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Smart Grid Standards by Takuro Sato

business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, data acquisition, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, exponential backoff, factory automation, Ford Model T, green new deal, green transition, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Iridium satellite, iterative process, knowledge economy, life extension, linear programming, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, Thomas Davenport

TK3105.S25 2014 621.3102′ 18–dc23 2014004867 Typeset in 11/13pt Times by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India 1 2015 Contents About the Authors xi Preface xv Acknowledgments 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2 2.1 2.2 xvii An Overview of the Smart Grid Introduction An Overview of Smart Grid-Related Organizations 1.2.1 SDOs Dealing with the Smart Grid 1.2.2 Technical Consortia, Forums, and Panels Dealing with the Smart Grid 1.2.3 Other Political, Market, and Trade Organizations, Forums, and Alliances Status of the United States (US) 1.3.1 Strategy Development and Planning 1.3.2 Policy and Law Enforcement 1.3.3 Government and Company Pilot Projects Status of the European Union (EU) 1.4.1 Activities of the European Union 1.4.2 Activities of EU Member Countries Status of Japan Status of South Korea Status of China Conclusions References 1 1 3 4 12 15 15 18 19 20 20 22 25 27 28 30 30 Renewable Energy Generation Introduction Renewable Energy Systems and the Smart Grid 2.2.1 Hydroelectric Power 2.2.2 Solar Energy 35 35 37 37 40 9 Contents vi 2.3 2.4 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 2.2.3 Wind Energy 2.2.4 Fuel Cell 2.2.5 Geothermal Energy 2.2.6 Biomass Challenges of Renewable Energy Systems 2.3.1 High Capital Cost 2.3.2 Integrating Renewable to the On-Grid 2.3.3 Reliable Supply of Power 2.3.4 Power Transmission 2.3.5 Power Distribution Conclusion References 51 56 60 64 73 73 74 74 74 74 75 75 Power Grid Power Grid Systems An Overview of the Important Key Standards for the Power Grid Communications in the Smart Grid 3.3.1 Communications for Substations: IEC 61850 Standards 3.3.2 Communications for Telecontrol: IEC 60870-5 Standards 3.3.3 Inter-Control Center Communications: IEC 60870-6 Standards Energy Management Systems 3.4.1 Application Program Interface: the IEC 61970 Standards 3.4.2 Software Inter-Application Integration: the IEC 61968 Standards Teleprotection Equipment 3.5.1 An Overview of the IEC 60834 3.5.2 Types of Teleprotection Command Schemes 3.5.3 Requirements for Command Type Teleprotection Systems 3.5.4 Teleprotection System Performance Requirements 3.5.5 Teleprotection System Performance Tests Application Cases of Related Standards in the Power Grid 3.6.1 Case 1: Engineering Process in Smart Substation Automation 3.6.2 Case 2: Information Exchange Services and Service Tracking Analysis of Relationships among Related Standards 3.7.1 IEC 61970 and IEC 61968 3.7.2 IEC 61850 and IEC 61970 3.7.3 IEC 61850 and IEC 60870 3.7.4 TASE.2 and MMS 3.7.5 Latest Progresses of Related Standards Conclusion Appendix 3.A A SED File Example (Extensible Markup Language) References 79 80 81 82 82 88 93 97 97 102 106 106 107 108 108 110 111 111 117 125 125 126 126 127 128 129 129 140 Contents 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 vii Smart Storage and Electric Vehicles Introduction Electric Storage 4.2.1 An Overview of Electric Storage 4.2.2 Electric Storage Technologies and Applications 4.2.3 Standardization Projects and Efforts Distributed Energy Resources 4.3.1 An Overview of Distributed Energy Resources 4.3.2 Technologies and Applications 4.3.3 Various Standardization Processes and Projects E-Mobility/Electric Vehicles 4.4.1 Introduction of E-Mobility/Electric Vehicles 4.4.2 The Rise and Fall of Electric Vehicles 4.4.3 Types of Electric Vehicles 4.4.4 Electric Vehicle Batteries 4.4.5 Grid to Vehicle (G2V) and Vehicle to Grid (V2G) Opportunities and Challenges 4.4.6 Standardization of E-Mobility/Electric Vehicles Conclusion References 145 145 146 146 147 151 154 154 155 158 160 160 161 162 164 Smart Energy Consumption Introduction Demand Response 5.2.1 An Overview of Demand Response Technologies 5.2.2 Demand Response Technology and Barriers 5.2.3 Standardization Efforts Related to Demand Response Advanced Metering Infrastructure Standards 5.3.1 The AMI System 5.3.2 The IEC 62056 and ANSI C12 Standards 5.3.3 Metering Standardization Projects and Efforts Smart Home and Building Automation Standards 5.4.1 ISO/IEC Information Technology – Home Electronic System (HES) 5.4.2 ZigBee/HomePlug Smart Energy Profile 2.0 5.4.3 OpenHAN 2.0 5.4.4 Z-Wave 5.4.5 ECHONET 5.4.6 ZigBee Home Automation Public Application Profile 5.4.7 BACnet 5.4.8 LONWORKS 5.4.9 INSTEON 183 183 184 184 185 186 188 189 189 194 197 166 170 178 180 198 207 217 221 224 228 231 233 235 Contents viii 5.4.10 5.4.11 5.4.12 5.5 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 KNX ONE-NET A Comparison of Smart Home and Building Automation Standards Conclusion References 235 238 Communications in the Smart Grid Introduction 6.1.1 Communication Requirements for the Smart Grid 6.1.2 List of Standards Architecture of the Communication System in the Smart Grid 6.2.1 IP in the Smart Grid Wired Communication 6.3.1 Power Line Communication 6.3.2 Optical Communication 6.3.3 Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and Ethernet Wireless Communication 6.4.1 Introduction 6.4.2 Wireless Very Short Distance Communication 6.4.3 Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks and Related Technologies in the Unlicensed Spectrum 6.4.4 Cellular Networks in the Licensed Spectrum and WiMAX Technology 6.4.5 Satellite Communication Conclusion References 247 247 248 250 256 257 259 259 264 266 268 268 270 Security and Safety for Standardized Smart Grid Networks Introduction Threats and Vulnerabilities of Smart Grids 7.2.1 Network Vulnerabilities 7.2.2 Errors of Communications Communication Network Standards of Smart Grids 7.3.1 Wireless Network Standards 7.3.2 Wired Network Standards and Their Safety Extensions Wireless Network Security Mechanisms in the Smart Grids 7.4.1 An Overview of Security Mechanisms in the Wireless Standardized Smart Grid 7.4.2 Device Joining 7.4.3 Securing Normal Traffic Wired Network Security/Safety Mechanisms in the Smart Grid 7.5.1 An Overview of Security Technologies in the Wired Smart Grid 299 299 300 300 301 302 302 302 303 239 242 242 275 285 291 292 294 303 303 307 309 310 Contents 7.6 7.7 7.8 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 9 9.1 9.2 ix 7.5.2 Basic Security Mechanisms of Communication Infrastructure 7.5.3 Principles of Safety Extensions 7.5.4 Security Measures of Safety Extension Typical Standards of Functional Security and Safety 7.6.1 IEC 62351 Standards 7.6.2 IEC 61508 Standards Discussion 7.7.1 Safety versus Security 7.7.2 Security Level 7.7.3 Safety Level 7.7.4 Open Issues Conclusion References 311 312 313 316 316 319 321 321 321 322 322 324 325 Interoperability Introduction 8.1.1 Interoperability and Interchangeability 8.1.2 The Challenges of Network Interoperability 8.1.3 Adding Application Interoperability Interoperability Standards NIST Identified List of Standards to Be Reviewed NIST Interoperability Conceptual Reference Model for the Smart Grid Different Priority Areas Identified for Standardization 8.6.1 Wide-Area Situational Awareness 8.6.2 Demand Response and Consumer Energy Efficiency 8.6.3 Smart Energy Storage 8.6.4 Electric Transportation 8.6.5 Cybersecurity 8.6.6 Network Communications 8.6.7 Advanced Metering Infrastructure 8.6.8 Distribution Grid Management Priority Action Plans Different Layers of Interoperability Conclusion References 329 329 330 330 331 332 333 339 339 340 341 341 342 342 342 343 344 344 344 346 347 348 Integration of Variable Renewable Resources Introduction Challenges of Grid Integration of Intermittent Renewable Systems 9.2.1 Operation of a Conventional Electric Power System 9.2.2 Impact of Adding Intermittent Renewable Systems to the Power Grid 351 351 352 352 354 Contents x 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 10 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 Transitioning to Highly Renewable Electricity Grid 9.3.1 Planning Studies Very High Penetration and Grid-Scale Storage 9.4.1 Grid-Matching Analysis – Case of the Israeli Grid 9.4.2 Storage Design and Dispatch – Case of Interconnected Grid List of Standards Related to Integration of Renewable Resources Conclusion and Recommendations References 357 357 363 363 366 374 375 375 Future of the Smart Grid The Premise of the Smart Grid What the Smart Grid Should Deliver?

NEDO under METI has launched several projects to promote the development of the Japanese Smart Grid. One example is the Japan-US collaborative Smart Grid project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which was launched in 2009 with an investment of $10 billion. NEDO has established the JSCA to promote cooperation among various stakeholders An Overview of the Smart Grid 27 to accelerate Smart Grid-related activities in Japan. In order for Japanese companies to participate in Smart Grid-related activities, Japan has become actively involved in expanding the Asian Smart Grid market. NEDO has conducted an investigation of the Smart Grid-related technology requirements in the industrial areas surrounding Jakarta, Indonesia in 2010.

In 2009, the Presidential Committee on Green Growth issued the guideline, Building an Advanced Green Country, which specifies the contents of the South Korea Smart Grid. In August 2009, the Korea Smart Grid Institute (KSGI) was launched to promote the development of the Smart Grid in South Korea. KSGI issued Korea’s Smart Grid Roadmap, which specifies five sectors for implementing the Smart Grid: smart power grid, smart consumer, smart transportation, smart renewable, and smart electricity service [55]. In the first stage (2010–2012), the implementation direction was to construct and operate the Smart Grid test bed in pilot projects. In the second stage (2012–2020), the implementation direction is to expand the Smart Grid into metropolitan areas.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Dynamic pricing also will let local energy producers know the best time to sell electricity back to the grid, or to go off the grid altogether. The US government recently allocated funds to develop the smart grid across the country. The funds will be used to install digital electric meters, transmission grid sensors, and energy storage technologies to enable high-tech electricity distribution; this will transform the existing power grid into an Internet of energy. CPS Energy in San Antonio, Texas; Xcel Utility in Boulder, Colorado; and PG&E, Sempra, and Southern ConEdison in California will be laying down parts of the smart grid over the next several years. The smart grid is the backbone of the new economy. Just as the Internet created thousands of new businesses and millions of new jobs, so too will the intelligent electricity network—except “this network will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet,” says Marie Hattar, vice president of marketing in Cisco’s network systems solutions group.

A study prepared by KEMA, a leading energy consulting firm, for the GridWise Alliance—the US smart grid coalition of IT companies, power and utility companies, academics, and venture capitalists—found that even a modest $16 billion in government incentives to smarten the nation’s power grid would catalyze $64 billion worth of projects and create 280,000 direct jobs.40 Because the smart grid is critical to the growth of the other four pillars, it will generate hundreds of thousands of additional jobs in the renewable energy sector, the construction and real estate markets, the hydrogen storage industry, and electric transportation, all of which rely on the smart grid as an enabling platform.

These employment estimates are small, however, in comparison to the jobs that will be created with the €1 trillion the European Commission now projects is needed for public and private investment over the next ten years to bring the distributed smart grid network online across the world’s largest economy.41 Today’s idea of a distributed smart grid was not what most of the major ICT companies had in mind when they first began to talk about intelligent utility networks. Their early vision was for a centralized smart grid. The companies foresaw digitalizing the existing power grid, with the placement of smart meters and censors, to allow utility companies to collect information remotely, including keeping up-to-the-minute information on electricity flows.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Campbell, The Smart Grid: Status and Outlook, Congressional Research Service, April 10, 2018, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45156.pdf, 8. 34.  Electric Power Research Institute, Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the Smart Grid: A Preliminary Estimate of the Investment Requirements and the Resultant Benefits of a Fully Functioning Smart Grid, March 2011, https://www.smartgrid.gov/files/Estimating_Costs_Benefits_Smart_Grid_Preliminary_Estimate_In_201103.pdf (accessed March 24, 2019), 1–2. 35.  Electric Power Research Institute, Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the Smart Grid, 4; Electric Power Research Institute, The Power to Reduce CO2 Emissions: The Full Portfolio, October 2009, https://www.smartgrid.gov/files/The_Power_to_Reduce_CO2_Emission_Full_Portfolio_Technical_R_200912.pdf (accessed March 23, 2019), 2–1. 36.  

Millions of electric vehicles connected to the Energy Internet will also provide a storage system that can send electricity back to the grid during peak demand, when the price of electricity has spiked, while vehicle owners can be compensated for contributing their electricity to the network. The construction of a national smart grid across the country will serve as the backbone of the Energy Internet. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) provides a comprehensive definition of what makes up the national smart grid: Today’s power system … is primarily comprised of large central-station generation connected by a high voltage network or Grid to local electric distribution systems which, in turn, serve homes, business and industry. In today’s power system, electricity flows predominantly in one direction using mechanical controls.… The Smart Grid still depends on the support of large central-station generation, but it includes a substantial number of installations of electric energy storage and of renewable energy generation facilities, both at the bulk power system level and distributed throughout.

.… The Smart Grid still depends on the support of large central-station generation, but it includes a substantial number of installations of electric energy storage and of renewable energy generation facilities, both at the bulk power system level and distributed throughout. In addition, the Smart Grid has greatly enhanced sensory and control capability configured to accommodate these distributed resources as well as electric vehicles, direct consumer participation in energy management and efficient communicating appliances. This Smart Grid is hardened against cyber security while assuring long-term operations of an extremely complex system of millions of nodes.34 Back in 2011, EPRI estimated that the national smart grid and accompanying storage technology would cost upwards of $476 billion over a twenty-year period to construct but that the grid would create between $1.3 trillion and $2 trillion in overall economic benefits.


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

This shifting of when everyday devices do their work from the time somebody is home to turn them on to the time that electricity is cheapest is not just appealing to Val; it is at the heart of why the smart grid is valuable to utilities. The reason companies would pay to outfit a house along the line of the Petersons’—and why they would dream of also including all the smart appliances the Petersons did not get—is because the smart grid makes it possible to shift consumption around the clock. It doesn’t reduce consumption; in fact, quite the opposite: the utilities would be pleased if everyone used more electricity than they currently do. Rather, what the smart grid does is change the time at which consumption takes place. Instead of most of the nation vacuuming, washing and drying laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV, charging their car, and turning up their air-conditioning (or heat, depending upon the season) at the same time of day, some people, like Val, will let the house decide.

“Effect Hits Santa Cruz”: Gary L. Hunt, “The Bakersfield Effect Hits Santa Cruz,” Tech & Creative Labs, August 29, 2010, http://www.tclabz.com/2010/08/29/the-bakersfield-effect-hits-santa-cruz/. like a cash grab: Jack Danahy, “Smart Grid Fallout: Lessons to Learn from PG&E’s Smart Meter Lawsuit,” Smart Grid News, November 13, 2009, http://www.smartgridnews.com/story/smart-grid-fallout-lessons-learn-pge-s-smart-meter-lawsuit/2009-11-13, for individual customer complaints see: https://sites.google.com/site/nocelltowerinourneighborhood/home/wireless-smart-meter-concerns/smart-meter-consumers-anger-grows-over-higher-utility-bills.

would not use again: Mark Jaffe, “Xcel’s SmartGridCity Plan Fails to Connect with Boulder,” The Denver Post, October 28, 2012, http://www.denverpost.com/ci_21871552/xcels-smartgridcity-plan-fails-connect-boulder. “Give me a blinking break”: April Nowicki, “Boulder’s Smart Grid Leaves Citizens in the Dark,” Greentech Media, March 18, 2013, http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Boulders-Smart-Grid-Leaves-Citizens-in-the-Dark. “ ‘Stupid Customer’ pilot”: Jesse Berst, “SmartGridCity Meltdown: How Bad Is It?” Smart Grid News, August 8, 2010, http://www.smartgridnews.com/story/smartgridcity-meltdown-how-bad-it/2010-08-03. positions on the matter: Randy Houson, business technology executive for Xcel Energy, public speech, Washington, D.C., September 22, 2009.


pages: 49 words: 12,968

Industrial Internet by Jon Bruner

air gap, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, commoditize, computer vision, data acquisition, demand response, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Google X / Alphabet X, industrial robot, Internet of things, job automation, loose coupling, natural language processing, performance metric, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application

In one configuration, the Tesla S electric sedan can draw 20,000 watts and its battery can store 85 kilowatt-hours of electricity.[15] Handling these new demands will involve both physical changes to the grid (especially the construction of small fast-dispatch power plants that can start in as little as 30 minutes when the wind stops blowing) as well as better controls based on software intelligence — the so-called “smart grid.” Any improvement in these controls can substitute directly for new physical capacity. The smart grid will require pervasive network connections to everything from coal turbines to clothes dryers, and an interoperable software stack to go with it. The core function of the smart grid will be dynamic electricity pricing that reflects supply and demand on a minute-by-minute basis. Fully dynamic pricing hasn’t arrived yet, but peak-use surcharges are common in some markets today, and the sorts of responsive, intelligent controls that will work with it are useful even in the absence of dynamic pricing.

Industry Focus Following is a handful of studies drawn from industries that will be particularly affected by the rise of the industrial internet. The accessibility of these examples varies; building the smart grid, with dynamic electricity prices calculated instantaneously as electricity supply and demand shift, will take years of stack development, entailing careful collaboration between power plant operators, distributors, independent system operators, and local utilities, and drawing in the seasoned engineering bases of all those participants. Even so, some elements of the smart grid stack have been standardized and are now open to innovators from any background. Modularity means that an innovator doesn’t need access to the mechanism of pricing in order to to build a responsive electric-car charger; she just needs to anticipate that dynamic pricing will eventually emerge as a service to which her machine can connect.

Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra wrote, “With this information at their fingertips, consumers would be enabled to make more informed decisions about their energy use and, when coupled with opportunities to take action, empowered to actively manage their energy use.”[23] It’s effectively an effort to reduce consumption not by edict, but by making markets more transparent and giving consumers the tools they need to react quickly to market conditions. As promising as these initiatives are, the full “smart grid” as futurists imagine it will take years of careful collaboration between utilities, independent system operators, regulators, and software and hardware developers. Proposals for smart-grid standards abound, and big investments by any individual utility won’t reach their full potential until every adjacent component is also modernized and connected. “There are some dangerous conceptual ideas coming out of Internet companies saying the power system is like the Internet,” says Dan Zimmerle, who runs a power-systems lab at Colorado State University[24] and directs research on grid technologies there.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Scott DiSavino, “U.S. Smart Grid to Cost Billions, Save Trillions,” Reuters, May 24, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/24/us-utilities-smartgrid-epri-idUSTRE74N7O420110524 (accessed June 7, 2013); “Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the Smart Grid: A Preliminary Estimate.” Electric Power Research Institute, March 2011, 21. 24. “Growing International Co-Operation Driving the Spread of Smart Grids,” GlobalData (June, 2012): 1–7. 25. Katie Fehrenbacher, “For the Smart Grid, the Wireless Debates Are Over,” Gigaom, January 23, 2012, http://gigaom.com/2012/01/23/for-the-smart-grid-the-wireless-debates-are-over/ (accessed July 5, 2013). 26.

