smart meter

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

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. digital smart meters: Jesse Wray-McCann, “Householders Shielding Homes from Smart Meter Radiation,” Herald Sun, April 9, 2012, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/householders-shielding-homes-from-smart-meter-radiation/story-fn6bfm6w-1226321653862.

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CHAPTER 6: Two Birds, One Stone station after the event: Charlie Wells, “Houston Woman Thelma Taormina Pulls Gun on Electric Company Worker for Trying to Install ‘Smart Meter,’ ” New York Daily News, July 19, 2012, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/houston-woman-thelma-taormina-pulls-gun-electric-company-worker-install-smart-meter-article-1.1118051. which were watching Shrek 2: “Researchers Claim Smart Meters Can Reveal TV Viewing Habits,” Metering.com, September 21, 2011, http://www.metering.com/researchers-claim-smart-meters-can-reveal-tv-viewing-habits/. For the research conducted at the University of Washington, see Antonio Regalado, “Rage Against the Smart Meter,” MIT Technology Review, April 26, 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427497/rage-against-the-smart-meter/.

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The question remains the same in Boulder as in Bakersfield and Houston and Maine (with residents’ worries about the well-being of their ball-shaped organs): If smart meters or even a whole smart grid can’t be proved to benefit customers even by the very utility undertaking the upgrade, whom, then, do they benefit? Why did Xcel go to the trouble and expense of building a citywide smart grid? Why did CenterPoint visit the Taorminas seven times in attempting to give them a smart meter? Why did PG&E risk a class-action lawsuit to ensure that all the people of Bakersfield also got their new meters? The answer, of course, is that smart meters don’t benefit us, the customers. At least they don’t directly. Smart meters, and to a lesser extent other grid-smartening investments, benefit them, the utility companies.

pages: 376 words: 101,759

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

As a strong supporter of personal privacy, I myself have some issues with smart meters. My concerns are not overwhelming. I have a smart meter in my home, though I easily could opt out. However, I do not consider my concerns to be trivial, either. In Vermont, since smart meters save money for the utility, there were proposals that you should pay if you opt out of having a smart meter in your home. Without a smart meter in your home, utility costs for servicing your home will go up, and the idea is that it is unfair to make other customers pay such costs. Paying a fee to opt out of having a smart meter was first implemented in Maine.251 However, the Vermont legislature passed a bill allowing Vermont utility customers to opt out of smart-meter installation for free.252 Very few people actually opt out of having a smart meter.

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pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0. 248 “When you use electricity can make a difference in how much it costs (webpage),” Alliant Energy, undated, https://www.alliantenergy.com/WaysToSave/SavingsTipsandPrograms/TimeofDayPricingIOWARES. 249 Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. 250 Stoltz, “‘Smart’ electric meters.” 251 Katherine Tweed, “Even With WiFi Interference, Meter Opt Out Not Popular,” gtm: (website of Greentech Media), November 23, 2011, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/even-with-wi-fi-interference-meter-opt-out-not-popular#gs.3l0aq5. 252 Katherine Tweed, “No Smart Meter, No Cost in Vermont,” gtm: (website of Greentech Media), May 15, 2012, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/no-smart-meter-no-cost-in-vermont#gs.3l0rjs%5C. 253 Tom Evslin, “Don’t like smart meters? Opt out at your own expense,” VTDigger, September 28, 2011, https://vtdigger.org/2011/09/28/evslin-don’t-like-smart-meters-opt-out-at-your-own-expense/. 254 Robert Walton, “Smart meter readings are a valid ‘warrantless search,’ court rules,” Utility Dive, August 21, 2018, https://www.utilitydive.com/news/smart-meter-readings-are-a-valid-warrantless-search-court-rules/530507/. 255 Peter Cappers, Annika Todd, and Greg Leventis, “Uses for Smart Meter Data Webinar Series,” Electricity Markets & Policy Group (at Berkeley Lab), November 2018, https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/uses-smart-meter-data-webinar-series. 256 Jeff St.

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According to a recent article on smart meters for New Jersey,250 PG&E eventually admitted that the meters they had installed in Bakersfield malfunctioned when they got too warm. In other words, PG&E’s claim was incorrect. The large increase in Bakersfield electricity bills was not because the people of Bakersfield did know how to work with their smart meters. The increase was due to PG&E’s malfunctioning smart meters. This type of incident does not make installing smart meters acceptable to the ratepayers. This entire series of events is sometimes called “The Bakersfield Effect.” Smart meters THE BAKERSFIELD EFFECT WAS more about utility arrogance than about smart meters or time-of-day pricing.

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

Electricity Costs Utility companies tell everyone that installing a smart meter will reduce your electricity costs,486 but a lot of people have in fact experienced a sharp rise in their monthly electricity bill.487 Some smart meters are a real fire hazard and are thought to have caused hundreds if not thousands of fires in North America alone.488 Fire Hazard Dirty Electricity Smart meters create a ton of dirty electricity in your house,489 and a lot of people have reported getting sick since their installation.490 RF Radiation Smart meters emit a strong RF signal 24/7 — which is the main issue I’ll talk about… right now.

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Here’s what to look for. Smart Meters Around two years ago, I watched a documentary produced by Josh Del Sol called “Take Back Your Power”483 — which explains exactly why switching your old analog electricity and gas meters for the wireless “smart” ones is a really bad idea. There are a lot of issues around these meters, and most of them are way beyond the scope of this guide that was supposed to be relatively short but that I realize is getting pretty beefy after all. 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.

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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.

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

Section 5.3.2.2 describes the metering standardization projects and efforts initiated by various organizations and groups. 5.3.1 The AMI System The AMI system is made up of the smart meter, communication module, Data Concentrator (DC), and Meter Data Management System (MDMS). The AMI system diagram is shown in Figure 5.2. At the consumer level, the energy consumption data are communicated to both the user and the utility by smart meters. Smart meters have the ability to transmit the collected data through different media. The meter data are received by the DC and sent to the MDMS. MDMS manages data storage and analyzes the consumption data to provide the information in useful form to the service provider.

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IEC 61107 is a half-duplex protocol Smart Grid Standards 190 Table 5.1 Standard list of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) Function field Standard name Short introduction Product Product Product IEC 62051 IEC 62052-11, 62052-21, 62052-31 IEC 62053 series Product IEC 62054-11, 62054-21 Product Product Transmission Transmission IEC 62058-11, 62058-21, 62058-31 IEC 61968-9 IEC 61334 EN 13757 Transmission PRIME Transmission ITU G3-PLC Transmission HomePlug Netricity PLC Transmission Transmission AMI AMI IEEE 802.15.4 IEEE 802.11 UtilityAMI high level requirements OPEN meter deliverables Electricity metering – glossary of terms General requirements, test and test conditions for electricity metering equipment (AC) Particular test requirements and test methods for electricity metering equipment Tariff and load control requirements for electricity metering Acceptance inspection requirements for electricity metering equipment Interfaces for meter reading and control Metering automation using narrowband PLC Communication systems for remote reading of meters based on M-bus Iberdrola specs-based PLC modem standard for smart meters ERDF specs-based PLC modem communication standard for smart meters HomePlug PLC standards targeting smart meter to grid applications Wireless WPANs PHY and MAC specification Wireless LAN PHY and MAC specification High-level requirements for AMI Payment Reliability IEC 62055 series IEC 62059 Data exchange IEC 62056 series Data exchange ANSI C12 series Data exchange Data exchange EN 1434-3 AEIC Guideline V2.0 Data exchange Security NEMA SG-AMI AMI-SEC (security) AMI system security requirement A comprehensive set of open and public standards for AMI Payment systems for electricity metering Dependability prediction and assessment methods for electricity metering equipment Data exchange for meter reading, tariff, and load control Standard suite of data formats, data structures, and communication protocols specified by ANSI for smart meters Data exchange and interfaces for heat meters Guideline for vendors and utilities desiring to implement ANSI C12 standards Requirements for smart meter upgradability Security requirements developed by the AMI-SEC Task Force for AMI ERDF, Électricite Réseau Distribution France and LAN, local area network.

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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

Smith, “Hacking and Attacking Automated Homes,” Network World, June 25, 2013. 50 Hilton Hotels too: Nancy Trejos, “Hilton Lets Guests Pick Rooms, Use Smartphones as Keys,” USA Today, July 29, 2014. 51 Worldwide nearly ninety million: Michael Wolf, “3 Reasons 87 Million Smart TVs Will Be Sold in 2013,” Forbes, Feb. 25, 2013. 52 Many brands have been found: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Your Smart TV Could Be Hacked to Spy on You,” Mashable, Aug. 2, 2013; Dan Goodin, “How an Internet-Connected Samsung TV Can Spill Your Deepest Secrets,” Ars Technica, Dec. 12, 2012. 53 “750,000 malicious spam”: Ellie Zolfagharifard, “Criminals Use a Fridge to Send Malicious Emails in First Ever Home Hack,” Mail Online, Jan. 17, 2014. 54 Refrigerator spam: “Spam in the Fridge,” Economist, Jan. 25, 2014. 55 In early 2014, researchers: Dan Goodin, “ ‘Internet of Things’ Is the New Windows XP—Malware’s Favorite Target,” Ars Technica, April 2, 2014. 56 As of mid-2013: Utility-Scale Smart Meter Deployments, IEE report, Aug. 2013, 3; Chris Choi, “Smart Meters Are Heading to Every Home in Britain,” ITV News, July 8, 2014. 57 Researchers in Germany: Jordan Robertson, “Your Outlet Knows: How Smart Meters Can Reveal Behavior at Home, What We Watch on TV,” Bloomberg, June 10, 2014. 58 According to an investigation: Brian Krebs, “FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread,” Krebs on Security, April 9, 2012. 59 Like all computers: Katie Fehrenbacher, “Smart Meter Worm Could Spread like a Virus,” Gigaom, July 31, 2009. 60 Nest’s thermostats: Rolfe Winkler, “What Google Gains from Nest Labs,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 15, 2014. 61 “conscious home”: Marcus Wohlsen, “What Google Really Gets out of Buying Nest for $3.2 Billion,” Wired, Jan. 14, 2014. 62 Google’s Nest thermostat: Richard Lawler, “Nest Learning Thermostat Has Its Security Cracked Open by GTVHacker,” Engadget, June 23, 2014. 63 Nest’s other main product: Edward C.

