Author Archives for brentn

Coincidences

After ordering a copy of Cox’s “The Elements” from ABE., I received a copy previously owned by Gene Bertin, a pioneer in the field of x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, who passed away in 2008. The book is meticulously annotated, with elegant lettering. The graphs he annotated are better than as printed, not just different. In the plot of binding energy vs. stable nuclide, he carefully labelled the break between exothermic fusion and fission, then connected it to the adjacent graph that was a detail of the Z=10-30 region with careful “zoom-lines.”  The text is carefully underlined with a straightedge in key sections. No sloppy highlighting here.

I feel somehow privileged.

Dr. Bertin’s obituary can be found in Powder Diffr. 24, 59.

The book is a classic Oxford Science text: Short, concise, dense, and interesting. It covers the basics of nucleogenesis and the geochemistry of both the Earth and the solar system. I’m interested in understanding the distribution of phosphate-bearing minerals. (Also, rare-earth-bearing minerals, but that’s a different story.)

Panel on sustainability and innovation

I’ll be on a panel tonight at Asheville Green Drinks entitled “Does Social Innovation Support or Stifle Sustainability?” There are a host of really great people on the panel, including my buddy Ian Wilker, a social media expert of great insight.

Those of you with an eye towards precision will immediately ask “what does social innovation mean in this context.” I’ll go ahead and stick a stake in the ground on this question and say that social innovation is a lot more than “Facebook+Twitter.” Social innovation, by my definition, is when one or more different types of innovation (technological innovation, market innovation, cultural innovation, design innovation, etc.) is highly leveraged by the power of a social network.

Even though Metcalfe’s Law was first articulated in 1980 (or 1993, depending on how pedantic you want to be), we have only really brushed the surface of how pervasive it truly is. It is possible to frame technological development in terms of progress as a function of largest polity in existence – from the rise of hunter-gatherer tribes to the first cities, to the multi-city civilization of the Sumerians. As the number of people in the network grew, so did the capacity for innovation of all stripes.

Once the telegraph, then the telephone, air travel, and eventually the internet made the world to become smaller, or rather, grew our networks larger, our capacity for innovation increased commensurately. The innovations the proceeded from this, I argue, were necessary to understand the different facets of sustainability and to develop strategies for getting there. One example of this was the Viridian movement, from which ground grew Worldchanging.

My argument Friday night will be that social innovation is absolutely required if we are to develop a civilization that is sustainable in all facets.  I think this is the case is because I am increasingly of the opinion that a lot of the necessary innovation for sustainability lies in the realm of design and cultural innovation. These innovations happen most rapidly when you build a critical mass of passionate people with similar ideas, a task that I believe requires social innovation.

Limitless solar?

One of the things I have been almost continuously talking about in the realm of renewable energy is the need to diversify our sources of energy. Another is the need to beware of people who preach that there is One True Solution. It was thus with great interest that I read about an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

In this paper, Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide argues that solar, and in particular, solar thermal, is the Ultimate Answer to the world’s energy problems.  In fact, according to Physorg, he claims that solar thermal can last us for “the next billion years.”

Despite this claim, the quoted numbers in the article and the conclusions are actually pretty reasonable in general. Solar thermal is the most cost-efficient (although certainly not the most space efficient) renewable technology in terms of energy yield.  However, stating that solar thermal by itself is sufficient for the next “billion” years is rather unreasonable.

Either Abbott presumes that the rate of growth of energy usage on the planet will slow down to nearly nothing or that we will eventually fill near-Earth space with solar collectors and ship either hydrogen or microwaves back down to Earth. No other possibility can justify his statement. As I calculated some time back, at modest growth rates, there is a much-closer horizon of about 500 years before we start running up against the limits of solar power.

There are also other issues in the article that should be addressed. The first is the cost, both capital and variable, of transmission lines in his scenario. If, as he suggests, we convert 8% of the desert land in the world to energy production, we are faced with the challenge of either building transmission lines to the hinterlands, which are on average about 30% efficient, or according to his scenario, generating hydrogen, liquefying it, and shipping it. I don’t know the efficiencies of electrolysis of water, or of hydrogen liquefaction, but in any case, there are three lossy steps here, before that hydrogen is either burned or passed through a fuel cell to make electricity.

Don’t get me wrong: in large part I agree with Dr. Abbott. Both my numbers and his point to the same conclusion – that solar must be a part of any renewable future. My primary concern about this article and others like it is that they will serve to skew the funding and research environment in renewable energy the same way that the biofuel craze has. We have a good way to go before we can replace fossil fuels in their entirety and it seems clear to me that as we transition away from a fossil fuel energy monoculture, we would do well to avoid another one.

Notes from my Renewable Energy talk

As promised, you can click through here and get a list of resources that I used in putting together my talk and that you might find helpful in general. I appreciate the great audience that I had – everyone was really engaged in the subject and I’m glad that so many of you got a lot out of it.

There are a couple of points I want to reiterate. First is that I think that true wealth can only be measured in Joules, the unit of energy, and that access to energy is a key human rights issue. I also think that the current and coming energy crisis can be solved by breaking both design and technology constraints on our production and use of energy. Of these, I think that the design constraints are going to be hardest to solve.

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Renewable Energy 101

This Friday, I’m going to be speaking at Asheville Green Drinks about renewable energy. The event starts at 6 pm and I’ll start talking at around 6:30. The blurb about my talk is up on the AGD website already, but I wanted to write a little bit about why I’m giving this presentation.

Talking to lots of people has made me realize that it is easy to be overwhelmed by the quantity of information out there about renewable energy.   Energy production and consumption is a complex topic and it is made more complex by those who have the most financial interest in the field tossing out truths and truthiness, often out of context, in order to solidify their position. And without some kind of base level of knowledge, its impossible to think critically about the news and propaganda that’s flying around in the media.

