I’m holding a talk today tonight at ACACES 2008 in lovely l’Aquila outside Rome. This posting is a placeholder for putting up information related to that talk and facilitating audience follow-ups.

The Amazon listmania for the suggested books is http://tinyurl.com/psm20080714B.

Below are selected slides from the presentation. These are also available as a public Google document.

Today was the WWF Earth Hour event. CNN reports:

The environmental group WWF has urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes Saturday starting at 8 p.m. wherever they were.

Yes, for some bizarre reasons candles are viewed as good for the environment. I first assumed it was just media and folks in general that were confused, but nope. On the Earth Hour FAQ you can read:

If you plan on burning candles during Earth Hour, make sure you use 100% beeswax candles which are gentler on our planet – smoke free, non-toxic and non-allergenic. They are also made of natural products, not petroleum-based materials, so they are effectively carbon neutral (the CO2 they emit has already been taken from the atmosphere to produce the wax).

Brilliant.

Here’s an idea: let’s use beeswax for all our energy needs, since it’s carbon neutral.

(Of course, most people will burn paraffin candles, which are a by-product of, you guessed it, the petroleum industry.)

Why must environmental consciousness always seem to come with a dose of Luddism? Burning candles is a great way to add more CO2 to the atmosphere.

In my house most lamps are CFL (compact fluorescent) or halogen. They’re much more expensive, of course, but far greener. Indeed, CFL is several hundred (!) times more energy efficient than candles. The vast majority of the energy from a candle goes to heat and lighting in frequencies your eye can’t pick up anyway (e.g. infrared and ultraviolet).

Even good old-fashioned incandescent lights are much more efficient than candles.

Plus, the energy of the candle is 100% combustion-based. That means CO2. As opposed to the grid, which in North America is only 65% from combustion (the rest is nuclear, hydro, or renewable sources).

So yes, by all means, light those candles, and add some more CO2 to the world. Me, I celebrated Earth Hour by buying a neat new charger for my rechargeable batteries, plus a bunch of the new hybrid rechargeable batteries to try out.

And I threw my candles in the trash. Most US trash goes to landfills. So this way I’m doing some CO2 sequestering, too…

PepsiCo’s Walkers unit in the UK spent two months to figure out that the carbon footprint of a bag of chips is 75 grams (Business Week). There are about a million grams in a short ton, and at $20 external cost of a ton of CO2 that’s 0.2 cents (see my previous posting about those numbers). Of course, there are no regulations covering how this number is generated, and there is no audit, nor any liability for PepsiCo if they get it wrong. But even at face value, we have a new reference point for CO2 emissions: bags of chips.

So consumers are supposed to include this as a guide to their behavior. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, let’s look at some other alternatives a consumer can look at.

Replacing a single 75W incandescent light bulb with an energy star alternative saves 100 lbs per year (EPA estimate). That’s 600 potato bags per year.

A typical pair of cheap PC speakers (with subwoofer) that are left turned on 24/7 can on passive use pull 40W. That’s what one of mine did that I measured using the highly useful Watts Up? meter. In terms of bags of potato chips, that’s almost 3000 bags. Turning off those speakers when you’re not playing games will save you thousands of potato chip bags.

Replacing an old gas or oil furnace or boiler with a new one saves about 3000 lbs per year of emissions (again, EPA estimate). That’s about 20,000 bags of potato chips per year. Per household.

The EPA estimates the average US household emits 41,500 pounds of CO2 per year, in total. That’s the equivalent of a quarter million bags of potato chips. So consumers are supposed to approach the CO2-reduction in their lifestyle in increments of 1/250,000?

Building a single additional nuclear power plant unit (upping our national production by less than 1%) instead of coal-based power is equivalent to about 100 billion bags of potato chips each year. Those are more interesting increments in my mind.

Carbon labeling products like potato chips is a nutty approach to global warming. It’s about being eco-chic, about feeling good, not about actually doing something about the problem. Plus it’s misleading, since a price difference of 1/5 cents is more significant than whether or not you buy that bag. The only practical solution is of course a carbon tax, which will allow the market to figure out how to minimize the aggregate effects.

