"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
We tend to view our era as a time of unprecedented change while assuming the world before our birth was virtually stagnate. In fact, rapid, radical change has been the norm for at least the past few centuries. The case can be made that the generations living just before our generation experienced changes every bit as disorienting as ours.
Early in the nation's history, most travel was by water. We built cities on major waterways. Most states in the eastern half of the United States have a major river or the ocean as a boundary. This meant that each state had access to the water transportation superhighway. Traveling by land was exceedingly difficult. There were few roads. It took days to reach even nearby cities by stagecoach, and each night meant fees for food and lodging that were not part of the stagecoach price. You had the labor of a driver spread across a few people. The cost of travel for even short distances could consume a week or more of wages for a typical working person. Only the wealthy and merchants could afford such travel.
I believe it was Pred who said travel from New York to Pittsburgh did not typically take a route across Pennsylvania. It involved boarding a boat in New York, sailing down the east coast around Florida to New Orleans, and then navigating up the Mississippi and Ohio to Pittsburgh. Boats could handle far more people per trip, required no extra lodging expenses, food was generally provided on board, and laborers per person were much smaller. Water travel was also far more energy efficient and thus less costly.
As turnpikes and canals were built, and with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s, travel times shrank, and so did the prices. Depending on travel destinations, Pred shows the cost of travel per mile between 1800 and 1840 dropped by 50-90%. Railroads shrank the distance and decreased costs even more. Today, we can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours for one or two days' wages for someone earning around the US median Salary.
The world continues to change significantly but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that our age is the first to encounter sweeping technological and economic changes.
I've gotten very behind on my links pages. Here is my attempt to catch up on science and technology links. Sorry for the length, but there is some good stuff here. I'll have another post with environment links shortly.
This incredible research has revealed the following:
There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
The Denisovans share up to 8 percent of their genome with a "super achaic" and totally unknown species that dates back around 1 million years.
The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
About 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of all people with European ancestry can be traced to Neanderthals.
Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.
6 percent of the genome of Australian Aborigines and indigenous Papua New Guineans belong to the Denisovan species.
The Han Chinese, native to East Asia, and the Dai people of southern China are related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Some indigenous people from Brazil, such as the Karitiana, are not only related to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but they show relatively high genetic contributions from the Denisovans.
Only 87 genes responsible for making proteins in cells are different between modern humans and Neanderthals. Intriguingly, some of the gene differences involve ones involved in both immune responses and the development of brain cells in people.
Somewhere within these 87 genes may lay the answer to why Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct.
And least consequential of all, the Neanderthal woman's parents were related, possibly half-siblings, or an uncle and niece. As evolutionary biologist Mattias Jakobsson stated, the incest finding "is more of an anecdote". The results from one individual cannot be applied to an entire species, in the same way that the recent discovery of an incest family in Australia does not apply to the whole of the human race.
- See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/entire-neanderthal-genome-finally-mapped-amazing-results-001138#sthash.XmA90FGI.dpuf
Here are a few of the findings:
There is now conclusive evidence that Neanderthals bred with Homo sapiens – a fact disputed for many years. Some scientists claimed the two species had never even met.
Ancient human species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens mated with each other, resulting in an incredibly complex family tree.
The results conflict with the theory that modern humans arose completely from one "out of Africa" migration more than 60,000 years ago that spread worldwide without mating with other early humans.
Proportions of Neanderthal DNA are higher among Asians and Native Americans, who also have small percentages of Denisovan DNA.
Before farming began to spread across Europe some 8500 years ago, the continent's occupants were hunter-gatherers. They were unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain. But these original occupants did already possess immune defenses against some of the diseases that would later become the scourge of civilization, and they apparently had dark skin. The findings are helping researchers understand what genetic and biological changes humans went through as they made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. ...
By analyzing the MRIs of 949 people aged 8 to 22, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that male brains have more connections within each hemisphere, while female brains are more interconnected between hemispheres. ...
... By analyzing the subjects' MRIs using diffusion imaging, the scientists explored the brains' fiber pathways, the bundles of axons that act as highways routing information from one part of the mind to the other. After grouping the image by sex and inspecting the differences between the two aggregate "male" and "female" pictures, the researchers found that in men, fiber pathways run back and forth within each hemisphere, while in women they tend to zig-zag between the left, or "logical," and right, or "creative," sides of the brain.
Because female brains seem to have a stronger connections between their logical and intuitive parts, "when women are asked to do particularly hard tasks, they might engage very different parts of the brain," said Ragini Verma, an associate professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the report. "Men might over-engage just one part of the brain."
This could mean, for example, that men tend to see issues and resolve them directly, due to the strong connections between the "perception" and "action" areas of their brains, while women might be more inclined to combine logic and intuition when solving a problem. ...
Fifty years ago, American scientist and author Isaac Asimov published a story in The New York Times that listed his predictions for what the world would be like in 2014.
Asimov wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime, including science fiction novels and nonfiction scientific books, so he was well-versed in thinking about the future.
In his article, called "Visit to the World's Fair of 2014," Asimov got a whole bunch of his guesses right -- and his other predictions are making us a little envious of his imagined future. ...
As you might have guessed, they get virtually nothing right. Memes, cat videos, Miley Cyrus, even Facebook -- all are mysteries to the people of the past. Take a look and glory in your superiority. But beware - the world of 2034 is laughing at you behind your back.
... Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. "It turns out the wired folk — they recognized like three times as many of their neighbors when asked," Hampton said. Not only that, he said, they spoke with neighbors on the phone five times as often and attended more community events. Altogether, they were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more. Not only were people not opting out of bowling leagues — Robert Putnam's famous metric for community engagement — for more screen time; they were also using their computers to opt in. ...
…this was Hampton's most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It's not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston's Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. "The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles," Hampton writes. Men seem to be "taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine."
Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. "I mean, who would've thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?" Hampton said. "We don't think about that."...
WASHINGTON — An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion.
A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement. ...
In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths (see figure at right). Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning.
... A new study suggests that people who believe in creationism are more likely to prefer to take in information via their senses versus via intuition. In contrast, religious believers who see the Bible's creation story as symbolic tend to be more intuitive. ...
There's been a drop of more than 10 points—to just 43 percent—in the last four years. ...
... What does that leave? Maybe the gap represents an emotional response by Republicans to being out of power. Among others, Chris Mooney has argued that beliefs on politically contentious topics are often more rooted in opposition to perceived attacks than anything else—an instance of "motivated reasoning." Given that Democrats have controlled the White House and Senate since 2009, this could be backlash to the political climate, though it will be hard to tell until Republicans control Washington again.
Of course, motivated reasoning might help explain why many Democrats also believe in evolution.
MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis unveiled the "MakerBot Replicator Mini Compact 3D" today, a smaller, cheaper, simpler 3D printer that he believes will finally make all consumers want to start extruding corn-based plastic in their own homes, and printing objects on demand. ...
... The process involves a giant robot with a hanging nozzle and a flexible arm on a gantry-type crane — the whole rig is known as a "contour crafter" — above the foundation. The contour crafter then proceeds to layer concrete based on a computer-generated pattern. The layers eventually take shape into walls, embedded with all the necessary conduits and passages for electricity, plumbing and air conditioning.
The research team envisions a future where contour crafters could be used for disaster relief to build emergency housing and to create affordable housing for those who are displaced, homeless or in desperate living conditions. ...
2014 could be a landmark year for an amazing medical technology: human organs built by 3D printers.
San Diego biotech firm Organovo promises that its "bioprinting" technology will successfully print a human liver by the end of 2014, the company told Computerworld's Lucas Mearian. ...
To be sure, the technology isn't quite ready for fast food. "From an economic perspective, cultured meat is still an experimental technology. The first in vitro burger reportedly cost about $335,000 to produce and was made by possible by financial support from Google cofounder Sergey Brin." Mattick and Allenby discuss a number of technological challenges.
But the potential for altering the environmental footprint of meet the global demand for meat is remarkable. ...
... In September, an eminent group of scientists called upon the scientific community to "stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances, such as golden rice, that have the potential to save millions" of people from "needless suffering and death." But this passionate appeal fails to address the fundamental problem: the unfounded notion that there is a meaningful difference between "genetically modified organisms" and their conventional counterparts.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe fact is that GMOs and their derivatives do not amount to a "category" of food products. They are neither less safe nor less "natural" than other common foods. Labeling foods derived from GMOs, as some have proposed, thus implies a meaningful difference where none exists – an issue that even regulators have acknowledged.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphHumans have been engaging in "genetic modification" through selection and hybridization for millennia. Breeders routinely use radiation or chemical mutagens on seeds to scramble a plant's DNA and generate new traits.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphA half-century of "wide cross" hybridizations, which involve the movement of genes from one species or genus to another, has given rise to plants – including everyday varieties of corn, oats, pumpkin, wheat, black currants, tomatoes, and potatoes – that do not and could not exist in nature. Indeed, with the exception of wild berries, wild game, wild mushrooms, and fish and shellfish, virtually everything in North American and European diets has been genetically improved in some way. ...
