In Europe, coal now offers both lower prices for electricity consumers and higher profits for utilities

September 22, 2012

 

The costs of coal fired power generation in Europe have been artificially inflated for some time now by the imposition of various forms of carbon taxes. These taxes and penalties – which are quite arbitrary – serve political and electoral goals and generally pander to the alarmist view of climate change. The electricity consumer has taken the hit.

Bloomberg reports:

Coal Era Beckons for Europe as Carbon Giveaway Finishes

European utilities are poised to add more coal-fired power capacity than natural gas in the next four years, boosting emissions just as the era of free carbon permits ends.

Power producers from EON AG to RWE AG (RWE) will open six times more coal-burning plants than gas-fed units by 2015, UBS AG said in a Sept. 5 research note. Profits at coal-fired power stations may more than double by then, according to a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. report published on Sept. 13.

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22nd IgNobel awards – 2012

September 21, 2012

“The Stinker”, the official mascot of the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Researchers who worked on statistics which show brain activity in dead salmon, changed height perceptions when leaning to the left, a “speech-jammer” and a report that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports are some of the winners of this years IgNobel awards.  

The Guardian

The 22nd Ig Nobel awards, organised by the humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and awarded on Thursday at Harvard University, are a spoof of the Nobel prizes, to be announced next month. They honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. …….

….. This year’s Ig Nobels were handed out by five Nobel laureates including the 2009 physics laureate Roy Glauber, 2009 physiology or medicine winner Jack Szostak, and 2007 economics winner Eric Maskin.

Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and founder of the Ig Nobels, ended the ceremony with the traditional goodbye: “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”

Psychology prize:Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe, for their study entitiled Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.

Peace prize: The SKN company, for using technology to convert old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

Acoustics prize:Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada for creating the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

Neuroscience prize:Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, andGeorge Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere – even in a dead salmon.

Chemistry prize: Johan Pettersson for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.

Literature prize: The US government general accountability office, forissuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.

Physics prize:Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren andRobin Ball, for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.

Fluid dynamics prize:Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans Mayer, for studying the dynamics of liquid sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

Anatomy prize:Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify specific other chimpanzees from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

Medicine prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance of their patients exploding.

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Solar Energy is in crisis

September 20, 2012

The solar energy industry is in crisis and I keep reading that it is because subsidies are being reduced or eliminated. As if subsidies come for free. I don’t believe subsidies work and the current crisis only proves that the fundamental issue is not subsidies but that solar energy is not (yet ?) commercially viable. It surely has a place in some very particular situations and the best use of solar energy remains with some isolated users or as a “support” for other energy sources. But for base-load power generation it is just  not viable.

Peter Glover writes in the Energy Tribune:

The global solar power industry is in crisis. The industry blames widespread national subsidy cuts and over productivity; China, in particular, being widely vilified on the second count. However, the real cause of the solar industry’s malaise runs deeper, rooted, as it is, in the inescapable fact that, in terms of current technology, commercial scale solar energy remains a non-viable proposition.

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Tax on income is easy to levy but fundamentally unsound

September 18, 2012

The latest Mitt Romney “gaffe” is getting much attention. But I was a little surprised to find that while what he said may well be a gaffe in electoral terms – and he may even have lost the Presidential election here – his statement was actually quite correct. I had not appreciated that almost half of all US households paid no federal income tax at all. In the US, federal income tax is a major source of tax revenues and contributes about half of all tax revenues (tax revenues about 15.4% of gdp in 2011 with federal income tax providing 7.3% of gdp). Romney in his leaked video said:

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When will my computer know who I am?

September 18, 2012

Passwords, Userid’s and 4-digit codes are the bane of my life and I am still waiting for the computer which knows – uniquely and reliably  – whenever I happen to be using it. I am probably very average when I find that I have twelve different passwords, five different Userid’s and eight 4-digit codes that I use regularly and which – so far – I generally manage to keep separate in my memory. As I get older I expect I shall have increasing difficulty in remembering and keeping track of these. I find that – already – I sometimes refrain from taking on new commitments, buying new on-line services, joining new groups or registering at new sites if I need to find yet another password to be remembered. The need for defining and remembering new passwords is now – in fact – limiting the extent to which I use the on-line world.

