The death of the "green energy" trade-off.

CNet reports on the predicted demise of the current vision of green energy where the energy is produced at high cost with massive government subsidies.

The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs features "The Crisis in Clean Energy--Stark Realities of the Renewables Craze," which offers a grim outlook for solar, wind, and other green technologies--a crisis that will make it tougher for the U.S. to address energy security, the trade deficit, and global warming. Another piece by Devon Swezey of the Breakthrough Institute, teeing off the Foreign Affairs article, calls it "The Coming Cleantech Crash."

Contrary to the report, I believe green energy will do well long-term. Today, electric energy is a commodity, therefore a new method of energy production has to be competitive with the old methods. Otherwise, it will not be widely adopted by businesses and consumers. As I wrote before, there are good technologies and business models available to companies that want to deploy solar panels in residential areas. A real breakthrough is still ahead of us, but we won't achieve it unless we drop the old thinking that green energy cannot become competitive without huge government subsidies.

tags: inertia, trade-off, problem, energy, synthesis, system, economics, business, model, psychology

Inventing the future

Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, sums up the 10,000-hour (10-year) rule for becoming an expert:

... it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas... The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

Now, if it takes 10 years to become an expert, one of the most important questions a would be expert faces on day one of his or her 10-year term is "In which area should I become an expert, so that my expertise will not get obsolete by the end of the full term?" One way (the best way?) to answer it is to create a new domain of expertise, as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, James Watson, Tom Perkins, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Zack Zuckerberg, and others had done before.



Another question, which arises on or beyond the 10-year expertise boundary, is how to avoid the curse of knowledge, a mindset that locks one's creativity within a set of "expert" assumptions.



tags: creativity, brain, system, mind, philosophy, technology, quote, timing, inertia, psychology

Three birds with one stone: the 105th anniversary of bottle recycling.

According to Feb 19, 2011 online issue of Berliner Zeitung, glass bottle recycling was invented and promoted by Carl Benz, of the Mercedes Benz fame, in the early 20th century. Concerned with broken glass that punctured car tires on the streets, the entrepreneur proposed to pay 2 phennings for a returned beer bottle. German beer manufacturers, who at the time began experiencing a shortage of empty containers, supported the idea, and the program became an almost overnight commercial success. As a result, car enthusiasts got into fewer accidents, beer enthusiasts got more money in their pockets, and beer producers got a cheap source of empty bottles. Win-win-win-... Eventually Carl Benz's invention served as a prototype for many other successful recycling programs: from paper, to metal, to plastic.

So, if somebody tells you "There's no such thing as a free lunch," it means he didn't spend enough time thinking about a creative solution.

tags: creativity, trade-off, problem, solution, invention, innovation, inertia, psychology

h/t http://neuraum.livejournal.com/787978.html

Problem-solving in context

In one famous experiment, the psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby showed that subjects often had difficulty solving a logical puzzle which required them to identify playing cards that failed to conform to a rule of play (this is called the Wason selection task). However, when the very same logical puzzle was reformulated as a problem of identifying people who had failed to conform to a rule of social behavior, the subjects performed very much better on the test. This led Cosmides and Tooby to conclude that our reasoning abilities are sensitive to context in ways that would have been beneficial for our ability to spot cheats during our evolutionary history.

Wilson, Robert. The Company of Strangers. revised edition. p. 75.

It appears, in many cases we fail to solve a problem because we don't understand - no, understand is not the right word here - we don't internalize the rules, i.e. we don't feel comfortable working and playing within the context in which the problem is presented. Transferred into a familiar context, the problem becomes an easy target. Therefore, finding the right context of a problem should be one of the first steps in a problem-solving process. Stripping the problem of professional jargon, explaining it to an 8-year-old would be good first steps.

tag: creativity, problem, solution, method, process, inertia, psychology, magicians

Trade-off of the day: privacy vs performance

A NYT article about HTML 5, an upcoming standard for web pages, describes potential problems the standard creates for user privacy:

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored on the user’s hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data. That could include a user’s location, time zone, photographs, text from blogs, shopping cart contents, e-mails and a history of the Web pages visited.

It is remarkable how tradeoff-based, standard, non-creative, non-inventive thinking builds privacy problems right into a major technology standard for the next 10-15 years. Engineers are educated and brought up with the idea that an improvement in one area has to lead to a deterioration in another. It's not entirely their own fault because they are trained to work and think within certain constraints. But even when they do have a chance to create a new technology from scratch, their psychological inertia guides them toward preserving bad old compromises, or, as in this case, making them worse than the old ones for the sake of "balance"!

...software developers and the representatives of the World Wide Web argue that as technology advances, consumers have to balance its speed and features against their ability to control their privacy.

WTF is balance?!

tags: psychology, inertia, tradeoff, problem, book, creativity, internet, security

BBC Science story: Dull jobs really do numb the mind

Boring jobs turn our mind to autopilot, say scientists - and it means we can seriously mess up some simple tasks.

Monotonous duties switch our brain to "rest mode", whether we like it or not, the researchers report in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

They found mistakes can be predicted up to 30 seconds before we make them, by patterns in our brain activity.

The team hopes to design an early-warning brain monitor for pilots and others in "critical situations".

This seems to be a localized version of the Einstellung effect. It affects people as well as organizations as a whole.

It's quite possible that art is a way to overcome the problem on the "culture" level. Similar to the way junk food parasitizes on our evolution-induced taste for fat and sugar, TV shows ride our need to un-dull ourselves from monotonous environment.

Scientific American proposes a grand scheme for solar power:

Solar energy’s potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption in 2006.

To convert the country to solar power, huge tracts of land would have to be covered with photovoltaic panels and solar heating troughs. A direct-current (DC) transmission backbone would also have to be erected to send that energy efficiently across the nation.

The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. We project that this energy could be sold to consumers at rates equivalent to today’s rates for conventional power sources, about five cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If wind, biomass and geothermal sources were also developed, renewable energy could provide 100 percent of the nation’s electricity and 90 percent of its energy by 2100.

While British researchers see environmental dangers everywhere, except in massive installations of solar panels:

the great environmental concerns of the future should be nanomaterials, manmade viruses and biomimetic robots.

So say researchers, policymakers and environmental campaigners, who have identified 25 potential future threats to the environment in the UK, which they say researchers should focus on.

In addition to well-publicised risks such as toxic nanomaterials, the acidification of the ocean and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, the list includes some more outlandish possibilities. These include:

• Biomimetic robots that could become new invasive species.

• Experiments involving climate engineering, for instance ocean 'fertilisation' and deploying solar shields

• Increased demand for the biomass needed to make biofuel.

• Disruption to marine ecosystems caused by offshore power generation.

• Experiments to control invasive species using genetically engineered viruses.