Still, you do save CO2 by eating the chips and then walking it off, instead of driving. By my estimates, your car emits the equivalent of six (6) bags of potato chips per mile. If you use the chips directly to fuel your own biological engine, a single bag will get you about 1 1/2 miles, so that’s about ten times as efficient.

Now that would be a smart consumer decision.

Today the price of oil just set a new all-time high of over $104, something that may come as news to a President that doesn’t know the price of gasoline [1]. But that’s not what’s most interesting about the news on energy. What’s interesting is the recent data that gasoline consumption in the United States is down slightly, and what that tells us about carbon taxes and climate change.

The issue isn’t whether global warming is real or not, or even whether it’s mostly (or just partly) a man-made phenomenon. The issue is what to do about it. And in the midst of the hoopla around super delegates and related matters of import, it merits to be reminded of some of the key issues that the next President will face.

For the sake of argument let’s assume global warming is all about CO2 emissions. CO2 is not a pollutant in the sense that it’s something we can get rid of. In fact if we got rid of CO2 in the atmosphere, most of life as we know it would die. CO2 plays a role in a broad number of natural processes, not just ecosystems. Changing the level of CO2 - up or down - impacts a number of these, weather being one of them.

What that means is that there is no “right” level of CO2. There is no historical “in the absence of Man” level. In particular, there is no notion of zero.

Which means a cap-and-trade system makes little sense, which is why most economists favor carbon tax. They are both effective in reducing emissions - “effective” in the strict economic sense, namely, that under certain assumptions it minimizes the costs in adopting new manufacturing techniques etc, as needed, to cut the aggregate emissions to some very small number. The principal difference is that cap-and-trade focuses on the target level, whereas carbon tax focuses on setting the external cost.

The challenge with CO2 that is in question is that large amounts of it affect the weather, which in turn affects a number of facets of life on Earth. Rise in ocean levels, changes in rainfall patterns, possibly more flooding, likely more hurricanes, some species will either adapt or become extinct, changing agricultural conditions, and so forth. There are also some good effects - a reduction in cold-related deaths, increased water supplies in large parts of Asia, etc. But on balance, it appears to be a net negative.

That negative carries an associated economic cost. The cost of improving infrastructure, adapting farming, building or improving levees, providing disaster aid, etc. And this is where it gets really interesting. The costs are huge - in the billions - but the emission base is large as well. Hence the logic of a carbon tax - calculate the aggregate cost and divide it by total emissions. Predictably, human intuition is weak when a large number is divided by another large number. That’s where this thing called “math” comes in.

Global emissions of CO2 are on the order of 30 billion tons per year. The current best estimate of the likely annual cost of these emissions is on the order of $60 billion - or $2 per ton. But there is a great deal of uncertainty with that number, which is as you would expect from an extraordinarily complex economic calculation. The various studies conclude different numbers with wide zones of confidence.

The principal meta study to date (a study that looked at all the major studies done and tried to form a balanced view of them) concluded that the cost per ton was very likely on the order of several dollars per ton, or less, but to be 80% sure you needed to assume a $20 price tag, and to be 95% sure you need to consider a $60 price tag. (The study also concluded that there was a distinct possibility that the net value was negative, in other words, that the net effect of higher CO2 levels was an economic good.)

Some global warming critics will argue that we should go with a “likely” number of something around $2 until there’s serious evidence that the cost is higher. They have a point, but for my purposes today - talking about cars - I can assume a statistically safer position. Let’s go with the 80% number: thus the aggregate external negative effects of CO2 emissions is at most $20 per ton, or on the order of $600 billion, globally, per year. (To put that number in perspective, that is approximately equivalent to paying for a new Katrina each month.)

So that would be the “carbon tax” we should put in place (globally), and the proceeds should be spent on offsetting the damage (globally).