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In doing so, hackers can keep your appliances running at full speed, generating virtual currencies for them while sticking you with the electric bill for spinning your devices 24/7. In theory, the new smart meter in your home might catch the excessive electricity use, but of course it too can be hacked. What the Outlet Knows Smart meters will be at the core of the global IoT, and their two-way communications abilities will record and track details of electricity usage in homes and businesses in order to increase the overall efficiency and reliability of an outdated and overburdened electrical grid. As of mid-2013, smart meters had been installed in over forty-six million homes in the United States, and the U.K. anticipates their deployment throughout all of Britain by 2020.

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As of mid-2013, smart meters had been installed in over forty-six million homes in the United States, and the U.K. anticipates their deployment throughout all of Britain by 2020. Smart-meter information, much of which is transmitted in an unencrypted format, can actually reveal details such as the brand and age of your appliances and when you are using them in which rooms of your home. Extrapolating such data reveals how much time you spend cooking and when you turn on the TV in the bedroom. But the deep granularity smart meters can provide on your activities extends far beyond simply knowing you used the microwave at 7:26 p.m. on Thursday. Researchers in Germany revealed that smart meters could also tell what television programs people were watching at what times, because of the specific electricity required in order to display the scenes of each show on your screen.

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

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. Smart meters are to your old electric meter what a smartphone is to your grandmother’s Bakelite 1950s rotary phone. It’s a souped-up, networked upgrade that constantly reports back to the electric company a stream of data about your power consumption, including when it detects blackouts and brownouts. The more advanced models can manage power-hungry appliances in your home. In-Stat, a market research firm, projects that by 2016 fully three-quarters of American electric meters will have been converted to smart meters.47 While these are the most visible endpoints of the emerging new grid, Siemens actually sold off its smart-meter business a decade ago.

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Load shifting, the gentler of the two, tries to spread demand for power away from peak periods of demand through price incentives. In their simplest form, smart meters allow businesses and consumers to see the true cost of generating electricity during periods of high demand. As they fire up those costly peaking plants, utilities simply pass the higher generating cost along to consumers. Dynamic pricing can dramatically reduce swings in demand for power and increase overall generating efficiency, but load shifting can also be automated and proactive. Smart meters that communicate directly with smart appliances might automatically reschedule a load of wash for later in the day when demand and prices are likely to fall.

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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: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

It’s creating two different kinds of equally important social participation tasks, for people with smart meters and people without smart meters. First, and most obviously, players with smart meters can tackle the social participation task of reducing their energy consumption. This is the core “do-good” mission of the game. But there’s also the SPT of lavishing our attention on each other’s good acts. People who don’t have access to smart meters yet can still play the game, by making wagers on players who do have smart meters. And this is a real contribution to the common good, since it creates social rewards for the energy savers.

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The more energy bets you win, the more powerful and rich your Lost Joules avatar will become. The game works with smart meters, home electricity meters that are connected to the Internet. Smart meters allow you to monitor and analyze how and where your energy is being consumed—they can even calculate exactly how much each appliance in your house is costing you. Studies have shown that having this kind of feedback makes it much easier to reduce energy consumption: on average, a smart meter user will be able to decrease his or her consumption permanently by 10 percent.15 And that’s without friends, family, and strangers cheering you on, or trying to beat your best effort.

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Studies have shown that having this kind of feedback makes it much easier to reduce energy consumption: on average, a smart meter user will be able to decrease his or her consumption permanently by 10 percent.15 And that’s without friends, family, and strangers cheering you on, or trying to beat your best effort. Can you imagine how much more energy could be saved if using smart meters was turned into a good game? Lost Joules is set to find out. The application collects personal smart-meter data from players and challenges them to achieve concrete, energy-saving missions. Then it makes that data public to other players—who will place bets on your ability to achieve energy-saving missions. If they think you can do it, they’ll bet with you—and if they doubt you, they’ll invest in someone else. The players who achieve the most missions regularly will become superstars in the Lost Joules world, generating returns not only for themselves, but also for everyone who cheers them on.

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

(Notice that “Innovative” appears twice in the figure, indicative of the rapid pace of change, and note the foundation level position for smart end-use devices.) These so-called smart meters are the enabling technology for intelligent engineering and market solutions to electric energy problems. Recall that electronic market access (first seen in the NYSE’s DOT) was the enabling technology for disintermediation, and later, the use of information technology for algorithmic trading. Similarly, these smart meters will allow utilities, small producers, and consumers to bring the benefits of ubiquitous computation and market solutions to creating a more efficient, less polluting, low-carbon electric industry. These smart meters exist now. GridPoint in Arlington, Virginia, is the lead dog firm in this space.

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For consumers, the platform provides protection from power outages, increases energy efficiency through online energy management, and integrates renewable energy, paving the way for the commercial success of solar and wind energy sources. The initial application for smart meters was simple: remote meter reading. This was the motivation for the utility vendors to install them to the limited extent that this has been done. But with greater capabilities in the newer versions the smart meters enable a much greater and more sophisticated set of applications. This could lead to savings to customers, as well as utilities, and for reductions in emissions that benefit everyone. From Efficiency to Control to Markets The first wave of energy conservation technologies was about energy efficiency, reducing the power demand by building better machines to plug into the wall, but with the same dumb old meter spinning outside.

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GridPoint in Arlington, Virginia, is the lead dog firm in this space. 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.

pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

The electricity system is designed around ever-larger power stations (coal, nuclear and now gas) transmitting electricity to the local distribution networks and then your home. As yet, smart meters are not fully in place (and some do not fully work); there is no clear understanding of how to use (and who can use) the data; and smart appliances are a long way off becoming universal. The reason this smart technology is not in place is because the communications infrastructure is not up to the job, and nor will it be for the whole country for perhaps another decade. You cannot run a smart meter or enable your smart devices unless you have good internet and mobile connectivity. The road system is designed entirely around petrol and diesel vehicles.

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Next time you try to make a mobile call along even some of the major rail routes in Britain, wonder why sewage spills into the rivers when there is a storm, and stand on a railway platform waiting for a train to run along the mostly empty railway lines, this is the reason. It is government failure and poor regulation of private utilities. The centrality of infrastructure networks Imagine what a net zero economy would look like. There would be lots of decentralised renewables generation, possibly some nuclear power stations (both large and small), smart meters, smart devices, interconnected homes and the internet-of-things, autonomous electric cars and perhaps hydrogen-powered vehicles and electric trains. Travel, especially by air, would be much reduced, and holidays would be much more local, as would quite a lot of food production. There would probably be more remote working, including from home using video links, as many people had to do during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

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We cannot have a decarbonised economy without the supporting green networks, and we cannot convert from fossil fuel networks to low-carbon ones unless the investment is made. We cannot invest without savings and a credible guarantee that customers and taxpayers will actually pay up. We could have an electricity charging system like Norway and its associated smart meters;[2] we could have a high-speed electric railway system like France; and of course we could have fast fibre like Spain. This would have one other advantage: it would be no regrets. We need all of this anyway. A net zero national infrastructure plan A net zero plan starts with these core infrastructures as the backbone of the low-carbon economy.

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

The plan was to install 20 million “smart meters” over five years. Smart meters are simply digital versions of the old spinning electric meter. Power companies nationwide employ tens of thousands of people who do nothing but read the meters. With smart meters, utility companies don’t need meter readers anymore. As Sharan put it: “In five years, 20 million manually read meters are expected to disappear, taking with them some 28,000 meter-reading jobs. In other words, instead of creating jobs, smart metering will probably result in net job destruction.”25 Sharan calculated that installing 20 million new smart meters over five years would create about 1,600 new installation jobs.

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In other words, instead of creating jobs, smart metering will probably result in net job destruction.”25 Sharan calculated that installing 20 million new smart meters over five years would create about 1,600 new installation jobs. Unfortunately, most of the smart meters are made overseas. The meters will require people who know how to maintain and service them, but that would create a few hundred jobs at most. Does that mean we should make a law protecting meter reader jobs forever? I don’t agree with that. For the same reasons we no longer have elevator operators, bowling pin setters, and newspaper copy boys, we’re unlikely to have meter readers in a few years’ time. The point is, when you look closely at the technology and the goals of green energy, you’re not likely to find the millions of jobs that our political leaders are promising.

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

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.

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But by using this feature an attacker could seize control of the meters to disconnect power to thousands of customers in a way that would not be easily recoverable. In 2009, a researcher named Mike Davis developed a worm that did just this. Davis was hired by a utility in the Pacific Northwest to examine the security of smart meters the company planned to roll out to customers. As with the Siemens PLCs that Beresford examined, Davis found that the smart meters were promiscuous and would communicate with any other smart meters in their vicinity as long as they used the same communication protocol. They would even accept firmware updates from other meters. All an attacker needed to update the firmware on a meter was a network encryption key.

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Some vendors now use multiple network keys on their meters, assigning a different key for different neighborhoods to limit the damage an attacker could do with a single key. But the remote disconnect is still a problem with most smart meters, since an attacker who breaches a utility’s central server could do what Davis’s worm did, but in a much simpler way. “Were [the remote disconnect] not in there, none of this would really be all that much of an issue,” Davis says. “In my opinion, if it’s got the remote disconnect relay in it, whether it’s enabled or not … it’s a real big, ugly issue.” Going after smart meters is an effective way to cut electricity. But an even more effective and widespread attack would be to take out generators that feed the grid or the transmission systems that deliver electricity to customers.

pages: 133 words: 42,254

Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data Into Big Money by Frank J. Ohlhorst

algorithmic trading, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, create, read, update, delete, data acquisition, data science, DevOps, extractivism, fault tolerance, information security, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Network effects, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, RFID, sentiment analysis, six sigma, smart meter, statistical model, supply-chain management, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application

Transaction volumes also fluctuate much faster, much wider, and much more unpredictably. Competition among firms is creating more data, simply because sampling for trading decisions is occurring more frequently and at faster intervals. Smart instrumentation. The use of smart meters in energy grid systems, which shifts meter readings from monthly to every 15 minutes, can translate into a multithousandfold increase in data generated. Smart meter technology extends beyond just power usage and can measure heating, cooling, and other loads, which can be used as an indicator of household size at any given moment. Mobile telephony. With the advances in smartphones and connected PDAs, the primary data generated from these devices have grown beyond caller, receiver, and call length.