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Not long after Gordon E. Moore proposed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be etched on a silicon chip would continue to double approximately every 18 months, critics began predicting that the era of "Moore's Law" would draw to a close.
More than ever recently, industry pundits have been warning that the progress of the semiconductor industry is grinding to a halt — and that the theory of Dr. Moore, an Intel co-founder, has run its course.
If so, that will have a dramatic impact on the computer world. The innovation that has led to personal computers, music players and smartphones is directly related to the plunging cost of transistors, which are now braided by the billions onto fingernail slivers of silicon — computer chips — that may sell for as little as a few dollars each.
But Moore's Law is not dead; it is just evolving, according to more optimistic scientists and engineers. Their contention is that it will be possible to create circuits that are closer to the scale of individual molecules by using a new class of nanomaterials — metals, ceramics, polymeric or composite materials that can be organized from the "bottom up," rather than the top down. ...
The Internet Of Things represents a major departure in the history of the Internet, as connections move beyond computing devices, and begin to power billions of everyday devices, from parking meters to home thermostats.
... Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is a technology that promises to create huge amounts of green energy from very cheap fuel. In the case of Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyser), nickel and hydrogen are fused into copper — a process that has 10,000 times the energy density of gasoline, and 1,000 times the power density. For more background information on cold fusion/LENR, and why it's safer and cleaner than normal nuclear reactors, read our previous E-Cat story. Suffice it to say, the scientific community's main contention is whether this reaction is actually possible or not. Rossi says he's found a special catalyst that makes it possible; lots of other scientists, though, claim it's hogwash. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.) ...
... There are five declared and four other nuclear-armed countries (assuming Israel's warheads detonate). There are 31 nations with nuclear power stations (and 58 with research reactors). Only seven of the nine nuclear-armed countries have civilian power programs.
All of the technical factors can be circumvented with sufficient time and money. Uneconomic fuel cycles can be run and warheads built with high levels of radioactivity. However, no country has developed indigenous nuclear weapons after deploying civilian nuclear power stations.
Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactorsespecially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.
... Whereas the past 4 years saw an incredible halving of cost seven times, this will not continue. There may only be one halving left to achieve. The action will be in deployment, and it will be phenomenal. The next 40 years should see seven doublings of in-place capacity. In Solar 1.0, the megawatt-era has given way to today's gigawatt-era. In the next 40 years the gigawatt-era will give way to the terawatt-era. By 2054 we should see over 17 terawatts of solar capacity in place around the world, which would equate to more than 10% of global energy demand at that point. At an average installed cost of $1/watt (which we will have passed by then), this represents a $17 trillion opportunity. ...
The Great Pyramid of Giza is 174 meters tall and weighs 10 megatons. The Eiffel Tower is over twice that height but weighs just five and half kilotons–some 10 times lighter. The difference, according to materials scientist Julia Greer, is that "elements of architecture" were introduced into the design that allowed it to be stronger and more lightweight while using far less materials. Where the pyramids are four solid walls, the Eiffel Tower is more skeletal in structure–and vastly more efficient as a result. ...
Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.
So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...
As the author notes, we have challenges but hardly descend into a global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are three examples. It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to those for Europe/USA in the 20th century. And then there is this:
The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing promise to revolutionize the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do, but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.
We like to think of the 20th century as a time of unprecedented change. But was the change of the 19th century even more profound? Geology and evolution changed our perception of deep history. People and information were liberated to move across the land at speeds faster than a horse. Human productivity exploded. Some would make the case that most change since that time has merely been an extension of nineteenth century changes from the ancient order of things. The map is a great illustration of the radical change that happened in transportation.
A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the editors of Scientific American
(Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.
Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland". ...
... "We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.
"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review. ...
Ever since Star Trek explained away how all alien races could speak English through a piece of future tech called the Universal Translator, technology companies have worked to create just such a device. One may have succeeded in developing a 1.0 version with the Sigmo.
The Sigmo is a small, pillbox-sized device equipped with a microphone and speaker, but with a cloud-connected twist. Select the language you'd like to translate into, then hold the Sigmo up and speak to it. The Sigmo records your voice, then sends the recording to the cloud for translation via Bluetooth connection with your smartphone.
... the nearly-complete home is bullet and fireproof, earthquake resistant, and maintains a comfortable interior temperature of 64 degrees fahrenheit year round!
... At 600,000 tons and 243 feet wide, when the Prelude left its dry dock in South Korea after a year-long build, it unseated the Emma Maersk (1,302 feet) as the world’s largest ship. But calling it a ship is almost a misnomer. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility that will be posted off the coast of Western Australia and will stay there for the next quarter-century.
As an FLNG plant, the Prelude handles everything involved in capturing, processing, and storing liquid natural gas, sucking the stuff from deep within the Earth and refining 3.9 million tons each year before it’s offloaded onto smaller ships that bring it back to the mainland. ...
China cemented its reputation as the fastest rising star on the space scene this weekend by landing a rover on the moon—a challenging feat pulled off by only two nations before: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “This is a very big deal indeed,” says lunar scientist Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. “Landing on the moon is not something easily attained—it requires precision maneuvering, tracking, computation and engineering. It is a delicate task and the Chinese success reflects a mature, evolving and capable program.” ...
Bowing to scientists' near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats, after the authors refused to withdraw it.
The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France, and published in 2012, showed “no evidence of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of the data,” said a statement from Elsevier, which publishes the journal. But the small number and type of animals used in the study mean that “no definitive conclusions can be reached.” The known high incidence of tumors in the Sprague–Dawley strain of rat ”cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality and incidence observed in the treated groups,” it added. ...
British researchers have used an inkjet printer to successfully print retinal cells for the first time, in what could be a breakthrough for the treatment of optic nerve injury and diseases like glaucoma. ...
The EU proposes spending that much on projects that will barely reduce temperatures or lower sea levels. ...
... This does not mean that climate change is not important; it means only that the EU’s climate policy is not smart. Over the course of this century, the ideal EU policy would cost more than $7 trillion, yet it would reduce the temperature rise by just 0.05o Celsius and lower sea levels by a trivial 9 millimeters. After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference. ...
... We need a smarter approach to tackling climate change. Rather than relying on cutting a few tons of incredibly overpriced CO2 now, we need to invest in research and development aimed at innovating down the cost of green energy in the long run, so that everyone will switch. ...
... About 3.5 million of them die prematurely each year as a result of breathing the polluted air inside their homes — about 200,000 more than the number who die prematurely each year from breathing polluted air outside, according to a study by the World Health Organization.
There’s no question that burning fossil fuels is leading to a warmer climate and that addressing this problem is important. But doing so is a question of timing and priority. For many parts of the world, fossil fuels are still vital and will be for the next few decades, because they are the only means to lift people out of the smoke and darkness of energy poverty. ...
... The developed world needs a smarter approach toward cleaner fuels. The United States has been showing the way. Hydraulic fracturing has produced an abundance of inexpensive natural gas, leading to a shift away from coal in electricity production. Because burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, this technology has helped the United States reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the lowest level since the mid-1990s, even as emissions rise globally. We need to export this technology and help other nations exploit it.
At the same time, wealthy Western nations must step up investments into research and development in green energy technologies to ensure that cleaner energy eventually becomes so cheap that everyone will want it.
But until then they should not stand in the way of poorer nations as they turn to coal and other fossil fuels. This approach will get our priorities right. And perhaps then, people will be able to cook in their own homes without slowly killing themselves.
The paper, Cook et al. (2013) 'Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature' searched the Web of Science for the phrases "global warming" and "global climate change" then categorizing these results to their alleged level of endorsement of AGW. These results were then used to allege a 97% consensus on human-caused global warming.
To get to the truth, I emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper. Their responses are eye opening and evidence that the Cook et al. (2013) team falsely classified scientists' papers as "endorsing AGW", apparently believing to know more about the papers than their authors. ...
They left BBQ off the list, but other than that, it is an interesting list
... 50 Social innovations that changed the world more or less in chronological order. Rank order in top 10 shown in [ ]
1. Irrigation that 2. created a structured bureaucracy, land measurement and administration in Egypt and Mesopotamia 3. mathematics [3] 4. creation of nations as workable structures 5. empires based on bureaucracy and military discipline 6. writing, instructions could be sent over distance – Incas used knots [1] 7. written rules and laws - the lawyers and courts as independent 8. alphabet [11] 9. agriculture and and animal husbandry skills that could be recorder and spread 10. history as peoples myths and lessons ...