Now, CO2 emissions per gallon of gasoline is about 20 pounds per gallon. So at $20 per ton, that’s 20 cents per gallon. (See where I’m going?) Prices of gasoline the past ten years have gone from around $1 per gallon to upwards $4. This three dollar increase in price is over a magnitude (!) above our upper limit of the external cost.

The recent statistics on gasoline usage in the United States indicates that it’s only now that consumption has started leveling off - 2007 petroleum consumption was up only 0.2% over 2006, and recently actually declined. Certainly a general slowdown in the economy affects consumption, but one can’t help conclude that consumers tolerated a quadrupling of gasoline prices before noticeably altering their behavior.

Which means that the consumer easily values gasoline well above any reasonable estimate of the external cost.

Which means we should go ahead and put a federal 20 cent tax on gasoline, and pool that money with the countries that are also willing to tax their carbon emissions at the same level (and put in place carbon tariffs against countries outside this group to avoid unfair trade), and put in place an agency that invests this money globally to offset these damages. And then we’re done.

Basically, car usage would be paying for reconstruction around the world, including providing for an infusion of aid to developing countries, offsetting damage from global warming. This is why gasoline powered cars are good for global warming. They provide the needed tax base.

Ah, you might say, this can’t be right. We should go to bio fuels. Or hybrids. Or electric cars. And more public transport. We have to get off “foreign oil”.

This is where the debate gets even messier. I’ve already proved the point that gasoline cars are good for global warming, given what we now know about aggregate consumer pricing sensitivity. But that doesn’t in and of itself prove that there aren’t even better solutions, just that properly taxed gasoline-powered cars are a good solution.

Some of these comments are also quite sensible. Hybrids are indeed a net good - they are a smart way to increase the energy efficiency of traditional cars. So by all means, let’s encourage the transition to hybrids, especially hybrid diesel. Public transportation should obviously be expanded - in particular high-speed trains that can offset commercial aviation.

But electric cars don’t make sense no matter how you do the math. First let’s look at CO2 emissions. The current mix of electric power consumption in the US corresponds to 1.3 lb of CO2 per kWh, and at 0.3 kWh/mi an electric vehicle emits about 0.4 lbs/mi. That’s the same emission as a 50 mpg gasoline powered hybrid. In other words, if you buy a plug-in electric vehicle today, you’re not doing much to reduce greenhouse gases.

What if the emissions associated with power consumption could be reduced? What about solar power and other renewable energy sources? They’re expensive. Residential solar power only makes sense given a combination of artificially low interest rate, high tax subsidy, and artificially high electricity prices. If the current energy industry was allowed to do it’s thing, we’d have residential power at under 10 cents per kWh. Solar power is about four times that. That would be a 30 cents per kWh additional cost, which for an electric vehicle would translate to 9 cents per mile - compared to the carbon cost of gasoline of 0.4 cents per mile.

And of course the energy requirements for switching to electric are enormous. If you do the math, you would need to double the total electricity production in the US. The only option for that is nuclear. Personally, I’m all for it - there’s enough uranium in sea water to last us for thousands of years. Currently nuclear is about 20% of electricity production, so we would need to quintuple that. The political will isn’t there. So it won’t happen.

But even if it did, it wouldn’t matter. The aggregate external carbon costs from a gasoline engine over it’s entire lifetime is around $1000. So any engine changes that increase the price of the car by more than that doesn’t change the equation. And batteries are much more expensive than that, more on the order of $10,000 over the lifetime of the car. In other words, even if you could get zero-emission free electricity for your electric car, it still would not make sense.

What about bio fuels? Well it turns out we don’t know much about their net effects on CO2 emissions - some recent studies show they are a net loss. Sure, they remove our “dependence on foreign oil”, and they get you votes in agrarian districts, but they don’t do much to reduce carbon emissions. They simply either require too much energy to produce to have much effect, or too much acreage to be economical. And they have some nasty side-effects, like dramatically raising the price of food in the world, to the detriment of developing countries, many of whom are net food importers.

