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…and nothing on the other 72% of the planet?
Why does NASA spend every year 1,600 times as much as NOAA spends in ocean research? Is it because heaven is up there?
Don’t miss geophysicist and ocean explorer Robert Ballard’s TED Talk “Exploring the ocean’s hidden worlds”
Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur behind the X Prize Foundation, shows video of Stephen Hawking sampling his dream of going into space. The TED Talk video is only 4 minutes - check it out.
Statistician William Briggs discusses Chapter 14 “Cheating” of his new book — in which he gives away free some of the most guarded secrets of his trade — how to cheat successfully with statistics
It is important these days for people to know how to get away with as much as they possibly can. This chapter shows you how to do it.
There are no cheap methods like data fudging or just plain lying—those techniques are for pikers. No: what I give you is genuine, sophisticated gold. Tricks you can actually use and get away with. Tricks that work.
I must be out of my mind to give these secrets away for free, but it is a measure of how much I love you, my audience, my faithful readers.
From there you can download Chapter 14 as PDF.
Professor of statistics William Briggs wrote a nice piece on the theme Experts are often too sure of themselves. I especially liked this segment:
For fun, we have a list of the Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions from the List Universe. Here’s #2, from Mr Bill Gates, a well known rich person who lives near Seattle: “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” And #8 from Lord Kelvin, who was a mathematician and physicist, and president of the British Royal Society, 1895: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
Ho ho ho, we say to ourselves when we read these prognostications. How stupid can they be! We experience mirth. But that is exactly the wrong emotion. You might despise Bill Gates, but he is an incredibly bright person, an expert among experts in his field. Kelvin, who you probably haven’t heard of, was one of the smartest people who ever lived (not at the top of the list, to be sure, but ahead of all of us). These, and the other people with quotes on the List Universe page, were masters, yet they made remarkably huge mistakes.
You must also remember that when these men, superior in perception to their peers, made these predictions, there were not hosts of others saying the opposite. Most people believed the predictions, and with good reason. These experts had often been right before. What we should take away from this list is an increased skepticism, a belief that experts are not nearly right as often as they’d like us to think they are. Doubt, therefore, is the proper emotion.
Something else to worry about…
…Donald K. Yeomans, who manages the jet propulsion lab’s Near-Earth Object Program, said the Earth’s atmosphere is continually streaked by space stuff, ranging from the basketball-size (several a day) to the Volkswagen-size (twice a year). Almost everything burns up, though some may explode in the air, a phenomenon known as an airburst, with the potential of causing damage below. And then there are objects, like the meteorite that dug a 60-foot-wide crater in Peru last September. Perhaps no bigger than a basketball, the meteorite was a reminder of the destructive power of what is lurking out there.
“In fact, there was a daylight fireball event widely observed near Los Angeles two days ago,” Dr. Yeomans said in an e-mail message last Thursday. “I take these events as Mother Nature’s little reminders that we need to pay attention, find and track the large ones and then deflect the very few that threaten us. Tunguska was another reminder. Until recently, we humans did not pay heed to these shots across the bow but now, I think, there is more of a recognition of this low probability — but high consequence — type of event.”
For deflecting an incoming object, I like the “gravity tractor” concept promoted by Rusty Schweickart’s B612 Foundation [I’m not certain that B612 still considers the gravity tractor to be the best design].
TED has produced a very enjoyable highlights video of the top-ten TED presentations based on visitor downloads. The highlights video is also available in HD 480p.
Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, is promoting urban vertical farms. It’s great to see some of us thinking-big and thinking outside the box. Compared to the R&D costs of, say, fusion research it shouldn’t be very expensive to design, plan and build some pilot projects. Like geosequestration, this is in the class of engineering that requires learning by doing. For funding, perhaps this is a better outlet for some of the excess Soros money :-)
Imagine a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using current green building systems, a vertical farm could be self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and energy.
Despommier began developing the vertical-farming concept six years ago (his research can be found at verticalfarm .com), and he has been contacted by scientists and venture capitalists from the Netherlands to Dubai who are interested in establishing a Center for Urban Sustainable Agriculture, either independently or within Columbia. He estimates it could take a working group of agricultural economists, architects, engineers, agronomists, and urban planners five to ten years to figure out how to marry high-tech agricultural practices with the latest sustainable building technology.
During the ACS session on solar energy I kept hearing references to the Graetzel Cell — apparently high efficiency but short life. For you researchers, try this link for a start:
Michael Graetzel, the father of the Graetzel Cell, a kind of dye-sensitized solar cell, has developed an improved photoelectrochemical cell that will more efficiently and cost-effectively produce hydrogen. Details of the unprecedented development are expected to be released by the Journal of the American Chemical Society within the next 10 days.
Michael Graetzel first developed the Graetzel Cell in 1991, which uses low-cost materials and simple apparatus in manufacturing. The cells have a simple structure and the newest breakthrough technology is supposed to increase quantum efficiency from the current level of 37-percent to an all-time high of 42-percent.
Technorati Tags: Solar Power
Supplying the World’s Energy Needs with Light and Water: offers more background on research targeting direct conversion of solar flux to fuels.
While researchers and technologists around the world scramble to find cleaner sources of energy, some chemists are turning to nature’s own elegant solution: photosynthesis. In photosynthesis, green plants use the energy in sunlight to break down water and carbon dioxide. By manipulating electrons and hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms in a series of complex chemical reactions, the process ultimately produces the cellulose and lignin that form the structure of the plant, as well as stored energy in the form of sugar. Understanding how this process works, thinks Daniel Nocera, professor of chemistry at MIT, could lead to ways to produce and store solar energy in forms that are practical for powering cars and providing electricity even when the sun isn’t shining.
What’s needed are breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental chemical processes that make photosynthesis possible, according to Nocera, a recognized photosynthesis expert. He is studying the principles behind photosynthesis and applying what he learns to making catalysts that use solar energy to create hydrogen gas for fuel cells. Nocera’s goal: a world powered by light and water.
Our friend Patricia alerted us to this remarkable Antarctic neutrino experiment. We thought it was quite brilliant to utilize the mass of high density ice to achieve a high probability of muon neutrino collisions:
The IceCube Neutrino Detector is a neutrino telescope currently under construction at the South Pole. Like its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube is being constructed in deep Antarctic ice by deploying thousands of spherical optical sensors (photomultiplier tubes, or PMTs) at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 meters. The sensors are deployed on “strings” of sixty modules each, into holes in the ice melted using a hot water drill.
…Due to the high density of the ice, almost all detected products of the initial collision will be muons. Therefore the experiment is most sensitive to the flux of muon neutrinos through its volume.
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