Lordan of the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) said that the nation’s power sector is beginning to ask how many transformers need to be stockpiled and stored and how best to transport and deploy them to critically exposed regions in the aftermath of a concerted cyberattack on the nation’s power grid.69 Although the Congress, EPRI, the National Academy of Sciences, governmental commissions, and private sector groups are to be praised for drawing attention to the level of the threats, their responses come up short because their various “what if” scenarios continue to assume a business-as-usual power grid that relies on fossil fuels and nuclear power to generate electricity that is then distributed across power lines that are designed to transmit it only from a centralized power station to millions of end users. If a centralized smart grid were brought online, it would only exacerbate the potential vulnerability to a cyberattack on the grid. Unfortunately, the United States is playing directly into the hands of cyberterrorists by championing a centralized smart grid. The European Union and other governments, by contrast, are deploying a distributed smart grid—or Energy Internet—that lessens the potential threat and damage that can be inflicted by a massive cyberattack. Even if the electrical transformers were to flame out, if a fully functioning Energy Internet were operational across every region of the country, local communities could go off-grid and continue to generate their own green electricity, sharing it with their neighbors and businesses on microgrids, keeping the power and lights on, at least long enough to keep society functioning.

“Technology,” Transphorm, Inc., http://www.transphormusa.com/technology (accessed June 6, 2013). 20. “Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the Smart Grid: A Preliminary Estimate of the Investment Requirements and the Resultant Benefits of a Fully Functioning Smart Grid,” Electric Power Research Institute, March 2011, 4, http://ipu.msu.edu/programs/MIGrid2011/presentations/pdfs /Reference Material - Estimating the Costs and Benefits of the Smart Grid.pdf (accessed February 3, 2014). 21. Michael Bame, “USS Gerald Ford Aircraft Carrier,” About.com, 2013, http://defense.about .com/od/Navy/a/Uss-Gerald-Ford-Aircraft-Carrier.htm (accessed June 17, 2013); “Building an Energy Future: Annual Report,” Royal Dutch Shell, December 31, 2012: 10, http://reports.shell .com/annual-review/2012/servicepages/downloads/files/entire_shell_review_12.pdf (accessed February 3, 2014). 22.


pages: 458 words: 135,206

CTOs at Work by Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel, Gary Donaldson

Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, distributed generation, do what you love, domain-specific language, functional programming, glass ceiling, Hacker News, hype cycle, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, Pluto: dwarf planet, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, systems thinking, thinkpad, web application, zero day, zero-sum game

As we transition to electronic medical records, that will cause a data tsunami in the medical community. This will be a good thing in the end, but first our customers are going to have to learn how to deal with that data deluge. The same thing is happening in the energy domain. Think about the smart grid. I call the smart grid “social networking for the power grid” because it's got a lot of distributed sensors networked together, it's going to be information-aware, sending a lot of data back and forth, it's going to use real-time data to make decisions, whether at a central command and control level about which assets and resources to bring online or offline or decisions made by consumers about when to turn on their appliances, whether to buy an electric vehicle, and if so, when and where they recharge it, and so on.

So it's constantly about inventing the next frontier and selling people a concept and then building it for them. S. Donaldson: Okay. Miller: We're doing that now and, in fact, this afternoon I'm working on software for that. I'm doing that, not a full-time gig, and along comes the smart grid investment grants and the smart grid demonstration program—huge stimulus projects from the DoE [Department of Energy], multiple billions. S. Donaldson: Right. Miller: NRECA, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, invited me over to help them win grants and demonstrations. Because of my experience at SAIC and elsewhere, I'd become a bit of an elephant hunter, you know, learning how to win big gigs.

Miller: I hope, for the people at the end of the century, we have it solved and that there's another cool problem to solve. But for 2011, the coolest problem there is right now is building the smart grid. Everybody thinks of it in terms of meters. “I'm going to give this person a meter, and they're going to walk in, and they're going to see an in-home display, and they're going to sit there every night, managing their energy.” Well, I'll give you a clue here, CSI [Crime Scene Investigation] is a hell of a lot more interesting than anybody's in-home portal. But there's another part of this smart grid that the average Joe doesn't know about—shouldn't know about—because they're not in the business.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

The consumer, on the other hand, has little to no idea of how much their power consumption is until provided with a bill, nor any idea of which type of energy source—renewable or non-renewable—was used to generate the power they consume; the only power the consumer has over the system is to notify the utility in case of a power cut. Greening India’s power sector: Smart grids and renewable energy Increasing the efficiency and transparency of our power grids is possible only when they become smart grids, incorporating the power of technology and digital processes to change the energy landscape of our country. Such smart grids are two-way channels of communication, allowing energy utilities to integrate renewable energy sources into the system and monitor their networks more effectively while providing more information to consumers about their energy usage.

By promoting the use of alternative energy sources as well as the more efficient usage of fossil fuels, smart grids can cut down the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and help to rein in the runaway problem of climate change. From Italy to the USA, countries around the world are embracing the smart-grid model with the dual goals of increasing operational efficiency and reducing the impact on the environment.8 While comprehensive data is not available, a 2011 study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) suggests that while the net investment needed to realize the vision of a smart grid will be nearly $500 million (over a twenty-year period), the benefits from such a power system will run into trillions, with a benefit-to-cost ratio of 2.8 to 6.9 What goes into the building of a smart grid?

Italy has been a pioneer in the smart meter field; over 30 million smart meters have been brought into service since 2001, and 85 per cent of all Italian households now use smart meters to manage their electricity.12 The ability to monitor power sources in real time allows utilities to respond to demand-and-supply forces rapidly and with much greater accuracy. This makes it possible to integrate smaller and intermittent sources of power, such as wind turbines and rooftop solar panels, into the power supply system. In the future, smart grids can also accommodate the draw on energy by electric cars being recharged. Power utilities can use smart grids to improve their operational efficiency for maximal utilization of existing energy sources, as well as the integration of renewable energy sources into the system. Energy efficiency has in fact been dubbed the ‘fifth fuel’, and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has coined the term ‘negawatt’ to describe power saved through efficiency or conservation.13 Energy efficiency is being driven by innovations across multiple areas.14 Renewable energy sources, in particular solar energy, have boosted the available energy supply, and consumers can now act as small producers and storers, in effect ‘decentralizing’ the power grid.15 Storage is getting cheaper—the batteries that power Tesla’s electric cars may soon be made available for the home as well.16 Smart systems are managing power consumption more efficiently.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

By exploiting the intelligence in the system and its visibility into the car, Better Place has provided a smart-grid solution for utilities without the need for utilities to deploy a smart grid. Beyond intelligence in pulling power from the grid, the Better Place solution can use electricity stored in idle batteries to deliver power back to the grid when electricity demand threatens to exceed supply (for example, during peak hours on hot days when utilities are reaching their generation limits). While the idea of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging has been discussed for decades, two key obstacles stood in its way. First was the need for smart-grid technology that would allow for such signaling and two-way transfers.

In contrast to the usual problems of emergence that we have examined, the problem here is one of scalability: the light is green as long as there is no traffic; but once traffic picks up, we have a flashing red light on our blueprint. The good news here is that around the world governments and utilities are investing to deploy smart-grid technologies to help circumvent this problem. “Smart grid” is a catchall term for a host of technologies that can respond to, and even predict, the individual demands placed on the electric system and adjust load and distribution accordingly. These include smart meters that adjust the price charged for electricity in real time, smart automation that can turn electric equipment and appliances on or off depending on the load on the grid, and smart distribution that can help ensure that local power lines are not overloaded.

Finally, adding a service dimension to what had been a pure product sale allowed Better Place to address the final roadblock to mass adoption of electric cars: the generation and distribution of electricity itself. Better Place’s model, which had the firm intermediating in real-time between utilities and drivers, allowed it to control the battery-charging load that would be placed on the system at any given moment, essentially creating a smart grid solution without needing utilities to deploy a smart grid. The mainstream success of the electric car hinges on solving the three problems of range, resale value, and grid capacity. And for this reason, it requires the successful alignment of the entire electric car ecosystem. Better Place’s model is the only one to date to address all three and so remains the holistic blueprint against which other EV strategies and investment should be judged.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

While Siemens still builds smart systems for telecommunications and transportation, the smart grid plays a special role in its vision for cities because, writes Jeff St. John on the GigaOM blog, it’s “one of the few corporations out there that can lay claim to almost every share of the world’s current grid infrastructure, building everything from gas and wind turbines to high-voltage transmission cables to sensors and controls that monitor and manage the delivery of power to homes and businesses.”45 Targeting nearly $8.5 billion (€6 billion) in annual smart grid business by 2014, CEO Peter Löscher boasted, “We’re on the threshold of a new electric age.”46 As consumers, we think of the smart grid mostly through our growing experience with smart meters.

But beyond just keeping the lights on, the smart grid could finally unleash the kind of innovation in energy services that we’ve become accustomed to in telecommunications. Start-up firms could audit and manage our home’s electricity use in return for a small cut of the savings off our energy bill. In a world where Siemens forecasts that electricity prices could change as often as every fifteen minutes, we’ll be relieved to have a piece of tracking software automate the process.51 By allowing us to account for all of the power we put in and take out of the system, the smart grid will also allow us to add a social layer to the production, distribution, and consumption of electricity.

Hill, “New Challenges Demand New Solutions: IBEW Leader Charts Energy Future,” EnergyBiz, September/October 2007, http://energycentral.fileburst.com/EnergyBizOnline/2007-5-sep-oct/Financial_Front_New_Challenges.pdf. 43Martin Rosenberg, “Continental Grid Vision Needed,” RenewableEnergyWorld.com blog, last modified December 11, 2007, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2007/12/continental-grid-vision-needed-50777. 44“Company development 1847–1865,” Siemens, n.d., http://www.siemens.com/history/en/history/1847_1865_beginnings_and_initial _expansion.htm. 45Jeff St. John, “How Siemens is Tackling the Smart Grid,” GigaOM, last modified June 24, 2010, http://gigaom.com/cleantech/how-siemens-is-tackling-the-smart-grid/. 46“Siemens CEO Peter Löscher: We’re on the threshold of a new electric age,” Siemens press release, December 15, 2010, http://www.siemens.com/press/en/pressrelease/?press=/en/pressrelease/2010/corporate_communication/axx20101227.htm. 47“75% of US Electric Meters to be Smart Meters by 2016,” In-Stat press release, March 5, 2012, http://www.fiercetelecom.com/press-releases/75-us-electric-meters-will-be-smart-meters-2016. 48Chris Nelder, “Why baseload power is doomed,” SmartPlanet, blog, last modified March 28, 2012, http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/why-baseload-power-is-doomed/445. 49Massoud Amin, “North American Electricity Infrastructure: System Security, Quality, Reliability, Availability, and Efficiency Challenges and their Societal Impacts,” in Continuing Crises in National Transmission Infrastructure: Impacts and Options for Modernization, National Science Foundation (NSF), June 2004. 50Fitze, “No Longer A One-Way Street,” 23. 51Tim Schröder, “Automation’s Ground Floor Opportunity,” Pictures of the Future, Spring 2011, 19, http://www.siemens.com/innovation/apps/pof_microsite/_pof-spring-2011/_pdf/pof_0111_strom_buildings_en.pdf. 52Eric Paulos, lecture, “Forum on Future Cities,” MIT SENSEable City Lab and the Rockefeller Foundation, Cambridge, MA, April 13, 2011, http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/senseable/videos/12305-changing-research; For a thorough treatment see Eric Paulos and James Pierce, “Citizen Energy: Towards Populist Interactive Micro-Energy Production,” n.d., http://www.paulos.net/papers/2011/Citizen_Energy_HICSS2011.pdf. 53James R.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Supplementing these clean energy highways would be decentralized microgrids serving, for example, neighborhoods, military bases, or schools, all networked together into a smart grid. Retiring much of the expensive, overbuilt infrastructure of today’s grid could pay for both supergrids and asset-light microgrids. This hybrid grid model could weather the volatility of renewable energy both through the wide reach of its long-distance transmission backbone and the precise responsiveness of the decentralized smart grid. Although the supergrid and decentralized grid models are each radical departures in opposite directions from today’s power system, they might actually coexist in a truly advanced hybrid grid.

To compensate for the rise in fluctuating renewable energy, Germany has invested in a fleet of expensive backup plants to maintain grid reliability.7 Over the next five years, consumers will foot the bill as Germany invests $20 billion in building transmission lines, upgrading local distribution grids, and installing smart grid technology, partly to accommodate even more renewable energy.8 Given the sophistication of its grid and its ability to invest in grid upgrades, Germany is better equipped than less wealthy countries, such as India, to confront the challenges inherent in rapidly adding solar capacity. Still, rich or poor, countries will confront dizzying costs and complexity if they seek to ramp up their levels of solar power.

As solar PV’s share of electricity supply rises, the electricity grid will need to tolerate massive amounts of intermittent power. Chapter 8, “Is Bigger Better?” contemplates whether it makes more sense to expand the grid to harness sunlight wherever the sun is shining or to make the grid smaller in a sense, by decentralizing the generation and consumption of energy through the use of smart-grid technology. Ultimately, the best solution might be a hybrid of both approaches to make the grid bigger, smaller, and smarter all at once. The most intuitive solution for the problem of intermittency is to bundle solar PV together with energy storage. Chapter 9, “No Silver Bullet,” argues, however, that relying only on batteries, the most familiar storage technology, would be prohibitively expensive.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

See Nick Land, “Lure of the Void, pt. 1,” August 2012, http://www.scribd.com/doc/242684419/Nick-Land-Lure-of-the-Void#scribd. 60.  See Pete Foster, “Cloud Computing—a Green Opportunity or Climate Change Risk?” Guardian, August 18, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/cloud-computing-climate-change. 61.  On smart grids and data ownership, see Jon Bruner, “Two Crucial Questions for the Smart Grid,” O’Reilly Radar, November 5, 2012, http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/11/two-crucial-questions-for-the-smart-grid.html. 62.  See Sally Daultrey, “Adaptation on the Roof of the World,” December 30, 2010, http://designgeopolitics.org/blog/2010/12/adapatation-on-the-roof-of-the-world/. 63.  On the Chinese embassy air monitoring issue, see Steven Jiang and Alexis Lai, “China: Haze Isn't Foreign Embassies’ Business,” CNN, June 6, 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/06/world/asia/china-foreign-embassy-pollution-monitor/index.html. 64. 

Absent a radical relaxation of energy scarcity by renewable sources, the finely grained electron sorting between points of production and consumption must be realized at global scale or the growth of planetary-scale computation will hit physical energy limits and will stall.54 A more scalable grid of electrons needs to be wrapped inside and around The Stack's Earth layer. In short, planetary-scale computation needs smart grids to grow, and for smart grids to grow, they need more ubiquitous computation. The computational future of energy and the infrastructural program of computation form such a coil, one end feeding on the other like Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Whether or not the risks associated with the energy costs of Stack infrastructure will outpace the efficiencies provided by calculative technologies as they become pervasive across industrial sectors is unknown, and probably unknowable at the moment.

Stack as Model 12. Stack as Political Machine 13. Stacks That Were and Might Have Been 14. The Stack We Have 15. The Layers of The Stack II The LayersEarth Layer 16. Discovering or Inventing Computation? 17. Digestion 18. Geo-graphy and Geoaesthetics 19. From Global Surface to Planetary Skin 20. Smart Grid: Ouroboros 21. Sensing and Sovereignty; Polities of Supply and Effect 22. Designing for versus Designing with Emergencies 23. Designing the Earth Layer Cloud Layer 24. Platform Geography 25. The First Sino-Google War of 2009 26. Cloud Infrastructure 27. Cloud Polis 28. Platform Wars 29. 


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

What this involves is modernizing the system of moving electricity all the way from generation to its final use in home, office, or factory. This entire effort goes by the shorthand of “smart grid.” The term has become almost ubiquitous, wildly popular, and the subject of considerable enthusiasm. After all, who wants to be against a “smart grid” or in favor of a “dumb grid”? But the concept has many definitions. As the head of one of the world’s largest utilities put it, “the concept of a smart grid is rich, complex, and confusing.” After all, it is not a single technology but a host of technologies. Yet in one form or another, it largely comes down to the application of digital technology, two-way communication, monitoring, sensors, information technology, and the Internet.

That will require new investment in transmission capacity and in the digital capability to integrate larger amounts of renewables into the grid and keep the overall system balanced, manage voltage, and avoid disruption. That is the urgent challenge that Germany faces with its target of doubling renewables’ share of its electricity to 35 percent by 2020. The smart grid movement has one other very important objective—increasing reliability. The smart grid can enhance reliability with a “self-healing” capability. It is impossible to ensure that weather-related events, such as an ice storm or a hurricane, do not cause outages. However, what should be a minor operational problem can, on rare occasions, have a domino effect and create a blackout over a large area.

Increasing situational awareness for the utility could go a long way toward reducing the duration of power outages and limiting their effects. It would also help limit the fallout from an external assault—a terrorist attack on the electricity infrastructure. Overall, this part of the smart grid could speed up response to any disruptions and reduce traditional “truck roll”—the dispatch of emergency repair teams—by solving problems in the control room.20 The smart grid, in its entirety, could have what has been described as a “transformational impact on how utilities operate their system, interact with their customers, and conduct their businesses.” It could also be a major step forward in applying technology to promote much greater energy efficiency in buildings.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

And once the grid carries information, there are few reasons, if any, why it shouldn’t benefit from all of the rich possibilities for innovation, collaboration, and wealth creation that the Internet has fostered in other sectors of the economy. In many ways, the argument for a smart grid based on open standards parallels the argument for an open Internet. The old power grid is analogous to broadcast media with its bias toward centralized, one-way, one-to-many, one-size-fits-all communication. A smart grid, if it could be built, would leverage the Internet’s connective tissue to weave millions, and eventually billions, of household appliances, substations, and power generators around the planet into an intelligent and programmable network.

“And the easiest way to be able to pay the real cost of transportation would be if we had ubiquitous wireless data connections. It’s the same thing that we talk about with the smart grid: dynamically priced power consumption, with the real price of what it’s costing.” In other words, the intelligent network we need for electricity can also turn cars into nodes. She sees automobiles as just another network device, one that, like the smart grid, should be open and net-based. “Cars are network nodes,” she says. “They have GPS and Bluetooth and tollbooth transponders, and we’re all on our cell phones and lots of cars have OnStar support services.”

.,” greentechgrid (July 17, 2009). 13. Maria Hattar, Cisco, quoted in “Cisco: Smart grid will eclipse size of Internet,” cnet News (May 18, 2009). 14. The Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS). See: http://www.dehems.eu/about. 15. David Miliband, U.K. Secretary of State for Environment, quoted in “Carbon emissions: Now it’s getting personal,” New York Times (June 20, 2007). 16. Richard MacManus, “IBM and the Internet of Things,” ReadWriteWeb (July 22, 2009). 17. “World electricity: The smart grid era,” Economist (June 5, 2009). 18. “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age,” The Climate Group (2008). 19.


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Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Renewable advocates claim many advantages for this new type of grid, though they usually explain that the grid has to be modernized to be a “smart grid” before the transition can take place. The reason the grid needs to be modernized is that electricity production and consumption will be a two-way street. An electricity consumer will also be an electricity producer, and so communications between the grid and the “prosumer” (producer and consumer) will be important. Becoming a prosumer BEFORE GOING FURTHER INTO the pros and cons of the prosumer and the smart grid, we have to ask ourselves some questions about who these “prosumers” are. A Department of Energy webpage about prosumers and consumers shows a man receiving electricity and a bill from the power company.

For many people, the idea that the power company can manipulate electric devices within their home is extremely distasteful. Can they turn off my air conditioner, delay the start of a cycle of my dishwasher, delay the start of my washing machine? For many people, this is unacceptable. In my blog post “The Oversold Smart Grid: Dismissing the Work of Women,”261 I took aim at a local commercial extolling the smart grid. The commercial showed a dryer running in the middle of the night. As a woman who raised two children, I can tell you that laundry doesn’t do itself. If that dryer is running, someone turned it on. And someone will have to be around to take the clothes out so they won’t get wrinkled.