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Many industries fall under the umbrella of new data creation and digitization of existing data, and most are becoming appropriate sources for Big Data resources. Those industries include the following: Transportation, logistics, retail, utilities, and telecommunications. Sensor data are being generated at an accelerating rate from fleet GPS transceivers, RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag readers, smart meters, and cell phones (call data records); these data are used to optimize operations and drive operational BI to realize immediate business opportunities. Health care. The health care industry is quickly moving to electronic medical records and images, which it wants to use for short-term public health monitoring and long-term epidemiological research programs.

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See Data mining Mobile devices Modeling Moore’s Law Mozenda N NAS National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Science Foundation (NSF) Natural language recognition New York Times Noisy data NoSQL (Not only SQL) O Object-based storage systems OLAP systems OOZIE OpenHeatMap Open source technologies availability options pilot projects See also Hadoop Organizational structure Outsourcing P Parallel processing Patents Pentaho Performance measurement Performance-security tradeoff Perlowitz, Bill Pharmaceutical companies Pig Pilot projects Planning Point-of-sale (POS) data Predictive analysis Privacy Problem identification Processing Project management processes Project planning Public information sources Purging of data Q Queries R RAM-based devices Real-time analytics Recruitment of data analytics personnel Red Hat Relational database management system (RDBMS) Research and development (R&D) Resource description framework (RDF) Results Retailers anomalies Big Data use click-stream data data sources goal setting in-memory processing technology organizational culture Retention of data Return on investment (ROI) Risk analysis S SANS SAP Scale-out storage solutions Scaling Scenarios Schmidt, Erik Science Scope of project Scrubbing programs Security backup systems challenges compliance issues data classification data retention intellectual property rules technologies Semantics event-driven data distribution support mapping of technologies trends Semistructured data Sensor data filtering growth of types Silos Sloan Digital Sky Survey Small and medium businesses (SMBs) Smart meters Smartphones Snapshots Social media Software. See Technologies Sources of data. See Data sources Space program Specificity of information Speed-accuracy tradeoff Spring Data SQL limitations NoSQL Integration scaling Stale data Statistical applications Storage Storm Structured data Success, measurement of Supplementary information Supply chain T Tableau Public Taxonomies Team members Technologies application platforms Cassandra cloud computing commodity hardware decision making processing power security storage Web-based tools worst practices See also Hadoop Telecommunications Text analytics Thin provisioning T-Mobile Training Transportation Trends Trusted applications Turk Twitter U United Parcel Service (UPS) Unstructured data complexity of defined forms growth of project goal setting social media’s collection technologies varieties of U.S. census User analysis Utilities sector V Value, extraction of Variety Velocity Vendor lock-in Veracity Videos Video surveillance Villanustre, Flavio Visualization Volume W Walt Disney Company Watson Web-based technologies Web sites click-stream data logs traffic distribution White-box systems Worst practices Wyle Laboratories X XML Y Yahoo

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

New studies, however, including one conducted by my global consulting group, show that with the shift to a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, it is conceivable to increase aggregate energy efficiency to 40 percent or more in the next 40 years, amounting to a dramatic increase in productivity beyond what the economy experienced in the twentieth century.8 The Internet of Things The enormous leap in productivity is possible because the emerging Internet of Things is the first smart-infrastructure revolution in history: one that will connect every machine, business, residence, and vehicle in an intelligent network comprised of a Communications Internet, Energy Internet, and Logistics Internet, all embedded in a single operating system. In the United States alone, 37 million digital smart meters are now providing real-time information on electricity use.9 Within ten years, every building in America and Europe, as well as other countries around the world, will be equipped with smart meters. And every device—thermostats, assembly lines, warehouse equipment, TVs, washing machines, and computers—will have sensors connected to the smart meter and the Internet of Things platform. In 2007, there were 10 million sensors connecting every type of human contrivance to the Internet of Things.

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It is estimated that IT solutions—using social media—could drive the cost of solar down by 75 percent, making it cheaper than coal.31 The Cleanweb Movement in the United States is getting Big Data help from a new federal government initiative called Green Button. The program, which was launched in 2011, encourages power and utility companies to voluntarily provide easy access to real-time energy usage data now available for the first time because of the installation of millions of smart meters in homes and businesses. Smart meters are vital data collection points in the Energy Internet infrastructure. That data can be downloaded by the companies’ customers so they can have the information they need to more efficiently manage their energy use. In less than a year, the number of customers with instant access to their own energy use data ballooned to 31 million.32 Companies like Opower, Itron, First Fuel, Efficiency 2.0, EcoDog, Belkin, and Honest Buildings are scurrying to develop new applications and Web services that can use Green Button data to empower users to take control of their own energy future.33 This wealth of data on individual energy usage is now being leveraged through social media.

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Inside the substation are batteries that allow the village to store power during the night or when there is cloud cover. A small computer transmits data back to the company’s offices in Jaipur. Wires on wooden poles transmit the electricity from the substation to scores of homes around the village, providing green electricity for more than 200 residents. Each home is equipped with a smart meter that informs the user how much electricity is being used and what it is costing at different times of the day.38 Green electricity is far less expensive than electricity from India’s national grid, and it eliminates the burning of highly polluting kerosene that is responsible for respiratory and heart diseases common throughout India.

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

The same applies to the power-intensive equipment in large buildings, which increasingly is controlled through smart building energy management control systems. Second, utilities are rolling out “smart meters” that measure household power consumption on a much more granular basis than every month—some measure it every hour, minute, or even second. These meters can communicate with the grid to help both grid operators and customers find out what the other needs. Over half of American households have smart meters now. Although the torrents of data pouring in from these meters have overwhelmed some utilities, others have started to manage power flows on the distribution grid intelligently to meet local customer needs.46 Third, two-way communications networks and software solutions are emerging that can be overlain on the new hardware to orchestrate effective demand response by managing distributed energy resources in concert.

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Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Internet of Things: Privacy & Security in a Connected World (Washington, DC, November 2013, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/federal-trade-commission-staff-report-november-2013-workshop-entitled-internet-things-privacy/150127iotrpt.pdf). 46. Jeff St. John, “US Smart Meter Deployments to Hit 70M in 2016, 90M in 2020,” Greentech Media, October 26, 2016, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/US-Smart-Meter-Deployments-to-Hit-70M-in-2016-90M-in-2020. 47. Aghaei and Alizadeh, “Demand Response in Smart Electricity Grids Equipped with Renewable Energy Sources: A Review.” 48. Christopher Findlay, “Strength in Numbers: Merging Small Generators as Virtual Power Plants,” Living Energy 4 (2011), http://www.energy.siemens.com/us/pool/hq/energy-topics/publications/living-energy/pdf/issue-04/Living-Energy-4-Virtual-Power-Plants.pdf. 49.

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Utilities then oversize system components so that in the worst case—say, on a hot summer day with very high power demand from air conditioning—a substation or power line can deliver as much electricity as customers instantaneously need, even if that equipment is underutilized most of the year. Finally, most utilities have very little live information about how much power flows over the distribution grid. Until very recently, when some U.S. utilities began to roll out smart meters, they had no idea how much energy each customer consumed until a meter reader paid a monthly visit. These features make the power grid more expensive than it needs to be, and its sprawling infrastructure has innumerable points of potential failure that threaten the whole system. Utilities, meanwhile, have no incentive to move away from this paradigm.

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 data used by Nazis in the Netherlands—William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, “The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses,” Social Research 68 (2001), pp. 481–513. [>] On IBM and the Holocaust—Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Crown, 2003). 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.

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Washington Post, July 19, 2010 (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/). Query, Tim. “Grade Inflation and the Good-Student Discount.” Contingencies Magazine, American Academy of Actuaries, May-June 2007 (http://www.contingencies.org/mayjun07/tradecraft.pdf). Quinn, Elias Leake. “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). Reshef, David, et al. “Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets.” Science (2011), pp. 1518–24. Rosenthal, Jonathan. “Banking Special Report.” The Economist, May 19, 2012, pp. 7–8. Rosenzweig, Phil.

pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

With the aid of sophisticated software monitoring, automated smart meters, and optimized, price-driven timing for individual device use, localized in-home “nanogrids” can receive a high-tech level of micromanagement that puts public utilities’ region-wide load-management strategies to shame. The revolution that started with smart thermostats like Nest and Ecobee is poised to go a lot further. But this low-cost, low-carbon-footprint future depends on two things: decentralized control of the energy system (of power generation, distribution, and consumption) and the capacity to design and run an intelligent system of interconnected smart meters and Internet-connected appliances and devices that respond to price signals.

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The community was motivated by a desire to give environmentally conscious consumers and users the capacity to know they are buying clean, locally generated power as opposed to just helping pay their utility buy renewable credits that fund green energy production elsewhere in the United States. In the Transactive Grid, building owners install solar panels that are then linked together with those of their neighbors in a distribution network, using affordable smart meters and storage units, as well as inverters that allow the grid’s owners to sell power back to the public grid. The magic sauce, though, comes from a private blockchain that regulates the sharing of power among the smart meters, whose data is logged into that distributed ledger. And in the summer of 2017, LO3 took the process a step further by developing an “exergy token” to drive market mechanisms within and among decentralized microgrids such as Brooklyn’s.

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And in the field of solar energy, a team that Michael’s leading is exploring a model that would capture usage rights to energy generated in a communally owned microgrid as a way to funnel collateralized financing to off-grid communities that don’t have well-established legal and property title systems. Already, a team composed of IoT startup Filament, Nasdaq, and a team from IDEO Colab has found a way to integrate signals from a smart meter device with a blockchain so as to prove that a uniquely identified photovoltaic panel has produced and delivered a verifiable, measurable amount of solar power. In effect, that proven flow of power could be registered as a kind of certified claim to solar energy, which can then be traded or collateralized.

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

Pilot studies show that providing usage data to homeowners results in an average drop of 3–5 per cent in household electricity consumption.11 By allowing utilities to record usage patterns, smart meters also make it easier to detect theft and misuse. 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.