New models of computers, tablets and smart phones are released – it seems – every other day. For at least the last 10 years the possibility of personal identification of the user by the device has promised much but has not yet delivered. I look forward to each release eagerly only to be disappointed each time.  Each new device has new features. It can do more, remember more, is faster or more “intelligent” or has a larger memory but none has the capability to know – for sure –  who I am.

One of these days I will be able to switch on my device (computer, phone whatever) and it will know that it is “I” – and nobody else – who is operating the device and I will need no further passwords or pin-codes to access any connection or my account at any site through that particular device. That’s the dream.

In the meantime the search goes on but I am not sure that this aspect of “customer-friendliness” is very high up on the priority list. But it should be. I foresee a new explosion in on-line usage when a secure method of personal identification becomes available. PC manufacturers have been trying to use fingerprint recognition for some time, Intel is working on palm recognition and Apple is working on face recognition. Keystroke authentication, retina prints and other biometric or behavioural patterns have also been suggested. But before my dream is realised, the manufacturers have to hone in on a few methods which have then to be exhaustively tested before being widely accepted. New international standards will have to be agreed and  established before the banks and insurance  and credit card companies accept the identification method as being sufficiently secure.

It remains a dream – but passwords have to become obsolete sometime and I do hope it happens within the next two years.

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In-flight electronics ban is based on fears – not on any evidence

September 17, 2012

I am always irritated when the regulations regarding in-flight electronics are announced at the start of a flight. I dutifully switch my phone off not because I have any perception of causing danger but only because I don’t want to be denied travel.

There is no evidence whatsoever that using electronic devices on flights – whether during take-off and landing or while cruising – has any deleterious effects on aircraft navigation or any other technical operations during the flight. But this regulation – like so many others – was based originally on fears. Getting rid of an existing regulation even when there is no evidence that the fear is justified is extremely difficult. Once any irrational – but fear-based – regulation is in place the onus of proof shifts from showing something to be unsafe to proving instead that it is not unsafe. And proving a negative is not very easy.

An FAA regulator is walking down the street snapping his fingers continuously. A guy stops him and asks, “Why are you snapping your fingers all the time?”  “To keep wild elephants away.” “That’s ridiculous!“, says the guy. The regulator replies, “Oh, yeah? You don’t see any wild elephants around do you?”

The Wall Street Journal writes:

Do Our Gadgets Really Threaten Planes?

The ban on electronic devices rests on anecdotes, not on hard evidence—because there isn’t any.

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Belgium introduces euthanasia for prisoners

September 15, 2012

Belgium allows euthanasia under very stringent conditions and now permits prisoners also to choose euthanasia.

If you agree with the concept of euthanasia  then the idea of allowing prisoners to opt for euthanasia would seem perfectly rational. There are ethical questions here which I am still thinking my way through but I think there are some dilemmas to be faced. However I cannot help feeling that a prisoner – almost by definition – is inevitably subject to some level of coercion. Within an isolated and vulnerable prison population where individuals are probably subject to the additional pressures of group phobias and pressure, I am not sure that an apparently voluntary choice can ever be a completely free choice.

And I have an additional dimension of nagging concern when organs for transplantation are harvested from euthanasia subjects:

BioEdge reports:

For the first time, a Belgian prisoner has been euthanased. A man identified as Frank V.D.B, who had spent 20 years in prison for two murders and rapes, died recently. The date is not clear from media reports, but it took place outside the prison. The death only became known because it was revealed by a politician, Senator Louis Ide, who was complaining about the lack of social services in Belgian jails. He seems to have been tipped off by a prison official.

The case has provoked a controversy in the media –not over euthanasia but over the violation of the prisoner’s right to privacy. All of the conditions for euthanasia in Belgium were carefully fulfilled: the prisoner had a terminal illness, he had made repeated requests for death, and three doctors had independently ratified the request. ….. 