., September 15, 2017, http://eedal2017.uci.edu/wp-content/uploads/Friday-30-Feldman.pdf 259 “Residential Demand Response Programs (web page),” ClearlyEnergy, updated October 10, 2016, https://www.clearlyenergy.com/residential-demand-response-programs. 260 “Summer Discount Plan,” Southern California Edison (website), undated, https://www.sce.com/residential/rebates-savings/summer-discount-plan. 261 Meredith Angwin, “The Oversold Smart Grid: Dismissing the Work of Women,” Yes Vermont Yankee, April 7, 2013, https://yesvy.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-oversold-smart-grid-dismissing-work.html#.XeFxCKfMxTY. 262 “Historical Data Graphs per Year: United States,” IndexMundi (website), June 30, 2018, https://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=us&v=81. 263 Using the data from IndexMundi referenced in the previous note, we calculate: In 2008, electricity consumption in the United States was 3,892 million MWh, population 304 million, for a usage of 12.8 MWh/person.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

., made “smart”—and the number of entry points expands exponentially, entire systems will become more susceptible to cyberattack. Don’t misunderstand the stakes: The vulnerability and the potential value are enormous. The worldwide market value of smart grids is expected to rise from nearly $70 billion in 2009 to $170 billion by 2014. The United States and the European Union are leading the way in the deployment of smart grid technologies to link users to power plants, even as guidelines for regulating them are still being written. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has identified 137 data-exchange interfaces, each of which poses a potential entry point for a cyberintruder.

Over the past decade, the threats that increasingly skilled individual hackers and organized criminals pose for businesses have grown, but the risks have been commercial and social, not political. Two factors are changing that. First is the convergence of systems onto the Internet—of power and utility systems (with the move by so many countries to the use of smart grids to manage electricity generation), and information systems more broadly for major sectors of the economy (with the shift to cloud or network-based computing). These trends provide attackers looking to strike at governments or large populations with plenty of tempting and accessible targets. Second, governments themselves are moving aggressively into cyberspace.

., 164 convertability of, 43, 49, 50 devaluations of, 49 dominance of, 81–82 exchange rates tied to, 39, 43 as international reserve currency, 55 oil priced in, 81–82 Domain Name System, 87 droughts, 101, 106 drug trafficking, 183 Durban, South Africa, 94–95 Eastern Europe, 187 E. coli, 169 Ecuador, 177 Egypt, 48, 69, 113, 169, 179 food riots in, 98 revolution in, 112, 117, 175, 192–93 unrest in, 89 water supply of, 106 elections, 2009, Iranian, 192 elections, 2012, Russian, 182 emerging nations, 3, 16, 21, 26, 27, 29–30, 34–35, 44, 54, 59, 88, 119, 120, 179, 187 communication standards and, 84 exports from, 111 growing influence of, 76–77 rising middle class in, 98 environment, 68 equity funds, 127 Erdogan, Recep, 55 Estonia, 72 ethanol, 100 Ethiopia, 72, 106 euro, 17, 38, 54–55, 71, 155, 164, 165, 155, 181 as reserve currency, 55, 83 Europe, 16, 148–49, 170 aging population of, 120 budget crises in, 188 China’s trade with, 143 cooperation in, 174 debt and credit crisis in, 3, 17, 45, 181 defense budgets in, 134 intellectual property laws and, 84 Internet protocol in, 89 possible fragmentation in, 181 post–World War II reconstruction needed in, 38–39, 44–45 privacy laws in, 68 reduced role of, 194 European Central Bank, 71, 176 European Commission, 71 European Union, 54, 71, 117, 122, 123, 126, 132, 138, 155, 169 border controls in, 19 middle class in, 55 possible collapse of, 181 smart grids in, 73 Export-Import Bank of China, 29, 118, 135 exposed states, 135–36 ExxonMobil, 97, 127 Facebook, 91, 92–93 Ferguson, Niall, 158 “Fight the Debt Limit Extension,” 162 financial crisis, 2008, 2, 4, 11–12, 25–26, 62, 63, 65, 143, 152, 167 Finland, in Arctic Council, 96–97 food, 68, 69 security of, 3, 5, 97–104, 107, 133, 147, 152, 155, 168–69, 183 Fourcade, Jean-Pierre, 47 4G mobile phone standard, 86 France, 19, 25, 28, 39, 44, 45, 47, 166, 167 government intervention in economy in, 78 nuclear program of, 57 possible fragmentation of, 181 post–World War II reconstruction needed in, 39–40 freedom of speech, 89 French Revolution, 167 G2, 21, 35, 156 U.S.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

As the daily water needs for a planet of 7 billion are between 350 and 400 million gallons a day, using technologies like Skysource to tap the more than 12 quadrillion gallons contained in the atmosphere at any one time might be the only way to quench that thirst. Or consider the “smart grid for water,” which is what happens when exponential technologies converge on the farm. The smart grid allows for everything from precise soil monitoring and crop watering to the early detection of insects and disease. Estimates vary, but most studies find the smart grid capable of saving us trillions of gallons a year—which is the point. We’re not lacking in technological know-how. We are water-wise, but execution dumb, attacking a biosphere-wide problem with a piecemeal approach.

See: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/water-abundance-xprizes-1-5m-winner-shows-how-to-source-fresh-water-from-the-air/. 350 and 400 million gallons a day: Adele Peters, “A Device That Can Pull Drinking Water from the Air Just Won the Latest XPrize” Fast Company, October 20, 2018. See: https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-drinking-water-from-the-air-just-won-the-latest-x-prize. “smart grid for water”: Trevor Hill, The Smart Grid for Water: How Data Will Save Our Water and Your Utility (Advantage, 2013). saving us trillions of gallons a year: Ibid. In the US alone, we lose at least an estimated 1.7 trillion gallons of water per year to water main breaks. Climate Change for Optimists Forty billion tons of CO2: According to Maxwell Rosner’s Our World in Data, 35.46 billion tons of CO2 were emitted in 2017.

Researchers at MIT are using carbon nanotubes to create “ultra-capacitors” that increase battery capacity by as much as 50 percent. And there’s much more to come. So the challenge isn’t generating energy from renewables or storing the energy that gets generated, it’s doing all this worldwide. This isn’t just about building Ramez Naam’s continent-wide smart grid, it’s about building one of them on every continent. It’s resource management on a global level, because, like it or not, when it comes to the environment, we really are in this together. Electric Cars Are Gaining Speed The final piece in the energy puzzle is transportation. In America, fueling our cars and trucks accounts for one-fifth of our total energy budget.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

And the last thing—and this is probably different than all the other CIOs that you’re going to encounter, because of the nature of the utility industry and the moment in time where we find ourselves with all the smart grid and smart grid money and expansion of the grid and the cyber security threats—I spend a significant amount of my time actually talking to the Department of Energy, the Utilities Telecom Council, lobbyists, [and] political people, working with the other CIOs in our industry about what positions we’re going to take. [I] also have a technical Congressional appointment, … I’m on the Smart Grid Advisory Committee for the next three years, so I’m spending a lot of my time on large industry issues with a lot of political overtones, and God knows, nobody would have ever accused me of being a politician.

In 2003, the Association for Women in Computing named her as one of the Top Michigan Women in Computing. In August 2004, CORP! Magazine named her as one of Michigan’s Top Business Women. She is a member of IBM’s Board of Advisors and the DTE Energy Foundation Board of Directors, as well as an appointee to the Smart Grid Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and a fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council. Lynne Ellyn: Hello. Ed Yourdon: Hi, Lynne. Ellyn: I’m sitting outside in Ocala, Florida. Yourdon: Aha. So you’re not in Detroit. I very much appreciate your taking the time.

Yourdon: Let me switch gears to another question area that I imagine you would enjoy talking about. What are some of the new trends that you see coming down the line that you think are going to influence the IT industry in your world of utilities in the next few years? Ellyn: Well, the big one, of course, is the “smart grid.” The problem with that title is that it implies that there is a stupid grid. Yourdon: [laughter] Ellyn: The grid is highly automated now. This is a re-automation of the grid. For example, at one time (this predates me) Detroit Edison had 140 engineers that just operated it. Today it’s done with just a dozen or fewer.


pages: 282 words: 92,998

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) promises that in 2010 it really will start penalizing power companies that do not have secure cyber systems. What they have not said is how the Commission will know who is in violation, since the FERC doesn’t have the staff to regularly inspect. The U.S. Department of Energy, however, has hired two cyber security experts to determine if the $3.4 billion in Smart Grid grants are going to new programs that are adequately secured. Smart Grid is the Obama Administration’s idea to make the power grid even more integrated and digitized. Power companies can ask for some of that money by submitting proposals to the Energy Department. When they do, the two experts will read the proposals to see if there is a section somewhere that says “cyber security.”

There are no publicly available standards. One idea for a standard might be that the taxpayers don’t give any of the $3.4 billion in Smart Grid money to companies that haven’t secured their current systems. Don’t expect the Energy Department to use that standard anytime soon, because that would mean taking advantage of this unique federal giveaway program to incentivize people to make things more secure. That smacks of regulation, which, of course, is just like socialism, which is un-American. So, we will soon have a more digital Smart Grid, which will also be a Less Secure Grid. How could we make the U.S. national electrical system a Smart and Secure Grid?

Fortunately, the Federal Electric Regulatory Agency in 2008 finally required electric companies to adopt some specific cyber security measures and warned that it would fine companies for noncompliance up to one million dollars a day. No one has been fined yet. The companies have until sometime in 2010 to comply. Then the commission promises it will begin to inspect some facilities to determine if they are compliant. Unfortunately, President Obama’s “Smart Grid” initiative will cause the electric grid to become even more wired, even more dependent upon computer network technology. The same way that a hand can reach out from cyberspace and destroy an electric transmission line or generator, computer commands can derail a train or send freight cars to the wrong place, or cause a gas pipeline to burst.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

To be successful they must address the uncertainty and cost behind the innovations that are required to meet the targets.2 Supply-side policies are important for putting money ‘where the mouth is’, by financing firms directly or indirectly through the subsidy of long-term market growth, in the hope that it will accelerate the formation of innovative companies that can deliver a green industrial revolution. Given the success of these policies, and in addition, the success and spread of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, the opportunity for ‘smart grids’ to digitize energy supply networks is both created and stabilized. I say created, because the intermittent nature of renewable power will have to be more closely managed. I say stabilized, because the need (‘demand’) for smart grid technology will be greatest in the countries that go farthest towards integrating renewable energy into their grids. Success in transforming our energy system is as full of collective and complementary industrial changes, in other words, but getting serious about renewable energy is a necessary and critical step towards bringing energy technology into the twenty-first century.

As characteristically ‘intermittent’ and ‘diffuse’ sources of energy, wind and solar power have benefitted from what Madrigal (2011, 263) describes as ‘throwing software at the problem’: increasing the productivity and reliability of wind and solar projects with advanced computer modelling, management of power production and remote monitoring. Investments in a ‘smart grid’ are meant to digitize modern energy systems to optimize the flexibility, performance and efficiency of clean technologies while providing advanced management options to grid operators and end users. Such flexibility and control is not unlike the sort that emerged with digitized communication networks.

The ICT revolution that created digitized communications not only created new commercial opportunities (such as through the medium of the Internet), but has provided an invaluable platform for the generation, collection, access and dissemination of knowledge of all forms. Given time and broad deployment, the smart grid could change the way we think about energy, create new commercial opportunities and improve the economics of renewable energy by establishing new tools for optimal energy supply management and demand response. To begin the green industrial revolution and to tackle climate change we are again in need of an active State that takes on the high uncertainty of its early stages, which the business sector fears.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The story of the Gig began two years earlier, when EPB—which remains one of the largest publicly owned electric distribution utilities in the country—began building a “smart grid.” Funded by a bond issue and a federal stimulus grant, this undertaking promised to make the grid more efficient by embedding sensors and other digital devices that monitored the system in real time. Problems could be detected early, which would help reduce outages and improve reliability. The smart grid didn’t just end up saving EPB money. It also handed them the infrastructure they needed to become an ISP. The smart grid ran on a fiber-optic network, which is what enabled the monitoring devices to communicate.

Sanders called for $150 billion in both grants and technical assistance to municipalities and states “to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.” Significantly, Sanders also tied his proposal to the Green New Deal. The same networks that deliver internet service could support smart grids that improve energy efficiency, as in Chattanooga. This kind of support is indispensable for bringing community networks from the margins to the mainstream. It could help modernize existing networks, and create thousands of new ones. Where possible, new networks should be planted in existing institutions that already have technical expertise, infrastructure, or relationships with the community; an electric and telephone cooperative that has thousands of member-owners will probably make a better community network than one made from scratch, for instance.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

An alternative, developed in the late 1980s by two Virginia Tech professors, was already a fixture in China and a few other countries. Phasor measurement units (PMU), also known as Synchrophasors, gained traction in the years after these blackouts, and have shown a huge surge of popularity in recent years. A network of Synchrophasors—a “smart grid”—is like a hyperactive steroidal SCADA. Once every second, a Synchrophasor gathers 120 different types of data about the power at its node and transmits them instantly. Operators monitoring the grid can see the data displayed on a map, providing a real-time overview of power flow. Electrical grids are complex organisms that obey no national borders, with power flowing in different directions across large distances.

Synchrophasors are popping up around the globe. Although India’s Synchrophasors were in too much of a nascent state to prevent the crippling 2012 blackouts that left 700 million people without power, the country’s state-owned utility company had already hailed the technology as a “revelation.” For a smart grid to have value, its Synchrophasors must observe and report at exactly the same moment. Because they are spread over a large area, the easiest way to synchronize them is by connecting them to high-precision clocks sourced to GPS. If someone were to introduce a bogus GPS signal that disrupted the clocks and broke the synchrony, causing an distorted and possibly alarming overall view of power flow on the grid, what might happen?

The technology is at an intermediate stage, not yet considered a “critical cyber asset,” a classification used for hardware, software, data streams, and networks whose disruption could bring key parts of the critical infrastructure to the brink of disaster within fifteen minutes. But the next step is to make these smart grids smarter, giving them the ability to take direct action. They could redirect power to allocate it more efficiently or safely, and even shut the whole mess down, killing the power for thousands of users to isolate a problem before it spreads. If a spoofed GPS signal distorted Synchrophasor data, human operators might sense something was askew before taking action.


pages: 219 words: 61,720

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Figure 7.1 Definitions of “Green Jobs” Source: “Industries Where Green Goods and Services Are Classified,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 24, 2010, http://www.bls.gov/green/final_green_def_8242010_pub.pdf. Sunil Sharan, the former director of General Electric’s Smart Grid Initiative, wrote in the Washington Post in 2010 that the belief that green jobs could make a serious dent in the U.S. unemployment rate was always far-fetched. Sharan noted how the Obama administration allocated a little over $4 billion in stimulus money to building the smart grid, which is an important piece of infrastructure for our future. The plan was to install 20 million “smart meters” over five years. Smart meters are simply digital versions of the old spinning electric meter.

Rebuilding America’s urban wastewater systems, water infrastructure, and pipelines, along with schools and public buildings, could create as many as 825,000 direct and indirect jobs for construction workers and related support industries. Initial investment: $33 billion. Adopting an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that includes coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear, wind, and solar could create 2 million direct and indirect jobs as we build new smart grids, run transmission lines, and construct power plants and distribution facilities. Initial investment: $102 billion.16 In total, a revitalized infrastructure agenda can create nearly 10 million jobs for Americans who sorely need them. And beyond the jobs, what sort of benefits would that investment provide?


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

There was only one problem: the city sits in the middle of Tornado Alley, and the electricity goes out several times a year during big storms. Since the plant was going to be highly roboticized, electrical outages would be particularly problematic. So the EPB promised to build a smart grid so that when a tree fell on the wires on Flynn Street, only Flynn Street would go dark, because the smart grid would route power around the trouble. So they built the smart grid, Volkswagen built its plant, and the plant hasn’t had any downtime. But once EPB had strung fiber-optic cable on every lamppost in town, it realized that each of these posts stood less than one hundred feet from a home to which the company could sell broadband service—and there were at least fifty thousand of these homes.


pages: 118 words: 35,663

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Their work has now advanced beyond the pure science stage into product development, with a goal of reaching the market within the next few years. This melding of light and electricity will help computers move data around with a speed and energy efficiency that is impossible using today’s technologies. SCENARIO: ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO THE ELECTRIC GRID Today’s “smart grids” aren’t actually very bright. Most electric utility systems that claim the “smart” label use advanced metering systems that enable customers to monitor their electricity use and enable two-way communications between the meter and the utility provider. The systems make it possible for utility companies to set pricing that varies by the season and the time of day, providing discounts to customers who shift energy use to off-peak periods.

This will make it easier for new sources of energy to be integrated into the system. It will provide strong incentives for conservation, hasten repairs after power outages, and make it possible for societies to expand electricity services without needing to make massive investments in new generation plants. When all of this comes about, smart grids will begin to truly deserve the name. JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY: RETHINKING HOW COMPUTERS ARE DESIGNED How much does it cost to move a single bit of data from point of origin to point of computation? Apparently, until recently, nobody bothered to try to answer that question—perhaps because it didn’t seem consequential.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

In 20 years, we believe that this type of smart transportation network will be the expectation of citizens living in a smart city. Not just because it will provide better transport for citizens, but because it will cost a fraction of what public transportation systems cost today to maintain and run. Smart Grids and Energy Systems Smart energy encompasses a wide range of technologies and initiatives, including the improved distribution and monitoring of electric power as well as better insulation of homes and offices. Renewable energy (RE) is important to the citizens of a smart city for a number of critical reasons: • reduced air and water pollution for better health and productivity • decreased costs (as solar energy and other RE costs come down) • resilience, with power availability even in case of network disturbances due to overloads, natural disasters or terrorist acts The benefits of using renewable energy to population health can be dramatic, with thousands saved from illness or death.

Smart cities, however, must be underpinned by the appropriate infrastructure based on fibre-optic and high-speed wireless technologies. This infrastructure allows for the development of smart communities, supporting connected homes, intelligent transport systems, mHealth, eGovernment and massive open online courses/education (MOOC/E), smart grids and smart energy solutions, etc. Central to this will be infrastructure that starts to run itself, responding in real time. Automated UAVs, autonomous emergency vehicles and robots, and sensor nets giving feedback loops to the right algorithms or AIs to dispatch those resources. Artificial intelligence will not only be an underpinning of smart cities, it will also be necessary simply to process all of the sensor data coming into smart city operations centres.

Employment and Business in the Augmented Age—Winners and Losers Large human-dominant or process-based industries will be decimated by the AI, experience design and smart infrastructure disruptions that underpin the Augmented Age. The losers will be: 1. Big Energy. Four key forces will challenge any fossil fuel producer or incumbent energy system: • ultra-cheap renewables • smart grids • electric vehicles • energy storage systems (batteries like the Tesla Powerwall, fuel cells, etc.) Droves of gas (or service) stations will go out of business, wired electricity poles will fall into disrepair as whole cities and regions become net energy producers and mining will shift away from extracting fuels to extracting resources to power the new smart world. 2.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

However, a group of researchers decided to work with 33,000 drivers and, using a combination of dashboard-mounted GPS monitors and cloud-computing technology, were able to create an intelligent, real-time traffic service. Studying congestion on all 106,579 roads within the city, a distance of over 5,500 kilometres, they created a smart grid forming a digital map of the city. This was also integrated with weather and public-transit information. As a result, in testing, the new smart grid improved 60–70 per cent of all taxi trips and made them significantly faster. The smart city is being built from a combination of big city-hall projects alongside major software companies as well as more humble schemes that can be found on the 3 or 4G mobile in your pocket or the sat nav on the dashboard.

