Month: January 2008

Cell Phones Safe On Planes

In Flight Cell Phone Ban Could Hurt U.S. Competitiveness, according to Freesky Research
Over the last year, close to a dozen airlines have announced plans to allow passengers to send text messages from their own cell phones. Passengers in Australia, France, Turkey, Ireland, Malaysia, India, and other countries are now using mobile devices in flight, or will be able to do so sometime in 2008. However, passengers in the United States will have to wait.

“Independent agencies have been testing mobile devices’ interference with cockpit communications and navigation equipment for the last five years. But with live systems now installed on passenger planes in a variety of countries, there is growing operational evidence that picocell-based systems can allow phones to be used in flight without harming a ground network or an aircraft’s avionics bus,” according to David Gross, author of two reports that have looked at the matter. “We know Wi-Fi is safe, particularly with some airlines using the technology internally to connect cabin security cameras to Electronic Flight Bags in the cockpit.”

Ethanol from Tires, Wood, Leaves…

Coskata.com

GM just announced an undisclosed investment in this company, so there must be something to it.
Coskata is a biology-based renewable energy company. Our technology enables the low-cost production of ethanol from a wide variety of input material including biomass, municipal solid waste and other carbonaceous material. Using proprietary microorganisms and patented bioreactor designs, we will produce ethanol for under US$1.00 per gallon.

Lost Qurans Found

The Lost Archive – WSJ.com

Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form. Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran “is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay,” says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.

And so the Wall Street Journal reveals how photos of ancient copies of the Quran have been quietly re-discovered in Germany and their threat to Islamofacist “Fundamentalism” doctrine. quran.jpg

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran. Continue reading “Lost Qurans Found”

Ant In Tree Depends On Giraffe

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Big mammals key to tree-ant team
At first it may seem counter-intuitive: that preventing large African herbivores from browsing Acacia trees decreases their growth.

Acacia trees provide ants with swollen thorns, which serve as nesting sites; and nectar, which the ants collect from the bases of Acacia leaves. In return for this investment, ants protect the tree from browsing mammals by aggressively swarming against anything that disturbs the tree.

The researchers disrupted this relationship by fencing off six plots of savanna land in Kenya by an 8,000-volt electric fence for 10 years. Herbivores, such as giraffes and elephants, were no longer able to feed on the trees, causing a change in plant-ant dynamic.

Due to lack of housing and food, the mutualistic ant species becomes less aggressive, its colony size decreases and it loses its competitive edge.

“The net result is a community-wide replacement of the ‘good’ mutualist ant by a decidedly ‘bad’ ant species that does not protect the trees from herbivores, and actually helps a wood-boring beetle to create tunnels throughout the main stem and branches of the acacia trees, which the bad ant then uses as nesting space,” Dr Palmer explains.

Trees occupied by this antagonist ant grow more slowly and experience double the death rate compared with trees occupied by the mutalistic ant. Thanks to EPIC for passing on this example of the Laws of Unintended Consequences

Small Car Flood Coming

Tata unveils the Nano, world’s cheapest car | Reuters

From Tata, India’s largest company -owner of Tetley Tea and soon-to-be of Jaguar and Land Rover, will come more pressure on oil prices & the environment, as it upgrades the 3rd world from 2 to 4 wheel transportation.
The 4-seater Nano, with an engine around 625cc, will have a dealer price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500) — about half the cost of the cheapest car on today’s market, a 25-year old model from rival Maruti Suzuki.

Global car makers — initially sceptical that Tata could produce such a low-cost car — are now scurrying to make their own versions to meet the needs of cost-conscious consumers in emerging economies such as China, India and Russia.

With just 8 people in 1,000 owning a car in India, there is huge potential to upgrade bike and scooter owners, who bought about 7 million two-wheelers in 2006/07. Continue reading “Small Car Flood Coming”

Punk Capitalism

The Pirate’s Dilemma
As piracy continues to change the way we all use information, how should we respond? Do we fight pirates, or do we learn from them? Should piracy be treated as a problem, or a solution? To compete or not to compete – that is the question – that is the Pirate’s Dilemma, perhaps one of the most important economic and cultural conundrums of the 21st Century.

When European governments failed to accept commercial radio, pirates began broadcasting from international waters, he writes. When Beijing banned the movie “Memoirs of a Geisha” as “socially unhealthy,” pirates sold millions of copies. And when Western pharmaceutical companies declined to slash prices on AIDS drugs in developing countries, generic makers like Cipla Ltd. stepped in.

Though he doesn’t condone all piracy, Mason argues that it “transforms the markets it operates in, changing the way distribution works and forcing companies to be more competitive and innovative.” Corporate leaders are gradually accepting this reality, he says, citing Apple Inc.: The way to stop piracy, Jobs has said, “is by competing with it.”

This is Dr. Adrian Bowyer, who alongside his team of engineers at the University of Bath in England, is working on a project called the RepRap; an open source 3-D printer – a self-replicating machine that will one day be able to print out all of its own parts.

It has been hailed as “the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment.”

The Ignored War

Silence=Rape
the Congoy is six years into a brutal conflict, in which up to 4.7 million people have died–the highest number of fatalities in any conflict since World War II. Or that six countries–Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia–have been fighting proxy wars in the DRC, and helping to plunder the country’s tremendous mineral wealth to fill their coffers.

The commerce in these “blood” minerals, such as coltan, used in cell phones and laptops, cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium (Congolese uranium was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), drives the conflict. The brutality of the militias–the sexual slavery, transmission of HIV/AIDS through rape, cannibalism, slaughter and starvation, forced recruitment of child soldiers–has routinely been employed to secure access to mining sites or insure a supply of captive labor.

Today’s conflict profiteers are not the first to sponsor a campaign to ransack, rape, pillage and plunder in the Congo. A century ago, Belgium’s King Leopold II amassed a fabulous fortune this way. During the monarch’s genocidal reign of terror, when villagers couldn’t meet his impossibly high quotas harvesting rubber or mining ore, their hands were amputated and women were taken as slaves. By the time he was finished, an estimated 10 million Congolese, half the population, were dead. Thanks to Randy Marks -warning the article is graphic.

One Laptop Per Child Fatally Flawed?

NussbaumOnDesign One Laptop Per Child Versus Intel–Who Speaks for India and China? – BusinessWeek
China and India together have almost 50% of the children in the world. I think the educational establishments in India, China, Nigeria and other nations are rejecting the olpc approach because they feel insulted and misused. One Indian professor told me recently in Bangalore that sure, India has a rote educational system that is the anti-thesis of experiential learning but it has brought 200 million out of poverty in a decade so what’s so wrong with that? And China has brought half a billion people out of poverty within a rote educational system.

In fact, as I think about it, if your economic advantage is efficiency–to do the same things again and again at lower costs– a rote education system may be the right one for you at this time in history. China does this through manufacturing low-cost goods for export and India does this through low-cost services for US, European and other Western global corporations.

Say what you will about Intel’s commercial actions, it’s approach to education in poor villages has been to work with teachers on the ground, training them and creating local curricula. Yes, I know olpc is doing some of that in Brazil, but it’s major thrust is to bypass teachers, not co-create with them. Intel’s success, if it has much, may well turn out to be that it embraces the local educational establishment in both its pedagogy and its business model, while olpc does the opposite.

The disaster at olpc has many lessons. One of the most important is that, despite good intentions, technology, design and innovation by themselves cannot solve problems if they ignore local culture and history. The XO laptop for the world’s poorest children is being rejected by India, China and Nigeria as yet another form of foreign Western colonialism. And it is.