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Faults can be repaired remotely, obviating the need for a technician to manually do the job. Such sensors can also act as an early warning system in case of a power outage so that the problem can be rapidly identified and fixed remotely before it snowballs into a massive blackout like the ones that hit north India in 2012—the largest in recorded history.10 For consumers, smart meters can track electricity usage, transmitting information back to the power companies and to the consumers themselves. Consumers know exactly how much electricity they have been using, and this information can help prevent billing disputes. Utility companies can also start implementing time-of-day pricing schemes, charging customers a higher rate during times of peak load on the system.

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

The smart grid is also something of a movement, and as such it is the recipient of substantial and increasing investment from the federal government, utilities, industry, and investors. The best-known subset is grouped around advanced metering infrastructure, otherwise known as the smart meter. Current meters, which in some sense have been around all the way back to the days of Samuel Insull, may be read once a month. The smart meter, by contrast, is a two-way device packed with much more capability. It eliminates the need for meter reading by sending information directly back to the utility, which thus knows in great detail what is happening to its load in real time.

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At the same time, it provides homeowners with situational awareness about how much electricity they are using at any given moment. With the addition of a home-area network, that knowledge can be broken down appliance by appliance, so that the smart refrigerator or the smart television can talk to the smart meter. With all this knowledge—whether displayed on a control box, on the Internet, or on their cell phone—homeowners can turn things down or even turn them off to save money. The smart meter could, when overall demand is at the highest, enable the utility to reduce usage inside the house. For instance, during a heat wave that is straining the power system, the utility could reach out to people’s thermostats (with their approval) and raise the average setting from 68 degrees to 73 degrees.

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For instance, during a heat wave that is straining the power system, the utility could reach out to people’s thermostats (with their approval) and raise the average setting from 68 degrees to 73 degrees. (Some utilities are partway there with “paging” devices that enable them to cycle off air-conditioning every 15 minutes out of every hour.) If the electric car becomes common, the smart meter would also play a crucial role in managing recharging so that it is done late at night, off-peak, when demand is the lightest. The smart meter can do one more thing: verify energy savings. That could be essential if the utility is “paying” people to be more energy efficient. All this is directed toward achieving two objectives: One is sharing peak demand, which reduces the need to use the most expensive generating plants, saves money, and could reduce the need to build additional expensive new generating units.

pages: 271 words: 79,367

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

A megawatt hour saved by OhmConnect is identical to a megawatt hour generated by a highly polluting power station that is turned on especially to capture the very high prices paid at times of stress. When they get the alert, customers can then choose to reduce their demand by turning off air conditioning or pool pumps, which are big users of electricity, or any other appliances in their home. Ninety per cent of Californian homes have so-called ‘smart’ meters that collect information on electricity usage minute by minute and send it back to utilities or companies like OhmConnect. The app looks at the pattern of usage over the last days and weeks and estimates whether the homeowner has run the house with a lower than expected amount of electricity during the ‘OhmHour’.

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Interestingly, in winter electricity use declined over the whole day, not just the peak and there was little, if any, switching between periods of high and low prices. How does a utility such as the one in Ontario know when homes are using a lot of electricity? The answer is that it will have to install smart meters for all homes. Similar devices are gradually being put in UK homes to prepare for time-of-use tariffs. These meters can be set up to measure the amount of electricity used at differing times of the day and therefore calculate bills using the tariff for each slot. A householder or a business might be offered very low prices when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

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When I have too much electricity and you have too little, Sonnen’s platform sells you my excess. If it has been a cloudy December day all across Germany, the company buys in wind power or electricity from anaerobic digestion plants to fill the gap. All this is handled automatically via its central software platform and the smart meters that tell it second by second how much power your PV system is generating and how much is actually being used in the home. The promise to members of the scheme is that the electricity bought in by the utility from other generators will cost about €0.23 a kilowatt hour, a discount of about 25 per cent on current German prices (but still somewhat more expensive that fossil fuel-generated electricity in the UK).

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

All of that is coming in the very near future. And the other thing is that in the future there will be a lot more distributed generation. For example, there may be customers that are generating their own power through solar panels. We’re putting smart meters on everyone’s home so we can tell them—in the future—how much electricity they’re using at different times of the day. If customers want to be more efficient, these smart meters have the intelligence to tell them when they’re using a lot and determine what it is that’s driving usage up. Yourdon: I assume that’s just one small part of the overall buzzword of the “smart grid” that you folks in your industry are looking forward to over the next 10 or 20 years?

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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. As we go into more grid automation and smart meters and we can debate how smart they are, but meters to the extent that homeowners adopt a lot of home automation, and that remains to be seen, but there are a lot of people who are juiced about it. And we start to bring on a fair amount of electrical cars; electric vehicles; and the automation, billing, and management that is going to be in here.

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Yourdon: I assume that’s just one small part of the overall buzzword of the “smart grid” that you folks in your industry are looking forward to over the next 10 or 20 years? Blalock: Absolutely. There is lots of transformation coming in that area, and we will be leaders in helping move in that direction. I could talk forever about the things that we see coming, but I do think mobility and business analytics are going to be huge. I think the smart meters and the electric vehicles are two technologies, not necessarily in IT that are going to revolutionize our business in the way people are going to use electricity. Yourdon: It certainly makes a lot of sense. You know, there’s one kind of mundane answer that I was expecting everybody to give me that I haven’t really heard, and that is the response from people who say, “We’re depending on Moore’s Law to continue for another decade”—you know, the fundamental law that says computing power doubles in price performance every 18 months.

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

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.” It cautions that “children, pregnant women, seniors, those with immune deficiencies, medical conditions, pacemakers, and implants are particularly at risk.” According to the organization, the risks extend to animals and plants. Newspaper reports of the health effects of smart meters include headaches, interrupted sleep, dizziness, agitation, fatigue, skin rashes, ringing in the ears, leg cramps, and forgetfulness.

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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.

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See also names of individual states cold storage legislation, 196 support for domestic oils, 115 Status quo bias, 35 Steam-traction engines, 124 Steckel, Richard, 339n48 Steel, use in plows, 123 Steering wheels, 295 Stem cells, 15, 92 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 148 Stigmatization (demonization). See also Romanticization of alternating current, 144, 158–167, 171 of coffee, 45, 66 of margarine, 103 of new technologies, 8 product analogies and, 308–309 of technological innovation, 309 of telephone, 165–166, 309 of transgenic fish, 274 Stockholm, coffeehouses in, 62 Stop Smart Meters, 172–173 Storage goods, 186 Strasbourg, first printing of Bible in, 76 Street lighting, 146, 147, 149 Stupidity, Pessoa on, 280 Sublime Porte (Bâb-ı Âli), 83 Subramaniam, Chidambaran, 283 Subsidies to fishing industry, 259 Subsistence farming, 122 Substantial equivalence, 10 Success dynamics of, in scientific research, 327n115 factors affecting, 29–30 Succession in technological evolution, 326n106 Sufis, 47–48, 328n11 Sulfur dioxide, 190 Sulfuric acid, 179 Sultan of Cairo, 49 al-Sunbati, Ahmad ibn ’Abd al-Haqq, 50 Supermarkets, opposition to stocking of transgenic fish, 271, 273, 279 Supreme Court on antimargarine laws, 105 Diamond v.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

Although it was designed to help U.S. veterans who had been injured in combat, the prototype lost support and has not been manufactured since 2013. 6 Quoted from “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” Arthur Conan Doyle, 1893. 7 Independent researchers have demonstrated how devices such as smart meters and traffic sensors are vulnerable in the event of improper programming and encryption, human error, or taking advantage of the sheer number of devices that must be protected throughout a network. See Nicole Perlroth, “Smart Technology May Be Vulnerable to Hackers,” New York Times, April 21, 2015, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/smartcity-technology-may-be-vulnerable-to-hackers/. Dan Kaplan, “Black Hat: Assessing Smart Meters for Hacker Footprints, Vulnerabilities,” SC Magazine, July 25, 2012, http://www.scmagazine.com/black-hat-assessing-smartmeters-for-hacker-footprints-vulnerabilities/article/251947/. 8 In addition to Cisco’s dedicated focus on security, there are many independent groups highlighting the vulnerabilities of devices and how consumers can protect themselves, e.g.

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An innovator and his team have provided the world with a great technological advance, but it remains to be seen if global markets and political calculations will help in the creation of necessary supply chains.2 The “smart villages” of India, which must overcome the severe water shortage in that nation, will depend on exactly this sort of problem-solving. As for cities, the pursuit of a smart water delivery system is in the works in many of them, and it takes many forms. Some will rely on sensors to restrict waste. Others are exploring smart metering, which can more efficiently deliver water to agricultural and urban centers. Reading Diamandis and other thinkers who see the potential for exponential growth of technological solutions can drive away years of bad news. But is this “techno-optimism at its worst,” as one reviewer of Abundance complained?

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

I’ll say, ‘Of course.’” To date, 8.3 million homes in America have been equipped with smart meters covering 6 percent of the population. The number is set to grow to 33 million by 2011, while the worldwide total will reach about 155 million.12 Cisco Systems estimates that by the time it all gets built out, the energy grid will be one thousand times larger than today’s Internet.13 Meanwhile, a vast and growing number of companies are already lining up to offer consumers tools to help them make sense of the smart meter data. Typically leadership does not come from the companies that dominated the old industrial era of energy, but from a new generation of companies that understand the age of networked intelligence.

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Like other tech players in the emerging energy economy, Google is actively lobbying for open standards so that consumers are able to buy smart appliances, thermostats, or energy monitors from different companies and have them talk to each other. Personal Carbon Markets Pilots under way in Europe show how far the open-source grid concept could go. Homes across Europe, including Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Ruse (Bulgaria), and Cluj (Romania), have been equipped with advanced smart meters and sensor networks that track energy usage, efficiency, and overall household emissions to generate a real-time carbon footprint. Users pull up a Web-based interface to analyze the sources of their emissions, compare their home with the neighborhood, forecast household savings, or control their energy use remotely from a PC or a mobile phone.14 Like Google’s PowerMeter, the system developed by the Manchester City Council and its partners is an open platform, which means it can be seamlessly integrated with other applications for mobiles, TV, and social networks.