The whole city will operate from a hub that functions as Songdo’s ‘brain stem’.19 Here, for example, cameras will report on the flow of pedestrians on the street, and brighten or dim the pavement lamps accordingly; ‘radio frequency identification tags’ will be attached to car number plates to watch traffic and reaction to congestion; monitors on buildings and roads will report on conditions to avoid costly works or unnecessary delays; there will be real-time weather forecasts that can prepare the power grid for surges in demand when it gets suddenly cold; at other times, the smart energy grid will monitor usage and flows and predict demand as well as search for efficiencies; there will also be a smart grid for water and waste. Each home will also become smarter: there will be touchpads in each apartment so that one can control temperature and lighting and track energy use. Smart architecture will help the sustainable city – there will be roof gardens planted with vegetation to reduce the ‘heat island’ effect, and reduce storm-water run-off.

From theorists prophesying their visions, architects with their design innovations, management consultants who wish to sell their solutions, software companies who have developed the proprietary code to run the new world, making and marketing the smart city is big business. Big players such as IBM, Cisco, Siemans, Accenture, McKinsey and BoozAllen are all entering the debate on the intelligent city, the smart-grid, next-generation buildings, developing the tools to bring efficiency, sustainability and a connected metropolis. These big companies are talking to city halls, offering end-to-end solutions, the complete package to retrofit the everyday city for the twenty-first century with a very hard sell. How Smart Is Your City, produced by the IBM Institute of Business Value, supplies tools for assessing the connectedness of any city and offers a road map: Develop your city’s long-term strategy and short-term goals Prioritise and invest in a few select systems that will have the greatest impact Integrate across systems to improve citizen experiences and efficiencies Optimise your services and operations Discover new opportunities for growth and optimisation.21 In a corresponding document from the same team, A Vision of Smarter Cities, the researchers go into more detail on how ‘smartness’ can be achieved.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Current city energy systems lock citizens into a brown energy commodity that is priced to concentrate wealth and global political power rather than to create a common good that underpins a flourishing life for all. The negative results are all around us: localized pollution, increases in greenhouse gases, fuel poverty and high utility prices. In their place, we need to unlock a civic-energy revolution of distributed energy networks, local smart grids, municipally owned energy and zero-emissions, community-led developments. This involves new planning ordinances and mass national retrofit programmes to ensure that every single building is zero carbon; municipal energy companies modelled on the German Stadtwerke, which generate from 100 per cent renewable sources and undercut corporate energy giants; and people’s energy action to ensure a 100 per cent moratorium on fossil fuels and fracking.

This involves new planning ordinances and mass national retrofit programmes to ensure that every single building is zero carbon; municipal energy companies modelled on the German Stadtwerke, which generate from 100 per cent renewable sources and undercut corporate energy giants; and people’s energy action to ensure a 100 per cent moratorium on fossil fuels and fracking. A vast transfer of subsidies underpins all this. Civic innovations, such as those developed by Repower London, are flourishing, especially in Combined Heat and Power (CHP), onshore wind, solar photovoltaics, anaerobic digestion, local smart grids, energy-storage technologies and the new skills that will underpin these. The new civic-energy sector could really mean that the age of the large power plant is replaced with a constellation of distributed but highly connected small and medium zero-emission energy providers. Every home, garden and street becomes a micro power station.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Overcoming the price barrier was the biggest breakthrough, but it wasn’t sufficient for electric vehicles to become, as Agassi called it, the “Car 2.0” that would replace the transportation model introduced by Henry Ford almost a century ago. A five-minute fill-up will last a gas car three hundred miles. How, Ghosn wondered, can an electric car compete with that? Agassi’s solution was infrastructure: wire thousands of parking spots, build battery swap stations, and coordinate it all over a new “smart grid.” In most cases, charging the car at home and the office would easily be enough to get you through the day. On longer drives, you could pull into a swap station and be off with a fully charged battery in the time it takes to fill a tank of gas. He’d recruited a former Israeli army general—a man skilled at managing complex military logistics—to become the company’s local Israeli CEO and lead the planning for the grid and the national network of charging/parking spots.

Third, Israelis are natural early adopters—they were recently number one in the world in time spent on the Internet and have a cell phone penetration of 125 percent, meaning lots of people have more than one. No less importantly, Agassi knew that in Israel he would find the resources he needed to tackle the tricky software challenge of creating a “smart grid” that could direct cars to open charging spots and manage the charging of millions of cars without overloading the system. Israel, the country with the highest concentration of engineers and research and development spending in the world, was a natural place to attempt this. Agassi actually wanted to go even further.

He needed a country, a car company, and the money, but to get any one of them he first needed the other two. For example, when Peres and Agassi had gone to then prime minister Ehud Olmert to secure his commitment to make Israel the first country to free itself from oil, the premier had set two conditions: Agassi had to sign on a top-five carmaker and raise the $200 million needed to develop the smart grid, turning half a million parking spaces into charging spots, and building swap stations. Now Agassi had the carmaker, and it was time to fulfill Olmert’s second condition: money. Still, Agassi had heard enough to believe that his idea could take off. Stunning the tech world, he quit his job at SAP to found Better Place.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The ongoing implementation of the “smart grid” means that soon all the regional grids and all our homes’ energy systems will be connected to the Internet. In brief, the smart grid is a fully automated electricity system that’s supposed to improve the efficiency of electric power. It brings together old power sources like coal- and fuel-burning electrical plants with newer solar and wind farms. Regional control centers will monitor and distribute energy to your home. Some 50 million home systems across the country are already “smart.” The trouble is, the new smart grid will be more vulnerable to catastrophic blackouts than the not-so-dumb old grid.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The previous year, cell-phone apps in use near the Kremlin building, in the Russian capital of Moscow, had been showing the phones’ position incorrectly as Vnukovo Airport, a little under twenty miles away. Commentators described the spoofing attacks as a form of electronic warfare. The risks involved in all this are huge. Experts working with the latest electric supply networks, known as smart grids, rely on measuring equipment that is synchronized to within billionths of a second. In one reported case, a test device locked on to a single satellite signal, rather than the several signals it needed to get an accurate fix, and the system thought there had been a major electrical fault, so it shut down two 500 kV power lines.

“Governing the Time of the World,” in Time, Temporality and Global Politics, ed. Andrew Hom, Christopher McIntosh, Alasdair McKay and Liam Stockdale, 59–72. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, 2016. 11. WAR Allnutt, Jason, Dhananjay Anand, Douglas Arnold, et al. Timing Challenges in the Smart Grid (NIST Special Publication 1500-08). Gaithersburg: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2017. Curry, Charles. Sentinel Project: Report on GNSS Vulnerabilities. Lydbrook: Chronos Technology Ltd., 2014. Dudziak, Mary. War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

See hourglasses Sardar, Ziauddin, 45 Sartor Resartus (Thomas Carlyle), 52 Sassoon, Edward, 155 satellite navigation systems, 199–200, 205, 225 See also GPS clocks Sawai Jai Singh II (maharaja of Jaipur), 82–83, 86–89, 93 Schoen, Douglas, 193 Schwartz, Peter, 219 Science Museum, London, 137–38, 220 scientific revolution, 34 Scobie-Youngs, Keith, 114 sea clocks, 52 Seiko, 214, 217 Sharma, Virendra Nath, 86 Siena, Italy, 46–51 Sikhism, 31 Šindel, Jan, 38 Siri, 186 slave clocks, 118–19 slavery astronomy and, 103 free-pendulum clocks and, 118–19 resistance against clocks and, 164–65 Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 86 smart grids, 5 Smith, Adam, 100 Smith, Iain Duncan, 195 Smith, Mark, 165 Smyth, Charles Piazzi, 104 South African War (1899–1902), 203 speaking clocks, 177–81, 182–86 speed clocks, 163–64 Spencer Jones, Harold, 180 spoofing, 212–13 Sputnik, 95–96, 199 Srivastava, Sanjay, 22 standardization. See time standardization Standard Time Company, 72, 148–49 Stanley, Henry Morton, 113 Stenning, Richard, 187 Stephens, Carlene, 192 stock exchange clock, Amsterdam, 64, 65–66, 65, 68–69, 77–78 Storey, John, 159–60 Strasbourg Cathedral clock, 34–35, 192 Strobl, Andreas, 88 suffrage movement, 158–60, 161, 167 Sullivan, Patrick, 168 sundials ancient Greece, 12–14, 13 ancient Rome, 9–12 earliest use of, 15 mechanical clock accuracy and, 78 Samrat Yantra, Jaipur, 82–85, 84 temperance and, 58 surveillance, 225 Suso, Heinrich, 54, 55, 56–58, 57 synchronization chronometer manufacture and, 111 electric clocks and, 144 financial markets and, 72–73, 74, 75 GPS clocks and, 4 See also time standardization Synchronome company, 155, 156 Syrian Civil War, 206–7 Table Bay, 99–101, 102–3 Tallents, Stephen, 183–84, 185 telegraph, 147 Telehouse data center, London, 79–81, 80 telephone speaking clocks, 177–81, 182–86 temperance, 53–55, 56–58, 57, 150 temperance movement, 150–51 Ten Hours Bill, 163 Terry, Eli, 133–34, 135 textile industry, 163–64 Theodoric (Gothic king), 14 Thomas, Seth, 134 Thompson, E.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across the United States, including many in areas that are prone to heat waves and hurricanes. The previous year, Hurricane Ike had knocked out power to two million customers in Houston, and full restoration took nearly a month. When the city received $200 million in federal funds to install smart-grid technology, it quickly put crews to work. Nearly all Houston households have been upgraded to the new network, one that should be more reliable when the next storm arrives. Smart grids are in the early stages, but already they have several advantages over the old power systems.

Digital meters, which are installed in households and at key transmission points, automatically generate real-time information about both consumers and suppliers, allowing utility providers to detect failures immediately, and sometimes also to identify the cause. This means that, after an outage, operators don’t need to wait for calls from angry customers or field reports from crews. Moreover, smart grids are flexible, capable of being fed by disparate sources of energy, including systems powered by the sun and the wind. When the energy industry develops better technologies for storing power from these renewable resources, the new networks should be capable of integrating them. Re-engineered grids will ultimately offer other benefits.


pages: 501 words: 134,867

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice by Tony Weis, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

Trumka recognized that this would not happen simply through current market forces: “By themselves, capital markets will not properly incorporate climate risk and reward into pricing investment opportunities.” Investors need “government policies to make sure that critical investments get made— investments in building retrofits, in high speed rail and the smart grid, in carbon capture and sequestration.”17 Clean, renewable energy and energy conservation are cheaper than extreme fossil fuels and nuclear power. They are available right now. Many studies have shown that dollar for dollar, they produce far more jobs. If labour is to use its political clout to secure more jobs, the best way to do so is to fight for a new energy economy that rapidly phases out carbon-emitting fossil fuels and even more rapidly replaces them with renewable energy and conservation.

Within our cultural teachings lie these Indigenous Economic Principles: intergenerational thinking and equity (thinking for the seventh generation); inter- and intra-species equity (respect); and valuing those spiritual and intangible facets of the natural world and cultural practice (not all values and things can be monetized). Consider what may be one of the largest follies in economic thinking from fossil fuel supporters: the opportunity forgone costs. What this means is that we waste $200 billion or so on tar sands oil and infrastructure, and do not create weatherized and energy-efficient houses, a smart grid, energy-efficient vehicles, a relocalized food system, and renewable energy. And, ten years from now, we will in fact be in worse economic shape. Frankly, if we put that much money into weatherization, efficiency, relocalizing power production, and an energy-efficient grid powered by new renewables, as well as localized food and energy-efficient mass transportation systems, we would build a stronger economy and we would have a shot at lasting much longer than another fifty years.

Since the economic crisis, this “institutional ecology” project is associated with the idea of a “Green New Deal,” as part of a Keynesian stimulus package to tackle economic stagnation.11 Government stimulus funds, for example, could be mobilized to build the infrastructure for a transition to renewable—solar, wind, biofuels—energy and other “green” sectors rather than further lock in a high-carbon infrastructure. The Green New Deal also commonly includes: support for research and development into energy- and resource-efficient technologies; upgrading public infrastructure and building “smart grids”; retrofitting buildings; and expanding public transportation. Such “green” sectors, moreover, will tend to be relatively labour intensive and thus create more jobs than investment in “traditional” sectors. The basic idea is encouraging “green jobs” via “green growth” (as with the “market ecology” project of the neo-liberals) as a central means of transitioning to a low-carbon economy.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

This is only now being reversed because they emit polluting microparticles that endanger healthy living in cities.) But the third measure is the most crucial. Nations should expand Research and Development (R&D) into all forms of low-carbon energy generation (renewables, fourth-generation nuclear, fusion, and the rest), and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage and smart grids. That is why an encouraging outcome of the 2015 Paris conference was an initiative called Mission Innovation. It was launched by President Obama and by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and endorsed by the countries of the G7 plus India, China, and eleven other nations. It is hoped they’ll pledge to double their publicly funded R&D into clean energy by 2020 and to coordinate efforts.

See also aliens, intelligent; planets Shockley, William, 68–69 Shogi, 87 short-termism, 28–29, 32, 45, 225, 226. See also timescales silicon chip, complexity of, 173 Silicon Valley, push for eternal youth in, 80–81 Simpson, John, 222 the singularity, Kurzweil on, 108 The Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 42 smallpox virus, 73 smart grids, 48 smartphones, 6–7, 83, 84, 91, 104, 216 Smith, F. E., 12 social media: globally pervasive, 27, 84; SETI enthusiasts on, 157; spreading panic and rumour, 109; used by global organisations, 219 SolarCity, 49 solar energy, 49, 50, 51 solar energy collectors in space, 143 solar flares, disrupting communications, 16 solar system: artefacts of extraterrestrials in, 161–62; origin of, 122, 123; origin of elements in, 122; this century’s exploration of, 143.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

All homes and buildings produce their own electricity—every available surface is covered with solar paint that contains millions of nanoparticles, which harvest energy from the sunlight,7 and every windy spot has a wind turbine. If you live on a particularly sunny or windy hill, your house might harvest more energy than it can use, in which case the energy will simply flow back to the smart grid. Because there is no combustion cost, energy is basically free. It is also more abundant and more efficiently used than ever. Smart tech prevents unnecessary energy consumption, as artificial intelligence units switch off appliances and machines when not in use. The efficiency of the system means that, with a few exceptions, our quality of life has not suffered.

First, it restricted their sale, and then it banned them from certain parts of cities—Ultra Low Emission Zones.16 Then came the breakthrough in the battery storage capacity of electric vehicles,17 the cost reductions that came from finding alternative materials for manufacture, and finally the complete overhaul of the charging and parking infrastructure.18 This allowed people easier access to cheap power for their electric vehicles. Even better, car batteries are now bidirectionally connected with the electric grid, so they can either charge from the grid or provide power to the grid when they aren’t being driven. This helps back up the smart grid that is running on renewable energy. The ubiquity and ease of electric vehicles were alluring, but satisfaction of our appetite for speed finally did the trick.19 Supposedly, to stop a bad habit you have to replace it with one that is more salubrious or at least as enjoyable. At first China dominated the manufacture of electric vehicles, but soon U.S. companies started making vehicles that were more desirable than ever before.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Today the information and communications technologies that gave rise to the Internet are being used to reconfigure the world’s power grids, enabling millions of people to collect and produce their own renewable energy in their homes, offices, retail stores, factories, and technology parks and share it peer-to-peer across smart grids, just as they now produce and share their own information in cyberspace. Companies are already beginning to establish the beginnings of an infrastructure and market for what business leaders call “distributed capitalism.” Renewable forms of energy—solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean waves, and biomass—make up the first of the four pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Mini-grids allow homeowners, small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and large-scale economic enterprises to produce renewable energy locally—through solar cells, wind power, small hydropower, animal and agricultural waste, and garbage—and use it off-grid for their own electricity needs. Smart metering technology allows local producers to more effectively sell their energy back to the main power grid, as well as accept electricity from the grid, making the flow of electricity bidirectional. The next phase in smart grid technology is embedding sensing devices and chips throughout the grid system, connecting every electrical appliance. Software allows the entire power grid to know how much energy is being used, at any time, anywhere on the grid. This interconnectivity can be used to redirect energy uses and flows during peaks and lulls, and even to adjust to the price changes of electricity from moment to moment.

The intergrid makes possible a broad redistribution of power. Today’s centralized, top-down flow of energy becomes increasingly obsolete. In the new era, businesses, municipalities, and homeowners become the producers as well as the consumers of their own energy—what is referred to as “distributed generation.” The distributed smart grid also provides the essential infrastructure for making the transition from the oil-powered internal combustion engine to electric and hydrogen fuel-cell plug-in vehicles. Electric plug-in and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles are also “power stations on wheels” with a generating capacity of twenty or more kilowatts.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

For Obama, “smart” was the ultimate term of praise: “smart diplomacy,” “smart foreign policy,” “smart regulations,” “smart growth,” “smart spending cuts,” “smart investments in education,” “smart immigration policy,” “smart infrastructure projects,” “smart law enforcement,” “smart government,” “smart trade policy,” “smart energy policy,” “smart climate policy,” “smart entitlement reform,” “smart market reforms,” “smart environmental regulations,” “smart counterterrorism policy,” “climate-smart agriculture,” “smart development,” “smart market-oriented innovation,” and above all, “smart grids.” During his presidency, Obama spoke in praise of “smart grids” or “smart grid technologies” on more than one hundred occasions. Overall, he used the adjective “smart” in connection with policies and programs more than nine hundred times. 77 One of the defects of the technocratic approach to politics is that it places decision-making in the hands of elites, and so disempowers ordinary citizens.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Still others are privately employed, which means that the platform data they produce are extremely fragmented. Until financial incentives are aligned to encourage universal sharing of patient services and data, the growth of platforms within health care may be slow. Helping to bring about this alignment should be a key focus of regulators and industry leaders. ENERGY: FROM SMART GRID TO MULTIDIRECTIONAL PLATFORM In a world driven by vast amounts of energy—and in which the supply and usage of energy are intimately linked to such crucial factors as global climate change and international geopolitical conflict—we can’t afford to squander the energy supplies we have or use them in ways that harm the natural environment.

The more fully we can convert this network into an intelligent, interactive ecosystem of participants who can produce, share, conserve, store, and manage energy wisely together, the greater the value we can extract from our energy resources—and the healthier the world we’ll pass on to future generations. Today, energy companies and government authorities around the world are working with scientists and engineers to implement “smart grid” technologies that are improving the use and control of energy through digital systems for measuring, communicating, analyzing, and responding to vast amounts of data. Enhanced electrical metering tools are making it easier to implement variable pricing systems that improve the responsiveness of the system to variations in demand, encourage conservation, and smooth out fluctuations in energy availability and use.

, 275 side switching, 26, 198, 299 Siemens, 76, 204, 247, 284 signal-to-noise ratio, 199, 200 sign-up methods, 66, 81–85, 190 Silicon Valley, 16, 76–77, 112, 252–53, 281–82 siloed industries, 176, 178 Singapore, 160–61, 179 single-side strategy, 95–96, 105 single-user feedback loop, 45–46, 100–101 Siri, 147 Sittercity, 47, 122 Skillshare, 4, 96, 111, 122, 124, 212, 265, 266 Skullcandy, 162 Skype, 200–201 small businesses, 72, 276–77 smart grids, 272–74 smart metrics, 201–2 smartphones, 64, 66, 92, 113, 131, 140 Smith, Adam, 280 Snapchat, 217 social losses, 238, 239 social networks, 3, 11, 36, 41–42, 45, 51, 58, 71, 72, 90–91, 92, 95–104, 113–15, 120–21, 131–33, 152, 163, 185, 198, 204, 217, 218, 221, 226, 245, 251–52 software, 33, 52–54, 57, 62–63, 67, 91–92, 95, 125, 136, 137, 143, 151–53, 159, 170, 173–75, 216–17, 219, 254–55, 267, 295 SolarCity, 273 solar panels, 69, 273 Sollecito, Raffaele, 129–30 Sony, 61, 75, 94, 124, 137, 138–39, 178, 211, 240, 246, 259, 270–71 Sony Corp. of America v.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

These included: • Telecom firms, which had lots of data, but for some reason did not take advantage of it (perhaps because they had historically been a regulated monopoly or because they were busy with mergers and acquisitions) Chapter_02.indd 43 03/12/13 11:42 AM 44 big data @ work • Media and entertainment firms, which underachieved because they had decision cultures based on intuition and gut feel, and didn’t know how to assess whether people were looking at their content or not • Retailers had great data from point-of-sale systems, but most have underachieved with it until recently; Tesco and to some degree Walmart have been higher achievers • Traditional banks have massive amounts of data on the money their customers consume and save, but for the most part they have been underachievers in helping those customers make sense of it all and presenting targeted marketing offers to them • Electric utilities have been talking about the “smart grid” for a while, but are still a long way from achieving it; apart from some limited rollouts of smart metering devices and time-of-day ­pricing, very little thus far has happened in the United States This environment has changed dramatically with the advent of big data. Many of the also-ran industries in the previous generation of analytics can be leaders in the big data race, although in order to do so they need to change their behaviors and attitudes.

