From Charlemagne in the Ecnoomist
“The Germans think that the only way to make countries reform is to dangle them out of the window,”
He offers a rather sober overview of the policy options and policy making barriers in his article. It is worth reading.
Google’s decision to go public with its smart phone glasses says something about the company. It says that Google is not like Apple. If Apple were working on smart glasses, it would be a closely held secret until launch. Google is nowhere near launch, but it is telling the world that it wants more ideas about how this should work.
In other words, Google has not given up on crowd sourcing. Will this help Google come up with a better product? It might if the company manages its information sharing in a clever way. But it is also a marketing message — it is a buzz generator. Google wants to be cool again. And it has selected the least cool thing about Apple to distinguish Google.
Nice storyline. And check out Google’s video embedded in today’s Wire Mag profile. The video tells you who Google wants to be. BTW, you might compare Google’s future vision with Apple’s 1987 vision for knowledge navigator. One similarity — the need for capacity enhancement flows from deadline management, a very old fashioned problem.
Modern societies need a lot of modern fuels and so far, carbon based fuels are the most efficient. But where did the energy that is in our carbon based fuels come from? It was created a really long time ago by the sun and then stored in organic matter. So we run around the planet looking for places where this organic muck is stored in large enough quantities to refine and distribute.
But what if we could use the same ultimate resource (the sun) to generate energy as we need it. That is what plants do, so it is no huge surprise that we would be trying to copy the process that plants use. But so far, our best efforts are still not very efficient. The best solar panels convert around 10% to 15% of the sun’s energy into usable power. And while costs for solar panels are falling, they are not all that cheap yet. BTW, this is a price that I am keeping an eye on.
Can we do better? Well, a lot of people think we could. And they are experimenting with ways to tweak the conversion process. If we can do this — especially if we can do it by using carbon in the atmosphere — the fossil fuel era would come to an end. We would no longer need to go to the trouble to drill deep, deep holes to pump up the muck that we convert to gas.
FC offers a nice profile of one of the latest experiments to use genetically modified microbes to generate liquid fuel from the sun. This works, though not yet in a cost effective way. Good story. And it is a brief snippet of one the great learning adventures of our time.
FOLLOW - This is not the only great learning adventure about “fuels”. We are only now just beginning to understand what fuels ourselves. I don’t mean the physical foods that we need for fuel (though we are learning a lot about that too). I am talking about what fuels our our motivation in groups to learn. This process is still a bit mysterious. But we know more now than we ever have. But we just haven’t yet converted this into the right kinds of platforms that would be more efficient than the stuff we use now. Hence we tolerate very inefficient institutions. Will this change over the next century. I believe that it will.
NYT real estate section profiles a rather large country house for sale in the Latvian countryside near Riga. This quote caught my eye
A 2010 change to immigration policy enabled any non-European Union buyer of a residence costing 143,000 euros or more in a large city or 72,000 euros or more elsewhere to apply for a five-year residency permit in Latvia. That has increased the popularity of buying in Latvia, particularly among citizens of the former Soviet countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Mr. Rozenbergs said. One result has been a strengthening of the high-end residential market.
“For C.I.S. customers it’s good,” he said, “because residency gives them access to other European countries for travel. So the buyer can go to Latvia, and then travel further to Paris or Berlin or other places.”
Interesting strategy.