All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

High-altitude urban windpower: not just blue-sky thinking

Energy sources don’t come much cleaner than wind power, but there’s no way of deploying it in large urban areas, right? Well, not so; if you can get the turbines away from ground level, you not only avoid the problem of siting all those windmills but also get access to the much richer store of power that exists at higher altitudes.

The first rigorous, worldwide study of high-altitude wind power estimates that there is enough wind energy at altitudes of about 1,600 to 40,000 feet to meet global electricity demand a hundred times over.

The very best ground-based wind sites have a wind-power density of less than 1 kilowatt per square meter of area swept. Up near the jet stream above New York, the wind power density can reach 16 kilowatts per square meter. The air up there is a vast potential reservoir of energy, if its intermittency can be overcome.

Even better, the best high-altitude wind-power resources match up with highly populated areas including North America’s Eastern Seaboard and China’s coastline.

“The resource is really, really phenomenal,” said Cristina Archer of Cal State University-Chico, who co-authored a paper on the work published in the open-access journal Energies.”There is a lot of energy up there, but it’s not as steady as we thought. It’s not going to be the silver bullet that will solve all of our energy problems, but it will have a role.”

According to that article, there’s a handful of start-ups beavering away at making workable prototypes to take advantage of all that wind and promising their first sales in a year or so. It’ll be good to have another non-vaporware option on the renewable energy table, but I imagine any city that has a lot of aircraft traffic passing through isn’t going to be too keen on the idea…

Blog

Augmented urban reality

I’ve been jonesing from an Android phone for a while already, but now I’m practically salivating… because they can run Layar, a soon-to-be-released augmented reality browser. Check it out:

Despite its rather quotidian practical uses as demonstrated, it doesn’t take much imagination to think of some more weird and wonderful deployments of the same technology. Gaming, for example; immersive historical tours; complete aesthetic redesigns of entire cities… once it moves out of a cumbersome handheld device and into some spex, the sky’s the limit. [via Chairman Bruce]

Blog

Hyperdense terabit storage medium

1 Comment

computer rendering of a carbon nanotubeAt this point, the human species has more information stored and archived than ever before, and there’s more by the hour. The problem is that our storage media, while increasingly high-capacity, is increasingly frangible: CDRs and hard drives just don’t last long, and we’re in a largely unnoticed race between the growth of our body of knowledge and our ability to store it permanently.

Enter Alex Zettl and friends from the University of Berkeley, who’ve developed a storage medium based on carbon nanotubes that isn’t just extremely capacious but exceptionally durable and resistant to the ravages of time:

The system consists of a minuscule particle of iron encased in a carbon nanotube and represents information in binary notation—the zeroes and ones of “bits.” Using an electric current, information can be written into the system by shuttling the iron particle back and forth inside the nanotube like a bead on an abacus—the left half of the nanotube corresponds to zero, the right half corresponds to one. The encoded information can then be read by measuring the nanotube’s electrical resistance, which changes according to the iron particle’s position.

Because of their very small size, a square-inch array of these nanotube memory systems could store at least one terabit—a trillion bits—of information, approximately five times more than can be packed into a square inch of a state-of-the-art magnetic hard drive. But Zettl believes the technology could be pushed to much higher information densities.

“We can manipulate this particle and read out its position so accurately, we could divide the nanotube’s length into 10 or even 100 units instead of just two,” Zettl says. “Whether this is worthwhile to implement right away, I’m not sure, because it adds complexity, but it could immediately give us 10 or 100 times the information density with the same device.”

I’m immediately reminded of Charlie Stross’s thoughts about bit-per-atom data storage, and how it will enable us to record everything we do – literally everything. Bandwidth, processing power and storage are the pillar commodities of the information economy, and all three of them are still racing toward an omega-point of virtual zero cost; what happens when they’re all as ubiquitous as air itself? [image by ghutchis]

Blog

Keep watching the skies – tag clouds as predictors of emergent fads

1 Comment

relational tag cloudEvery day, I spend a couple of hours digging through my RSS subscriptions for interesting stories, some of which I use here at Futurismic and most of which I store away at del.icio.us as research material (you know, for those fiction pieces that I keep meaning to find time to write… ahem). [image by ottonassar]

I’m a big fan of tagging my links because it enables me to trawl through the stored pieces (mine, and other people’s as well) by context and related topics, but it turns out there’s a greater benefit – user folksonomies on social bookmarking sites can be used to track and predict emerging trends and fads using mass data analysis:

The researchers tracked different users and noted the submissions they made, as well as the tags used on those posts. Taking this data, they could see what tags were frequently used in correlation with one another. This created a “coocurrence network,” which assigns weight to tags based on how often the tag was used and how many different users applied it.