What I want to do is to give a quick overview of the state of the art in renewable energy – pros, cons, myths, and challenges. In addition, I’m going to talk about the size and scope of the “energy problem” that the world is facing and why its of utmost importance that we solve it, rather than deferring it or succumbing to it. I’m going to talk about why energy is the only true measure of wealth and how access to energy is a human rights issue. And, I’m going to end up by giving my perspective on what the ultimate solution will look like.

Its shaping up to be an exciting presentation.

Financial metrics

The capability and appropriateness of measurement systems and related metrics are not just things that scientists and engineers must care about. This seems to be obvious to just about anyone, unless you were on Wall Street before the financial crisis.

The Deloitte Center for the Edge has published a report on the decline in the return on assets of American businesses over the past 40 years. Jon Taplin, a professor at USC, posted a very insightful summary of the report, likening this decline and how it was hidden to a shell game. What was interesting to me in his post was how the blind obedience to a particular metric has been in large part to blame for our current financial insanity.

What the Deloitte report points out is that companies have been able to “juice” their return-on-equity (ROE) numbers by consistently taking on more and more debt. Meanwhile, their return-on-assets (ROA) have fallen steadily. If you are even a casual investor or small businessperson, you’ve probably heard of ROE and why it is important. You may not have heard of ROA. Let me briefly explain the difference

Return on equity is a company’s annual net income divided by total shareholder equity. Shareholder equity is essentially how much money investors have put into your company, so ROE measures how effective you are at generating a return on invested funds.  Return on assets, on the other hand, is your annual net income divided by total assets. ROA, therefore, measures your effectiveness at generating a return on everything the company owns and is in the bank.

You may already be seeing the disconnect, just based on my choice of words when I defined ROE and ROA above. Let me give you an example: Let’s say you have two companies, A & B. Each of these companies generates 1 M$ per year in net income. Each of these companies has 5 M$ in equity on the books, meaning that the investors have 5 M$ in them. In each case, the ROE of the company is 20%. Not too shabby. But there is an important difference between them. Company B also has 5 M$ of debt outstanding. Company B will thus have 5 M$ more assets on the books than Company A, and thus their ROA will be lower.

If you’re a CEO and you’re managed by your board on the basis of your ROE, you thus have a substantial incentive to leverage your company with loads of debt in order to have more resources with which to expand your business, since that debt doesn’t show up directly on your measurements. People will still invest in your company on the basis of your keen ROE (so long as they don’t look at your debt-to-equity ratio, or your actual return on assets.)

The bottom line here is that a lot of people had a warning right in front of them about what was happening with GM and other companies, but couldn’t see it because one of their chief metrics hid it from them. As with so many other things, relying on a few simple metrics is dangerous and sloppy. Simple metrics are useful, but they must be cross-checked and reviewed with a constant eye on exactly what they tell you and what they do not.

Liberalism and bankruptcy

I get simultaneously amused and frustrated by the anarcho-capitalists with whom I interact when the discussion comes to economics. Most of them have enough economics learning to parrot back choice segments from The Wealth of Nations and to discuss the Tragedy of the Commons. Of course, they will immediately tag any sort of collective ownership and use scheme  as a potential Tragedy of the Commons, even when the potential for such misuse is vanishingly small, but so it goes. What is frustrating, though, are their ideological assumptions about incentives and the free market.

A recent article in The Atlantic served as an excellent illustration of this point. In the article, Megan McArdle points out that the most selfish (i.e. most libertarian) bankruptcy laws serve to make everyone worse off and that having society defray the cost of failed entrepreneurship serves as an incentive to more entrepreneurialism, which makes everyone better off –  including non-entrepreneurs. Further, she lays out simply and elegantly why the current regime of tightening bankruptcy laws to “stick it to irresponsible” do little to prevent people from running up too much debt and a lot to disincentivize people from taking rational risks.

I think this is particularly timely as we see a rise in more socially networked entrepreneurs – a sign that we are growing to understand that collaboration is as much a part of capitalism as competition. As this transition occurs, I suspect that a distinction will grow between folks who run up tens of kilodollars in consumer debt and folks who run up tens of kilodollars in debt trying to start a business.

A strong argument for open access journals

Recently, the pharmaceutical giant, Merck, was caught having paid scientific publishing giant, Elsevier, to create a completely bogus “peer-reviewed” journal to help promote positive data about Merck’s products. The details are covered in this article from Bioethics.net.

In my mind, this is a clear argument for open access scientific journals. While it would be possible to corrupt the process of peer review in an open access journal, it would be pretty difficult to hide the fact for very long.

Having a love affair with a new technology

Everyone, every business, has love affairs with technology. You may have too. Remember that feeling? The fluttering in your stomach, feeling alternately hot and cold, daydreaming about the places you’ll go, the things you’ll do. No, it wasn’t your first date, but rather, the last technology you looked at and fell in love with. And, odds are likely, just like that first date, your breakup with that technology was harsh and bitter.

I’m going to talk about how that love affair manifests, how you manage it, and how you move past it into a wonderful relationship that will hopefully last many years, bring in revenue, and perhaps even change the world.

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What have you changed your mind about?

In the title of this post is last year’s Edge.org question to a group of noted intellectuals. I just got my copy of the book and have eagerly jumped into it. The premise is quite interesting to me; in the past decade, we’ve been drilled over and over with the importance of “staying on message” and keeping things soundbite-simple, even when reality is more complex, more nuanced, and more interesting.  Hearing from this group of people on their grappling, not so much with the specifics of their changed views, but with how to communicate those nuances to an audience in a short essay is both interesting and enlightening.