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The mere fact that neighborhood trading schemes and personal carbon allowances are even being debated is a sign that the efforts under way to make our infrastructure more intelligent and interactive will pay large dividends. As we argued in the previous chapter, it’s easier to remain aloof about climate change when the connections between our actions and the climate seem vague and hard to measure. But it becomes harder to simply ignore one’s personal responsibility when the smart meter on your wall not only shows you your real-time carbon footprint, but also compares your score to the neighborhood average and offers you tips on how to improve. Coupled with a real price for carbon, this new transparency and interactivity provides the fuel for truly creative responses to some of the world’s great challenges.

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

Orkney was pushed into experimenting because of the limited capacity of its connection to the mainland grid. Many islands around the world are following a similar path. Whether it be Hawai’i or the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast, the focus is on developing energy self-sufficiency by using advanced digital technologies, such as smart meters, to reduce dependence on energy from outside the area. Other places are beginning to notice these lessons. Many schemes now focus on trying to make ‘virtual islands’ in local areas. These also try to align the usage of electricity to its availability within a specific town or even smaller area.

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The LO3 microgrid in Brooklyn, New York, is often seen as a model for others around the world. There, a variety of homes and businesses buy and sell electricity from each other. A cinema with solar panels supplies power to a home down the street, while a bakery imports from a battery in the house across the road. Buildings with smart meters record electricity usage every second and communicate the information to the LO3 network. This enables management of supply and demand and settlement of bills for the sale of electricity by one participant to another. If demand is temporarily too great, an effective microgrid system can turn off or turn down flexible uses of energy, such as electric vehicle charging or air conditioning.

pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The resolution declared: “The United Nations Agenda 21 plan of radical so-called ‘sustainable development’ views the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms all as destructive to the environment.”14 Nor was this just right-wing rhetoric: the cities group Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI, described in some detail in Chapter 5) has become a particular target of Americans apprehensive about a loss of sovereignty. Simple conservation tools promoted by ICLEI, “smart meters” for example, have inspired an almost lunatic sense of peril. Such meters help measure electricity in the home and distribute its use to nonpeak hours, saving money and electricity for consumers and city budgets alike. Yet in Roanoke, Virginia, a protester insisted, “the real job of smart meters is to spy on you and control you—when you can and cannot use electrical appliances.”15 The Roanoke Board of Supervisors eventually voted to retain the city’s ICLEI funding, but only by a 3–2 vote.

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See “The West Must Be Honest about Its Role in Libya’s Violent Chaos,” The Guardian, September 16, 2012. 14. R. Burdett and D. Sudjic, eds., Living in the Endless City, London: Phaidon, 2011. 15. Leslie Kaufman and Kate Zernike, “Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot,” New York Times, February 3, 2012. The paranoia about smart meters is ironic in light of the newly revealed global surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency. 16. Charlie Savage, “Order on Interpol Work Inside U.S. Irks Conservatives,” New York Times, December 31, 2009. 17. Jean-Jacque Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 8; ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, in The Social Contract and Later Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 53–54. 18.

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See Virtues and vices of cities vs. countryside Villaraigosa, Antonio, 97, 145 Virtues and vices of cities vs. countryside, 29–49; American views of, 33–35; in arts and literature, 30–31, 37–39; backwardness of rural life, 37, 38, 40, 43, 48; capital cities in, 32–33, 35; cosmopolitan view, 36–37; decentrists on, 35–36, 45; dialectical view of, 41–43; European views of, 33; freedom and liberation, 30, 40; loss and decadence, 29–31; normative view of, 40–41; nostalgia for rural idyll, 29–31; opposing narratives on, 39–40; parks and public spaces, 44–48; and urban cowboys, 31–32 Voting: deliberative, 350, 390n28; online, 260 Walled towns, 60 Water: proximity to, 14–15, 60; safe drinking, 183, 206; smart meters for, 246 Wealth of cities, 55–58 Weapons of mass destruction, 128–129 Web. See Internet Weber, Max, 15, 42, 65 Weidman, Elaine, 247 Weiner, Anthony, 88 “We’re Number One!,” 115–116 Whitman, Walt, 3, 43, 53, 271–272, 281–282, 284–286 WICI (Women in Cities International), 122–123 “Wiki-government,” 266 Wiki-logic, 249, 252, 264 Wilderness, 64–65 Williams, Hank, Jr., 32 Williams, Raymond, 31, 39, 41, 191 Wilson, Robert, 272, 288 Wilson, William Julius, 221 Women: as mayors, 238–240; and microfinance, 230 Women in Cities International (WICI), 122–123 WOMEX (World Music Expo), 290 Workplaces, 63–64 World Conference of Mayors for Peace through Inner-city Solidarity, 122–123 World Economic Forum (Davos), 118–119 World Mayors Summit on Climate (Mexico City 2010), 6 World Music Expo (WOMEX), 290 World Wide Web.

pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

companies are building facial recognition technology into phones and cameras: Emily Steel and Julia Angwin, “Device Raises Fear of Facial Profiling,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303678704576440253307985070.html. technology to monitor your location: Keith Barry, “Insurance Company Telematics Trade Perks for Privacy,” Wired, August 19, 2011, http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/08/insurance-company-telematics-trade-perks-for-privacy/. wireless “smart” meters: Jim Marston and Joshua Hart, “Should Consumers Participate in Their Utility’s Smart-Meter Program?,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323415304578368683701371280.html. Google has developed Glass: “Glass,” Google Inc., accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/. The confidentiality of personal information: “Protecting Your Answers,” United States Census, 2010, https://www.census.gov/2010census/about/protect.php.

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Searching for a bra could trigger an instant bidding war among lingerie advertisers at one of the many online auction houses. And new tracking technologies are just around the corner: companies are building facial recognition technology into phones and cameras, technology to monitor your location is being embedded into vehicles, wireless “smart” meters that gauge the power usage of your home are being developed, and Google has developed Glass, tiny cameras embedded in eyeglasses that allow people to take photos and videos without lifting a finger. * * * Skeptics say: What’s wrong with all of our data being collected by unseen watchers? Who is being harmed?

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.

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Companies adopting production-class big data environments need faster and lower-cost ways to process large amounts of Chapter_05.indd 126 03/12/13 1:04 PM Technology for Big Data 127 Figure 5-3 A big data technology ecosystem Web logs HDFS Images and videos Operational systems Social media Documents and PDFs MapReduce Data warehouses Data marts and ODS Source: SAS Best Practices. atypical data. Think of the computing horsepower needed by energy companies to process data streaming from smart meters, or by retailers tracking in-store smartphone navigation paths, or LinkedIn’s reconciliation of millions of colleague recommendations. Or consider a gaming software company’s ability to connect consumers with their friends via online video games. “Before big data, our legacy architecture was fairly typical,” an executive explained in an interview.

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

Reading electricity usage every 15 minutes — a 2,880-fold increase in resolution from the monthly data it was getting from human meter-readers — the utility can detect power outages and quality problems immediately, and have detailed data on scale and location. In one case, Sumner says, meters in one neighborhood started to show voltage drops that suggested a transformer needed to be replaced. It was early spring and electricity demand was low; without smart meters, the problem would have manifested itself in the summertime when customers turned on their air conditioners. “Had we not done anything with it, we would have had a catastrophic failure,” he says. “Previously, we didn’t know what was going on at the customer level,” Sumner says. “Imagine trying to operate a highway system if all you have are monthly traffic readings for a few spots on the road.

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.

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• 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

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

Automated surveillance As surveillance technologies have become digital in nature and networked together it has become possible to automate various aspects of monitoring systems, and to add new techniques, to more effectively and efficiently track and trace the usage of different systems and places. An example of a manual form of surveillance that is increasingly becoming automated is smart metering. Here, automatic meter reading (AMR) technology is used to monitor and communicate utility usage without the need for manual reading (Hancke et al. 2013). Moreover, it can do these tasks on a continuous basis enabling a supplier to track usage in real-time, which has utility in matching demand with supply and in finding faults/leakage in a system.

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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: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

To return to Albert Hirschman’s futility-perversity-jeopardy triad, the first of those concerns doesn’t seem to be a problem. Unless they find a way to easily circumvent it, drivers will likely comply with the smart metering system; there’s no good reason to deem the scheme futile—at least not yet. A charge of perversity, too, is hard to substantiate: it’s not obvious how smart sensor-based metering could worsen the parking situation. What about jeopardy? Is there a “previous, precious accomplishment,” to use Hirschman’s language, that smart metering endangers? There is, of course, the standard set of criticisms associated with situational crime prevention discussed at length in Chapter 6.

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In this sense, the Santa Monica scheme is futile (in Hirschman’s sense) in that it doesn’t really alter how drivers and citizens relate to the problems of parking and congestion. Potentially, the scheme is also perverse, especially if it gives us citizens who no longer feel the need to show concern for other drivers, the city, or the environment whenever smart meters and other forms of policing are missing. Such schemes thwart the development of what we earlier called “narrative imagination” and what some design theorists call “system thinking”—an intellectual approach that grants complexity to both the causes and effects of a problem and, instead of reducing the roots of that problem to a handful of easily identifiable and controllable factors, seeks to redescribe them in the language of relations, structures, and processes.

pages: 571 words: 105,054

Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Lopez de Prado

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, G4S, Higgs boson, implied volatility, information asymmetry, latency arbitrage, margin call, market fragmentation, market microstructure, martingale, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, traveling salesman

H. et al. (2014): “Exploring irregular time series through non-uniform fast Fourier transform.” Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on High Performance Computational Finance, IEEE Press. Todd, A. et al. (2014): “Insights from Smart Meters: The potential for peak hour savings from behavior-based programs.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Available at https://www4.eere.energy.gov/seeaction/system/files/documents/smart_meters.pdf. Wu, K. et al. (2013): “A big data approach to analyzing market volatility.” Algorithmic Finance. Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 241–267. Wu, L. et al. (2016): “Towards real-time detection and tracking of spatio-temporal features: Blob-filaments in fusion plasma.

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.

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Mackenzie, A. (2016) ‘Code traffic: Code repositories, crowds and urban life’, in R. Kitchin and S. Perng (eds), Code and the City. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 72–87. Marcus, G.E. and Saka, E. (2006) ‘Assemblage’, Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3): 101–106. Marres, N. (2012) ‘On some uses and abuses of topology in the social analysis of technology (or the problem with smart meters)’, Theory, Culture & Society 29(4–5): 288–310. Martin, L. and Secor, A.J. (2014) ‘Towards a post-mathematical topology’, Progress in Human Geography 38(3): 420–438. McFarlane, C. (2009) ‘Translocal assemblages: Space, power and social movements’, Geoforum 40(4): 561–567. McLuhan, M. (1994) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

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!

