Michael Giberson Earth Techling reports on the release of the latest report in the U.S. Department of Interior’s efforts to identify opportunities to develop small-scale hydropower projects within the DOI’s current water delivery systems in the Western United States. The goal of DOI’s project was to inventory potentially valuable locations and then invite developers to …
Micro-hydropower Potential in Man-made Waterways Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In March I wrote about Adam Thierer’s paper on technopanics — “a moral panic centered on societal fears about a particular contemporary technology” — and I argued that we should bear the moral panic phenomenon in mind when evaluating objections to smart grid technologies. In the past two weeks we’ve seen news articles …
Lynne Kiesling Today in Technology Review, Jonathan Koomey has an interesting analysis of computational energy efficiency. We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law — Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years — but I did not realize that Moore’s Law is also borne out in improvements …
The Internet of Things and Computational Energy Efficiency Read More »
You know what? I’d happily spend the $27.98 for the 6 LED chandelier bulbs at Costco IF THEY WERE DIMMABLE. Yes, I know I’m shouting, but crikey, if you want people to use less energy, MAKE IT EASIER FOR THEM. Seriously, electronics engineers, what’s the problem? Who on earth thinks that people want to sit …
Lynne Kiesling Fear is a strong motivating factor, having evolved over millennia as we have protected ourselves against predators. Fear supports self-preservation by making us risk-averse and cautious. But such a deep, visceral, evolved emotion does not always serve our long-term objectives of thriving; it leads to maximin outcomes, and it is often mismatched to …
How Fear Affects Policy: Adam Thierer on Technopanics Read More »
Michael Giberson In the recent edition of The American magazine, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus write in defense of the President’s State of the Union address claim of federal government credit for the shale gas revolution. (For those of you not keeping score at home, (1) I commented …
The Federal Government’s Natural Gas R&d Breakthrough Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I was glad Mike mentioned Alex Tabarrok’s recent Launching the Innovation Renaissance in his recent post on the Honeywell-Next patent lawsuit, because reading Alex’s new TED book was on my to-do list for this past weekend. Alex’s focus in this book is U.S. innovation policy and ways that we could improve the institutional …
Alex Tabarrok on Innovation, Barriers to It, and the Warfare-welfare State Read More »
Michael Giberson Slate‘s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo examines Honeywell vs. Nest from a tech consumer’s point of view. The Honeywell v. Nest lawsuit is being justifiably criticized as another black mark on our broken patent system. If Honeywell invented all these cool features, why didn’t it make something of them? … Honeywell seems to have …
Michael Giberson At Slate, Matthew Yglesias tells the story of a business that is booming: Chipotle’s Mexican Grill, “a company that shows there’s clearly room for growth and innovation in even the most basic sectors of the economy.” The chain has been expanding rapidly, Chipotle’s stock has risen 500 percent over 5 years, and yet: …
A Secret to Chipotle’s Good-food-fast Innovations Read More »
Lynne Kiesling You know the down-home advice on investing — don’t put all of your eggs in one basket? That advice also holds for maintaining your online privacy in the face of Google’s impending “service integration” to use all of the information you provide in all of their services. This Wired article on how to …
Online Privacy is Like Portfolio Diversification Read More »
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