Lynne Kiesling Gee, I really feel like the new, new world has truly arrived, when one of the most visible conversations in the places I frequent is about Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson responds to Gladwell, continuing the conversation. But you know that …
Anderson/gladwell Debate Brings out All of the Web Intelligentsia Read More »
Lynne Kiesling How cool is this? Solar cells that can tune to the light angle and quality at different latitudes: Quantasol has now created GaAs [gallium arsenide] solar cells that can be tuned to the prevailing light conditions of a particular place, to get the most out of the cells wherever they are. To do …
Lynne Kiesling I have to admit, I thought that this point was obvious. Clearly Walmart (accurately, I think) sees itself as well-positioned to leverage its size nationally to negotiate better health care arrangements than its competitors, so its newly-announced support of employer-based health care is a classic example of raising rivals’ costs. Apparently, it’s not …
Walmart Supports Employer Health Care to Raise Rivals’ Costs Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Germany’s utility Yellow Strom is a technology leader. They are leading in the introduction of digital technology in the interface between their wires network and the customer’s home; for example they are one of the first partners with Google to roll out Google’s Power Meter, and they are working on an application that …
Technology and Changing the Business Model in the Electricity Industry Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Today a post from Ben Casselman at the WSJ’s Environmental Capital highlights one of my favorite unintended benefits of open-road electronic tolling: by eliminating deceleration and acceleration to pay a cash toll, electronic tolling reduces emisssions, with one big caveat: So does eliminating toll booths really cut down on emissions? The answer appears …
Open-Road Electronic Tolling Also Reduces Emissions Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve had a lovely morning catching up on some of Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcasts. In particular, I listened back-to-back to Michele Boldrin discussing intellectual property and Paul Romer discussing growth, including intellectual property institutions, with Russ. As the show notes for the Boldrin podcast note, “Boldrin argues that copyright and patent are used …
Boldrin, Romer, and Roberts on Intellectual Property Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibition of James Ensor’s work. Ensor was a late 19th-early 20th century Belgian painter, and the best word I can think of to describe his work is … eclectic. From the NYT review of the exhibition: He was an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop-culture itch, …
Meet James Ensor, Belgium’s Famous Painter, at New York’s Moma Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Here’s a roundup of some developments in smart grid end user devices (in other words, I had a bunch of cool articles open about nifty innovations, so let’s round ’em up so I can clear tabs in my browser!) that I hope you will find as interesting as I do: From the NYT …
Lynne Kiesling Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason: The trend of …
Lynne Kiesling In his usual trenchant way, Jonathan Adler has hit upon the two things to which I object the most in the Waxman-Markey bill and vote. The first is the one about which I wrote in May: despite all of the tooth-gnashing and knicker-twisting about the cap-and-trade portions of the bill, the really egregious …
Transparency and Representation in the Waxman-Markey Vote Read More »
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