The Internet is disappearing. And with it goes an important part of our recorded history. That was the conclusion of a studyTechnology Review looked at last year, which measured the rate at which links shared over social media platforms, such as Twitter, were disappearing.
The conclusion was that this data is being lost at the rate of 11% within a year and 27% within two years.
Today, the researchers behind this work reveal that all is not lost. Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., have found a way to reconstruct deleted material, and they say it works reasonably well. ...
Earlier this week we presented the thesis from Credit Suisse that not only is 3-D printing not a flash in the pan, existing market research reports have actually understated its potential market. 3-D printing is exactly what it sounds like: making 3-D objects from a device that's conceptually more like a printer than from a typical manufacturing process.
But we wanted to get a little bit more specific about where exactly this is going to happen.
So with the help of an excellent report from consulting firm CSC, we now present five industries that are already feeling the effects of 3-D printing's imminent dominance — for better or worse. ...
... The WAND Foundation has developed several dry composting toilet models, some of which were recognized at the 2011 Tech Awards at Santa Clara University. At the conference, Cora Zayas-Sayre, executive director of the WAND Foundation, explained that by using local materials, the organization has been able to build 275 toilets at a cost of US$30 per toilet. She added that this innovation has already impacted the lives of 3,000 people.
This innovation simultaneously addresses two challenges that prevail in developing countries: the unsustainable and costly use of water-sealed toilets, and the hygienic management of human waste. Water-sealed toilets require pumping mechanisms to transport water and sewage between 300 and 500 meters away from the home, a method that is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Inadequate management of human waste can lead to a host of health problems in developing areas, and dramatically impact quality of life. ...
... The green-roof movement has slowly been gaining momentum in recent years, and some cities have made them central to their sustainability plans. The city of Chicago, for instance, that 359 roofs are now partially or fully covered with vegetation, which provides all kinds of environmental benefits — from reducing the buildings' energy costs to cleaning the air to mitigating the
Late this summer, Chicago turned a green roof into its first major rooftop farm. At 20,000 square feet, it's the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the Midwest, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which maintains the farm through its program. ...
8. Interesting piece using driverless cars as an example and the inability of some people to see the potential innovations: The third industrial revolution
... In fact, these possibilities are only the tip of the iceberg. Autonomous vehicles' most transformative contribution might be what they get up to when people aren't in the vehicles. One suddenly has access to cheap, fast, ultra-reliable, on-demand courier service. Imagine never having to run out for milk or a missing ingredient again. Imagine dropping a malfunctioning computer into a freight AV to be ferried off to a repair shop and returned, all without you having to do anything. Imagine inventories at offices, shops and so on refilling constantly and as needed: assuming "shops" is still a meaningful concept in a world where things all come to you.
The really remarkable thing about such possibilities is that the technology is basically available today. It isn't cheap today, but that may change very quickly. If the public lets it, of course. When it comes to AVs stagnation, if it occurs, will be the fault of regulatory rather than technological obstacles.
1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape the Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.
... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages, but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power, and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools; they have been used for moving information, not for making things. Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.
The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture, in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an audience. ...
... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays off in a big "whoosh," but it takes many decades, depending on where you draw the starting line of course. A look at the early 19th century is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today. But it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity over the longer run.
5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40-minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.
6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste, but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future of sports. Will we even be able to have meaningful sports competitions?
The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.
1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)
"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their uniform color.
Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.
Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."
2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague
Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...
... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.
The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies. ...
Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:
• Creativity generates economic value. Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which translates into a market advantage and big margins.
• Creativity drives capitalism. These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.
• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth. Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth, growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and growth.
The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.
Here's why:
1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...
2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...
3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...
4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...
5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...
6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.
7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.
"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.
If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."
Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.
But how would military operations change if soldiers on the battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and in very little time? ...
"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:
Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."
The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.
The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.
8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"
"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."
"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."
The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29 identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older than 50.
The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.
16. Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion, while liberals, and particularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.
Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.
"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new survey shows.
Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years. Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."
... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...
... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...
... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...
... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...
5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea
"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.
This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."
8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.
Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.
With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a Latino market perceived to be homogenous?
11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”
"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about the scarcity of resources. (If you belong to both of those groups, there is little advice that I can offer.) However, in between those poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."
... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.
Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...
... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs, however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents' political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the researchers wrote. ...
STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.
He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...
... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...
Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the building blocks for cutting-edge materials.
Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...
... To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.
The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.
In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.
Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.
"Everything that humans can do a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."...
... So machines are getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession, have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five years, yet continue to operate just as well.
How is that happening?
-Reduced aid from Indiana's state government and other budget problems forced the Gary, Ind., public school system last year to cut its annual transportation budget in half, to $5 million. The school district responded by using sophisticated software to draw up new, more efficient bus routes. And it cut 80 of 160 drivers. ...
... -In South Korea, Standard Chartered is expanding "smart banking" branches that employ a staff of three, compared with an average of about eight in traditional branches. ...
... -The British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced plans last year to invest $518 million in the world's first long-haul, heavy-duty driverless train system at its Pilbara iron ore mines in Western Australia. The automated trains are expected to start running next year. The trains are part of what Rio Tinto calls its "Mine of the Future" program, which includes 150 driverless trucks and automated drills.
Like many technologically savvy startups, Dirk Vander Kooij's furniture-making company in the Netherlands needs only a skeleton crew - four people ...
... -Google's driverless car and the Pentagon's drone aircraft are raising the specter of highways and skies filled with cars and planes that can get around by themselves. ...
... "Trying to keep it from happening would have been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the combustion engine," Lavin says. "You can't stand in the way of technology."
The upside of emerging technology is that most will make goods and services less expensive. That improves our living standard. The downside is that much of the work we used to do to earn wages to buy goods and services is rapidly changing. As the last sentence of the article notes, this is not the first time we have been in these circumstances. Years ago, I read that in 1885, approximately 80% of everything we consumed in the U.S. was produced at home. By 1915, 80% was produced outside the home. It created massive economic dislocations. Each time these disruptions occur, it is hard for the people living at that time to foresee the new economic order.
Christian thinkers must wrestle with the challenges of technological innovation. Creative destruction (the market dynamic where jobs and industries are destroyed in the wake of creating new ones) has always been difficult for ethics. It is painful, but other alternatives' social cost is also quite high. Anti-technological calls to abandon consumerism or just saying that "the market will sort it all out" are not legitimate responses. I think topics like this should be central to our theological reflection about human labor and the economy.
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to become scientists, and some are starting to make its gadgetry a reality.
Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre, and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of pointy-eared fun, there'll be a high proportion of scientists and engineers.
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to take up a career in science, technology or engineering. I think the franchise deserves more respect as a science popularisation medium – how many other prime-time TV shows would allow their characters to toss out phrases like "I performed a Fourier analysis on the harmonics, Captain"?
Since its inception in 1966, Star Trek has familiarised us with the lingo and applications of science. At least, that was the case for me. I felt pretty disenfranchised from science at school: it wasn't until I discovered science fiction that I realised I could understand "difficult" technical concepts.
Since the show began, many of us have become more tech-savvy than we could possibly have imagined at school. More than that, we're now seeing emergent technology here on Earth that was once little more than a Star Trek scriptwriter's dream. To get you in the mood for this weekend's festivities, here's a roundup of some of the best Star Trek-inspired technology.
Replicators - ... Three-dimensional printers have been on the open market commercially for most of the 21st century. ...
Transporters - Earlier this year, Nature reported that photons had been teleported 89 miles, between La Palma and Tenerife. OK, it wasn't exactly transportation ...
Bioneural circuitry - ... And in February of this year, the Scripps Research Institute published details of a DNA-based biological computer based on an original design by Alan Turing. ...
Nanites - ... They've constructed a set of nanorobots, with inbuilt chemical sensors, that can silence genes within cancerous cells. ...
Androids - Japanese scientists have created some remarkably human-looking androids, though they wouldn't beat Data in a game of three-dimensional chess. ...
Of course, we already have personal communication devices. But as someone recently pointed out, while we all have communication devices, we don't see people in Star Trek constantly looking down at them and running into things. ;-) Warp drive would be pretty cool. Any other Trekkie devices that you want to see?
... Grocery stores that found success on the internet are instead returning to the physical world with a hybrid business model: the "virtual" supermarket, a shop for smartphone users that carries photographs and bar codes instead of food. After the success of locations in mass transit stations from Seoul to Philadelphia, the virtual supermarket is about to hit the city above ground. Chinese supermarket giant Yihaodian announced this week it is opening 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations. ...