What about “foreign oil”? Sure, you can make the argument that it’s of strategic value to reduce revenue to countries that we have various levels of disagreements with. But that is a different discussion. It has little to do with helping the environment or supporting developing countries in building their infrastructure.

So there you have it. US consumers are clearly willing and able to pay a lot more for gasoline than we expected. Which means gasoline can easily carry the cost of the external damage done by CO2 emissions. Which means the gasoline-powered car will be our savior - it can easily pay for any global investments needed to deal with global warming.

[1] Yeah I’m being bloggish. The prez actually reacted to the $4 claim, which had circulated in the press but was based on a local chapter AAA spokesperson comment in Florida. The official AAA comment was that they expected $3.75 gasoline.

Edit (3/7) I just found some good data to kill any arguments of “you save on maintenance”. Consumer Reports did a study of total cost of ownership over 5 years for 300 models of cars. Capital cost, and costs related to it, completely dominate: depreciation, sales tax, insurance, and interest together is 75% (!). Fuel (even at $3) is just 21%, and maintenance & repair is 4%. So there is minimal room to increase the cost of a normal car - you can only go one third above cost of the car, after that it doesn’t matter if fuel and maintenance is zero bucks.

In the category of best closing comment to close the first day of TC40, I hereby declare the legendary Yossi Varid the winner.

(And with that I’m heading to bed, my summary of the first day’s presentations with sundry stars won’t get any better.)

The last panel of the day ended with Yossi Vardi urging the audience to look up Theodore Roosevelt’s “arena” speech from 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

An appropriate wrap to the presentations! Indeed what deserves to be remembered. And nobody has quit put it as well as Theodore did. Good luck to each and every presenter!

And don’t forget those encouraging words, when you meet with those “cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”, the VCs! (I jest, I jest.)

I’m hanging out at the event of the day, the TC40, where Jason, Michael, and Heather have done an amazing job of getting sizzling hot startups to fight for a seat at the podium. Well, that’s the story, anyway. As if this event needs blog coverage, lol!

Update: On the off-chance you’re wondering, I never did get around to posting on the Day 2 companies, for various reasons. But seriously, the TC40 got an amazing amount of blogosphere attention, so it’s not as if more comments are needed.

As I’m watching the presentations and checking out the demos, I’ll try and rate them. My rating is from a perspective of “interesting”, in the sense of showing something that I think is really compelling - as opposed to something that’s an easy tech flip.

(Brief note from the demo pit: companies to watch from today’s set include BigSwerve, Stixy, and Tangler.)

Final version; I’m going home to bed. It’s been a fun day.

Session 1: Search and Discovery

There’s not much room for a new search company in the world, despite what the enthusiasts say. But conversely, it is a good space for tech flips, since there are buyers with deep pockets looking to continuously improve the quality of the search experience.

Powerset

“Powerset is a search engine that focuses on natural language processing. The technology is based on breakthrough technologies licensed from PARC and developed internally, natural language processing allows users to express their intent in plain English. Using technology that understands of the structure and nuance of ordinary language, Powerset’s index is built by carefully reading and encoding the meaning of each sentence on the Web. By matching the meaning of a user’s query to the meaning in our index, Powerset is aiming to change the way we search online.”

The problem with NLS is that it looks extremely well in “toy benchmarks” - small examples. But scaling it to the web is a really tricky thing. There is indeed a lot of interesting technology in NLP (natural language processing), but historically it’s been very context-sensitive and fairly hit and miss. They have introduced some crowdsourcing techniques to scale better, but I’m immensely skeptical. Sure, any established search company might buy their tech to flesh out some of their current strategies, but NLS won’t change the search landscape anytime soon.

Cognitive Code

“Cognitive Code makes tools and systems for enabling practical conversational artificial intelligence applications, so users can interact better with their computers and mobile devices. Their SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform is a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent applications to almost any platform, with a technological core that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways. The platform helps derive context and meaning from user inputs, via speech, text, or other methods, so you can communicate with the platform as if it were another person.”

