Finally, an energy technology that appears to tick all the boxes … especially the ‘burning’ the plutonium waste. | A return to nuclear power is attractive right now for many reasons. |
| nuclear energy also creates problems of its own, not least the risk of Chernobyl-style accidents and the production of radioactive waste that takes tens of thousands of years to decay. |
| There is a way of returning to nuclear while overcoming all these concerns: hybrid nuclear fusion. |
| Hybrid nuclear fusion combines the two forms of nuclear power, fission and fusion, in a single reactor. |
| Hybrid reactors have other advantages too. One is that the fission reaction can burn a range of fuels, including the long-lived high-level nuclear waste produced in conventional fission reactors. It “transmutates” these waste products into isotopes that decay over a hundred years rather than tens of thousands. |
| also sidestep looming shortages of the high-grade uranium |
The game is no longer about search and retrieve, it’s about being in the flow. The challenge is how to make meaningful flows. | We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. |
| This is not simply about aggregating or curating content |
| the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they’re doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed. |
| I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. |
| when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption. |
| The key is not be all utopian or dystopian about it, but to recognize what changes and what stays the same. The future of Web 2.0 is about information flow and if you want to help people, help them reach that state.Read more at uxmag.com |
Collaborative classification and tagging enabling work groups to tap into self-made “clip-streams” will I hope be a seventh reason before too long. | if four students are working on a research paper, all of them can sign into Amplify and follow one another. During the process of researching, each of them can keep posting resources to Amplify. The resources could be full length articles, quotations from e-books, interesting findings from reports and so on. The resources can be qualified with personal comments/thoughts/ideas. Amplify will help the students to collate information, discuss and share ideas/thoughts as they work on their paper. |
Amplify could also be used by organizations for employee training and learning. May be Amplify could be integrated into the corporate intranet or learning portal. Last but not the least, I must say I love the user interface design of Amplify and on a usability scale of 5, I would rate it as 4.5. Read more at blog.thewritersgateway.com |
The conclusion is that people do not need more energy, Green or not, but that they need less, both for their own benefit and for the benefit of all the others who live here. Only energy companies need more energy. SUMMARY: What if we suddenly had access to unlimited clean energy? Would that be a good thing, or would we simply use it to complete the biocidal program of industrial civilization? This little thought experiment suggests that our problem as a civilization is not lack of energy – it is lack of imagination, humility, and empathy. The core is rotten. We must find a better way. |
| The dominant social program of industrial civilization has been the destruction of the local community, followed by atomization of individuals as isolated consumers. Participants in strong local communities are just too darn self sufficient to be good industrial consumers. |
| Surely nothing but further tragedy would result from a prolonging the industrial experiment one second longer than it would otherwise last. Another bonanza supply of cheap energy would only lead to a more rapid and more thorough destruction of the biosphere.Read more at www.energybulletin.net |
Twitter would be great medium for people to spread spiritual ‘pearls of wisdom’. I would be very interested in the odd thought from such a man. I hope he begins to use it as a serious thought-spreader tool, rather than as part of his PR effort. The Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has joined micro-blogging service Twitter, attracting over 100,000 followers in two weeks. |
The Dalai Lama’s account has sent several messages so far although they are
not pearls of wisdom from His Holiness but rather links to articles and
photos of his activities during his world travels. He has shied away from
making any strong political statements and is not yet following any other
Twitter users.
|
The creation of a Twitter account by the Dalai Lama comes a year after Twitter
suspended an account set up by an imposter which attracted tens of thousands
of followers.
Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk |
The key word here is “algorithmic”. It does not apply to people opting to follow or recommend each other. And it does not apply to social networkers organising their own information, either. Indeed, this patent should be an advantage to both these approaches. | Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, “displaying a news feed in a social network environment.” Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be “one of the most significant social web patents” in a decade. |
| If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there’s going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. |
| It could impact any number of other social networks - like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. |
Today we’re ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
| With all the hype today around the release of the “breakthrough” Bloom Energy fuel cell (which has become known as the “Bloom box” and is referred to by Bloom as |
| As a fuel cell, it also needs fuel to run, in this case natural gas or another source of methane (such as landfill gas or biogas from anaerobic digesters). |
| The unsubsidized cost would be 13-14 cents/kWh, with about 9 cents/kWh from the capital costs of the Bloom box and 5 cents/kWh from natural gas costs, a |
| fter federal subsidies for fuel cells (they can claim the same 30% investment tax credit that solar gets) and a $2,500 California rebate, and assuming $7/mmBTU price for natural gas, a 100 kW Bloom Box unit generates electricity at 8-10 cents/kWh. That compares favorable to commercial electricity rates |
| if Bloom can bring prices down (and/or natural gas prices are stable/low), there could be a significant market for this fuel cell.Read more at blogs.forbes.com |
In a new blog posting, Amit Singhal, a Google employee responsible for the ranking system, claimed the company’s algorithms produced a better quality and more relevant result than a system that involved human intervention. |
Google is likely to remain on the defensive as competition regulators at the European Commission examine the three complaints received from Foundem, ejustice.fr and the Ciao websites. These parties accuse the US company of manipulating the formula to discriminate against competitors. |
If the Commission is persuaded that breaches of EU competition law have occurred, it would then issue formal charges against the company. Read more at www.ft.com |
If this works, it will significantly reduce the power and income of banks acting as intermediaries. Opportunities for direct investment in assets for storing value are likely to follow, further marginalising banks. The other exciting thing about this develoment is that the Paypal infrastructure could be for exchanging community and barter currencies. | nobody is as ambitious as PayPal. In November, it further opened up its code, giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay. The move could unleash a wave of innovation unlike any we’ve seen since self-publishing came to the Web. |
| Two months after PayPal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services, sending $15 million through the company’s pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose ShopSavvy program lets people find an item’s cheapest price by scanning its barcode, used PayPal to add a “quick pay” button to its app. |
| Previously, anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations and licensing bodies. But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business Read more at www.wired.com |
Or just boy’s toys? Either way, great for defense manufacturers.
The use of unmanned aircraft for surveillance hit the headlines last week,
after Merseyside Police had to ground their drone when it was discovered
they were using it without a licence.
|
But a government-funded European group is pushing ahead with work aimed at
showing that drones, known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), can safely be
used in civil airspace. Drones cannot be flown outside regulated areas at
present because they are controlled remotely and do not have the ability to “see”.
|
| The study aims to show that satellites are reliable enough to allow
uninterrupted communication between the drone and the person piloting it
|
| Drones are of interest to the military and the police as surveillance tools,
and could be used by immigration authorities for patrolling Britain’s
coastline. |
| BAE, Britain’s biggest manufacturer, is also developing UAVs, with the Mantis
drone making its first test flight in Australia last year. Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk |
|
Best buy - Hybrid fusion: the third nuclear option