... Grocery stores want to reach time-starved commuters, but they also seem to be capitalizing on consumers' desire to browse. It's one of the reasons why many people at least claim to still prefer physical bookstores, even as the monstrous success of websites like Amazon seem to negate that notion.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Yihaodian has also experimented with subway stores, but the announcement this week marks a big move back into physical space. No longer will "virtual supermarkets" be only in mass transit stations. They'll occupy actual retail space in the city.
Using compressed air to power cars is something people have experimented with since at least 1840. That's when two French men named Andraud and Tessie tested such a gaseous vehicle on a track. The eco-friendly automobile "worked well," reports the air-car lobby, which exists, "but the idea was not pursued further. "
Why not? Perhaps because making a practical, well-working model is damnably hard. But India's Tata Motors is pushing the technology forward, inch by inch, with its project to build "Airpods" – zero-pollution, cute-as-a-bug smartcars that zip along at 40 m.p.h. via the magic of squeezed air. ...
... So what does this auto of the future look like? Following the smartcar trend, sort of like it stumbled off the set of Disney's Cars. The mid-sized model fits three passengers, although one must face backward like he's being punished for something, and is streamlined almost to the point of becoming a sphere. Its tank can hold 175 liters of air, which a driver gets either at a specialized fueling station or by activating an onboard electric motor to suck it in. Its makers say that filling er' up will cost a paltry €1, and that a full tank of air can last for roughly 125 miles. ...
One of the first essays I ever read about economics in college was Leonard Read's I, Pencil, written in the year before I was born. While a little outdated in some ways, it still does a wonderful job illustrating the market process's wonder and complexity. The Institute for Faith Work and Economics has just released a four-minute clip that updates "I, Pencil" compellingly and entertainingly.
Now let me add a caveat, especially for my readers who are skeptical of markets and free enterprise. Markets are not a quasi-deity. They do not solve every problem. They aren't perfect. They don't prevent evil people from doing evil things. But what they do, by historical measures, is astounding. Until very recently, human beings were trapped in low-productivity labor. There was minimal ability to trade with others beyond the immediate community. There was no way for us to coordinate with and mutually benefit from the work of countless strangers from across the globe. Markets make that possible. Markets made this very conversation possible that you and I are having right now because there would be no computers and no internet to enable this interaction without it. And for that reason, markets can be celebrated, even as we wrestle with many implications arising from the emergence of well-coordinated markets.
(CNN) -- A private spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on Friday, a milestone in a new era of commercial space flight.
The docking happened just before 10 a.m., almost two hours later than planned. A radar system aboard the unmanned SpaceX Dragon that measures distance to the station had picked up a different part of the space station, meaning it could not dock properly, NASA said. ...
... The launch is an important step for NASA and the United States, which currently has no means of independently reaching space. NASA relies on the Russian space agency to ferry U.S. astronauts to orbit.
The first attempt to launch Falcon 9 was halted Saturday when a flight computer detected high pressure in an engine combustion chamber. Workers replaced the valve Saturday, SpaceX said.
The company plans 11 more flights to the space station.
One of a handful of private companies receiving funds from NASA to develop a space taxi system, SpaceX hopes the experience with the cargo flights will help the company reach its goal of carrying astronauts aboard the Dragon.
The company is developing a heavy-lift rocket with twice the cargo capability of the space shuttle, and also dreams of building a spacecraft that could carry a crew to Mars. ...
When the price of a tourist flight gets below about one year's salary, I'm buying a ticket! ;-)
WASHINGTON D.C. (CNNMoney) -- My first ride in Google's self-driving car was, all at the same time, thrilling, fascinating and a little disappointing.
The car was in Washington DC where Google representatives met with groups like the AARP and the National Council for the Blind, groups which might have an interest in cars that that could act as chauffeurs for those who, for one reason or another, can't drive themselves.
I got to ride along on a loop around several DC blocks with two Google engineers in the front seats. Google's "self-driving cars" must always have someone seated at the controls, whether in Nevada -- which recently licensed Google's cars -- or anywhere else.
The drive was thrilling and fascinating because, come on, the car drives itself. In traffic! Disappointing because it's clearly not going to be ready for public use for years and years. ...
I'm convinced that in some other language "Google" translates into "Skynet." ;-)
WASHINGTON -- U.S. traffic deaths dropped last year to their lowest level since record-keeping began in 1949, according to an estimate from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. ...
... Last year's national decline in traffic fatalities -- to 32,310 -- came as motorists drove about 36 billion, or about 1.2%, fewer miles, perhaps because of high gas prices and a still-difficult economy that might have discouraged pleasure road trips.
The 2011 fatality rate is projected to decline to the lowest on record, to 1.09 fatalities for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Traffic deaths have fallen by about 26% since the 43,510 fatalities reported in 2005; highway fatalities peaked in 1972, at 54,589. In 1949, there were 30,246 fatalities, but the rate was 7.13 fatalities for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
Traffic safety experts attributed the decline to a number of factors -- "probably people driving less, safer vehicles, safer roads and an improvement in the safety culture across the United States,’’ Jacob Nelson, director of traffic safety advocacy for the AAA national office, said in an interview.
Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Assn. cited increased seat belt use, safer cars, better roads and an improved emergency medical service response effort. "Also, the economy continues to keep traffic deaths lower than normal," he added. ...
(Reuters) - New cars and trucks sold in the United States are getting an average of 24 miles per gallon of gasoline, the highest ever, researchers at the University of Michigan said on Tuesday.
The average fuel economy rating as shown by window stickers on new vehicles bought in March - including pickup trucks, SUVs, minivans and passenger cars - was 24.1 mpg, the researchers found. That was up 20 percent from the average of 20 mpg in October 2007, they said.
The university's Transportation Research Institute began monthly updates on fuel economy four-and-a-half years ago.
The researchers also said that their index measuring polluting greenhouse gas emissions per new vehicle has fallen by 17 percent since October 2007.
For more on fuel economy calculations by researchers Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, click: www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/EDI_sales-weighted-mpg.html for fuel economy
HONOLULU (AP) — Hollywood icon James Cameron has made it to Earth's deepest point.
The director of "Titanic," ''Avatar" and other films used a specially designed submarine to dive nearly seven miles, completing his journey a little before 8 a.m. Monday local time, according to Stephanie Montgomery of the National Geographic Society.
He plans to spend about six hours exploring and filming the Mariana Trench, about 200 miles southwest of the Pacific island of Guam.
"All systems OK," were Cameron's first words upon reaching the bottom, according to a statement. His arrival at a depth of 35,756 feet came early Sunday evening on the U.S. East Coast, after a descent that took more than two hours.
The scale of the trench is hard to grasp — it's 120 times larger than the Grand Canyon and more than a mile deeper than Mount Everest is tall. ...
Early last week the State Smart Transportation Initiative, a sustainable transport program funded by the Department of Transportation, released some charts on the continued decline of vehicle-miles traveled in the United States. Overall VMT dropped 1.2 percent in 2011 from the previous year, reaching its lowest total since 2003, and per capita VMT fell 2.1 percent to levels not seen since 1998:
Researchers have been saying for several years now that cities in the United States and other developed countries may have reached "peak driving" — a level of vehicle miles at or near the saturation point. The idea is that the sheer volume of VMT can't possibly rise at the same rate it did in the second half of the 20th century, so mileage will either increase far more modestly than it has in the recent past, or perhaps even start to decline.
So far that prediction seems on point. SSTI notes a DOT study from 2006 [PDF] that estimated a rise of 50 to 60 percent in VMT from 2001 to 2025. That would be a significantly slower rise than over the previous 25-year period, 1977 to 2001, during which VMT rose 151 percent. But even this conservative estimate now seems incredibly generous: "In the first 10 years of the period, per capita VMT actually declined by nearly 3 percent," SSTI reports.
People do any number of things while waiting on the platform for the next subway or commuter train. Some pre-walk to position themselves at the best station exit for their destination. Some just mindlessly pace. The ones who used to look down the track every few moments for the next train now look at the digital arrival times every few moments instead. Some take pictures of rats.
And, as of earlier this month, some Philadelphians have been able to shop for groceries. The online grocer Peapod introduced virtual storefronts at select SEPTA stations throughout the city. While awaiting a train, users can download the Peapod app, peruse the items in front of them, and scan the barcode of anything they'd like to purchase. The groceries are delivered to their homes later that day.
Philly marks the idea's American debut, but a number of international cities already have similar services. Woolworths has placed virtual storefronts at the Town Hall Station in Sydney, Australia, and displays from British retailer Tesco were installed last year in South Korea. If three is a trend, you just got trended. ...