David Carr, “Giving Viewers What They Want,” New York Times, February 24, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cardsusing-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html. 7. GTM Research, The Soft Grid 2013–2020, study sponsored by SAS Institute, 2013, http://www.sas.com/news/analysts/Soft_Grid_2013_2020_Big_Data_­Utility_ Analytics_Smart_Grid.pdf. 8. Wes Nichols, “Advertising Analytics 2.0,” Harvard Business Review, March 2013, 60–68. 9. John Brockman interview with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, “Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data,” Edge, August 30, 2012, http://www.edge.org/conversation/ reinventing-society-in-the-wake-of-big-data. 10.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Most surprising is how these metals have become indispensable to new information and communication technologies for their semiconducting properties that regulate the flow of electricity in digital devices. And the once-distinct functions of green and digital technologies are beginning to converge. Indeed, increasingly sophisticated software and algorithms used in ‘smart grids’ make it possible to regulate fluctuations in the flow of electricity between producers and consumers. This is precisely what the 80 million smart meters already installed in the US are doing. In the smart cities of tomorrow, which will combine green and digital technologies, we will save up to 65 per cent of the electricity we use today, thanks to sensor-embedded streets that adjust the lighting to foot traffic, while weather-prediction software makes solar panels 30 per cent more efficient.

One data centre alone uses as much energy as a city of 30,000 inhabitants to manage the flow of data and run its cooling systems.23 A US study estimated that the information and communication technology sector consumes as much as 10 per cent of the world’s electricity, and produces 50 per cent more greenhouse gases than air transport annually.24 According to a Greenpeace report, ‘were the cloud a country, it would be the world’s fifth-biggest consumer of electricity’.25 This is just the tip of the iceberg, for the energy and digital transition will require constellations of satellites — already promised by the heavyweights of Silicon Valley — to put the entire planet online.26 It will take rockets to launch these satellites into space; an armada of computers to set them on the right orbit to emit on the correct frequencies and encrypt communications using sophisticated digital tools; legions of super calculators to analyse the deluge of data; and, to direct this data in real time, a planetary mesh of underwater cables, a maze of overhead and underground electricity networks, millions of computer terminals, countless data-storage centres, and billions of tablets, smartphones, and other connected devices with batteries that need to be recharged. Thus, the supposedly virtuous shift towards the age of dematerialisation is nothing more than an outright ruse, for there is no end to its physical impact.27 Feeding this digital leviathan will require coal-fired, oil-fired, and nuclear power plants, windfarms, solar farms, and smart grids — all infrastructures that rely on rare metals. Yet not a word about this is uttered by Jeremy Rifkin. So I reached out to the illustrious thinker to discuss the material reality of this supposed invisibility and the paradox of green energy. Repeatedly, I contacted the Foundation of Economic Trends, through which he offers himself as a speaker and consultant.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Public debates over new technologies engendering tensions between innovation and incumbency can rage for decades if not centuries. For example, debates over coffee spanned the Old World from Mecca through London to Stockholm and lasted nearly three hundred years. Echoes of the margarine controversy can still be heard in countries such as Canada today. New technologies such as genetic engineering and smart grids have triggered debates over a variety of concerns. Similarly, efforts to address climate change by introducing renewable energy sources such as wind power have generated intense public concern in many parts of the world. Many of these debates over new technologies are framed in the context of risks to moral values, human health, and environmental safety.

Technological innovation in this regard stimulated complementary adjustments in the political arena. Echoes of the debate can be heard today in world energy markets, which are experiencing major ecological challenges. The push for renewable energy and conservation has generated debates that mirror some aspects of the tensions over electrification as illustrated by attempts to introduce smart grid systems to promote energy conservation. The tensions revolve around issues such as privacy, security, pricing, and access to energy.69 Much of the debate is about the health impacts of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation and parallels earlier debates related to cell phone towers. For example, the advocacy group Stop Smart Meters says that because of the installation of smart meters, “bills are skyrocketing, health effects and safety violations are being reported, and privacy in our homes is being violated.”

Tom McNichol, AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War (San Francisco: Jossey-Boss, 2006). 68. For a discussion of the complexities surrounding such issues, see Shelley McKellar, “Negotiating Risk: The Failed Development of Atomic Hearts in America, 1967–1977,” Technology and Culture 54, no. 1 (2013): 1–39. 69. Timothy Kostyk and Joseph Herkert, “Societal Implications of the Emerging Smart Grid,” Communication of the ACM 55, no. 11 (2012): 34–36. 70. David J. Hesse and Jonathan S. Coley, “Wireless Smart Meters and Public Acceptance: The Environment, Limited Choices, and Precautionary Politics,” Public Understanding of Science 23, no. 6 (2014): 688–702. Chapter 7 1. For a comprehensive review of the technical history of the industry, see Roger Thévenot, A History of Refrigeration throughout the World, trans.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

A fifth force twining through the first four is technology. Fast global communications facilitate global financial markets and trade. Modern health care and pharmacology are shifting population age structures in the developing world. Advances in biotech, nanotech, and materials science affect demand for different resource stocks. Smart grids, solar panels, and geoengineering might combat climate change, and so on. Under our “No Silver Bullets” rule, technological advances like these are evaluated as enablers or brake pads on the four global forces, rather than as an independent force of its own. The thought experiment is begun. Its assumptions and ground rules are stated, its four overarching themes defined.

Too much capacity wastes money as power plants make unused electricity; too little capacity triggers brownouts or rolling power outages. It’s hard enough to predict fluctuations on the demand side. Solar and wind sources—because they wither or die on calm days, cloudy days, and at night—add new volatility on the supply side. In a world powered substantially from wind and solar sources, avoiding brownouts will require vast “smart grids,” meaning highly interconnected and communicative transmission networks, plenty of backup capacity from conventional power plants,162 and new ways to store excess electricity for times of deficit. Storing excess electricity is challenging. One way is “pumped storage” using water. If excess electricity becomes available, it is used to pump water uphill, from a reservoir or tank, to another one at higher elevation.

See specific river names Road of Bones Rodriguez, Ernesto Roosevelt, Franklin Russia and the Russian Federation: and aboriginal peoples; and aging populations; and the Arctic Council; and Arctic islands; and Arctic resources; and Arctic transportation; and climate distribution; and coal resources; and crop yields; and demographic trends; and economic growth models; and endangered species; and the Far East; and fertility rates; and gas and oil reserves; and global warming; and human settlement patterns; and immigration policy; and infrastructure development; and natural gas resources; and the “New North,” and North Pole expeditions; and population declines; and prospects for NORCs; and shifting economic power; and the Siberian Curse; and territorial boundaries; and UNCLOS; and water resources; and West Siberian Lowlands; and winter roads; and xenophobia Sahara Desert Sakha Republic Sakhalin Island Salazar, Ken Salisbury, Joe Sámi people Sanikiluaq, Canada sanitation satellite technology Saudi Arabia Scandinavia Schlesinger, James Schwarzenegger, Arnold Science Scott, Allen Scripps Institute of Oceanography sea ice: and albedo effect; and Antarctica; decline of; and global warming; multiyear ice; and ocean currents; and sea levels; and shipping sea levels: at-risk cities; and climate change; and glaciers; and sea ice; and urbanization Sea of Okhotsk sea surface temperatures (SST) Seager, Richard Serreze, Mark Sheutiapik, Elisapee Shiklomanov, Igor Alexander Shiklomanov, Nikolay shipping Shishmaref, Alaska Sibaral Siberia Siberian Curse Silent Spring (Carson) Simmons, Matt Simon, Julian Singapore Singh, Harnarayan Singh, Parminder slum cities smart grids Smith, Adam snowpack solar power Somalia Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland Sonoran Desert South Africa South America. See also specific countries South Kara Sea South Korea South Ossetia South-to-North Water Diversion project Soviet Union. See also Russia and the Russian Federation Spain Stalin, Joseph State Water Project Stern Report Stirling, Ian storm surges Straits of Hormuz Streletskiy, Dmitry Sub-Saharan Africa Sudan Suez Canal sugarcane ethanol sulfur dioxide super-regions surface water Swaziland Sweden: and aboriginal peoples; and the Arctic Council; and Arctic resources; and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS); culture of; and demographic trends; and human settlement patterns; and melting permafrost; and natural resource consumption; and the “New North,” and NORC collaborations; and North Pole expeditions; and nuclear power; and territorial boundaries; and UNCLOS; and winter roads synthetic natural gas (SNG) Syria Taiwan Tajikistan technology: arctic sea ice mapping; and ethanol production; as global force; and global warming; and hydrogen fuel cells; and nuclear power; and satellites; and smart power grids; and solar power; and tar sand extraction; and urbanization; and water resources; and wind power terrorism Thailand Thatcher, Margaret thermal expansion of water thermohaline circulation Thompson, Lonnie Three Mile Island Tibet Tibetan Plateau tidal power Tigris-Euphrates River system Tolko Industries trade Trans-Siberian Railroad transboundary rivers transmission of power Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Tromso, Norway tropical storms troposphere Truman, Harry tundra.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

On the amount of data smart meters collect—See Elias Leake Quinn, “Smart Metering and Privacy: Existing Law and Competing Policies; A Report for the Colorado Public Utility Commission,” Spring 2009 (http://www.w4ar.com/Danger_of_Smart_Meters_Colorado_Report.pdf). See also Joel M. Margolis, “When Smart Grids Grow Smart Enough to Solve Crimes,” Neustar, March 18, 2010 (http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/gc prod/documents/Neustar_Comments_DataExhibitA.pdf) [>] Fred Cate on notice and consent—Fred H. Cate, “The Failure of Fair Information Practice Principles,” in Jane K. Winn, ed., Consumer Protection in the Age of the “Information Economy” (Ashgate, 2006), p. 341 et seq. [>] On the AOL data release—Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller Jr., “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749,” New York Times, August 9, 2006.

“Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity.” McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011 (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation). Marcus, James. Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. The New Press, 2004. Margolis, Joel M. “When Smart Grids Grow Smart Enough to Solve Crimes.” Neustar, March 18, 2010 (http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/gcprod/documents/Neustar_Comments_DataExhibitA.pdf). Maury, Matthew Fontaine. The Physical Geography of the Sea. Harper, 1855. Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. “Beyond Privacy, Beyond Rights: Towards a ‘Systems’ Theory of Information Governance.” 98 California Law Review 1853 (2010). ———.


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

The fundamentals of these grids date back to Thomas Edison’s 1882 Pearl Street Station plant, an electricity-generating coal plant. As a result, buildings today cannot share resources—for instance, the way mycorrhizal fungal bridges share resources among trees. With new technology, including sensors inside of smart meters, the regular one-way grid can become a two-way system. This smart grid can move the excess energy generated from the photovoltaics on your office’s rooftop over to power another building. There may be another lesson to learn from our ecosystem. There is no “waste” in nature, since one species’ waste may be used productively by another species further down the food chain.

See also super slenders; supertall skyscrapers changes since the beginning, 267–69 defined by steel-frame construction, 58–59 environmental benefits, 269–70 environmental cost, 269 first appearing in Chicago, 58, 182 Foster’s more sustainable design, 132–33 greening of, 240, 254, 259–63 new paradigm for, 271 stilted, 204, 205 with trees, 250–51, 260, 261 smart buildings, 272 smart glass, 138 smart grid, 263–64 Smeaton, John, 28 Smith, Adrian, 38, 197 Smith, Stephen, 247–48 social interaction, 172–75, 188 class encounters, 229 in dense urban life, 209–10 designing spaces for, 15–16, 268 reduced by commuting, 221 removal of curbs and, 236 in skybridges and sky lobbies, 76 solar cells, 139, 263–64 Solar Hemicycle, 129 solar house movement, 128–30 solar shading devices, 139–40 Soleri, Paolo, 14, 131–32 space elevator, 109 Space Needle, Seattle, 97–98, 98 spalling, 34 Sprague, Frank, 93, 218 stainless steel, 34, 42 steel, 34, 42, 44, 58, 79.


pages: 83 words: 23,805

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

We think we could have “better” cities if we could only tune the machine to make it more “efficient.” The machine model is implicit in the popular language around “smart cities.” The promise is that shiny, smart boxes will figure out how to make our cities tick by smoothing traffic flow, monitoring crime, and allocating power through smart grids. Cities will be run by supersized versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL crunching continuous streams of big data. As Donald Fagen of Steely Dan sang, “A just machine to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision.” We need to think again. In reality, these deterministic paradigms are dwarfed by the scale and complexity of our cities.


pages: 92

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

Instead of just a few dozen giant power stations, millions of rooftops, street corners, rivers, tides and hilltops would be making a contribution, with technology ranging from wind and wave power to combined heat and power installations in industrial sites and micro-generation in every community. Homes become both receivers and generators of electricity, playing their part in a ‘smart’ grid that moves energy between us all. It is a lot more complicated and cannot be controlled from the centre, but it is also a lot more sustainable. All the technology is available, and if combined with a truly ambitious approach to energy efficiency and conservation, this model is entirely realistic as a way of meeting our future energy needs.


pages: 505 words: 147,916

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

Decentralised and renewable energy production, which is often erratic or (in the case of solar or tidal) depends on the time of day, require a smart grid that is far more flexible than the twentieth-century ones used in most cities today. A smart grid relies on sensors and feedback mechanisms to detect customer demand and adjust the load accordingly. For example, at peak demand – 7 a.m. when people switch their kettles on – standby generators or storage devices can be brought online, while some gadgets, such as refrigerators or air-conditioning systems can be automatically dialled down or switched off for a short time. Most countries are looking to adopt smart grids in the coming years, partly because they are far more efficient and so use less energy, but also because they allow for renewable energy integration – monitoring and sensing demand and supply in real time and balancing loads accordingly – and for individual householders to feed their excess electricity back to the grid.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

smart smoke and carbon monoxide detector: Heather Kelley (15 Jan 2014), “Google wants to run your home with Nest,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/15/tech/innovation/google-connect-home-nest. the smart power grid: US Department of Energy (2008), “The smart grid: An introduction,” http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages(1).pdf. US Department of Energy (2014), “What is the smart grid?” https://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid. when you’re having sex: Gregory Ferenstein, “How health trackers could reduce sexual infidelity,” Tech Crunch, http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/05/how-health-trackers-could-reduce-sexual-infidelity.


pages: 492 words: 153,565

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

They took control of the system in just a day, and Maiffret said it would have taken just a couple of additional steps to dump chemicals into the water to make it potentially undrinkable.38 Making critical systems remotely accessible from the internet creates obvious security risks. But if Stuxnet proved anything, it’s that an attacker doesn’t need remote access to attack a system—instead, an autonomous worm can be delivered via USB flash drive or via the project files that engineers use to program PLCs. In 2012, Telvent Canada, a maker of control software used in the smart grid, was hacked by intruders linked to the Chinese military, who accessed project files for the SCADA system the company produced—a system installed in oil and gas pipelines in the United States as well as in water systems. Telvent used the project files to manage the systems of customers. Though the company never indicated whether the attackers modified the project files, the breach demonstrated how easily an attacker might target oil and gas pipelines by infecting the project files of a company like Telvent.39 Direct computer network intrusions aren’t the only concern when it comes to critical infrastructure, however.

Emergency generators would kick in at some critical facilities, but generators aren’t a viable solution for a prolonged outage, and in the case of nuclear power plants, a switch to generator power triggers an automatic, gradual shutdown of the plant, per regulations. One way to target electricity is to go after the smart meters electric utilities have been installing in US homes and businesses by the thousands, thanks in part to a $3 billion government smart-grid program, which has accelerated the push of smart meters without first ensuring that the technology is secure. One of the main problems security researchers have found with the system is that smart meters have a remote-disconnect feature that allows utility companies to initiate or cut off power to a building without having to send a technician.

See Pastebin.com/Wx90LLum. 38 Ken Dilanian, “Virtual War a Real Threat,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2011. 39 Kim Zetter, “Chinese Military Linked to Hacks of More Than 100 Companies,” Wired.com, February 19, 2013, available at wired.com/2013/02/chinese-army-linked-to-hacks. For more information on the specifics of the Telvent hack, see also Kim Zetter, “Maker of Smart-Grid Control Software Hacked,” Wired.com, September 26, 2012, available at wired.com/2012/09/scada-vendor-telvent-hacked. 40 “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack,” April 2008, available at empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The reason was the same for power generation as for transportation: since electric utilities could measure power demand only in limited ways, they had to over-engineer the system. Now, though, what is known as a “smart grid” has the ability to collect huge amounts of data from devices like automatic meters that provide continuous real-time information. With access to so much information that it is measured in exabytes,h and the computer capacity to analyze it instantaneously, the system becomes highly dynamic. Some devices, like air conditioners, now have the ability to adjust their cycles when the grid is working its hardest. Like the old-fashioned grid, a modern smart grid can shunt power to different portions of the network automatically, but it can also manage consumption.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

Think about the automated “customer service” systems of major companies that make you provide the same information four times before you’re connected to a real person—that’s how system-centric feels. Mass production and mass consumption penetrate all aspects of society. Finally, the fourth wave of technological innovation is about to give rise to another Industrial Revolution that blends ICT (information communication technologies) with renewable energy, the smart grid, and awareness-based social technologies: a more human-centric turn in production and use. Just as 2.0 machines changed the dominance of 1.0 tools by being powered through energy, and 3.0 automated systems changed the dominance of 2.0 machines through the application of mathematical algorithms, we now see 4.0 technologies beginning to change the dominance of the old system-centric technologies.

The real disruptive change has little to do with cloud computing or faster data processing, but is the shift from optimizing abstract systemic functions or “systemic imperatives,” in the words of Habermas, to creating a shared field of human awareness that facilitates a new quality of entrepreneurship that sources action from the emerging whole.45 We refer to this transformative journey as the U process. Jeremy Rifkin refers to the convergence of ICT, biotech, nanotech, renewable energy, and the smart grid as the third Industrial Revolution.46 Just as the earlier waves of technology created an economic sphere that mirrors and amplifies the mechanical (1.0), motoric (2.0), and systemic (3.0) functions of the human being, the focus of our current technological innovations seems to duplicate and amplify the cognitive and communicative functions (4.0).


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Many of these disruptive digital ventures are being launched by millennials (popularly known as generation recession), who can raise capital on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, KissKissBankBank and MedStartr. Digital disrupters are not all young bootstrap entrepreneurs. Technology heavyweights including Apple, Google, Cisco and IBM are investing heavily in driverless cars, smart grids, connected homes and consumer medical devices. A massive shakeout in the automotive, construction, energy, health-care and other mature industries seems imminent. When asked who her company’s main competitor would be in five years’ time, a senior executive at a large US industrial firm answered: “Google.”

