Category Archives: Energy

Energy, Food, Security

Walk, Don’t Run. Drive, Don’t Walk.

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Energy consumption and emission is the focus of this mind-bending, paradigm-shifting article in the Times Online.

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Similarly, it seems an airline mogul has been pointing out that beef eaters are a bigger problem for the environment than those who fly:

Michael O’Leary, boss of the budget airline Ryanair, has been widely derided after he was reported to have said that global warming could be solved by massacring the world’s cattle. “The way he is running around telling people they should shoot cows,” Lawrence Hunt, head of Silverjet, another budget airline, told the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. “I do not think you can really have debates with somebody with that mentality.”

Statistics are a funny thing, as everyone from Groucho Marx to Mark Twain has famously observed. The question is, however, what really impacts people in their daily life.

The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. “This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,” Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. “Don’t buy anything from the supermarket,” Mr Goodall said, “or anything that’s travelled too far.”

And to think that kids who sat on the couch and ate bowls of cereal were derided for not keeping a healthy lifestyle. Little did we know they were really trying to save the planet…if you don’t count the marathon television and video game sessions.

Energy, Food, Security

The Challenges of a Bio-Refinery Model

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The problem with starting a company that is supposed to be good for the environment is that the owners have a big moral dilemma (e.g. a market opportunity) when faced with the waste (e.g. byproducts) they produce.

The NYT reports that industrial chemists in America are seeking ways to make profit from biofuel beyond its primary use. Scientists are working on disposal alternatives for fuel byproduct:

In another lab at Iowa State, Robert C. Brown is using distillers’ dry grain —a main byproduct of corn ethanol that is largely sold as animal feed — to produce hydrogen and a compound called PHA. Mr. Brown hopes his version of PHA, which is biodegradable, could be used for surgical gowns and gloves that must now be disposed of as medical waste.

Ethanol as a fuel is as much a dead-end for our general welfare as corn-syrup is for food, but don’t try to tell that to an industry trying to squeeze every penny out of crops while externalizing risks. Concerns for the welfare of the planet, let alone a fellow human, are not the usual rules of game here. The value system underlying the research is based on the much older highly-industrialized model of finding profit in areas without regulation (e.g. to ensure health). The news these days usually attributes this kind of risky behavior to China , rather than right in our own back yard.

The price of glycerol, now 20 to 50 cents a pound, could drop as low as 5 cents a pound as biodiesel production increases.

Mr. Kraus [professor of chemistry at Iowa State] said the higher quality glycerol made with the new process could command a much higher price. “What we see,” he said, “is an opportunity to make something that might cost 80 cents a pound.”

Money talks. In sum, it appears that the bio-fuel innovators are starting to try and emulate the model they think of as successful:

This, in turn, could help transform the biodiesel industry into something that more closely resembles the petroleum industry, where fuel is just one of many profitable products.

“Just like petroleum refineries make more than one product that are the feedstock for other industries, the same will have to be true for biofuels,” said Kenneth F. Reardon, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Biorefining is what the vision has to look like in the end.”

The problem with this is that the petroleum industry model is unhealthy. It puts the environment, including human health, low on the list of priorities for success.

In an emerging market where health and the environment threaten to be a top priority, a big paradigm shift for the vision of a bio-refinery seems like a sensible conclusion. More than one product, indeed, but waste disposal should have a whole new meaning. Or as the Director of Beijing Olympics cycling events put it recently

[President of the International Olympic Committee] Rogge’s comment reminds us that we have to work harder to fix environmental problems.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. After billions have been spent, pollution and waste are still a problem, which means a market opportunity of many more billions ahead.

Energy, Poetry, Security

Edinburgh bans SN07 from IDs

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This seems odd to me. What will regulators think of next? Will they ban actual snot?

The BBC explains the risk in an article humorously called “DVLA says ‘offensive’ SN07 number plates are snot allowed“.

The change means that cars registered in the capital are the only ones in Scotland not to begin with an S.

A DVLA spokesperson said the decision to change the plates was taken to avoid offending car buyers in the capital.

She added: “It is our policy that any registration mark that can be construed as being offensive to people will be suppressed.

“In this case, the SN07 marks would have been too similar to the word ‘snot’ and, as that could possibly offend some buyers, they were replaced with new TN07 registrations.”

Snot is really offensive to people? Another story by the BBC suggests the opposite, that poetry about snot is a good way to help children learn about health and medicine. Yes, poetry about snot:

North London GP Nick Krasner, has harnessed the fascination for all things “icky” to entertain and educate.

In ‘Oozing Medical Poems’ he tackles the issues of bugs, appendicitis and personal hygiene through 11 poems aimed at seven to 11-year-olds.

How offensive. Well, at least now plates from Scotland will be harder to identify. Wait, wasn’t that the point of the S?

Maybe they should have changed the N instead of the S? Is SP07 offensive to anyone? What about SC07?

Meanwhile, in American news, a federal judge has ruled that the state of Illinois is required to offer license plates with controversial political slogans:

A federal judge yesterday ordered state officials to offer license plates with the pro-adoption motto “Choose Life,” brushing aside claims that the slogan is really a thinly disguised anti-abortion message.

No, that’s not an anti-abortion plate. It’s an anti-war message. Maybe the pro-life lobby will push for a plate that says “If you’re running on gasoline, you just killed a marine.” Too controversial? To be clear the plate perhaps should read “choose life, unless it gets in the way of oil and pride, then shoot freely”.

Former state Sen. Patrick O’Malley, R-Palos Park, another sponsor, said in a telephone interview last night that it made no difference even if “Choose Life” did represent an anti-abortion slogan.