AMERICANS are getting fatter: obesity rates have risen 74% in the past 15 years to nearly 28% of the adult population. And they are driving more: the number of miles driven by each licensed driver (VMT/LD), excluding commercial vehicles, increased by an average of 0.6% a year between 1988 and 2008. Academics at the University of Illinois have found a striking correlation between these two variables—but with a large time lag. They noted that previous research had found that changes in diet had an affect on body weight only after some six years. Therefore VMT/LD in 2004 is correlated with obesity in 2010 (see left-hand chart). This near-perfect correlation (99.6%) permits predictions about obesity rates. Since VMT/LD fell in 2007 and 2008, America's obesity rate could fall to as low as 24% in 2014 (see right-hand chart). These predictions come with a strong caveat: correlation does not equal causation. And it should be noted that the authors did not control for factors such as diet, income and lifestyle. Additionally, they did not explore the possibility that the larger, and thus more immobile, people become, the more they drive.
Transport: The car industry's effort to reduce its dependence on rare-earth elements has prompted a revival in the fortunes of an old-fashioned sort of electric motor.
ONCE again, worrywarts are wringing their hands over possible shortages of so-called "critical materials" crucial for high-tech industries. In America the Department of Energy is fretting about materials used to manufacture wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar cells and energy-efficient lighting. The substances in question include a bunch of rare-earth metals and a few other elements which—used a pinch here, a pinch there—enhance the way many industrial materials function. ...
... The rare-earth element that other industrial countries worry about most is neodymium. It is the key ingredient of super-strong permanent magnets. Over the past year the price of neodymium has quadrupled as electric motors that use permanent magnets instead of electromagnetic windings have gained even wider acceptance. Cheaper, smaller and more powerful, permanent-magnet motors and generators have made modern wind turbines and electric vehicles viable.
That said, not all makers of electric cars have rushed to embrace permanent-magnet motors. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car based on a Lotus Elise, uses no rare-earth metals whatsoever. Nor does the Mini-E, an electric version of BMW's reinvention of the iconic 1960s car. Meanwhile, the company that pioneered much of today's electric-vehicle technology, AC Propulsion of San Dimas, California, has steered clear of permanent-magnet motors. Clearly, a number of manufacturers think the risk of relying on a single source of rare-earth metals is too high.
The latest carmaker to seek a rare-earth alternative is Toyota. The world's largest carmaker is reported to be developing a neodymium-free electric motor for its expanding range of hybrid cars. Following in AC Propulsion's tyre tracks, Toyota is believed to have based its new design on that electromotive industrial mainstay, the cheap and rugged alternating-current (AC) induction motor patented by Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, back in 1888. ...
This story has another lesson: As long as there are free markets, we will never run out of anything. Humans innovate and find substitute resources or processes as a resource becomes more expensive. As neodymium becomes too expensive, we find alternatives. As Douglas Hay observed 25 years ago, nearly everything we make can ultimately be made from renewable resources ... including building materials and plastics. As recycling becomes more prevalent and efficient, it also drives down costs. Technology improves the efficiency of how resources are mined, processed, and utilized, eliminating waste. While neodymium may become so expensive that no one wants to use it, we will never run out of it as long as there are market economies. The Stone Age did not end due to an absence of stones, and the horse transportation age did not end due to the extinction of horses. Neither will the rare-earth age end because of the exhaustion of mineral deposits.
... As might be expected, the Cato Institute has some sensible words on the subject of NASA: here, here, and here. If you don't want to believe these guys, see what Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University, has said about manned space flight: "The moon landings were an important impetus to technology but you have to ask the question, what is the case for sending people back into space? I think that the practical case gets weaker and weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturisation. It's hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the moon or indeed sending people into space at all."
Fortunately, President Obama has been eminently sensible on the moon, having already scrapped the moon landing project that had been in the works for some time. Indeed, the announcement of this decision provided what might be my favorite – and most refreshing – quotation from our 44th President:" Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We've been there before." I just wish he had scrapped most of the NASA missions, turned over what could be justified on national defense/public goods grounds to the Department of Defense and other agencies, and sold whatever was left over to private industry. Now that would be change I could believe in!
But of course, this just illustrates that Obama lies. We all know we've never been to the Moon. It was all broadcast from a soundstage in Burbank, CA. How can you trust a guy who wasn't born in the U.S. <***Big grin with tongue firmly in cheek.***>
... China has just launched an Apollo moon shot of sorts: The government recently decreed that 5 million electric cars will be traveling the nation's roads by 2020 -- up from basically none today. According to banking giant HSBC, that will equate to 35% of the global electric-vehicle market.
What that means is that China, which last year rocketed past the U.S. as the world's largest market for new-auto sales, is also determined to become its most innovative. As part of the country's 12th five-year plan (2011--2015), Beijing has pledged that it will do whatever it takes to help the Chinese car industry take the lead in electric vehicles (See: China vs. the U.S. in electric vehicles). (Its long-term plan also calls for building bullet trains, subways, and electric buses to alleviate traffic congestion.) "The Chinese are trailing in the development of internal-combustion engines," says Bill Russo, a senior adviser at Booz & Co. in Beijing who covers the car industry. "They figure, Why not leapfrog that technology and become a dominant global purveyor of battery-powered vehicles?"
Building an electric-car infrastructure won't be easy. Vehicle makers must work with a jumble of different players -- from the utilities, which will provide the power and smart-grid networks, to local governments, which will provide public charging stations. Standards must be set. But China, an authoritarian state, is particularly well positioned to help make the electric car a reality. "China's government is supporting electric-car technology more than any other country on earth," says Kevin Wale, head of GM China Group. ...
(Reuters) - Boeing Co plans to offer passengers the chance to fly into space on a craft it is developing for travel in low-Earth orbit, the aerospace company said on Wednesday.
Boeing said it reached an agreement with Virginia-based Space Adventures to market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard Boeing's CST-100 space vehicle being developed for NASA.
The spacecraft could carry seven people and fly in low-Earth orbit as soon as 2015, Boeing said. The company added that potential customers could include private individuals, companies, nongovernmental organizations and U.S. federal agencies. ...
Renting cars by the hour is becoming big business.
CAR clubs, whose members pay an annual fee and then rent a car by the hour on a pay-as-you-go basis, are moving from a fringe fad for greens to a big global business. Carmakers have no choice but to pay attention: one rental car can take the place of 15 owned vehicles.
Car-sharing started in Europe and spread to America in the late 1990s, when the first venture opened in Portland, Oregon, a traditional hangout of tree-huggers. For years it was organised by small co-operatives, often supported by local government. It still has a green tinge. One in five new cars added to club fleets is electric; such cars are good for short-range, urban use. But sharing is no longer small.
Frost & Sullivan, a market-research firm, estimates that by 2016 the market will be worth $6 billion a year, half of that in America, with a total of some 10m users. Outside America, most of the growth is in Britain and other north European countries such as Germany. The market leader is a company called Zipcar, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is now headed for a public listing. Zipcar already has 400,000 members, mostly in America where it is thought to have 80% of the market. It recently bought Streetcar, the market leader in London, though competition authorities are still scrutinising that deal. ...
... One South Korean firm, however, is taking a different tack. CT&T, whose main line of business until now has been making electric golf carts, is producing a range of battery-powered cars more suited to low-speed, short-distance urban driving than to cruising the freeways of the American West. Its flagship model, the eZone, is a quirky two-seater aimed at housewives, the elderly and those making the daily school run. It has a range of 100km and can clip along at 70kph if you really put your foot down.
It is a proper car, though. In particular, it is the only low-speed electric car to have passed international front and side crash tests, meaning that it can go on general sale. That will happen in Europe any day now, with a starting price between $8,000 and $16,000, and CT&T has plans to introduce the eZone into Hawaii (one part of the United States where journeys are, by definition, short) in two years’ time, when a local factory is up and running. It is also cheap to run. The firm claims that 1,500km of urban driving—about a month’s worth—will cost a mere $7 in electricity bills. ...
Even if we could farm on Mars, astronauts might be too weak by the time they get there to help plow the fields.
The first cellular analysis of muscles from astronauts who have spent 180 days at the International Space Station shows that their muscles lost more than 40 percent of their capacity for physical work, despite in-flight exercise.
No matter how good their shape was before the astronauts left, they returned with muscle tone that resembled that of the average 80-year-old. In fact, the astronauts who were in the best shape before they launched were the most likely to come back with withered, or atrophied, muscles.
NASA currently estimates it would take a crew 10 months to reach Mars, with a one year stay, and 10 months to get back, for a total mission time of about three years. These studies suggest they would barely be able to crawl by the time they got back to Earth with the current exercise regime. ...
Ten months after India's $2,000 Nano was launched, carmaker Tata has sold more than 200,000 vehicles.
Months after buying the shiny silver car, farmer Satish Kumar still keeps the plastic wrap on the seats. Most days, his Tata Nano – his first car – sits in the front yard, proudly displayed between the brick pillars of a homemade carport. Tucked from sight are a couple of cows and a humble scooter that still is driven a lot more than the four-wheeled wonder.