For instance, IBM has a programme called First of a Kind (FOAK) that brings together pioneering clients and IBM’s R&D teams to co-invent breakthrough business solutions with cutting-edge technologies. To date, IBM has completed over 150 FOAK projects, ranging from improving access to health-care data without violating patient privacy to reducing the cost of electricity using smart grids. FOAK is a frugal way for IBM to test the market viability of new technologies with a leading client before commercialising them on a larger scale. As stated earlier, however, customers – especially millennials – want not only to co-create branded products and services, but also to solve larger social problems.


pages: 309 words: 93,958

22 Days in May: The birth of the Lib Dem - Conservative coalition by Laws, David

first-past-the-post, high-speed rail, income inequality, low interest rates, pension reform, smart grid, smart meter

The priority is to increase bank lending to small businesses to create and protect jobs and boost the recovery, with discussion between our two parties to identify the most effective way of achieving this; other measures will include a bank levy; an independent commission on structural reform of the banking system reporting within a year; and over the longer term efforts to recover the taxpayer money that has been invested in the banks. • Specific measures to fulfil our joint ambitions for a low carbon and carbon friendly economy, including: the establishment of a smart grid and the roll-out of smart meters; the full establishment of feed-in tariff systems in electricity – as well as maintenance of banded ROCs; measures to promote a huge increase in energy from waste through anaerobic digestion; the creation of a green investment bank; the provision of home energy improvement paid for by the savings from lower energy bills; retention of energy performance certificates while scrapping HIPs; measures to encourage marine energy; the establishment of an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient CCS to meet the emissions performance standard; the establishment of a high-speed rail network; the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow; the refusal of additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted; and the replacement of the Air Passenger Duty with a per flight duty; the provision of a floor price for carbon, as well as efforts to persuade the EU to move towards full auctioning of ETS permits; measures to make the import or possession of illegal timber a criminal offence; measures to promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity; mandating a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles; continuation of the present Government’s proposals for public sector investment in CCS technology for four coal-fired power stations; and a specific commitment to reduce central government carbon emissions by 10 per cent within 12 months.

• Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason. • A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences. 11. Environment The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to fulfil our joint ambitions for a low carbon and eco-friendly economy, including: • The establishment of a smart grid and the roll-out of smart meters. • The full establishment of feed-in tariff systems in electricity – as well as the maintenance of banded ROCs. • Measures to promote a huge increase in energy from waste through anaerobic digestion. • The creation of a green investment bank. • The provision of home energy improvement paid for by the savings from lower energy bills


pages: 297 words: 95,518

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future by Chris Goodall

barriers to entry, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land tenure, load shedding, New Urbanism, oil shock, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, undersea cable

Third, we can introduce systems to manage electricity demand at short notice so that it matches the available supply. Every country in the world that relies on increasing amounts of wind, marine, or solar power will probably need to use all three of these mechanisms to align short-term supply and demand. In the U.S., this three-pronged approach is appropriately called the “smart grid.” The construction and operation of this new kind of grid are fascinating challenges to engineers and also to the mathematicians who will use statistical modeling to minimize the risk of not having enough power or, perhaps even more expensively, having grossly excessive power production for many hours a week.

Just before this happens, a large power station needs to be warmed up so that it is ready to start producing electricity the moment demand begins to surge. Supply simply aims to match moment-to-moment demand. This model is both costly and carbon intensive, because power stations have to be held in reserve, burning large amounts of fuel even when they are not supplying power to the grid. The smart grid is more efficient—and it’s also compatible with the incorporation of large amounts of power from wind and other unreliable energy sources. Let’s look in a little more detail at its three main approaches. Importing remote power If the wind suddenly drops on the Atlantic coast of Spain, it is statistically extremely improbable that Denmark will suffer at the same time.


pages: 98 words: 25,753

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation by Kord Davis, Doug Patterson

4chan, business process, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, performance metric, Robert Bork, side project, smart grid, urban planning

By 2025, the forecast is that the Internet will exceed the brain capacity of everyone living on the entire planet. Additionally, the variety of sources and data types being generated expands as fast as new technology can be created. Performance metrics from in-car monitors, manufacturing floor yield measurements, all manner of healthcare devices, and the growing number of Smart Grid energy appliances all generate data. More importantly, they generate data at a rapid pace. The velocity of data generation, acquisition, processing, and output increases exponentially as the number of sources and increasingly wider variety of formats grows over time. It is widely reported that some 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years (http://www.economist.com/node/21537967).


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

It is about smoothing the push of supply, so that eventually we get to the era of the virtual power station.” But he acknowledges that the electricity distribution grid is not yet up to speed. “A smart grid is the key to the energy market,” he says.4 GWEC Secretary General Steve Sawyer concurs, while pointing out that Spain is now 60 percent renewable and Denmark is close to 100 percent. “Connectivity and the smart grid is always the key. It is not so much about baseload as supply-demand management.”5 As well, the goal of cost parity—where generating power from renewable sources costs the same as fossil fuels such as coal and gas—is getting closer in Europe.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Turning our attention to automation—which is essentially the process of gathering all the data collected by the IoT, turning it into a series of next actions, and then, without human intervention, executing those actions. Already, we’ve seen the first wave of this in the smart assembly lines and supply chains (what’s technically called process optimization) that have enabled things like just-in-time delivery. With the smart grid for energy and the smart grid for water—what’s technically called resource consumption optimization—we’re seeing the second wave. Next up is the automation and control of far more complex autonomous systems—such as self-driving cars. There are even further opportunities in finding simpler ways to connect decision makers to sensor data in real time.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Whoever does it, and whichever fuel they use, the success of deep decarbonization will hinge on technological progress. Why assume that the know-how of 2018 is the best the world can do? Decarbonization will need breakthroughs not just in nuclear power but on other technological frontiers: batteries to store the intermittent energy from renewables; Internet-like smart grids that distribute electricity from scattered sources to scattered users at scattered times; technologies that electrify and decarbonize industrial processes such as the production of cement, fertilizer, and steel; liquid biofuels for heavy trucks and planes that need dense, portable energy; and methods of capturing and storing CO2

Solar panels made with carbon nanotubes can be a hundred times as efficient as current photovoltaics, continuing Moore’s Law for solar energy. Their energy can be stored in liquid metal batteries: in theory, a battery the size of a shipping container could power a neighborhood; one the size of a Walmart could power a small city. A smart grid could collect the energy where and when it’s generated and distribute it where and when it’s needed. Technology could even breathe new life into fossil fuels: a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plant uses the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water, and then sequesters the CO2 underground.18 Digital manufacturing, combining nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and rapid prototyping, can produce composites that are stronger and cheaper than steel and concrete and that can be printed on site for construction of houses and factories in the developing world.

Technology could even breathe new life into fossil fuels: a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plant uses the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water, and then sequesters the CO2 underground.18 Digital manufacturing, combining nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and rapid prototyping, can produce composites that are stronger and cheaper than steel and concrete and that can be printed on site for construction of houses and factories in the developing world. Nanofiltration can purify water of pathogens, metals, even salt. High-tech outhouses require no hookups and turn human waste into fertilizer, drinking water, and energy. Precision irrigation and smart grids for water, using cheap sensors and AI in chips, could reduce water usage by a third to a half. Rice that is genetically modified to replace its inefficient C3 photosynthesis pathway with the C4 pathway of corn and sugarcane has a 50 percent greater yield, uses half the water and far less fertilizer, and tolerates warmer temperatures.19 Genetically modified algae can pull carbon out of the air and secrete biofuels.


pages: 138 words: 40,787

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management

Says Glen Allmendinger: Once people started to understand how much value was locked up in just understanding asset information, they realized how much money could be made. Awareness is kind of a consumer thing — the smartphone and the physical B2B [business-to-business] space, big asset management. I think those two worlds finally met and everybody kind of said, “Oh, I can do a lot with this.” The more it seeps into stories like smart grids or health care, the more the subject becomes grounded in the context where people can imagine that there really are tangible advantages to trying to figure out what to do with all that data. Once the smartphone came into existence, all these sort of asset device stories that were roaming around got nearer to the consumer or user value, and all of a sudden, any person on the street could see that there are lots of things to be derived from location-based service: asset information, things in real time, essentially, and things that are state-based.


pages: 154 words: 48,340

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

What the local Orkney groups are doing is trying to use their own energy resources, rather than buying from the mainland. Among the many beneficial consequences, the cost of living on the islands will fall. More money will be retained in the local community. The economy will be able to diversify away from pastoral agriculture. Skilled jobs in such occupations as wind turbine maintenance and running the local ‘smart’ grid will multiply. Before starting work at the local council, Adele Lidderdale specialised in sustainable development for rural areas and she tells me the work on Orkney is an extraordinary chance to show that the transition to a 100 per cent clean energy system can benefit groups at the periphery, geographic and financial, of today’s economy.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The project is expected to reduce the eight-decade-old skyscraper’s energy use by nearly 40 percent and cut energy costs by about $4.4 million per year.22 Energy efficiency is the one energy policy issue upon which both Republicans and Democrats can agree. That bipartisan support is providing momentum to upgrades of the U.S. electric grid. Although there’s been a lot of hype around the phrase “smart grid,” there are significant gains to be had by providing consumers with more information about their usage and by giving utilities better information about the amount of voltage they are pumping into their wires. For instance, if a utility has reliable data showing that it is providing enough voltage to its most-distant customers on a given section of the grid, it can reduce the voltage on its generators and thereby reap energy savings of as much as 4 percent.23 In July 2009, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company released a report that predicted that if the United States adopted aggressive efficiency policies it could reduce primary energy consumption by about 20 percent when compared to a “business as usual” scenario.24 The consulting firm determined that there are big gains to be had from efficiency upgrades in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors.

(approximately August 3, 2008), http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/factsheet_energy_speech_080308.pdf. 18 PBS, “In Iowa, Questions Arise on Impact of Ethanol Production,” January 28, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/jan-june09/mixedyield_01-28.html. 19 Steven Chu, “Pulling the Plug on Oil,” Newsweek, April 4, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/192481. 20 See transcripts of two Obama speeches from October 23 and October 27, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-challenging-americans-lead-global-economy-clean-energy and http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-recovery-act-funding-smart-grid-technology. 21 Jan F. Kreider and Peter S. Curtiss, Kreider and Associates, “Comprehensive Life Cycle Analysis of Future, Liquid Fuels for Light Vehicles,” September 2008, http://www.fuelsandenergy.com/presentations/Kreider_LCA.pdf, 36. 22 Jesse Ausubel, in his article in “The Future Environment for the Energy Business,” APPEA Journal (2007), http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/ausubelappea.pdf, 8, uses 0.4 W/m2.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

Eurasian needs in this realm are massive—recent ADB estimates suggest US$26 trillion in new infrastructure is required over the 2016 –2030 period.26 Despite massive infrastructural spending across the continent already since the crisis of 2008 –2009, particularly in China, the process of building the requisite superhighways, high-speed rail lines, electric power grids, electric power generators, dams, ports, airports, and communications systems across Eurasia has just begun. Electric power transmission systems are growing capable of conveying greater and greater volumes of power over longer and longer distances, due to technical improvements in grid management as well as the progress of superconductivity.27 Increasingly sophisticated electric power grids (smart grids) are becoming ever more capable of managing energy usage at the grassroots level, including inside the home, drawing on technical and financial support from both ends of the Eurasian continent. In electric power, telecommunications, and other areas, there is a new digital dimension that greatly intensifies potential for efficient interaction across long distances.

See also China Perestroika (restructuring), 55 Perincek, Doğu: and Turkish Eurasianism, 41 Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), 128, 158 Persian Gulf: exports from, 81, 82, 98; growth of, 2 –3; oil reserves, 78, 80t, 81, 98; sea lanes between Strait of Malacca and, 246 Peter the Great, 32 Pharmaceuticals, 4, 130 Philippines, 12, 118, 128, 129, 186, 189 Piketty, Thomas, 190 –191 Pipelines, 79m, 144m; Central Asia-China (West-East Pipeline), 34, 57, 58 –59, 78 – 81, 83 – 84; Central-Asia-India (Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India, 321 TAPI), 61, 94; Central Asia-Turkey, 59; China-Myanmar, 135; China-Pakistan, 193; geopolitics of, 43, 143, 197, 213; proposals, 39, 83, 93, 258n15; Russia-China (Power of Siberia), 34, 83, 84, 144 –145, 153; Russia-Europe (Nord Stream I, Nord Stream II), 83, 265n29; Russia-Turkey (Blue Stream, TurkStream), 41; the United States, 241 Piraeus, 44, 88, 112, 177, 202, 217, 229, 245 “Pivot to Asia” (US policy), 46, 151, 152 Poland, 68, 83, 92, 113, 165, 172, 201, 215 Policy decisions, functional categories of, 18 –19 Polo, Marco, 24, 26, 47, 161 Populism, 205; and international relations, 200 –202 Port Arthur, 31, 142 Postal savings: and Chinese capital mobilization, 105 Pound sterling, 220, 302n39 Power grids: geopolitical implications of, 21, 43, 213, 216, 229; infrastructure projects, 93–94, 258n15; “Northeast Asian Super Grid,” 38, 84, 197; “smart grids,” 216 Power of Siberia project, 34, 83, 143, 153, 269n37 Prairie Road Program, 258n15 Pribumi, 124, 125 Production chains. See supply chains Production networks. See supply chains Prospects and policy implications, 232 –252 Public-private partnerships (PPPs), 250 Putin, Vladimir: foreign policy toward Asia, 33 –35; relationship with Xi, 84, 151–154; Ukraine crisis, 66 – 68 Qatar, 78, 82, 192 Qing China, 31, 141 Qinzhou Industrial Park, 130 Qualcomm, 113 Qualified majority voting (QMV), 242 Quesnay, Francois, 162 Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 193 Rajaratnam, S., 137 Razak, Najib, 132 Reagan, Ronald, 151 Redistributive policies, 18 Refugees, 191, 201 322 Index Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, 238 Regional development banks, 207 Regionalist integrators, roles of, 16 –17 Regulatory policies, 18, 226 Renewable energy, 84 Renminbi (RMB), role of, 221–222 Ren Xiao, 225 Resources: insecurities, 223; quest for, 197–198 Ricci, Matteo, 161–162 Richtofen, Ferdinand von: and Silk Road, 24 Roh Moo-hyun, 37 Roh Tae-woo, 33, 35 –36, 37 Roman Empire, 26, 47 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 18 Roosevelt, Theodore, xvi, 251 Rosneft, 147, 283n15 Rousseau, 163, 164 Russia: and the Arctic, 93, 145 –147; arms export, 154 –147; and Central Asia, 57–58; and China, 68, 84, 106, 140 –159, 223, 227; collapse of the Soviet Union, 54 – 61; continentalism, 32 –35; demography, 150, 189 –190; energy, 77–78, 82 – 84, 143 –145, 150, 198; and Europe, 82, 165 –166, 167– 168, 171–172; maritime access, 75m; as a transit state, 42, 89 –91; and the Ukraine crisis, 65 – 68; and the United States, 244.


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

Usually having more data trumps finding a better algorithm. Google does a reasonable job with spam detection, voice recognition, and language translation because it has large numbers of examples to work with. In the near future, we will have data that should help us better analyze individual health, create smart grids that use electricity more efficiently, drive cars autonomously, and lead to new understandings of the basic nature of our universe. How we understand data to enrich our lives is a great challenge for computer scientists. The Networking of Everything Roughly two billion people are connected through the Internet in some way, via email or social networks.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

With transactional overhead dominated by offline financial infrastructure, micropayments are uneconomic, and the Internet fills with mendacious free goods, bogus contracts, and pop-up hustles. Some 36 percent of web pages are spurious, emitted by bots to snare information from unwary surfers.3 At the same time, Silicon Valley moves toward an “internet of things,” sensors and devices—from heart monitors and “smart grid” gauges to automated cars and heating systems—linked across the net and needing secure automated transactions without offline intermediaries. Reform of world money is less a far-fetched dream than a rising imperative. Gold and digital currencies converge to provide a new solution to the enigma of money.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The Nest also ties into utility programs that ask users to cut back on power usage at times when energy consumption is at a peak, to relieve pressure on the electrical grid. Nest users who live where such programs are in place can save 5 percent or more on power bills by participating. That’s an early but effective instance of the smart grid, a sub-sector of the Internet of Things focusing on energy and our giant, antiquated, and inefficient power-generation and transmission system. You can install the Nest application on your phone and control your home environment remotely. So, say, if you want to start cooling down your house fifteen minutes before you arrive home, you can send a message to the Nest.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Automatic Markets and Tradenets An automatic market is the idea that unitized, packetized, quantized resources (initially like electricity, gas, bandwidth, and in the deeply speculative future, units of synaptic potentiation in brains) are automatically transacted based on dynamically evolving conditions and preprogrammed user profiles, permissions, and bidding functions.73 Algorithmic stock market trading and real-time bidding (RTB) advertising networks are the closest existing examples of automatic markets. In the future, automatic markets could be applied in the sense of having limit orders and program trading for physical-world resource allocation. Truly smart grids (e.g., energy, highway, and traffic grids) could have automatic bidding functions on both the cost and revenue side of their operations—for both inputs (resources) and outputs (customers) and participation in automatic clearing mechanisms. A related concept is tradenets: in the future there could be self-operating, self-owned assets like a self-driving, self-owning car.74 Self-directing assets would employ themselves for trade based on being continuously connected to information from the Internet to be able to assess dynamic demand for themselves, contract with potential customers like Uber does now, hedge against oil price increases with their own predictive resource planning, and ultimately self-retire at the end of their useful life—in short, executing all aspects of autonomous self-operation.


pages: 178 words: 52,637

Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term by Torkell T. Eide, Lawrence A. Cunningham, Patrick Hargreaves

air freight, Albert Einstein, asset light, backtesting, barriers to entry, buy and hold, carbon tax, cashless society, cloud computing, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, global pandemic, haute couture, hindsight bias, legacy carrier, low cost airline, mass affluent, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, price elasticity of demand, proprietary trading, shareholder value, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, vertical integration

Such companies may well be accessible to the student of industry or finance and even manifest features associated with quality companies, but their sheer scale and inherent opacity can lead even experts to perceive predictability that is partial at best. For example, Siemens operates through 19 divisions ranging from smart grid, to medical diagnostics and industry automation. While it is tempting to evaluate whether Siemens is a quality company, its enormity and intricacy presents considerable risks of mistake. Insisting on a firm basis of knowledge about a company and its industry, and being alert to the risks of straying into unfamiliar territory, is important.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

Third, while AI and ML are real and are different, as seen in the success of products such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s AlphaGo engine, it’s not clear that their deployment at scale, which is still a long way off, is zero-sum against either workers or wages. Take AI and power grid optimization. An intelligent programme monitoring and optimizing flow across a carbon-smart grid could save huge amounts of energy, reduce costs for all firms and households, and help with climate change. At least some of those savings would show up in cheaper products and demand for new goods and services, not all of which can be done by robots. What we should really care about then are the returns to robot-makers.


pages: 215 words: 55,212

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

Pragmatic and visionary businesspeople and governments understand this, and are reorienting themselves accordingly. The companies, cities, and countries that get there first will define business success in the early twenty-first century. That’s why the so-called clean tech and renewable energy sectors are hot on several continents. Or why policy experts are debating the best way to develop a “smart grid” that will transform the way energy is generated and shared. Finally, world population growth has sped up the trend toward greater urban density, which favors Mesh businesses. A car- or bike- or tool-sharing business can offer a greater depth and variety of products and services in neighborhoods where there are more people nearby to take advantage of them.