Last year Belgian surgeons revealed that they had been harvesting organs obtained from persons who had requested euthanasia.

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New paper – “Warming since 1850 is mainly the result of natural climatic variations”

September 13, 2012

A new paper in Global and Planetary Change byNorwegian researchers has identified persistent cyclic variations in temperature records from Svalbard and Greenland. They find that some of the identified cycles correspond to variations in the Moons’ orbit around Earth and some correspond to solar variations. They find that warming since 1850 is mainly the result of natural climatic variations and conclude that the persistence of cycles makes climate forecasting feasible for limited time ranges.

And if  “warming since 1850 is mainly the result of natural climatic variations” then it just confirms that the theory that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for global warming remains in the realm of speculation.

Identifying natural contributions to late Holocene climate change

by Ole Humlum, Jan-Erik Solheim and Kjell Stordahl

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2011.09.005

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World population by latitude >>the world of unusual map projections

September 13, 2012

With both landmass and population concentrated in the Northern hemisphere, a northern-centric view of the world in most things is inevitable.

I was looking for some information on population distribution by latitude and came across this graph on Chris Blattman’s site. However he was not the source of the diagram but had obtained the image from Paul Kedrosky’s page which still exists but no longer has the image. He in turn referred to a Bill Rankin whose page no longer exists. The diagram is said to be from 2000 data but I have not been able to find the source or anything more recent. An excellent diagram.

UPDATE: The original seems to be here: http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?histpop

POPULATION HISTOGRAMS 
Bill Rankin, 2008 

More fun with numbers! Roughly 88% of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere, and about half the world’s population lives north of 27°N.

Taking the northern and southern hemispheres together, on average the world’s population lives 24 degrees from the equator.

World population by latitude and longitude: source unknown (via chrisblattman)

Trying to trace some of the data on which this diagram is based I came across the fascinating work of Waldo Tobler. Professor Emeritus. Geography Department. University of California. In his presentation from 1999 on Unusual Map Projections I found two diagrams which – I think – must be the source (perhaps updated) for the diagram above. Unusual Map Projections Tobler 1999

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2012 Nobel prize speculations begin

September 12, 2012

UPDATE – 8th October

(The Physiology / Medicine awards are to be announced today)

The 2012 Thomson Reuters predictions are here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/19/idUS36510+19-Sep-2012+HUG20120919

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Every year around this time with about a month to go before the awards are announced the predictions and speculation begin about potential Nobel prize laureates. I don’t believe there is as much lobbying / marketing involved in the Nobel speculations as for the Oscars – but certainly some institutions and laboratories do try – much earlier in the year – to get some appropriate publicity for “their candidate”. This year the CERN publicity machine – which made much ado about their discovery – or not – of the Higgs boson – has been in full swing. Perhaps the hype was just to ensure funding but I am sure the possibility of a Nobel was not very far from their thoughts.

Dates for the Announcements

The prize awarding institutions have set the following dates for their announcements of 2012 prize decisions:

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE– Monday 8 October, 11:30 a.m. at the earliest
PHYSICS – Tuesday 9 October, 11:45 a.m. at the earliest
CHEMISTRY – Wednesday 10 October, 11:45 at the earliest
PEACE – Friday 12 October, 11:00 a.m.
ECONOMIC SCIENCES – Monday 15 October, 1:00 p.m. at the earliest
LITERATURE – The date will be set later

The Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates will probably be announced in another 10 days or so.

Each year, Thomson Reuters uses data from its research solution, Web of Knowledge™, to quantitatively determine the most influential researchers in the Nobel categories of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. Based on a thorough review of citations to their works, the company names these high-impact researchers as Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and predicts them to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the near future.   

Thomson Reuters is the only organization to use quantitative data to make annual predictions of Nobel Prize winners. Since 2002, 21 Citation Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

A few of the early predictions are out in the blogosphere:

Chemistry, Chemistry and Physics, Economics, Literature.

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