The Kumars actually don’t much need a car: Mr. Kumar works in the fields around his house; Mrs. Kumar stays at home; and the kids go to school by bus. The car proves useful for those special occasions when the family wants to arrive together – and in style. “I’m mainly concentrating on using it socially – taking my whole family to weddings and other family functions,” he says.
For Tata, the Indian automaker, Kumar belongs to a new class of customer, thanks to the Nano’s price of just $2,000. But while the Nano spurred much chatter about what it allows the middle class to do, Kumar suggests the Indian consumer may be more smitten with what the car allows them to be. “I think the Nano is actually used as a signaling device,” says Sourabh Mishra, chief strategy officer at marketing firm Saatchi & Saatchi India. “It’s signaling, ‘I’m now part of a group who can afford a lifestyle that hitherto was not possible to me.’ ”
Some 10 months after Nano’s launch, Tata has booked sales of 206,703 cars; 17,000 Nanos have been delivered. Some 70 percent of bookings came from nonmetro areas. ...
The "Nemo H2," which can carry about 87 people, is the first of its kind designed specifically to run on a fuel cell engine, in which hydrogen and oxygen are mixed to create electricity and water, without producing air-polluting gases.
"That's important in a city like Amsterdam with over 125 canal trips per day," said project manager Alexander Overdiep.
A boat trip around Amsterdam's concentric semi-circles of canals is a popular tourist pastime in the Dutch capital.
From spring, visitors will have the option of a 'CO2 Zero Canal Cruise', for an extra 50 (euro) cents, which will go toward further research into carbon-reducing technology, said Freek Vermeulen, managing director of Lovers boat company.
The new boat cost more than double to build than a canal boat running on a diesel engine, and needs to visit a hydrogen dispensing station for a refill once a day, while normal boats only need a fuel top-up once a week.
But developers of the 3 million euro project, which was partly government funded, said costs would decline as more boats followed this test phase, and if more advanced hydrogen distribution infrastructure emerged.
A new report states that EVs could potentially speed climate change rather than reduce it.
"Electric cars should be rewarded for their energy efficiency, not for moving emissions from exhaust pipes to powerstation chimneys" says the UK's Environmental Transport Association (ETA). In a report titled "How to avoid an electric shock—Electric cars: from hype to reality", the ETA has taken a close look at electric-powered vehicles (EVs) and their associated technologies. In what could be a shock to some commuters—and governments—the report states that EVs could potentially speed climate change, rather than reduce it, and might not be as good for the planet as some of the spin suggests. Simply put, it's not necessarily the cars themselves that will cause the damage, but the way the electricity is generated to power them and how often we drive them. For instance, EVs powered by "green energy"—wind or solar—are obviously superior, but if the electricity comes from coal, hybrids perform better.
Director at the ETA, Andrew Davis, said: "Whilst the report is not intended to dampen enthusiasm for electric vehicles, their introduction should not be viewed as a panacea; significant changes to the way we produce and tax power are needed before we will reap any benefits." ...
Solution: Electric cars and nuclear power plants. Nuclear is the new green. :-)
The prototype of a solar-powered plane destined for a record round-the-world journey will make its first trip across a runway on Thursday and Friday.
This week saw the Solar Impulse plane outside its hangar for the first time, with tests of its engines and computer.
The plane's maiden flight is scheduled for February, and a final version will attempt to cross the Atlantic in 2012.
As wide as a jumbo jet but weighing just 1,500 kg, it will be piloted by Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard.
"It's very exciting, we are moving now toward a very concrete phase," said Solar Impulse chief executive Andre Borschberg.
"You have to realise this airplane is quite special and you cannot just put it on the runway, apply full power and go in the air - it has to be done really step-by-step," he told BBC News. ...
WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.
In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.
But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.
The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.
"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."
The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it. ...
A new solar-powered aircraft attempts to fly around the world with zero emissions.
WHEN an airliner takes off for a transatlantic flight it needs to carry some 80 tonnes of fuel, which accounts for around one-fifth of its weight. On really long flights, fuel can account for 40% of a plane’s take-off weight, so that around 20% of the fuel is used to carry the rest of the fuel. Each tonne of fuel burned also produces 3.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Yet inside a hanger at a Swiss airfield is the prototype of an aircraft (illustrated above) that does not use any fuel at all. The wings of this aircraft are almost as big as those of an airliner, but they are covered in a film of solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity to drive its engines.
Solar-powered aircraft have flown before. The pioneer was Paul MacCready, whose Gossamer Penguin made the first manned flight in 1980 in California, with his then 13-year-old son at the controls. A derivative, Solar Challenger, crossed the English Channel in 1981. But nothing like HB-SIA, as the Swiss aircraft is known, has ever taken to the air. If it works as expected, another version will be built and this will take off, climb to 10,000 metres and, by storing some of the electricity generated during the day, continue flying through the night. Its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, plan to cross the Atlantic in it and later to fly it around the world.
The prototype will be unveiled on June 26th by Solar Impulse, a project the aviators run. ...
Princeton's Robert Wuthnow says American congregations are more international than ever.
Christians have been transnational since Pentecost. But world events create new possibilities. Spanish missionaries followed closely on the heels of Columbus, and Danish and British missionaries capitalized on trade relations with India. Today, globalized economic and communications networks create new possibilities for American congregations, says Princeton University's Robert Wuthnow in his most recent book, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches.
Since 2000, for instance, 12 percent of active churchgoers reported having gone overseas on a short-term mission while in their teen years. That is up from 5 percent in the 1990s, 4 percent in the 1980s, and only 2 percent before that. Currently, this represents about 100,000 congregations (or one-third of all congregations) every year sending teams that average about 18 members.
The rise in short-term missions accompanies a rise in giving to transnational ministry. U.S. church donations to both humanitarian and evangelistic transnational ministry now total about $4 billion annually. We see a similar rise in direct connections to congregations in the developing world, as modern travel and communications technology allow congregations to bypass denominational channels.
In an interview with CT Media Group editor in chief David Neff, sociologist Wuthnow doesn't see the new shape of congregational outreach as "a dramatic break from that past as some observers do." Churches that have been engaged in mission work are still doing it. But new technology, transportation, and markets mean they are able to do it better. ...
MUMBAI (AFP) – India's Tata Motors on Monday launched the world's cheapest car, the Nano, hoping to revolutionise travel for millions and buck a slump in auto sales caused by the global economic crisis.
Company boss Ratan Tata said the no-frills vehicle, slated to cost just 100,000 rupees (2,000 dollars) for the basic model, will get India's middle-class urban population off motorcycles and into safer, affordable cars.
"I think we are at the gates of offering a new form of transport to the people of India and later, I hope, other markets elsewhere in the world," he said, describing the launch as a "milestone."
"The present economic situation makes it somewhat... more attractive to the buying public," he told reporters in Mumbai ahead of a glitzy official unveiling ceremony at 7:30 pm (1400 GMT).
Potential owners of the car -- which is just over three metres (10 feet) long and has a top speed of 105 kilometres (65 miles) per hour -- can apply between April 9 and 25, Tata managing director Ravi Kant said. ...
This is a great video. I think it was prepared for a presentation at Sony (that will explain the seemingly out of place stat at the end.) Does this video unnerve you or exhilarate you? It exhilarates me! What a great time to be alive.
DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said it would launch an all-electric car for city commuting by 2012 in the United States as part of its plan to speed up the introduction of green cars as its global sales falter.
The FT-EV concept made its debut at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit Sunday, where the world's top automaker is also unveiling two new gasoline-electric hybrid cars.
The FT-EV concept shares a platform with the tiny iQ urban commuter car, which runs on a gasoline engine and emits just 99 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer.
"Now, more than ever, while we are so focused on the pressing issues of the moment, we cannot lose sight of our future," Irv Miller, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. group vice president, said in a statement.
Toyota said the concept car is targeted at the urban dweller driving up to 50 miles between home and work, for instance. ...
Aspiring scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period. There isn't much of an application for it, but it sure is cool to look at.
The Brazilian authorities are to use a plane equipped with body-heat sensors to monitor uncontacted Indian tribes in the Amazon from a distance.
Brazil has a policy of leaving such isolated indigenous groups in peace unless it is absolutely necessary to make contact.
Officials say the plane will help them to protect remote communities without interrupting their way of life.
Some 39 isolated groups are believed to be living in the Amazon region.
In May this year the authorities released a photograph of members of an uncontacted tribe firing arrows at a passing plane - an image reproduced in newspapers and on websites.
It is thought there may be more than 100 such tribes still in existence worldwide - more than half living in Latin America. ...