Previously, using less sophisticated techniques, it might take days of computation to arrive at a useful result; now it can be done in seconds. In addition, as models are tested against real-world outcomes, they learn and get better over time. To see how stochastic optimization works, consider an electricity grid. Today, many electrical-distribution systems are outfitted with smart meters that make it possible for consumers and operators of the system to know how much energy is being used in real time. Based on that information, consumers can make informed choices about their consumption levels, and operators can predict with a reasonable certainty what demand will be at a specific time.

Live Green: 52 Steps for a More Sustainable Life by Jen Chillingsworth

carbon footprint, clean water, food miles, Indoor air pollution, Mason jar, microplastics / micro fibres, smart meter

Search online for the best deal and look for companies that provide 100% renewable electricity. HEATING Reduce the temperature on your thermostat by one degree and you’ll find a significant reduction in your bill, while barely noticing the difference. If you have thermostats on your radiators, set the temperature for each room that requires heating. GET A SMART METER These show you exactly how much energy you are using and how much it costs. Seeing the numbers creep up on the meter makes you think more about any energy you are wasting, encouraging you to make positive changes where you can. TELEVISION Did you know that the larger the television you have, the more electricity it uses?

pages: 121 words: 36,908

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

As an alternative, some cities are experimenting with various schemes for pricing street parking, often under the influence of UCLA parking theorist Donald Shoup.21 One of Shoup’s key themes is that urban governments should avoid under-pricing street parking, because to do so leads to Soviet-style shortages as described above, along with tedious rationing rules such as two-hour limits and the like. Under the influence of this theory, the city of Los Angeles decided to implement a wireless smart-metering system called LA Express Park. Sensors are installed in the pavement below each space, and they detect the presence of cars in a given area. The computerized system then automatically adjusts the price of parking depending on how many spaces are filled. When spaces are in high demand, the price can rise as high as $6 per hour, and when many spaces are available they can be as cheap as 50 cents.

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

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. The goal was to improve the efficiency of moving electricity across the grid, reduce the costs of maintenance, and keep more accurate records on customer usage.

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CPS and the city have already saved 142 megawatts of electricity in the past two years and have set a target of a 771-megawatt reduction in electricity use by 2020. Building on their already significant achievement in renewable energy generation of 910 megawatts, San Antonio expects to generate 1,500 megawatts of renewable energy by 2020.30 CPS is also beginning to assemble a smart grid, with a two-year initiative to install 40,000 smart meters in buildings across the metropolitan region. CPS has also entered into an agreement with GM to provide power charging stations for the Chevy Volt.31 All in all, San Antonio is on its way toward a TIR economy. COUNTERINTUITIVE COMMERCE The most important challenge facing CPS is transforming its business model and management style to accommodate the requirements of a new distributed-energy era managed by Internet communication technology.

Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Our “real” and “online” environments are converging, and digitalization will seemingly track individuals before their birth to their death.67 These developments may improve our welfare well beyond online commerce. For instance, health ser vices could provide faster response and monitoring through automated data collection. Smart meters and appliances can help optimize our electricity usage. Even our local authorities can optimize their ser vices by carefully collecting and using data from various sources.68 In the context of our discussion, one distinct trend is the shift from brick-and-mortar stores to online sites. We see this already with Amazon’s sprawling platform.

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It will become more proactive—making recommendations on entertainment, commenting on the music we listen to or the books we are reading. By complimenting and cajoling, sharing thoughts with us on recent events, sending personalized notes on special occasions, reminding us of presents, suggesting popular gifts trending among the recipient’s friends, and informing us about information from our smart meters and smart sensors, it will ingrain itself in our lives. We will wonder how we ever managed without a digital personal assistant. While we appreciate this free ser vice, we will not know its exact cost. When it joins our chats to make suggestions, or at times makes suggestions counter to those made by other helpers, we may not know whether it is being helpful or simply manipulating our behav ior.

pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

FUTURE GOVERNMENT The technologies in this book might be currently undermining democracy, but they also offer exciting opportunities to dramatically improve the way that government works. We need a bold programme of reform, which brings democracies up to speed. First, there’s scope for government departments to make better and more efficient decisions using data and AI. Smart meters could help save energy bills for people, welfare payments could be better targeted and police resources better allocated – provided this is all done ethically, with public involvement and with humans in the loop. Similarly, powerful AI used in the public interest could yield remarkable benefits in health research, spending decisions, intelligence, strategy and much more.

pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

the condensed idea Locally produced and distributed energy timeline 1816 First energy company established in USA 1821 First electric motor 1839 Discovery of photovoltaic effect 1882 First hydroelectric power plant 1888 Tesla invents AC alternator 1892 General Electric founded 1980 First US wind farm 2030 Wind farms start to be demolished 2035 Most homes engaged in local energy trading 2040 Personal energy harvesters become mandatory 13 Smart cities Stuff that was once “dumb” is becoming smart. Pipes, roads, buildings and even whole cities are no exception. Whether it’s smart meters for water supply, appliances that work out when it’s best to be switched on, or dynamic tolling for roads, we can expect more efficiency, less waste, faster fixing and more pricing that’s responsive to real-time demand. Back in the 1990s, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, wrote a book called Mirror Worlds.

Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Consequently, much of current smart city initiatives have focused on this area.Water – Without sufficient clean water, humans cannot sustain life. This means that any gains in efficiency or quality are particularly valuable for the city. Since water is a scarce resource, minimizing waste is also often a focus area. McKinsey estimates that water consumption can be lowered by 20–30%. This can be done with smart meters and leakage control. Energy – Is a fundamental need for almost every function of the city, and cities are main consumers of energy on a global scale. Similar to water, energy is a scarce resource that we try to reduce with initiatives like dynamic electricity pricing and smart lighting solutions that turn light on and off depending on need.

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

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. The better news is that this technology is already available.

pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

We conducted an interview recently with a candidate whose Producer status was unmistakable. When asked about a business he would like to pursue, he outlined a consulting practice aimed at helping organizations manage the risks of damage to the electric grid. Over the course of a twenty-minute conversation, he explained his view that the current thrust of investment in smart meters and at-the-source energy use management was overemphasized (as he put it, a relatively small problem with relatively limited profit potential) and that the real opportunity centered around the aging utilities’ infrastructure, grid damage caused by intensifying natural disasters, security concerns, and the risks that massive failure poses to all types of organizations—federal governments, local municipalities, insurance companies, as well as utilities, and other businesses.

pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioﬀ, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

THE INTERNET OF THINGS Over the past five years, thousands of manufacturing businesses around the world have quietly been investing huge sums of money into sensors and connectivity. They’ve been hard at work putting sensors into everything they make: doors, chairs, pipes, tiles, windows, tables, sidewalks, rebar, lights, shoes, bottles, tires, bricks, etc. According to various predictions, by 2020 we’re expected to have more than a billion smart meters, 100 million connected lightbulbs, more than 150 million 4G-connected cars, 200 million smart home units, several billion smart clothing units, more than 90 million wearables. And what do these sensors allow these products to do? Collect and transmit data—lots of it. All of these products will be beaming information back into centralized servers, so companies can start using analytic platforms to look for patterns and ways to improve things (you want to talk big data?

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

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.

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

The future of our economy lies in the clever exploitation of our informational surplus, and data-rich markets are the mechanisms and the places where we can achieve this. When artificial intelligence and Big Data meet the social reality of human coordination, we can become more sustainable. 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.

pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Another example of what is possible is Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, where investments by the government in public transport and cycle routes have made a car-free city a reality.49 Making buildings more energy-efficient is another major area of opportunity for cities, with the potential to reduce emissions and save money at the same time. Solar panels can be affixed to urban rooftops. Households can be equipped with smart meters to better understand their energy usage. Homes, offices, shops and the like can be insulated to reduce temperature variability. District heating systems can capture waste heat produced at industrial sites and use it to warm buildings throughout the city. Adding more green space to cities is also important.

pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Take your kids out of school, leave your nice house behind and wave your neighbours goodbye? * Warnings about digitisation are met with the same doubts and uncertainty. All day long we go around calling, sharing and liking. We enjoy the convenience the digital era has brought us – the smartwatches that monitor our heart rates, the smart meters that clock our energy consumption and the smartphones that let us navigate wherever we want to go. And, sure, we hear the warnings. Beware: these devices are minutely tracking your routines. Watch out: new threats are looming. States are increasingly using the internet to control and influence.

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.

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

He believes that, much like the telecoms sector after its liberalisation, Europe’s energy-sector deregulation will create competition, and push firms towards more frugal, distributed energy systems. Digitisation involves the convergence of energy technologies and digital tools that help to create connected homes and buildings. This convergence, Mestrallet believes, will help customers use energy more responsibly and cost-effectively (thanks to smart meters) and even enable some to produce their own energy (with advanced home-energy storage technologies). Deregulation is not the only reason utility firms such as GDF Suez are investing in decentralised and digitised energy-production systems. The bigger motivation is to respond to a structural economic trend not seen since the first world war: the deceleration of energy consumption in developed countries.

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

The networking of these digital things will also provide a huge spinoff for telecom companies and Internet service providers who will have to provide the traffic transportation between devices. Indeed, telecom companies are predicting huge increases in the number of SIMS and data modems integrated into all sorts of remote devices, such as vending machines, connected cars, trucks for fleet management, smart meters, and even remote health monitoring equipment, by 2020. Automation is the way forward and, as we have just seen, it relies heavily on effective M2M in the process chain. M2M should play a large part in the business convergence and digital transformation process, as it not only improves productivity through overall equipment effectiveness but also allows for new and innovative business models.