The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs by Nicolas Pineault

Albert Einstein, en.wikipedia.org, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, off-the-grid, precautionary principle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter

The short version: Everything That’s Wrong With Smart Meters Privacy Civil rights Cybersecurity 483 484 Smart meters gather information from all your smart appliances, and transmits this information — how frequently you open the fridge, what’s plugged into your walls outlets, etc. — to the utility company. Then, utility companies are allowed to sell your information to 3rd parties and make a ton of money with it. When your home is connected to a smart meter, the utility company can shut down your power usage for any reason, at any time. Creating a “smart grid” where every household’s electricity use is monitored online means that it can be hacked into. A lot of people way smarter than me when it comes to cybersecurity — including a former CIA director484 — have said this is a really, really bad idea. I highly suggest renting it for $4 on the official website: takebackyourpower.net/ youtube.com © 2017 N&G Media Inc. 180 Everything That’s Wrong With Smart Meters Environment Smart meters need to be replaced every 5 to 7 years, compared to every 20 to 30 years for analog meters485 — and you’re the one paying the bill.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Philips is developing disposable sensors that can detect spoilage in your refrigerator, or when it’s time to clean carpets, towels or clothing. GE’s Grid IQ is an “insight tool” that mines social media for geo-tagged mentions of electrical outages, allowing utility companies to respond faster. Data is fed to hot maps where patterns alert crews and first responders to power outages, floods, tornadoes or fires. Could such smart grids prevent such tragedies as the one caused by the massive forest fire that took the lives of 19 Arizona firefighters in June 2013? Perhaps not quite yet. But they are coming closer all the time. Robotic Household Assistants Another category of personal assistants for the home steps out of the pages of science fiction and perhaps meanders over the freaky line.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We watched a major scientific conference being held in a virtual-reality environment; the physicist running it was a pulsing purple fuzzball, but otherwise it looked as boring as usual. A buzzing exhibit that took up a whole room, an impressive model of the electric grid of North America, explained how smart grid technology was enabling smooth integration of many different sources of power, and adaptation to demand spikes caused by substitution of electricity for dispersed uses of fossil fuel. We were feeling a lot better, with the gentle refrain of "As ye muddle, so shall ye reap" caressing our ears as we headed for the exit.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

A few additions have been announced since, none of which were ideal: warehouses, a hotel, a cancer radiation lab (since shelved), and an organic produce nursery. That’s all well and good for the tax rolls, but if Detroit is going to win this war of all against all that’s raging, it again begs the question: What is the aerotropolis for? The answer, given by everyone from Ficano on down, is anything and everything: batteries, biofuels, windmills, and smart grid-building software consultancies. Two years ago, Ficano announced Wayne County would build a Stem Cell Commercialization Center—adding genetic engineering to the list. When we met, practically the first word off his lips was The Graduate’s punch line, plastics—but in this case a biodegradable kind derived from wheat.

The center would be one of only five worldwide, joining a network of skunk works in Bangalore, Shanghai, Munich, and Schenectady, New York (where the lightbulb had been perfected). GE promised to hire more than a thousand engineers at six-figure salaries. The lucky ones would tinker with the next generation of wind turbines, smart grids, CAT scanners, and jet engines, applying their know-how in composites, casting, and machining. It was knowledge work in its most tangible form: they wouldn’t build jet engines there; they would discover how to build better, cleaner ones. It was a startling validation of Ficano’s vision and a down payment on the jobs and wages he’d promised to create.


HBase: The Definitive Guide by Lars George

Alignment Problem, Amazon Web Services, bioinformatics, create, read, update, delete, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, FOSDEM, functional programming, Google Earth, information security, Kickstarter, place-making, revision control, smart grid, sparse data, web application

Even before the transition to HBase, the existing system had to handle more than 25 TB a month.[12] In addition, less web-oriented companies from across all major industries are collecting an ever-increasing amount of data. For example: Financial Such as data generated by stock tickers Bioinformatics Such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (http://www.gbif.org/) Smart grid Such as the OpenPDC (http://openpdc.codeplex.com/) project Sales Such as the data generated by point-of-sale (POS) or stock/inventory systems Genomics Such as the Crossbow (http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/crossbow/index.shtml) project Cellular services, military, environmental Which all collect a tremendous amount of data as well Storing petabytes of data efficiently so that updates and retrieval are still performed well is no easy feat.

ServerName class, Cluster Status Information servers, Servers, Servers, Servers, Cluster Status Information, Cluster Status Information, Cluster Status Information, Adding Servers, Adding a region server (see also master server; region servers) adding, Adding Servers, Adding a region server requirements for, Servers, Servers status information for, Cluster Status Information status of, Cluster Status Information, Cluster Status Information setAutoFlush() method, HTable class, Client-side write buffer, Client API: Best Practices setBatch() method, Scan class, Caching Versus Batching setBlockCacheEnabled() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setBlockSize() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setBloomFilterType() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setCacheBlocks() method, Get class, Single Gets setCacheBlocks() method, Scan class, Introduction, Client API: Best Practices setCaching() method, Scan class, Caching Versus Batching, Client API: Best Practices setCompactionCompressionType() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setCompressionType() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setDeferredLogFlush() method, HTableDescriptor class, Table Properties setFamilyMap() method, Scan class, Introduction setFilter() method, Get class, Single Gets setFilter() method, Get or Scan class, The filter hierarchy setFilter() method, Scan class, Client API: Best Practices setInMemory() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setMaxFileSize() method, HTableDescriptor class, Table Properties setMaxVersions() method, Get class, Single Gets setMaxVersions() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setMaxVersions() method, Scan class, Introduction setMemStoreFlushSize() method, HTableDescriptor class, Table Properties setReadOnly() method, HTableDescriptor class, Table Properties setRegionCachePrefetch() method, HTable class, The HTable Utility Methods setScannerCaching() method, HTable class, Caching Versus Batching setScope() method, HColumnDescriptor class, Column Families setters, Table Properties setTimeRange() method, Get class, Single Gets setTimeRange() method, Increment class, Multiple Counters setTimeRange() method, Scan class, Introduction setTimeStamp() method, Delete class, Single Deletes setTimeStamp() method, Get class, Single Gets setTimeStamp() method, Scan class, Introduction setValue() method, HTableDescriptor class, Loading from the table descriptor, Table Properties setWriteToWAL() method, Increment class, Multiple Counters setWriteToWAL() method, Put class, Single Puts sharding, The Problem with Relational Database Systems, Scalability, Auto-Sharding, Auto-Sharding Shell, HBase, Shell (see HBase Shell) shouldBypass() method, ObserverContext class, The ObserverContext class shouldComplete() method, ObserverContext class, The ObserverContext class shutdown() method, HBaseAdmin class, Cluster Operations Simple Object Access Protocol, Introduction to REST, Thrift, and Avro (see SOAP) Simple Storage Service, S3 (see S3) SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter class, Filters Summary SingleColumnValueFilter class, SingleColumnValueFilter, SingleColumnValueFilter, SingleColumnValueExcludeFilter, Filters Summary size() method, Put class, Single Puts size() method, Result class, The Result class SkipFilter class, SkipFilter, SkipFilter, Filters Summary slave servers, The Problem with Relational Database Systems, Servers, Servers (see also region servers) smart grid, data requirements of, The Dawn of Big Data Snappy algorithm, Available Codecs, Snappy SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), Introduction to REST, Thrift, and Avro, Introduction to REST, Thrift, and Avro Socorro, Mozilla, Time Series Data software requirements, Software, Windows, Building from Source Solaris, Operating system Solr, Search Integration sort and merge operations, compared to seek operations, Log-Structured Merge-Trees speculative execution mode, MapReduce, Table Splits split command, HBase Shell, Tools, Managed Splitting split() method, HBaseAdmin class, Cluster Operations, Managed Splitting split/compaction storms, Managed Splitting SplitAlgorithm interface, Presplitting Regions splitlog directory, Root-level files, Region-level files, Log splitting splits directory, Region-level files, Region splits src directory, Apache Binary Release SSH, requirements for, SSH standalone mode, Quick-Start Guide, Run Modes, Standalone Mode for HBase, Quick-Start Guide start key, for partial key scans, Partial Key Scans start() method, Coprocessor interface, The Coprocessor Class start_replication command, HBase Shell, Replication static provisioning, for MapReduce, Static Provisioning, Static Provisioning status command, HBase Shell, Quick-Start Guide, General stop key, for partial key scans, Partial Key Scans stop() method, Coprocessor interface, The Coprocessor Class stopMaster() method, HBaseAdmin class, Cluster Operations stopRegionServer() method, HBaseAdmin class, Cluster Operations stop_replication command, HBase Shell, Replication storage API, Storage API (see client API) storage architecture, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Storage, KeyValue Format, Overview, Write Path, Write Path, Files, Compactions, HFile Format, HFile Format, KeyValue Format, KeyValue Format, Write-Ahead Log, Durability, Read Path, Read Path, Concepts, Concepts, Tall-Narrow Versus Flat-Wide Tables accessing data, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Overview column families, Concepts, Concepts deleting data, Log-Structured Merge-Trees files in, Files, Compactions HFile format, HFile Format, HFile Format KeyValue format, KeyValue Format, KeyValue Format LSM-trees for, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees read path, Read Path, Read Path tables, Tall-Narrow Versus Flat-Wide Tables WAL (write-ahead log), Write-Ahead Log, Durability writing data, Log-Structured Merge-Trees writing path, Write Path, Write Path storage models, Dimensions store files (HFiles), Tables, Rows, Columns, and Cells, Implementation, Implementation, Cluster Status Information, Cluster Status Information, Log-Structured Merge-Trees, Overview, Region Server Metrics, Enabling Compression, Enabling Compression, HBase Configuration Properties, HBase Configuration Properties (see also storage architecture) compaction of, Enabling Compression (see compaction) compression of, Enabling Compression (see compression) creation of, Overview in LSM-trees, Log-Structured Merge-Trees metrics for, Region Server Metrics properties for, HBase Configuration Properties, HBase Configuration Properties status information about, Cluster Status Information, Cluster Status Information stored procedures, The Problem with Relational Database Systems StoreScanner class, Read Path strict consistency, Nonrelational Database Systems, Not-Only SQL or NoSQL?


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Spurred by “smart meter” technology, for example, energy markets will become data-rich, transitioning from their inefficient and fragile current state, in which a limited number of large producers provide energy for many, toward a much thicker market in which a huge number of diverse participants, including home-based producers of energy (think solar) and storage (think batteries), can better coordinate with each other. Not only will we waste less energy, this will enable us to more efficiently use the smart grid, an advanced energy distribution infrastructure. Shipping logistics will benefit from data-rich markets as well. About one in four trucks drive empty because there is no efficient way for them to get freight for a particular leg of a trip. Self-driving trucks alone will not change this situation, but data-rich markets can provide better matches of trucks and freight.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

In tackling both financial and energy crises simultaneously, the Obama administration is planning everything from a “green bank” to a clean energy development agency to provide more than $100 billion to fund clean-tech research and create jobs in solar cell installation (which takes more hands than running a power plant), to build commuter railways and smart grids, to expand the country’s natural gas infrastructure, and to reinsulate houses and buildings. The United States has at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone that are suitable for solar plants. America’s high-tech and clean-tech communities are now coming together to design green infrastructures for the common man.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Donohue, “Rebuilding America—the Time Is Now,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 10 Aug. 2007, www.uschamber.com. 38 Since we need all the power: American Society of Civil Engineers, “America’s Infrastructure Report Card Fact Sheet: Energy,” 2009, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 39 These ongoing brownouts and blackouts: U.S. Department of Energy, “Smart Grid System Report,” Jul. 2009, www.energy.gov. 40 The ASCE estimates that it could take: American Society of Civil Engineers, “America’s Infrastructure Report Card Fact Sheet: Energy,” 2009, www.infrastructurereportcard.org. 41 On August 14, 2003, we got a glimpse: Allan J. DeBlasio et al., “Learning from the 2003 Blackout,” U.S.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

E-mail interview, September 2, 2009. 31 University of California, Davis, “Genetically Engineered Tomato Plant Grows in Salty Water,” press release, July 25, 2001, www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=5840. 32 See “Drought-Tolerant Wheat: ‘Promising Results,’” GMO Safety, August 2008, www.gmo-safety.eu/en/news/654.docu.html. 33 Martin LaMonica, “IBM Plunges into the ‘Smart Grid for Water,’” Cnet News, September 4, 2009, http://news.cnet.com/8301–11128_3-10345122-54.html?tag=newsCategoryArea.1 . 34 Peter Huber, “Wealth Is Green,” Speakout.com, March 23, 2000, http://speakout.com/activism/opinions/5039-1.html. 35 Don Coursey, “The Demand for Environmental Quality,” University of Chicago, December 1992, as discussed in Matthew Brown and Jane S.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Even non-Cornucopian economists, who tend to see technological change more as a tortoise than a hare, are getting upbeat about clean energy. The new conventional view is that climate change can be solved by innovative technologies and market incentives such as a price for (or tax on) carbon. There’s palpable excitement about plug-in hybrids, smart grids and smart homes, renewable energy, and reflective roofs, as well as a significant government role for turning these ideas into realities. There’s reason for optimism, and not just on energy. The last few decades have witnessed enormous progress in the first stage of a sustainability revolution employing ideas such as zero waste, eco-efficiency, and biomimicry (the practice of applying nature’s own parsimonious and evolutionary wonders to manufacturing and design).


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Using a wireless traffic-detection system commonly deployed in cities throughout the world, an Argentinean hacker, Cesar Cerrudo, was able to control traffic lights in Manhattan by hacking the underlying sensors embedded in the roadways, a technique that enabled him to reroute traffic and cause traffic jams at will. Hacking buildings and a city’s operating system can compromise physical safety as well as allow attackers to gain control of elevators, air ducts, door locks, lighting, bridges, tunnels, water treatment facilities, and other vital systems. If smart meters can be hacked, so too can smart grids, and the ability of a hacktivist collective, organized crime group, or rogue nation to shut off power to the masses now becomes a reality. In July 2014, a security researcher was able to seize control of the power supply to Ettlingen, a town of forty thousand people in southern Germany. A hacker using the same exploit could have switched off all municipal utilities, including power, water, and gas.

Chamber,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 21, 2011. 77 As the Chinese premier: Goodman, “Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology.” 78 “means of electric media”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Routledge, 2001), rev. ed. 79 “Fitbit for the city”: Elizabeth Dwoskin, “They’re Tracking When You Turn Off the Lights,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2014. 80 Better sensors in our streetlights: “Outdoor Lighting,” Echelon, https:/​/​www.​echelon.​com/​applications/​street-​lighting/. 81 Using a wireless traffic-detection system: Mark Prigg, “New York’s Traffic Lights HACKED,” Mail Online, April 30, 2014. 82 If smart meters: Erica Naone, “Hacking the Smart Grid,” MIT Technology Review, Aug. 2, 2010. 83 A hacker using the same exploit: Reuters, “ ‘Smart’ Technology Could Make Utilities More Vulnerable to Hackers,” Raw Story, July 16, 2014. Chapter 14: Hacking You 1 “We Are All Cyborgs Now”: Amber Case, “We Are All Cyborgs Now,” TED Talk, Dec. 2010. 2 Over 90 percent: “Text Message/Mobile Marketing,” WebWorld2000, http://​www.​webworld2000.​com/. 3 Over 100 million: Marcelo Ballve, “Wearable Gadgets Are Still Not Getting the Attention They Deserve—Here’s Why They Will Create a Massive New Market,” Business Insider, Aug. 29, 2013. 4 Most wearable devices: “How Safe Is Your Quantified Self?


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Every day people are using Collaborative Consumption—traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again. Social networks, smart grids, and real-time technologies are also making it possible to leapfrog over outdated modes of hyper-consumption and create innovative systems based on shared usage such as bike or car sharing. These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and -consumption.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

If, through some unfathomable invention, scientists managed to stop all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the process of global warming would continue for centuries, and sea levels would keep rising for thousands of years. We must mitigate, but we also have no choice but to adapt. In coming decades, the world’s most affluent societies will invest trillions of dollars on new infrastructure—seawalls, smart grids, basins for capturing rainwater—that can withstand twenty-first-century challenges, including megastorms like Harvey and Irma. But no investment in hard infrastructure will be sufficient to “climate-proof” the densely populated cities and suburbs that modern societies have built in coastal areas, river deltas, deserts, and plains.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

What’s more, rather than being concentrated narrowly in a personal computer industry that was essentially a niche market, today’s new technologies impact nearly every part of the economy, creating many new opportunities. This trend holds tremendous promise. Precision medicine will use computing power to revolutionize health care. Smart grids use software to dramatically improve power efficiency and enable the spread of renewable energy sources like solar roofs. And computational biology might allow us to improve life itself. Blitzscaling can help these advances spread and magnify their sorely needed impact. THE TYPES OF SCALING Blitzscaling isn’t simply a matter of rapid growth.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

Jenny Anderson and Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Bill Is Offered to Increase Tax on Private Equity,” New York Times, June 23, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/23/ business/23tax.html. 10. Robert D. Yaro, “An Investment We Have to Make,” New York Times, October 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/10/13/will-we-ever-have-highspeed-trains/an-investment-we-have-to-make. 11. U.S. Department of Energy, “The Smart Grid: An Introduction,” 2008, http:// www.oe.energy.gov/1165.htm. Chapter Eleven: Taxing Harmful Activities 1. A. C. Pigou, in The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed., London: Macmillan, 1932, http://www.econlib.org/library/NPDBooks/Pigou/pgEW.html. 2. For an excellent case study, see Gary W. Dorris, “Redesigning Regulatory Policy: A Case Study in Urban Smog,” PhD dissertation, Department of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, 1996. 3.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

/Industries/industrie4.0-smart-manufacturing-forthe-futu.. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/life-after-the-fourthindustrial-revolution 215 CHAPTER 14 Smart Factories The heart of Industry 4.0 in conceptual terms is the Smart Factory (Figure 14-1) and everything revolves around this central entity that makes up the business model. If we look at how Industry 4.0 will work in theory, we can see that everything from the supply chain, business models, and processes are there to provide the Smart Factory. Similarly, all the external interfaces from supply chain partners, smart grids, and even social media conceptually have the smart factory at the hub—it is the sun around which other processes orbit. Figure 14-1. Smart Factory So what is a Smart Factory and why is it so important to the future of manufacturing? © Alasdair Gilchrist 2016 A. Gilchrist, Industry 4.0, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2047-4_14 218 Chapter 14 | Smart Factories Introducing the Smart Factory A Smart Factory hosts smart manufacturing processes, which we have explained previously.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

We already see the movement in higher education toward MOOCs—massive open online courses—where the best teachers in the world will provide instruction through videotaped lectures watched at home, while in-person class time is reserved for personal and intimate group instruction. The energy sector will be mostly converted to Peers Inc. A smart grid will be supplied by millions of distributed small solar- and wind-powered plants—co-generation. Communications will include a significant Peers Inc component. In addition to fiber, satellites, and cell towers, individuals’ devices (cellphones, laptops, cars) will be receiving and forwarding wireless data, acting like mini cell towers—infrastructure built and owned not by big companies but by the peers themselves.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Hidden in the shadows of low-level thuggery and cyber crime for cash, in other words, are more serious and potentially devastating operations, like acts of sabotage against critical infrastructure. Now perilously networked together, such infrastructure is especially vulnerable to cyber attacks: our smart grids, financial sectors, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants, hospitals, and government agencies are all there for the taking. And this is happening at a time when militaries, criminal organizations, militants, and any individual with an axe to grind are refining capabilities to target and disrupt those networks.