To illustrate the impact of technological and infrastructure changes on daily life, imagine that the year is 1789, and you are living in Philadelphia. George Washington had just been elected president of the United States. You have always been one of George's biggest fans. He just dropped by your house and appointed you secretary of state. How long will it be before the rest of the country knows of your appointment from the newspapers?
Here is the average number of days you should expect to lapse before people in other cities hear of your good news:
Albany, NY = 20 Days Baltimore, MD = 10 Days Boston, MA =15 Days Charleston, SC = 22 Days New York, NY = 5 Days Harrisburg, PA =15 Days Lexington, KY = 57 Days Pittsburgh, PA = 31 Days Quebec City = 100 Days Portland, ME = 20 Days (1)
Ten years later, in 1800, you live in New York and decide to go on the lecture circuit to talk about your experience as the first secretary of state. Thirty years after that, in 1830, a biographer will retrace your steps, traveling to the same places you visited. How long should you expect your commute to be to any American city in 1800 versus how long will your biographer's commute be in 1830 to the same cities?
Albany, NY: 3 Days vs. 2 Days Boston, MA: 4 Days vs. 2 Days Charleston, SC: 2 Weeks vs. 5 Days Detroit, MI: 4 Weeks vs. 1 Week Louisville, KY: 4 Weeks vs. 1 Week New Orleans, LA: 4 Weeks vs. 2 Weeks Philadelphia, PA: 1 Day vs. 1 Day Pittsburgh, PA: 2 Weeks vs. 4 Days St. Louis, MO: 5 Weeks vs. 2 Weeks (2)
Clearly, improvements were happening in transportation in the early nineteenth century. Travel times declined, and average travel fares dropped by 50-80%. Still, as late as the 1840s, transportation was very costly. The average non-farm laborer's wage was about $1.00 a day, and a free agricultural laborer's wage was about $10.00 a month. Travel in the North would cost about 2.0-4.5 cents a mile and about 5.5-6.0 cents a mile in the South (where wages were about 50-75% of Northern wages.) Furthermore, many of these trips required food and lodging expenses. A round trip from Baltimore to New York could easily consume one month's wages for a northern agricultural worker and two months or more for a similar person traveling similar distances in the South. (3)
Today we travel distances in minutes that took travelers days to cover less than 200 years ago for pocket change. More than once, I have risen in the morning in Kansas City, flown to Chicago 500 miles away, attended a meeting, flown back home, and gone to bed at my home on the same day. The cost was less than one day's wages. What happened in the last 150-200 years? The four factors of prosperity!
Many historians differ about which technological events had the most significant impact. The first steam-powered pumps emerged in England in 1705 to pump water out of mines. This technology was tinkered with over the next several decades. The watershed moment was James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1765. It took another thirty years of tinkering before the technology could be perfected, and engines could be put to practical use.
What no historian disputes is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, production was no longer limited to the power provided by man and beast for the first time in human history. But the mass production of such machines was anything but cheap. The raw materials were expensive and had to be finely crafted by skilled laborers. The potential for exponential growth in manufacturing was staggering, but the cost to the manufacturers to make engines and to the end users to purchase them was equally staggering. These were the dynamics that drove governments to create laws that facilitated the aggregating of capital into limited liability corporations.
However, increased production would be pointless if you couldn't transport your products in large quantities. I noted that the English had developed horse-drawn rail systems for transporting coal to various distribution centers. It wasn't long before innovative entrepreneurs began exploring how to use the new technology to move these carts. This led to the birth of the steam-powered locomotive.
The United States faced an enormous transportation problem. I have illustrated the travel issues above. There was a desire to expand territory, but the land area was already enormous at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase came in 1803 and doubled the size of the nation. How could a government effectively govern such a diverse and disconnected expansive area?
Some turned to the idea of building canals. The Erie Canal, which took nearly a quarter century to build, was completed in 1825 across New York. Building it was far more expensive than the government was willing to risk, so a quasi-corporation was established to finance its construction. Some inventors took steam technology and applied it to boats that could navigate the highly developed network of waterways. Sea-going vessels were modified for international travel. Steam locomotives began appearing in England and the United States during the 1820s-1830s. Meanwhile, English engineer John Loudon McAdam perfected a road-building process called macadamization that revolutionized the quality and durability of road construction.
The construction and maintenance of all these canals, ships, railroads, and roads required huge sums of capital. Not surprisingly, it was in the 1830s that the United States saw the emergence of limited liability companies. The railroads, in particular, would become the most significant corporations of the nineteenth century.
As impressive as the transport revolution was, the invention of the telegraph was even more transforming. It came into use in England and the United States in the 1840s. Information could travel faster than a man on horseback for the first time in human history. It was not just quicker but virtually instantaneous. One author describes the telegraph as the Victorian Internet. (4) Capital markets thrive on having a broad range of buyers and sellers with as complete a view of markets as possible. The telegraph ballooned the number of players participating in markets in real-time. Using the analogy, I started with above, the travel of critical information quickly went from taking weeks and days to minutes and seconds.
We talk about our era as a time of rapid transformation, but I agree with William J. Bernstein's conclusion that the most rapid change in human history is not our current era. It was the time between about 1825-1875. (5) Most of what we've seen since is a refinement and elaboration of the changes experienced during those times. The internal combustion engine was invented during the nineteenth century. It further expanded our ability to travel by automobile and to travel long distances at radically reduced costs. The technology was further elaborated to create air and space travel in the twentieth century. The electricity critical for telegraphs (which morphed into telephones) created power for almost everything we touch. Radio waves were discovered and turned into radio and television signals in the twentieth century. Microchips were invented to handle electronic signals. They were made into computers that morphed with telephones and wave technology to create our present digital and wireless communication networks, including the internet and cell phones. Then there is the controversial development of atomic energy. The list goes on.
Each subsequent step has expanded and integrated ever-broadening markets. Science and technological knowledge has mushroomed and is more widely shared than ever before. (6) All of these have led to broadening global prosperity. As Bernstein notes, when a significant number of people in poverty begin to experience prosperity, they begin to take a greater interest in the rule of law and property rights to solidify and perpetuate that prosperity. (7)
This is not to say this transition of the past 200 years has been absent from its share of abuse or harmful effects. Dissecting each and every influence of these technological changes is beyond our scope here. The point I hope is clear is how the emergence of property rights, scientific rationalism, and capital markets interacted in a way that gave birth to modern technology and infrastructure. The rise of this technology and infrastructure put pressure on the other three, leading to their transformation and elaboration. The four combined have generated the prosperity we know today.
(1) Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) 37.
(2) Pred, 176-177.
(3) Pred, 175-185.
(4) Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (Berkley, CA: Berkley Trade, 1999)
(5) William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 187-188.
(6) An astronomy professor friend tells me we have learned more about the universe in the past ten years than in all human history combined.
We have briefly reviewed three of William J. Bernstein's four factors that led to today's unprecedented prosperity: property rights, scientific rationalism, and capital markets. Bernstein refers to the fourth factor as "power, transportation, and light." I'm simply referring to this as "technology and infrastructure." (1)
Not every technological innovation that contributed to Europe's growing prosperity originated with Europeans. Several inventions similar to the ones Europeans developed appeared earlier in other cultures like China or the Muslim world. But the central issue is not how early a specific invention occurred but the ability of that invention to have an impact on culture and the economy. Europe made slow but steady innovations in the 1,200 years following the fall of Rome. Then over the last 200-300 years, an explosion in technological innovation began, nurtured, and sustained by property rights, scientific rationalism, and capital markets. The advances in technology, in turn, influenced these other factors.
One of the theses of Rodney Stark's book, Victory of Reason, is that the so-called "Dark Ages" were not so dark. (2) Historians often point to the days of the Roman Empire as the Zenith of Western Civilization. The fifth century saw Rome's demise, and then there were 1,000 years of "darkness" until the rediscovery of the classical West gave birth to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The evidence says otherwise.
Stark points out that Roman society knew nothing of waterwheel-powered technology. When William the Conqueror took his census in England in 1066, he counted approximately one water-powered mill for every fifty families. (3) What had changed over the previous five centuries? Motivation. What need did the master of a Roman villa have for waterpower when he could simply acquire more slaves to do the work? Common Europeans had no such luxury and turned to ingenuity to solve their production problems.
Much is made of the elaborate Roman road system but rarely is it noted that roads were primarily restricted to military traffic and luxury goods "extracted" from outlying regions for the wealthy in the city. They had little impact on the economic well-being of the average person in Roman society.