“Does that make it bad?” O’Malley said. “Whether it is or it isn’t you should still be allowed to express yourself.”

O’Malley clearly does not have a problem with SN07 on his ID. I guess he would also support the MPEACHW plate owner who is being asked by the state of South Dakota to surrender her personalized ID. The Rapid City Journal explains:

State law declares motor vehicle licenses plates to be the property of the state as long as the plates are valid. The law also allows personalized plates with as many as seven letters for an extra $25 fee. But it gives DMV officials the right to refuse to issue “any letter combination which carries connotations offensive to good taste and decency.�

Hillmer said MPEACHW meets that criterion. The plates never would have been issued if DMV officials had caught their meaning at the time Moriah applied, Hillmer said.

“This was one that we apparently missed when it came through originally, and we received a complaint from an individual that found it offensive,� she said, declining to identify the individual or provide the contents of the complaint. “I don’t think we ever would have issued it if we’d have picked up on what it was inferring.�

So there you have it. A manual process, perhaps a mere individual, sitting and looking at untold license plate applications and trying to decipher meanings to protect the public from harm. Is that person a trained linguist? A code analyst? Will computers be increasingly used to search a database for offensive patterns? The concept of a state-owned identity that can be personalized presents interesting cross-section of philosophy, security and technology.

Energy, Security

Car-2-Car System Risks

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I stepped out of my home the other day and saw a man laying on the ground, his new scooter a few feet away on the ground leaking oil. A small crowd had gathered around him as he described his injuries and what had happened. “A woman in a car just swerved from the far right over to the left and hit me” he said as he nursed his left shoulder and minded a scrape to his ankle. The armored jacket and helmet had clearly helped avoid further injury. He should have been wearing boots.

It seemed highly plausible that someone trying to make a last-minute left turn had decided it would make sense to abruptly cross three lanes without signaling and did not see a scooter coming. She might not have even looked at all and thought she could react in time if something appeared. After she hit the man, she apparently told a pedestrian she was going to park and then come back. Of course she never returned.

I immediately thought a vehicle sensor system could have saved this man and his scooter from injury, and perhaps even given him the identification information of the driver who swerved.

On the flip side, what if the car had some kind of positioning radar that showed another moving object within close proximity and therefore gave a warning siren when the driver tried to steer towards it? This is the same basic system as people now have in their rear bumper for backing up in tight spaces, but would be based on more sophisticated in-flight sensors.

The downside to a system like this, I simply couldn’t avoid, would be all the regular privacy concerns. In particular, should the system capture VIN and/or plate information? That would be useful in a hit-and-run scenario. Both of these could hardly be called secret information, but the ability to collect them remotely and compile them raises the risk to our privacy to a whole new level. Credit card security uses this line of reasoning; a person swiping a single card at a time is not a primary concern for data security standards, but a system that reads cards and stores the information is high risk.

I left the scene after helping move the scooter to a safe spot (it had toppled in the middle of a lane) and ensuring that the injured man was in good hands (rescue squad just pulling up).

Now I come to find out that something very similar to what I was thinking is already underway around the world:

The near-collision warning is a demonstration of technology that is expected to be rolled out to all shapes and sizes of cars in the coming years.

It is being developed by the European Car-2-Car consortium and is backed by General Motors, Audi, BMW, Fiat, Honda, Renault and a range of in-car hardware manufacturers and several universities.

The security implications of the system are absolutely stunning:

GPS tracks the position of the car while sensor data from the car – such as speed, direction, road conditions and if the windscreen wipers are on and if the brakes have been stamped on – is monitored by the on-board computer.

A wireless system similar to existing wi-fi technology – based on the 802.11p protocol – transmits and receives data to and from nearby cars, creating an ad-hoc network.

Data hops from car to car and the on-board computers can build a picture of road and traffic conditions based on information from multiple vehicles across a great distance.

Cars travelling in opposite directions can share information about where they have been and so informing each other about where they are going.

Wouldn’t you like to share all that information with a car nearby, especially someone you are trying to get away from? What about spoofed data or non-repudiation? How will this system handle people running secondary boxes to fool nearby drivers?

They say the system will rely on multiple signals, as though from multiple vehicles, but what is to stop someone from running five boxes themselves to get motorists to slow down (e.g. a cranky neighbor who wants cars in to slow while passing by)?

I suspect there will have to be a certificate system at the core of this and that begs the question of who will become the authority to all these devices? The government? Does that make them also the master repository of the information? Driving is said to be a privilege, not a right, so will someone make the case that it is ok to trace and trap the whereabouts of every vehicle at all times? Will code violations and fines be issued based on this system?

Professor Horst Wieker, from the department of telecommunications at the University of Applied Sciences, Saarbruck, said the aim was to create “foresighted driving”.

He said: “This technology allows us to build a short-range and long-range picture of road traffic conditions.

Further research brought me to a similar approach in 2004 at the University of Rutgers.

The intent sounds fine, except for the fact that there is no mention of the security implications of collecting this kind of information. Drivers tend to use and dispose of information immediately. No one at the scene of the accident could remember more than a few letters of the license plate from the car involved. Technology could certainly help, but at what level of new risk? Are people adequately assessing the security trade-offs of data generated by a peer-to-peer system? It does not appear so. I suspect the automobile manufacturers working on this do not have a strong consumer information privacy group or advocate in house. Time to propose another lower-risk way to assess traffic conditions?

Singapore seems to have a different approach that is already working, but they also apparently based their system upon reducing the environmental and economic impact of gridlock and accidents.