The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

They have also proposed: individuals entering into partnerships with developers wherein they can more proactively select what data they are willing to release, to whom, and under what circumstances; companies providing users access to their own data in a usable format for their own benefit; and that companies ‘share the wealth’ in the monetisation of personal data (Tene and Polonetsky 2012; Rubinstein 2013). An example of such a co-beneficial sharing of the wealth of data are smart grids where data generated by smart meters concerning household electricity consumption are used by the power company to produce supply efficiencies, with households supplied with apps that enable them to monitor their own use and adapt behaviour to save money. Industry, by and large, wants either the present provisions to continue or to be relaxed, with privacy administered through market-led regulation that does not stifle the economic leveraging of data.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

The Chinese government actually published a notice adding Bitcoin to a list of industries that could be shut down.11 With China, there are always other reasons for such decisions and announcements, but the argument made is that the amount of energy consumed by the industry, in which the currency is created by “mining” activities involving computers solving ever more complicated puzzles, contributes to pollution and wastes valuable resources. Every new technology creates unexpected problems, but if I had to pick three or four personal priorities from the WEF list, I would take AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth—and then I would add several not on the list: among them the renewable energy and smart grids nexus, the replacement of animal farming by precision biology and fermentation, and synthetic biology. The latter was the subject of a wonderfully insightful survey by Oliver Morton, published by The Economist.12 New tools like Crispr are helping to radically accelerate genetic engineering.13 “Every now and then,” noted Wired magazine, “nature politely taps us on the shoulder and hands over a world-changing gift.


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Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

., ‘The US has a fleet of 300 electric buses. China has 421,000’, Bloomberg News, 15 May 2019. 17 Mazzocco, I., ‘Electrifying: how China built an EV industry in a decade’, Macro Polo, 8 July 2020, https://macropolo.org/analysis/china-electric-vehicle-ev-industry/. 18 ‘Next generation lithium: from electronic components to the smart grid of the future’, Batteries International, Issue 92 (summer 2014). 19 Li, F., ‘Powerful CATL dominates electric car battery sector’, China Daily, 11 March 2019. 20 ‘The breakneck rise of China’s colossus of electric-car batteries’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 1 February 2018. 21 Schreffler, R., ‘Battery supplier CATL riding crest of EV wave’, Wards Auto, 29 January 2018, www.wardsauto.com/technology/battery-supplier-catl-riding-crest-ev-wave. 22 Ibid. 23 Ward, A., ‘Low-carbon technology power play by China’s CATL’, Financial Times, 15 March 2018. 24 ‘CATL aims to plug into the global market’, China Daily, 29 December 2016. 25 Li, F., ‘Powerful CATL dominates electric car battery sector’, China Daily, 11 March 2019. 26 ‘Battery pack prices cited below $100/kWh for the first time in 2020, while market average sits at $137/kWh’, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 16 December 2020, https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-100-kwh-for-the-first-time-in-2020-while-market-average-sits-at-137-kwh/. 27 Conference call with Bernstein analysts, April 2020. 28 Zeng, Y., ‘抓住重大历史机遇, 推动我国新能源产业快速发展’ , GaoGong Industry Institute, www.gg-lb.com/art-40852.html. 29 Ibid.


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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

There is, however, no scenario in which we can avoid wartime levels of spending in the public sector—not if we are serious about preventing catastrophic levels of warming, and minimizing the destructive potential of the coming storms. It’s no mystery where that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to the kinds of ambitious emission-reducing projects already discussed—the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams. The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

Imagine if there had been a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed by the crashing economic model—demanding that Obama do no less. The stimulus package could have been used to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. The auto industry could have been dramatically reengineered so that its factories built the machinery to power that transition—not just a few token electric cars (though those too) but also vast streetcar and high-speed rail systems across an underserved nation. Just as a shuttered auto parts factory in Ontario had reopened as the Silfab solar plant, similar transitions could have been made in closed and closing factories across the continent.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Such data-driven technologies include: urban control rooms, e-government systems, city operating systems, coordinated emergency 2 R. Kitchin, T. P. Lauriault and G. McArdle response systems, intelligent transport systems, integrated ticketing, real-time passenger information, smart parking, fleet and logistics management, city dashboards, predictive policing, digital surveillance, energy smart grids, smart meters, smart lighting, sensor networks, building management systems and a wide plethora of locative and spatial media. Collectively these technologies are generating an ever-growing tsunami of indexical data (uniquely linked to people, objects, territories, transactions) that can be repurposed in diverse ways – for example, in predictive profiling and social sorting of citizens and neighbourhoods, creating urban models and simulations, for policing and security purposes, etc.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The result could be an athletic jersey or flak jacket that monitors vital signs or motorcycle visors that automatically adjust to bright light.27 NorTech also supports Northeast Ohio’s advanced energy and water technology clusters. The advanced energy industry encompasses a wide range of subspecialties such as energy storage, smart grids, biomass, wind energy, and fuel cells. This cluster arose out of the interactions between NASA’s top advanced energy research center, which is in Cleveland, and the companies and people in the region who know how to make big, complicated mechanical things like wind turbines and generators. There’s also a bit of geographic felicity at work: the Great Lakes are a superb source of wind energy.


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Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

This is a world where farmers in the extensive irrigation systems of the Indus plains of Pakistan or the Australian Murray-Darling basin can find out online, in real time, how much water they are allocated and thus plan their agricultural activities; where conservation programs for tropical forests in Brazil or Indonesia (critical components of our global strategy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions) are planned using global mapping technologies; where we can use networked platforms to coordinate millions of individual decisions on consumption and production of energy through smart grids (information-laden networks for power transmission); where weather data can be acted upon across the globe. And where, for the first time, large-scale interventions in Earth’s climate, such as attempts to increase carbon capture by the ocean, are being considered by ventures that already assume a fully networked world.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Likewise, many energy conservation and demand management programs target resource man by offering households more technological control over their consumption, better data, and information for improved decision making, or economic incentives designed to encourage rational choices and action. Like the smart wife, we called out resource man in past research as a provocation to draw attention to a biased and gendered vision for energy consumers in the smart home, in which smart grid and metering technologies are expected to realize a range of energy benefits for residents. For instance, one estimate from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative suggests smarter systems could save ten times the carbon emissions that they generate.55 Resource man, however, is not just a hypothetical character.


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Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

It cast more than 50 million people into darkness for more than 30 hours, at a cost of some $6–$10 billion.73 Until that moment, few in government or the utilities believed that a single outage on that scale was even possible. But US power consumption had jumped almost 30 percent in a decade, not least due to the lighting up of the Internet. Deregulation and privatization begun in the early 1990s had increased the number of parties plugged into the grid from hundreds to thousands. Emerging smart grid devices alongside aging power stations had complicated control systems. And greater use of renewable generation (which stops and starts according to the vagaries of sunshine and wind) had complicated load-balancing on the grid. Not surprisingly, a joint US-Canada task force concluded in the aftermath that the top two causes of the blackout were “inadequate system understanding” and “inadequate situational awareness.”74 Clearly, these episodes from our recent past have begun to sensitize us to systemic infrastructure risks.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

According to a report in 2007 by the infrastructure consultants Booz Allen Hamilton, “Over the next 25 years, modernizing and expanding the water, electricity, and transportation systems of the cities of the world will require approximately $40 trillion.” What would infrastructure totally rethought in Green terms look like? China is currently building 170 new mass transit systems. High-speed rail is finally coming to the United States. With the coming of “smart grids” and microgrids, the distribution of electricity will be reshaped toward greater adaptability as well as efficiency. As climate change unfolds, cities will be on the frontier of human response. Taking the danger zone as 30 feet above sea level, a Columbia University study reported in Science says that two thirds of all cities with a population over 5 million are “especially vulnerable” to rising sea levels and “weather oscillations.”


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

It was selected as a technology pioneer by the heavies at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2007, as a top innovator by MIT’s Technology Review, and by the Department of Energy for its model energy-efficient homes. What Apple is to music players, GridPoint is to smart meters. An overview for the controller is shown in Figure 14.3. Figure 14.3 GridPoint’s smart grid platform is designed to align the interests of electric utilities, consumers, and the environment through an intelligent network of distributed energy resources that controls load, stores energy, and produces power. Algo trading for electrons is coming. Source: GridPoint (www.gridpoint.com). 334 Nerds on Wall Str eet GridPoint explains how its simple blue box on the wall addresses all the key issues in our electricity future: The platform applies information technology to the electric grid to enable distributed energy resources to perform the same as central-station generation.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

‘One of the reasons that the green sweet spot is an attractive focus for an economic stimulus is the labor-intensity of many of its sectors’, claimed the Bank.43 A study by the University of Massachusetts’ Political Economy Research Institute supported that view. It identified six priority areas for investment: retrofitting buildings, mass transit/freight rail, smart grid, wind power, solar power and next generation biofuels. The authors calculated that spending $100 billion on these interventions over a two-year period would create two million new jobs. By contrast, the same money directed at household spending would generate fewer jobs; and directed at conventional sectors like the oil industry fewer still.44 The proposal briefly held real political traction.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Instead, essential bits of energy infrastructure are built to shut down at the first sign of trouble, spreading blackouts and increasing their economic impact. The North American blackout, for example, cost power users around $7 billion. Engineers have to spend hours or even days restarting power plants. The good news is that technologies are now being developed in four areas that point the way towards the smart grid of the future. First, util- 286 ENERGY ities are experimenting with ways to measure the behaviour of the grid in real time. Second, they are looking for ways to use that information to control the flow of power fast enough to avoid blackouts. Third, they are upgrading their networks in order to pump more juice through the grid safely.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

In contrast to the clear liability of credit card processors for fraudulent transactions, for instance, the electricity sector is a mess when it comes to cybersecurity organization. Generation, transmission, and distribution are governed by separate entities. This leads to both overlapping regulations and gaps in coverage. Both NIST and the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC) are responsible for developing Smart Grid standards, but neither has an explicit responsibility to lead security initiatives. Furthermore, the distribution layer of the power grid is not covered by either entity, creating a situation where two agencies simultaneously have and do not have the ability to set security standards. Absent a uniform strategy, the dominant approach has been for each regulatory agency to look after its own industry.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Schellnhuber said Germany already had put in place a package of measures that would reduce its emissions by 40 percent by 2020, but much more needed to be done, especially in the United States. "We have the technologies needed to decarbonize our societies," he told the conference, citing improved energy efficiency, thermal solar power, a smart grid, and others. But governments had to provide leadership, in particular by shifting incentive structures and market regulations to send a price signal that would drive private capital and consumers to respond accordingly. "It will be very difficult, but technically it can be done," he added. "The laws of nature are not against us, but they will be if we wait another ten years."


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

The exclusions, he contends, the things the industry doesn’t want regulated, are precisely the areas that need standards. “NERC said almost 70 percent of power plants in U.S. were not considered critical. Almost 30 percent of transmission assets were not considered critical. All of the distribution assets, which are the heart of the smart grid, are not considered critical because distribution is explicitly excluded.”1 Even after the Ukrainian blackout, the electric power industry continued to disagree with Weiss about the significance of that event and the vulnerability of the U.S. grid. Kimberly Mielcarek, a spokeswoman for the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC), flatly rejected that it could happen here.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

The vision for future 5G networks is: 1 millisecond delay end-to-end + 10 gigabits per second speed + 99.9999% reliability + E2E security + 10 years lifespan for embedded M2M devices with one battery + capacity for about 500 billion devices + lower costs. We will see the first deployments of 5G in 2020. There would be a big demand for this kind of infrastructure because of the increase in digitisation. Cyber security is one of the most important pillars for the automated car ecosystem as well as for applications in smart cities, smart homes or smart grids. This is a very important element of 5G standardisation and of developing this new, future-proof technology. Autonomous Driving 132 Box 12.2. Statement by Telecommunications Experts Experts from a Telecommunications Company A very high service quality can be achieved with 5G networks, so autonomous driving will become possible. 5G networks will form the basis for communication between road users.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He called for “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward,” and concluded that “building is how we reboot the American dream.”29 It is time for tech to take up that challenge—for instance, with more venture capital directed toward advanced manufacturing processes and robotics that would enable us to creatively reshore American industry. The federal government should stand ready to help. A National Infrastructure Bank—proposed in Congress many times—could establish a public-private entity to spur investment in everything from railways to smart grids. Such legislation has included provisions to “bolster manufacturing in the United States” and promote “economic connectivity,” and could be expanded to explicitly include priorities like establishing a national 5G network.30 Instead of fifty-eight manufacturing-related programs across eleven agencies, a standalone National Institute of Manufacturing—modeled on the National Institutes of Health, as Michigan senator Gary Peters has proposed—could be created to implement a national manufacturing strategy.31 The government should also greatly increase funding for small businesses, focusing on the same strategically vital industries China has emphasized in its Made in China 2025 initiative.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

They become unavailable in ways both easily predictable – there is no solar energy at night – and less so. Sometimes the wind will fail to blow over quite large areas for days or weeks at a time. This need not be as much of a problem in the future as it would have been in the past; information technology will make it easier for ‘smart grids’, smart appliances and, indeed, smart people to cope with such fluctuations by managing demand; consumers will probably consent to such management if it lowers bills. But intermittency still drives up the costs and complexity of power supply if you want to get most or all of your electricity from renewables and you don’t have access to a great deal of hydro-electric capacity – a largely zero-carbon source that can be ramped up or down very quickly to balance out the intermittencies of other supplies.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

“Actually, I have been doing that a lot more lately,” says Pierrehumbert, “and it works. Imagine how wonderful it would be if you could get on a shiny new high-speed train in Chicago and visit your relatives in Madison without having to go to the airport, and all the hassle. What if we had a robust energy-supply system with a smart grid, so that someone with a bright idea about putting energy into the grid could hook up and make money on that. Think of the possibilities! All the ways we can make life better, easier, and cheaper by doing things that also happen to reduce our carbon footprint.” What climate scientists, politicians, economists, and engineers should be talking about is the problem and the concrete solutions: How do we plan communities and energy supply in ways that work better for people, that give them more choices—that increase their liberty.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Currently, we’re losing about fifteen million acres per year to desertification, the worst losses in sub-Saharan Africa where, unlike the Munroes of the outback, people can’t afford water pumps, air-conditioning, or migration.8 We need our utility grids and our engines not to leach energy and carbon into our atmosphere. While the utilities are looking at IoT benefits to their existing infrastructure (“smart grid”), connecting microgrids could lead to entirely new energy models. Utility companies, their unions, regulators, and policy makers, as well as innovative new entrants such as LO3, are exploring these new models for generating, distributing, and using electricity first at the neighborhood level and then around the world.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

But these systems don't require this sort of registration, likely because, when they were built, such registration was simply impracticable. The electronics of a power grid couldn't handle the registration of different devices; roads were built stupid because smart roads were impossible. Things are different now; smart grids, and smart roads, are certainly possible. Control is now feasible. So we should ask, would control be better? In at least some cases, it certainly would be better. But from the perspective of innovation, in some cases it would not. In particular, when the future is uncertain—or more precisely, when future uses of a technology cannot be predicted—then leaving the technology uncontrolled is a better way of helping it find the right sort of innovation.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The lower class of “useless eaters” gets fed the nutritionally deficient GMO food and they can chase it down with fluoride-laden polluted water, the same water that will be strictly rationed due to water shortages. They will be forced to live in 300 square foot micro-apartments inside high-density cities in order to combat global warming, and their carbon footprint will be monitored and taxed through the smart grid while imposing forced austerity on the masses. Due to the tight living quarters, vaccination will be mandatory for “herd immunity”, and all children will need to be fully immunized with all 100+ shots before they are allowed to attend the government schools teaching Common Core. The upgrades to the infrastructure will be due to the privatization of current public roads, bridges, and waterways, and public safety features will include the removal of all guns from the citizens.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

When Theresa May became prime minister in July 2016, she briefly paused the nuclear deals on security grounds but gave the final go-ahead two months later under pressure from the City of London, and after the Chinese gave ‘a series of warnings’ that rejection would damage the ‘golden era of relations’. In economic terms, the Hinkley C project is ‘a dreadful deal, laughable’, as one expert put it: not just financially and technically risky, but also likely to be obsolete once it comes on stream in 2025 or later, as renewable energies and ‘smart grid’ technologies provide ever cheaper and safer alternatives. British consumers are expected to pay tens of billions, over and above the normal price of electricity, to subsidise this project if it goes ahead as planned.2 Britain is pursuing an economically unviable nuclear industry for many complex and varied reasons, including lobbying by big-money interests and genuine disagreements about the future price of electricity.


Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

IoT can be defined as a network of computationally intelligent physical objects (any object such as cars, fridges, industrial sensors, and so on) that are capable of connecting to the internet, sensing real-world events or environments, reacting to those events, collecting relevant data, and communicating it over the internet. This simple definition has enormous implications and has led to exciting concepts, such as wearables, smart homes, smart grids, smart connected cars, and smart cities, that are all based on this basic concept of an IoT device. After dissecting the definition of IoT, four functions come to light as being performed by an IoT device. These include sensing, reacting, collecting, and communicating. All these functions are performed by using various components on the IoT device.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

His six priorities are: new manufacturing technologies in areas such as robotics and 3D printing; basic “enabling technology” such as optical electronics and new materials linked to novel products; biotech-based production techniques; low-carbon and other low-pollution manufacturing techniques; “clean” vehicles, such as cars using new forms of hybrid engines; and equipment needed for new “smart grids” to facilitate more efficient energy use. Tajani wants the EU’s manufacturing output to rise from 15.5 per cent of GDP in 2011 to 20 per cent in 2020.645 That is an absurd target, given that manufacturing is shrinking as a share of the economy even in China. Even if his priorities turn out to be correct – a big if – any support he provides is unlikely to be well-directed.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

A Republican banker in Danville, who had been the president of the Virginia Bankers Association, wondered why there was no money in the stimulus bill for public works, like overhauling the Depression-era post office downtown—that was how desperate things were. Perriello himself regarded the stimulus as “fairly milquetoast stuff”—he wanted something bigger and more visionary, like a “national smart grid”—but the Recovery Act did bring three hundred million dollars into his district, money that kept teachers in classrooms and paved roads that needed paving. But over time, as the months went by and the slump continued, and there was no sign of work starting on the stimulus project to rebuild the decrepit Robertson Bridge over the Dan River, and the Republicans in Washington and the Glenn Becks on the airwaves denounced everything the government did, endlessly repeating the lie that the stimulus hadn’t created a single job, public opinion in the Fifth District began to turn against Obama and Perriello.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

For sociopaths, indifference to infrastructure has a certain logic. Bridges and waterworks take years to complete and often decades to return investments. What little interest the Boomers had in infrastructure therefore dwindles with age, especially if such investments risk the entitlements budget. As long as Boomers control government, there will be no smart grid, no public hyperloop, no wholesale move to clean power, not even appropriate maintenance. The Selfless and Selfish Cases for Public Goods The argument for infrastructure reduces to two facts: (1) we need it, and (2) it generates a significant and positive return on investment. That we require roads and sewers demands no further comment.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

His DC “micropower” systems failed because the technology was unreliable and expensive. Edison had to watch a couple of his DC plants literally go up in flames before he gave up on the idea. dk I have chaired two committees on IT in the power sector, and the second one recommended having such “Smart Grids” that can deal with distributed generation and multiple renewable sources.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

If they didn’t, the United States had the next round of indictments ready to go and would move to sanctions. Xi agreed, but everyone in the room knew that by then, China had already collected enough U.S. intellectual property to last it well into the next decade. Chinese hackers had taken everything from the designs for the next F-35 fighter jet to the Google code, the U.S. smart grid, and the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint. With Xi standing beside him in the Rose Garden that afternoon, Obama announced that the two leaders had come to a “common understanding” that neither the United States nor China would engage in state-sponsored theft of each other’s intellectual property.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Politicians had dialed up the rhetoric about pricing or regulating carbon, and VCs acted on these signals; when the politicians failed to deliver, the VCs unsurprisingly took losses. Post-2010, there has been no equivalent policy shock, and cleantech has done better. Between 2014 and 2018, green VC investments earned gross annual returns of just over 21 percent, with smart-grid and energy-storage startups generating around 30 percent.[10] Finally, the idea that venture capitalists can’t manage some amount of capital intensity is unsupported by history. The early stories in this book show how venture capitalists have succeeded with expensive hardware projects in the past: recall Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Tandem, 3Com, Cisco, and UUNET.