Most of the significant early European innovations were related to agricultural production. Roman agriculture was based on a two-crop rotation system and required half the land to lie fallow at any given time. In the seventh century, Europeans created a three-crop rotation system in which only one-third of the ground had to be kept out of production. The land's fertility was enhanced by rotating crops in a particular order. The fallow land also served as excellent grazing land for livestock. Livestock produced manure and further increased the fertility of the land. These innovations produced an agricultural surplus, freeing some for pursuits other than agriculture. Monasteries owned vast tracts of land and benefited greatly from the technological advances, allowing them to begin to specialize in other activities. They eventually became centers of commerce in Europe and developed many features of modern corporations.
Rodney Stark points out that Europeans invented horse harnesses and horseshoes by about the eleventh century. A horse with a harness can pull more than an ox and work twice as long. The horseshoe greatly decreased the injury to horses and improved their traction on difficult surfaces. (4) The Europeans also invented wagons with brakes and swiveling axles. Combined with harnessed horses, these wagons greatly enhanced the ability to move heavy loads over long distances. (5) Europeans also greatly improved ship design, including rudders. They invented windmills that greatly increased agricultural productivity in the lowlands of Northern Europe. Eyeglasses were invented in the thirteenth century, greatly extending the working life of many artisans. (6) From the end of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, there was a slow but steady flow of technological improvements. The steady flow became a tidal wave from about the eighteenth century.
Proto-capitalist enterprises were emerging in Northern Italy in the first centuries of the second millennium. Forerunners of the modern corporation were in place that included double-entry bookkeeping, by-laws, and financial markets. Water-powered fulling mills, developed in England during the thirteenth century, created small factories across the English countryside. The thirteenth century also was when a reliable mechanical clock was invented. Town clocks were installed in bell towers with chimes to mark the day. People over a wide area of real estate could coordinate activities for the first time. By the end of the seventeenth century, property rights and capital markets had been well established, and more people than ever had strong incentives to innovate. The pace of innovation and invention began to increase in a variety of areas through the use of scientific rationalism.
(Continued...)
(1) William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 161-188.
(2) Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, (New York: Random House, 2005), Chapters 2 and 3.
THE Chevrolet Volt is expected to be the icing on General Motors’ 100th birthday cake this week. The much-promoted sedan, which will operate as an electric car in typical local driving, is intended to provide a jump-start for the company’s second century.
The timing of the Tuesday event is fortuitous, for much more is riding on the Volt than whether a new model using experimental technologies will be a hit. For if the Volt succeeds, it could put the troubled company on a whole new path after 10 decades tethered to the internal-combustion engine. If it fails, it could drag G.M., and perhaps the entire struggling American auto industry, even further behind Asian competitors.
It was on Sept. 16, 1908, that William Crapo Durant filed the incorporation papers that formed G.M., with a revitalized Buick as its foundation. The centennial should be a time of joy at the company. But, with losses since 2005 approaching $70 billion, and Toyota having accelerated past G.M. into the No. 1 spot in global auto sales, the company’s staff won’t be dancing in party hats.
Instead of toasting the glory days when G.M. owned half of the United States car and truck market — its share peaked at 51 percent in 1962 amid suggestions that it should be broken up under antitrust laws — G.M. executives are looking .expectantly ahead to November 2010. That’s when the Volt, expected to break cover this week in close to final form, is due to reach customers. ...
Technology is the devices and machines used in society, and the practical knowledge society has about its material existence and methodologies for applying technical knowledge. Technology has several important impacts on the cycle of prosperity.
Arrow A
As Thomas Malthus correctly concluded, food production is critical to achieving prosperity. Domestication of crops and animals is widely credited as the impetus for human civilization. Excess crop production led freed some from food production for other pursuits. Somewhere between the sixth and ninth century (CE) in Europe, a three-crop rotation system was discovered that enriched the soil and significantly improved outputs. Knowledge of crop production, including issues like irrigation, fertilization, and soil management, is one form of technology. The Green Revolution in crop breeding and more recent efforts at genetic crop modifications are more recent examples.
Technology, as it relates to tools, has also had significant impacts. The creation of durable metal tools used in farming was an important factor. Changes as seemingly innocuous as the teardrop-shaped harness for horses (circa tenth century) dramatically increased the power efficiency of horses. Waterwheel technology used in grain milling was studied, perfected, and promoted by economic-development-minded Benedictine monks in the early part of the second millennium. Then, in the past two centuries, we’ve seen the rise of machines with magnitudes more power than a team of horses.
There are more indirect improvements in food supply from technology. Transportation technology has played a critical role in improving food distribution from grower to consumer. The development of waterways, overland trade routes, and the transportation devices that used them led to an improved food supply. Seaworthy ships that could carry large cargo were among the first major advances. More recently, refrigeration and packaging technology has substantially extended the useful life of foods from the grower through the supply chain to the consumer, radically reducing the spoilage of harvested food. Routing technology for vehicles and instantaneous knowledge of changes in food demands through communication technologies has radically increased the efficiency of food distribution. Arrow E
The impact of technology on human life is the subject matter of entire books. Here are some quick observations.
Medical – Medical knowledge and techniques, particularly in the last couple of centuries, have had an astonishing impact on treating and even eliminating diseases. Medical equipment accomplishes tasks that were unimaginable a generation ago. This extends the length and quality of life to unprecedented levels. People with deformities and injuries that would have been utterly debilitating can often now lead satisfying, productive lives. Shelter – Advances in construction of human dwellings and communities have created the possibility of people living without worry from natural threats that have plagued humanity throughout the ages. Medical knowledge gained over the past century has radically improved the sanitation of our dwellings. Technology has also played a key role in reducing several varieties of pollution brought on by dense urbanization in recent decades.
Communication – Technology has greatly expanded literacy and human learning. In Europe, the invention of printing technology greatly expanded literacy and caused an explosion in learning. The early nineteenth century brought the invention of the telegraph, making possible instantaneous communication between distant locations for the first time. Iterations of change would put us on the path to today, where we can communicate with every major populated area on the earth through wireless handheld devices, making incomprehensibly large volumes of information available to billions of people.
Transportation – Until the nineteenth century, land travel was limited to the fastest horse and sea travel to the fastest wind-powered ship. The world has been shrunk by advances in travel, allowing people to learn in distant lands and to experience other regions and cultures in unprecedented ways. Transportation also has made delivering goods, from the essential to the frivolous, to one’s doorstep an unremarkable reality. It has expanded the range of work opportunities for people by making it possible for a person’s home and work to be miles apart. Labor Saving and Entertainment Enhancing Devices – Our technology has been so effective at creating consumer goods that people now feel overwhelmed with the choices and want to simplify. Technology has driven the price of such options to levels that even some people we today classify as poor can live more comfortable luxurious lives than reasonably wealthy people did a century ago. This has enabled people to indulge personal interests and passions in historically unprecedented ways.
This is just a sampling. The list goes on. I do not intend to suggest that these changes are all unmitigated positive developments. Yet, it is worth noting that very few people would be interested in returning to a world without these developments. More on these issues later.
Arrow F
If we move in the counterclockwise direction in the diagram, we see the impact of technology on economic growth and wealth. Technological advances lead to decreased quantities of time, labor, materials, and errors in producing and delivering goods and services. Purchasers reward producers with sales. That generates profits which are either plowed into more efforts at efficient production or paid out in dividends to stockholders. Profits usually mean appreciation of stock values as well. Meanwhile, consumers experience declining costs, thus freeing up disposable income for savings or other expenditures. Wealth is created by expanding profits through efficiency or by reductions in consumer prices. Arrow I
Technology facilitates trade by improving infrastructure and developing devices like ships, ground transport, planes, pipelines, and fiber optic cables, to name a few. The ability to transport large quantities of goods improves the food supply distribution and brings larger numbers of people into market exchange networks. Communication technology synchronizes worldwide market functions.
These arrows have all dealt with outputs from technology. Two deal with inputs.
Arrow H
Technology is driven by human capital. Each new technology builds on and combines previous technologies to create an increasingly complex cumulative effect. At the core of technological innovation are well-disciplined and educated minds of well-fed and physically sound individuals devoted to systematic experimentation and innovation. Each technological advance usually necessitates upgrading society-wide competencies to take advantage of the technology effectively.
Arrow D
Also essential to technological change is wealth. Society must have sufficient wealth to support significant numbers of its populace devoted to such specialized learning and work. Technological change often requires accessing and experimenting with raw materials. This, too, requires financial resources.
We have only skimmed the surface of technology’s impact, but hopefully, this gives us enough to get a sense of technology’s role. Next up is the food supply.
After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.
The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, on Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with Archimedes.
Archimedes, who lived in Syracuse and died in 212 B.C., invented a planetarium calculating motions of the Moon and the known planets and wrote a lost manuscript on astronomical mechanisms. Some evidence had previously linked the complex device of gears and dials to the island of Rhodes and the astronomer Hipparchos, who had made a study of irregularities in the Moon’s orbital course.
The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.
Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument’s back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar....
