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As the Beijing Olympic Games came to a close today, some thoughts started stirring…
First, I came across this amazing data model from The New York Times. It not only shows this year’s medal count, but the counts from over 100 hundred years of past Games. I think it’s a fabulous way to show data over time, the changes are far more obvious than a bunch of bars or even the raw data.
Some of the changes in medal counts and top or even participating countries are easily explained, such as in the boycotts in the early 1980’s. Others are not so obvious. I confess my first instinct was to assume cheating by the host country when looking at the 1896 and early 1900’s counts. Upon further consideration, I think it more likely due to the great difficulty and expense of travel in those days which meant more athletes from the host country were present than the significant global participation we see today. At least I hope that’s the cause! It would be a shame if the modern Olympics have been dogged all along by biased judging, underage participants or doping charges.
This then led me down the murky path of “way back when…” I was a horse-crazy little girl, and my Olympic dreams looked something like the storyline of National Velvet. Though I have become an accomplished horsewoman, I have little skill nor experience compared to the athletes competing today. I still have Olympic dreams though, and they manifest around world peace. Trite or improbable it may be, but what if we take a lesson from the ancient olympic truce, which in theory allowed safe travel to Olympia and to varying degrees stopped/prevented some fighting for a bit, and apply it to our modern Games?
Maybe we’ll get used to the quiet…the pointless bombs and shooting would stop, families would stop weeping, 24/7 news networks would go dark and politicians would have to quit their confused yammering about “withdrawal horizons” or how the “US doesn’t torture” and actually solve a problem or two to stay in office…truly Olympic dreams!
One of the biggest reasons businesses and home owners have for not installing solar panels are their high cost. This is due in part to two things: (a) the cost of manufacturing anything with silicon, solar panels’ primary component, is high and (b) the overall efficiency of solar panels is relatively low (15-25% max), thus you need a lot of panels to meet your electrical demands. The low efficiency of panels implies the need for a lot of real estate that faces in a specific direction to ensure demand is met. The net-net is that even though solar is a perfect solution as an energy source, we need to significantly improve how we capture and transform it into usable electricity.
Luckily, we’ve finally got some global attention on the matter and innovation is occurring!
- Changes in solar panel manufacturing, increases efficiency 25%
- Improving concentrated photovoltaic technology, increases conversion efficiency to 37.5%
- Major advance in inorganic chemistry that could lead to a cheap way to store sun’s energy
On a related note, if you’re looking for a solar charger for your electronics, check these out.
sitting on the dock by the bay
I just wanted to share the most stunning day I’ve had at our shore house (Long Beach Island) this year (another pic). The picture on the left of this post was taken from the edge of our dock looking across the bay at the mainland, which is way over there on the horizon far past the marsh). For all those who think all of NJ is equivalent to Newark, I beg to differ…and it has reminded me that to be as productive as I need to be, I also need to take time to unplug, unwind and decompress. The Information Age is awesome in all respects, but even Gibson’s characters unjack every now and then.
Cloud computing has been steadily gaining momentum and validity in meeting enterprise needs and this latest global experiment from HP, Yahoo, Intel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE) and Infocomm Development Authority (SG) should prove interesting to watch.
The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.
The project’s large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.
Tim O’Reilly is concerned that though we may move into the cloud for all the right reasons, we will still use the old architectures and lock everyone in as we did with ERPs and other proprietary applications.
…the success of the internet as a non-proprietary platform built largely on commodity open source software could lead to a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud. What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage? How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition?
The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?
This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc.
How do we ensure openness and interoperability prevail at the end of the day? Seemingly irrelevant for something referring to clouds, but no less important to cloud computing’s success, how too do we ensure the right locations for the physical manefestations of the cloud?