With this information, it was possible to conduct a random walk (stepping randomly from one tag to another) and note how tags that occur together can form an otherwise undetectable semantic chain. These tags, based on their association with one another, allowed the researchers to follow along as one popular trend gradually replaced its predecessor.

When comparing individual random walks with one another, researchers noted that tags that appear close together in a non-obvious semantic network were likely to be visited by the same user, and tags that were far apart were visited together less often. Although no individual user might be aware of following these obscure connections, they became obvious when the data was examined in bulk.

[…]

The applicability of Heaps’ law to Internet tags was noted in particular. Heaps’ law states that the number of distinct words used in a body of text grows sublinearly relative to the size of the text—the bigger texts have more diverse vocabulary, but there are diminishing returns as things scale up. Likewise, the number of unique tags on del.ici.ous and BibsSonomy grow nearly linearly relative to the total number of tags—that is to say, our interests and the vocabulary used to describe them grow directly along with the Internet. It isn’t all just lolcats and musical parodies, even though it might seem so sometimes.

This fascinates me, because it confirms as a real phenomenon something that I always dismissed as a fallacy born of close involvement; scanning close to a thousand RSS feeds a day from a variety of sources and covering a variety of subjects gives me a sense of being able to observe trends bubbling up out the web’s chaotic maelstrom. I get a real kick out of watching a story or meme moving from low-level niche sites into the wider world of the web, and seeing new obsessions gather popularity.

And talk about hindsight – if I’d thought about it, I’d have seen the economic collapse coming about six months or more before it bit in and shifted all my investments somewhere safer. If I’d had any investments, that is…

Of course, this sort of trend analysis could probably be used for profit or surveillance purposes as well as the more abstract goals of research and cultural analysis, but if you haven’t realised that the internet is the ultimate double-edged sword by now… well, you’ve not been following along with my links, have you? 😉

Blog

Metaverse bank chairman does a runner with the cash

1 Comment

Starship screenshot from EVE OnlineYeah, so we’re all tired of hearing about crooks in charge of banks shafting their depositors and borrowers at the same time… but this story’s a little different, given that the bank in question exists in the virtual universe of science fiction MMO EVE Online.

That’s not to say no real money was involved, though; RMT, or Real Money Trading, is one of the few things frowned upon in EVE‘s laissez-faire economy, but it still takes place – and as such there may be a lesson for real-world economists in the story:

Because players often do not have the interstellar credits — abbreviated to ISK, also the official abbreviation of the Icelandic kroner — they need to expand their fleets, an enterprising player created a bank that would accept deposits and lend to players who would pledge assets, like their spacecraft, as collateral.

The bank was a success. According to its Web site (yes, it has one), Ebank accumulated about 8.9 trillion ISK in deposits in 13,000 accounts belonging to 6,000 users. That was far more than it was able to lend out — there were around 1 trillion ISK of loans.

Somewhere along the way Ebank’s top executive, who went by the online handle Ricdic, apparently got greedy. According to CCP, he made off with deposits, which he then sold for real cash to gamers on a sort of black-market exchange separate from Eve.

CCP kicked Ricdic out of the game. And Ebank has temporarily shut down while its board of directors (yes, it had one of those too) tries to sort out the mess. Depositors, meanwhile, appear to have pulled 5.5 trillion ISK of deposits.

It’s not clear how much of that virtual money was embezzled and now needs to be found, somehow, by Ebank. But if the Eve chatter is accurate, it could amount to 10 percent of deposits withdrawn. That could wipe out whatever capital was used to finance Ebank’s loan book. As in the real world, that would spell insolvency.

[…]

As in the real economy, the customers could be tempted to appeal to a higher authority — Eve’s creators. That would probably involve appealing to the Council of Stellar Management — a body of nine members chosen by Eve players to represent them in discussions with CCP.

But the word from Reykjavik isn’t likely to comfort Ebank’s depositors. Eve’s creators at CCP — which employs its own economist and philosopher — take a laissez-faire approach, leaving most such matters to the game’s users to sort out. Unlike the Icelandic government, which allowed three local banks to nearly bankrupt Iceland with unchecked expansion, CCP is determined not to encourage entities to become too big to fail.

This is similar to a nasty incident in Second Life a while back, but SL’s banks are governed by US banking law, and so Linden Lab takes a much more hands-on approach to its economy.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out; it’s easy to dismiss the travails of a metaverse bank as irrelevant, but as they become more complex (not to mention valuable in real-world terms), metaverse economies may become a valuable testing ground for alternative economic theories. Anything that helps us avoid another real-world clusterfuck has got to be worth keeping an eye on, right? [via MetaFilter; image by Pentadact]