. Especially the pianists, causing a brief stoppage of music. I asked my wife, "Why isn't there an app for that?" This morning I saw that someone had invented a battery operated page turner but that seemed a little primitive. So I searched and found this App that almost does what I pictured.
While my idea had it scroll at a certain speed given the song's tempo, this app listens to you play and keeps track with when you need to turn the page. It follows along, even as you change tempo, make mistakes and pause. It can distinguish your playing above background noise and even other people playing music in the background.
The only problem is that the app still moves one page at a time. Can't someone create an app that scrolls down the lines so you always see the line you are working on, one above and two below? Or is everyone so used to pages of music that they cannot adjust to a scroll?
Margaret Thatcher saved England from itself
With the Euro zone splitting into the haves and have-nots it is interesting to see where England stands and why. The British never adopted the Euro largely due to Mrs. Thatcher's insistence that it would be dragged down by the weaker economies. She was right.
She was also responsible for fighting off the descent into socialism that has plagued some of the Southern European countries which are falling into default. By standing strong against budget deficits and the militant coal miners she pulled Britain through the austerity programs early enough to place the country on strong footing. More importantly she did not wait until it was too late, a lesson Greece and Spain could learn.
She had her detractors. "Ding Dong, the witch is dead'" is rising to the top spot in the British charts. But strong leaders do what's right for their countries, regardless of what is popular. And Britain stands financially firm due the programs she put in place. Give the woman her due.
Why doesn't the Egyptian Leadership prevent rapes?
In Mubarak's Egypt, with the omnipresent police force, women walked the streets in relative safety. Now, under the auspices of the Muslim Brotherhood, there can be as many as 18 rapes in a single square in a single evening. Most are gang-rapes by groups of men.
The response by the Muslim Brotherhood? "Sometimes a girl contributes 100% to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions." Read the NY Times article for more shocking details.
Some ultraconservative Islamists condemned the women for speaking out: "You see those women speaking like ogres, without shame, politeness, fear or even femininity," declared a televisions preacher, Ahmed Abdullah, also known as Sheik Abu Islam.
Such a woman is 'like a demon,' he said, wondering why anyone should sympathize with those 'naked' women who 'went there to get raped."
On YouTube you can find videos of these horrific attacks.
I think a fair judgement of the effectiveness of any government is how well it protects its people. Using this creterion, the new Egyptian Government is extremely ineffective.
Concrete Tent
I like this invention. I saw it first on the Youtube video where it is shown as a mobile hospital for use in disaster areas The idea is that concrete impregnated fiber is wet, then inflated with a leaf-blower and the structure is allowed to set. This leaves you with a large structure that can be made sterile for use as a hospital.
When I visited the website it showed the military uses of the same technology. Guess where it will make more money?
Two Great Ideas to Quit Smoking
There was an excellent Op-Ed piece in Monday's paper about the efforts to curb the 400,000 American deaths per year blamed on cigarette smoking. Two ideas are being pushed up against the strong pro-tobacco lobby. Let's hope they come to fruition:
1) FDA enforces non-addictive levels of nicotine in cigarettes.
Apparently, the Food and Drug Administration has been given the power to regulate the amount of nicotine allowed in a cigarette as long as they don't regulate it to zero. They do have the right to force tobacco companies to bring it down to a level that is non-addictive. This should cause current smokers to switch to other 'healthier' sources for their daily fix. More importantly it will prevent the next generation from becoming addicted. Which brings us to the second strategy, this one enforced at the local level.
2) Communities refuse to sell tobacco to anyone born in the year 2000 or later.
These kids are just turning 13, (my twins are an example) so what parent could argue against this? Of course, when they turn 18 and can vote, they may have something to say about it. But the idea has merit. We don't care what age they are, if they were born after 1999, they don't get to buy, sell or even possess tobacco. Tasmania, a state in Australia is considering the law.
Maybe Jeff McGinley can rewrite Prince's 1999 along these lines
They say two thousand zero zero smoking's over oops outta time
So tonight I'm gonna toke it like it's 1999
French 'Workers'
I laughed out loud when reading this recent article about French workers. An American executive described French workers to union representatives as such: “The French work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.”
The union reps simply laughed and said, "That's the French way!
“You can keep your so-called workers,” he wrote. “Titan is not interested in the Amiens factory.”
While this attitude seems funny to Americans, the French 35-hour work week and 17 week annual vacations make France non-competitive in the global market. France is doomed to follow Greece and Spain into default. Their average citizens scoff at paying taxes while Hollande is raising rates to 75% for those earning more than a million Euros a year.
It's time for the French to take a page from the Germans. Work hard, pay your taxes and watch your country thrive. If they continue with the status quo they will have austerity shoved down their throats by the solvent European countries.
Clever project to block illegal tunnels
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| A Palestinian clearing a tunnel of sewage in Rafah, between Egypt and the southern Gaza StripBy FARES AKRAM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: February 20, 2013 |
For centuries, governments have fought against those trying to tunnel in or out of their installations. Whether it was sappers trying to tunnels under castles to knock down walls, prisoners escaping prison camps or drug smugglers sneaking into the US, there has been a one-upmanship battle between the tunnelers and those detecting them.
The latest battleground has been the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza used to smuggle weapons into this dangerous area. The Egyptians have come up with a simple but effective measure to fight them: Raw Sewage. Simple, but effective.