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

More and more countries intend to provide homes with “smart” electricity meters that can be remotely instructed to switch appliances off or that can limit total household power use to a set level—say, 3 kilowatts. Already, some French homes are fitted with meters that restrict energy consumption to this level. In Italy, almost all the customers of the main electricity company have smart meters and can reduce their bills by switching their electricity use to the times of day when prices are lowest. More advanced meters could be used to switch off non-critical machines such as dishwashers and washing machines at moments when wind power drops. The technology is already available to do this.

pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

Operational Data This is information about customers, suppliers, partners, and employees that is readily accessible in online transaction processing and/or online analytical databases. It typically includes transactional data, contact data, process data, and reference data such as master data. Enterprises often have the opportunity to collect even more information during the course of business via sensors or process monitoring such as: Log data, Smart meters, Internet-connected devices (e.g., IoT), Voice/phone, Security camera feeds, RFID, and Wireless signals. For example, XO Communications now analyzes 500 discrete customer data elements including call patterns, late or delinquent payments, and other vital signs. After just a four-month implementation, XO reduced customer churn by 47 percent, protecting $15 million in revenue.10 And Memorial Healthcare System integrated information from eight hundred disparate databases for greater visibility into vendor activities, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in vendor invoice cycle times that led to vendor discounts totaling over $2 million.11 Dark Data This is information collected during the course of business that remains in archives, is not generally accessible, or is not structured sufficiently for analysis.

pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

But, of course, it was a private company, with profits to cosset (£7.4 billion in 2018–19). Labour took its cue, making broadband coverage a theme in the 2019 election. For a decade the government hesitated and stood back, unwilling to think afresh about privatisation or its regulation. It refused to require train operators to speed up wi-fi provision or to link household smart meters with a data network. ‘Talks beset by infighting,’ reported the Financial Times, as O2, Vodafone, EE and Three tried to escape an Ofcom injunction to ensure 95 per cent of the UK’s landmass was covered. In a confused tangle of rebates on licences and opaque bargaining with the regulator, the companies’ disunity and the government’s unwillingness to push were exposed.

pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

Reduce bollocks purchases (lattes, meals at the health club and work lunches): £200. Ditch childcare (while both working full-time hours): £150. Ditch cleaner (DIY: easy after the physical declutter): £80. Ditch shared office (while retaining an office facility): £65. Renegotiate utility bill (gaining a smart meter): £35. Renegotiate mobile phone bills (while upgrading to 4G): £30. Petrol (through a reduced commute and increased use of our bikes): £25. Renegotiate landline/broadband (doubling speed): £10. Renegotiate life insurance (while increasing cover): £5. Total Monthly Savings: £900.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

With a colleague, Joe Philip, who is Indian American and had been working at the renewable energy start-up SunEdison, Poindexter put together a small round of financing in 2015, and they started their first project in the Kumasi region, under the Black Star Energy label. (Check out the Ghanaian flag and you’ll get the name.) None of it was easy. American-style smart meters, at fifty bucks a pop, were way too expensive, for instance, so Philip and his team built their own, at a buck apiece, with chips ordered from Amazon. Kumasi, the regional capital, where Black Star’s headquarters was located, had grid power as unreliable as everyplace else in Ghana, making the office almost impossible to work in.

pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

What about bringing back the house sparrow, by carefully focusing on both building design to create nesting sites and also their food supplies? There are many more people in cities so there are many more people to join in and benefit from a great resurrection of key species, and in the process the return of habitats.10 We mandate all sorts of requirements for buildings, from energy efficiency to smart meters and aesthetics, but fail to do so for nature. Indeed, many building regulations damage natural capital. The new green spaces Part of this return of nature to our towns and cities is about public spaces and public initiatives. But much of the wildlife potential is in the hands of private companies and individuals.

pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

This is the thinking behind Amazon’s anticipatory shopping patent.43 Instead of customers making their own decisions, Amazon decides for them, sending what they want before they know they want it. It is, as one commentator noticed, one more step towards cutting out human agency altogether.44 Pervasive monitoring devices – smartphones, wearables, voice-enabled speakers and smart meters – allow companies to track and manage consumer behaviour. The Harvard business scholar Shoshana Zuboff quotes an unnamed chief data scientist who explains: ‘The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale . . . we can capture their behaviours and identify good and bad [ones].

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

As discussed in the Cloud chapter, the interweaving of multiple and incongruous sovereign claims often hinges on how emergent platforms problematize and repurpose existing platforms (such as the intercontinental highway network and its federal stewards), and by how existing platforms steer that emergence toward its own publics. Moreover, the psychological anguish of relinquishing driver status would likely ensure whatever policies are initially put in place may be irrational and absurd. Today the populist backlash against smart meters installed in residences as end points of more efficiently managed energy networks is nothing compared to the resistance (both legitimate and delusional) that will meet the sunsetting of human-driven automobiles. In important ways, however, the moral high ground may be with the robots. Gary Marcus writes, “Eventually (though not yet) automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles.

…

See also land versus sea beyond the line, 30 French versus English concepts of, 380n15 search, 112, 118, 136–138, 202–203, 332, 342 “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation” (Dyson), 106 Seasteading Institute, 180 secession, 177, 306–307, 309–314, 336, 447n43 second planetary computer, 300–301 secular disenchantment, 426n46 Securities and Exchange Commission, Regulation National Market System, 451n63 securitized entertainment, 156 security imagine no lines/imagine nothing but lines, 324, 355 interfacial security regimes, 345 post-Oklahoma City Bombing architecture, 322–323 trading for, 445n37 utopia of, 311, 321–325 security Apps, 241 seeing like a state, 8, 106, 120, 333 self, the care of, 126, 261 dissolution of, 263 fabrication of, 126 mirror reflection of, 253, 264 quantification of, 258–263 self-knowledge through numbers, 261 technologies of, 348 self-identity of the User, 258, 261, 263, 274, 345, 362 self-image geographic, 144 human, 71, 253 of the User, 253, 261 self-knowledge through numbers, 261 self-mapping swarms, 265 self-realization, 129 self-reflection of the User, 252–253 semantics of the address, 193 semantic web, 202–203 “sensing like a state,” 340 sensing networks, 303 sensors blanketing Earth, 97, 180, 192, 198, 295 design questions, 342 forming a Cloud of machine sensation, 340 future of, 342 mobile phones as, 342 as User/User as, 340 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 321, 363 Serres, Michel, 1, 19, 75, 210, 222–223, 238 Shanghai World Expo (2010), 257–258, 285, 289 Shannon information, 205, 296–297 Shannon's law (Shannon-Hartley Theorem), 92, 393n52 Shaping Things (Sterling), 201 signaling, 148 “Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit” (Srinivasan), 312–314 Simondon, Gilbert, 272, 405n26 Singleton, Benedict, 43–44, 288 singularity, 401n51 Siri for iOS, 277, 286 skeuomorphic interface designs, 139, 224, 339 skin. See also Earth designability of, 352–353 everywhere is, 355 human, 88 question of, 392n42 Sky Ear (Haque), 392n40 SkyGrabber, 401n45 Sleep Dealer (Rivera), 308 Smarr, Larry, 267–270, 285, 288 smart cities, 147–148, 160–162, 179, 181 smart dust, 201 smart grids, 92–96, 393n53 smart meters, resistance to, 283 smart space design questions, 201 smart surfaces, 198 Smart2020 (Climate Group), 93–94 Smithson, Robert, 53, 86, 178 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 400n42 Snowden, Edward, 35, 121, 287, 405n16 social body, inside/outside of, 22 social capital/social debt, 127 social imaginary, 233 socialism, 332 socialist pricing problem, 333, 369 social media, 9, 262–263, 428n58, 431n70 social nudity, 285 social space, 125–128, 169, 424n41 social systems City layer as, 157–159 classlessness in, 439n65 inclusion/exclusion in, 308–309, 311–312, 317 social-technical form, emergence of a new, 176 social Turingism, 80 social wallet, 127 software architecture, 166 constructing new civilizations, 181 design, 254–255 envelopes, 167 interfaciality, 167 language versus technology dichotomy, 60 law as code, 327 mixed programs, designing for, 168–172 and sovereignty, 20, 303 translegal forms, 355–356 software espionage, 398n21 software program, 43 software-space coprogramming, 237–238 solar energy, 106 Soleri, Paolo, 178–179 solidification and liquefaction, 379n9.

pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

The geopolitics of carbon shifted east and the EU became sensitive to its dependency after Russia started using its gas and oil as a diplomatic tool: why manoeuvre tanks when you can turn off the taps? By 2015 the UK would depend on imports of gas for 75 per cent of supply, and the regulator Ofgem said the UK gas market faced a cliff edge in 2015. To secure supply and cut carbon, Ofgem said the UK should invest £200 billion by 2020 in smart meters, transmission, renewable heating, wind and nuclear. The challenge was ideological as much as practical because cutting carbon meant more state action. Liberalized gas markets simply did not give firms enough incentive to invest – even the CBI agreed with that. Of course the UK still sat on top of millions of tonnes of potentially usable carbon.

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

Global e-Sustainability Initiative and Accenture Strategy, #SMARTer2030: ICT Solutions for 21st Century Challenges (Brussels: Global e-Sustainability Initiative, 2015), http://smarter2030.gesi.org/downloads/Full_report.pdf. 56. Yolande Strengers, “Bridging the Divide between Resource Management and Everyday Life: Smart Metering, Comfort and Cleanliness” (PhD diss., RMIT University, 2010). 57. Yolande Strengers, Larissa Nicholls, and Cecily Maller, “Curious Energy Consumers: Humans and Nonhumans in Assemblages of Household Practice,” Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 3 (November 2016): 761–780; Larissa Nicholls and Yolande Strengers, “Peak Demand and the ‘Family Peak’ Period in Australia: Understanding Practice (In)flexibility in Households with Children,” Energy Research and Social Science 9 (September 2015): 116–124. 58.

pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

And since that record is stored on every computer in the network, it acts as a public ledger that cannot be altered, corrupted or deleted, making it a highly secure digital backbone for the future of e-commerce and transparent governance. One fast-rising digital currency that uses blockchain technology is Ethereum, which, among its many possible applications, is enabling electricity microgrids to set up peer-to-peer trading in renewable energy. These microgrids allow every nearby home, office or institution with a smart meter, Internet connection, and solar panel on its roof to hook in and sell or buy surplus electrons as they are generated, all automatically recorded in units of the digital currency. Such decentralised networks – ranging from a neighbourhood block to a whole city – build community resilience against blackouts and cut long-distance energy transmission losses at the same time.

pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

It should be clear that many people - not just company employees - have contributed to their competitive advantage. How we govern technology affects who shares in the benefits. The digital revolution requires participatory democracy, keeping the citizen, not big business or big government, at the centre of technological change. Take smart meters, for example; Morozov argues that if they are closed boxes transferring information, ‘what we are doing is essentially introducing more and more closed systems which simply seek to capture rent from infrastructure that has been funded by us, without letting us the citizens take advantage of the same infrastructure for our own purposes and our own monitoring of the government, whether it is the city, or the national government'.7 With this in mind, we can move beyond the idea of public goods as ‘corrections', that is being limited to areas that need fixing (due to positive externalities that they generate), to being ‘objectives'.

pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

But the city lacked the staff to enter all of them manually into a database so that people could pay them. The city halted its scofflaw program, which booted cars with multiple unpaid citations, and made sure that people who had been unable to pay their tickets didn’t face late fees or have their licenses suspended. Water billing had also gone digital. In 2016, the city installed smart meters in homes to record water consumption. Now more than a hundred servers with water billing records were useless, and DPW couldn’t process the data or generate monthly bills. All it could do was urge residents to put money aside or come to the office and pay as much money as they wanted credited to their accounts.

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

“The situational awareness of the system might allow operators to reconfigure the system, either before or after the event, to maintain service,” Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, an engineering professor at Rice University who is developing resilience metrics for critical infrastructure systems, told me. “As a hurricane approaches, operators could ‘island’ areas that look like they will get the most damage. This breaks the system into small clusters and prevents cascading failures. It gives the operators more control, more capacity to keep the power going or get it back.” Smart meters also enable consumers to go online anytime to learn when and how they use energy and how much they’re spending. Already there’s evidence that customers with this information are adjusting their behavior accordingly: easing off on air conditioning, drying their clothes at night. But reducing individual demand through such neoliberal programming will only go so far.

pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

1. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/facebook_ipo_has_social_networking_supplanted_real_innovation_in_silicon_valley_.html. Chapter 26. Financial Identity 1. See Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010). Chapter 28. The Interface to Reality 1. http://www.firstround.com/our_focus/. 2. http://www.naturalnews.com/036476_smart_meters_hacking_privacy.html. Chapter 29. Creepy 1. See http://www.fellowgeek.com/a-US-security-firm-hacked-by-Anonymous-ix1113.html and http://www.esecurityplanet.com/hackers/panda-security-hacked-lulzsec-is-your-website-safe.html. 2. http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html. 3. See http://totalrecallbook.com/.

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

Therefore, at least three service classes are deﬁned for 5G: (1) Conventional broadband applications, also termed enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), e.g. for video streaming and downloading map material. (2) Time-critical, reliable applications, e.g. for automated and autonomous driving. (3) Sensor applications with an extremely high number of devices and very low electricity consumption, e.g. smart metering. In Europe, some carmakers, telecommunications companies and network operators have already jointly formulated their requirements for 5G technology, which will successively ﬂow into the standardisation committees. The 5G standardisation started in 2016 and is to be completed by 2019. The main challenge consists of creating a shared interface between the car platform and the 5G network.

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

Those can be all consuming and we've got a company to run. We have a tremendous amount of interaction with customers and the technologists within the customer base. That's where most of our new product ideas come from. S. Donaldson: What are examples of some of the partners that you deal with? Tolnar: Examples would be smart metering companies, they're in our space, but in an adjacent space. Other partners could include Siemens, SAIC, and Schneider Electric. They're in adjacent space with very little overlap. What we always try to do is make a build-buy-partner decision. If we've got a sustainable differentiation in intellectual property, we will typically build.

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

Vaccines are filling kids up with all sorts of toxins plus aborted fetal tissue.38 Glyphosate is killing farmers in a way that asbestos could only dream of, but that information is being actively suppressed from the public by Monsanto.39 Cell phones are probably going to end up sterilizing an entire generation of men from being kept in their front pockets. 5G is going to cook people from the inside like microwave popcorn, and smart meters are filling people with electromagnetic pollution.40 There is little doubt that future generations will shake their heads in dismay when they look back at this generation’s willingness to be used as guinea pigs the same way this generation looks at the old cigarette ads showing four out of five doctors recommending Lucky Strikes to their patients.

pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In his talk, Chen drew comparisons between the military and business, and his slide deck showed a picture of a soldier holding a rifle. Another controversial project that McKinsey pushed in China focused on “smart cities.” The idea of smart cities is to make urban areas more livable by using networked cameras to better manage traffic, or to reduce water and electricity use through “smart” meters that can send information back to a central location. McKinsey promoted this idea around the world. McKinsey took part in a 2018 smart cities conference in southern China alongside a government commission that descended from the Mao-era state planning bureaucracy. In 2019 the senior partner Sha Sha, one of the firm’s first local hires, spoke at the China Smart City Expo.

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

Other cities are using intelligent sensors for regulating utilities, designing flood-defence systems, regulating traffic lights and flow, reducing emergency vehicle response times, speeding baggage flows through airports, locating parking spaces for drivers, optimising waste management, reducing peak-load demand on electric grids and even cutting crime rates. Masdar, a new city being built in the desert of Abu Dhabi, has many of these elements designed into it from the start. The entire city is on a raised platform so that the smart-metered services – from waste to water – can be monitored and accessed from underneath. Masdar plans to be carbon neutral and is powered by an enormous solar station and wind farms, with buildings that incorporate smart shading, solar panels and architecture to maximise cooling breezes. The city, which aims to be completed by 2020, is car-free with above- and below-ground driverless electric transport pods that operate like a personal rapid transit system.

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

Moreover, advancements in technology such as the availability of IPv6, smaller and powerful processors, and better internet access have also played a vital role in the popularity of IoT. The benefits of IoT range from cost saving to enabling businesses to make vital decisions and thus improve performance based on the data provided by the IoT devices. Even in domestic usage IoT equipped home appliances can provide valuable data for cost saving. For example, smart meters for energy monitoring can provide valuable information on how the energy is being used and can convey that back to the service provider. Raw data from millions of things (IoT devices) is analyzed and provides meaningful insights that help in making timely and efficient business decisions. The usual IoT model is based on a centralized paradigm where IoT devices usually connect to a cloud infrastructure or central servers to report and process the relevant data back.

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

Smart electricity meters in your home could turn the washing machine off and the heating down at peak times when prices are high and also allow you to sell surplus electricity to the grid from solar panels or a wind turbine on your roof. A global pioneer is Italy’s Enel, the state-owned energy utility, which has deployed more than 30 million smart meters to its customers since 2001.552 The internet is also making it easier to connect people who want to rent out rooms, cars and all sorts of other things with those who want to borrow them – a new sharing economy that offers huge potential for growth. Airbnb, a company based in San Francisco, allows people to rent out accommodation for the night; by the end of 2013 ten million people had used its services, many of them in Europe.553 It now has several European rivals: Wimdu and 9flats, both based in Berlin, and London-based onefinestay, which also offers upmarket services.

pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

The reason could be that he does not know about LEDs, or that he forgets to buy them when he goes to the shop, or that he cannot make up his mind about just how much a premium he is willing to pay for the LEDs because he has a hard time putting a number on how much he really cares about preventing climate change. Would such a person be better or worse off if the government banned non-LED bulbs? Or if bans seem too extreme, the government could “nudge” people gently toward choices that are better for the environment. For example, smart meters now afford the possibility of charging higher prices for electricity during peak hours, compensated by lower prices the rest of the time; this would be better for the environment. A recent study in Sacramento, California, found that only 20 percent of users actively chose such plans when they were made available.23 And yet when a plan like this was made the default for (randomly chosen) users who then had the option of switching back to the traditional plan, 90 percent of them stayed on it, and those who stayed indeed used less energy.

pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

And when the stories the right tells aren’t fantastical enough, Jones goes all the way: he doesn’t just oppose firearms regulation, he has been a Sandy Hook truther, insisting two years after the massacre that it was “a synthetic completely fake [event] with actors.” The evil lurks everywhere. Life is a horror movie. “What’s coming to take over,” he says, “is your smart car taxing you by the mile, what’s coming to get you is the smart meter frying you in your house, what’s coming to get you is fluoride in the water, what’s coming to get you is cancer viruses in the vaccines, what’s coming to get us is the soft-kill New World Order.” The advertising on Jones’s various media platforms illustrates the overlaps among regions of make-believe.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

There are an estimated 24 billion connected devices in use in 2021, growing 10 percent annually to an estimated nearly 30 billion devices by 2023. As the internet expands, it is bringing both more people and devices online. By 2023, there will be an estimated 5.3 billion internet users, or two-thirds of the world’s population. IoT devices, which include smart meters, medical devices, home appliances, and industrial applications, are growing even faster than users and by 2023 are expected to account for over half of all connected devices. These devices create data and share it across a global network that trafficked an estimated over 250 exabytes of data per month in 2020.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Trying to explain that the target platform has 15% of an ARM7 TDMI and 18K RAM available and that no operation can tie up the CPU for more than 2ms before it’s killed by the system watchdog won’t have much effect. This became particularly problematic when smart meters started to become widespread and regulators imposed requirements for certificate-based signed messaging and updates onto CPUs like TI MSP430s, Motorola ColdFires, and ARM Cortex-Ms, some clocked as high as 16MHz and with as much as 32kB of RAM (for everything, not just the crypto). The solution with smart meters was to cut corners as much as possible in order to make things fit, skipping certificate verification, assuming hardcoded public keys, and various other measures that are destined to become entertaining Black Hat or Defcon presentations in the future.

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

The smart intergrid is made up of three critical components. 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.

pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

Obama and his advisers decided that day to design the stimulus to make a down payment on their major domestic priorities—particularly clean energy. Franklin Roosevelt’s stimulus during the Depression years had built national park facilities; Obama’s bill, they concluded, should launch a new era of investment in solar energy, wind power, other clean energy technology, “smart” meters to regulate home electricity use more efficiently, upgrades to the national electric grid transmission system, home weatherization, and energy efficiency programs. These expenditures ultimately would total $80 billion. The renewable energy advocates around Obama recognized, however, that the long-term economic viability of solar and wind power would depend on whether dirtier, cheaper sources of energy such as oil and coal would be taxed—directly or through cap and trade.