“Artificial intelligence for everyday problems.” Their main product is the SILVIA platform. Again, this is a technology that has worked well for a long time in demo mode. (This is the kind of technology that makes you insane when some company buys it for their call center.) Their initial monetization is focused on toys.

Similar to NLS, it’s yet another application of high-end software techniques; which is nice, and may be a useful technology/talent asset for existing net players, but not compelling per se.

When challenged about this, the founders had two comments: first, computing costs have fallen to interesting level, and secondly, with search, there’s a monetization option. To which I say, yes, true, and Google already knows this and is busy putting a lot of AI into their search engine - as are other search providers.

Cast.tv

“CastTV is trying to build one of the web’s best video search engines. CastTV lets users find all their favorite online videos, from TV shows to movies to the latest celebrity, sports, news, and viral Internet videos. The company’s proprietary technology addresses two main video search challenges: finding and cataloging videos from the web and delivering relevant video results to users.”

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m too old, but I don’t quite get this. The problem with searching video is sorting out what’s good. YouTube is fun for a while, but mostly it becomes a distribution platform for videos (like key scenes from network news) that are referenced from other sites. So YouTube’s real strength today is branding.

That said, CastTV showed some pretty cool search technology. It’s pretty clear that the current search engines are behind the curve on best practice. Like VentureBeat notes, companies like CastTV are good tech purchases.

Faroo

“FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users, which leads to a more democratic, user centric ranking. FAROO also shares advertising revenues up to fifty percent with its users. The search engine uses privacy-protected behavioral targeting to increase conversion rates.”

Essentially, Peer-to-peer search engine. Without using a traditional crawler, Faroo’s idea is to index only pages visited by one of the P2P users. Instead of expensive, centralized resources, Faroo will scale with users, and also leverage user behavior to gather information on usefulness etc.

This was clearly the most compelling company in the search category. There are some alluring aspects to P2P search. But there are a number of issues as well. Firstly, it presents a chicken-and-egg problem: what level of usage

Viewdle

“Viewdle is a media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing will let video content owners extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. Content owners can leverage both their new and old content with Viewdle’s internal and white-label search and indexing capabilities to maximize relevance, usage, audience and monetization. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle has a killer feature in its facial-recognition technology. It is able to index video frame-by-frame and create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.” They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references. Reuters is currently testing out Viewdle’s technology with their videos news inventory by letting people search their catalogue for specific people.”

Ok, so, NSA will love this, but I just find this scary.

And, yet another Britney Spears example. It seems that 90% of searches on the planet are either Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

Viewdle is a real good reason for not sharing your personal videos on any indexable location.

Session 2: Mobile and Communications

Anything that relies in any way on collaboration with mobile operators is a challenge; the only player that stood out for me in this category was Ceedo.

Cubic Telecom

“Cubic Telecom is a mobile service provider looking to become a fully global mobile startup by blanketing the globe with their signal. The company aims to drastically reduce international mobile roaming and call charges, which will lead to cheaper prices for overseas calls. They will accomplish this goal by utilizing existing phone network resources without the need of downloads or new phone configurations. Founder Pat Phelan a well known communications blogger “wants a world in which anyone can pick up their mobile phone wherever they are and call anyone in any country for as long as they like without worrying about the price.”

The “pre-game chatter” had this company pegged as a favorite. 500 million international travelers spend $20B+ on roaming charges when traveling. Check out Max Roam.

They’re dubbing themselves the Ryan Air of international cell phone. The notion is to sort out various issues with allowing a single SIM card to programmed for local phones in up to 50 countries (e.g. you will have up to 50 phone numbers). They’ve fleshed out the solution to include mobile phone unlocking services etc.

But the challenge is, how do you build a sustainable business model? If anything, this is yet another reason to short cell phone operators, as if we needed more. If we spend $20B+ on roaming charges, and they take the example of a $1400 bill from one trip to France; well, what if I want a 99% savings to use their service? So that’s a 200M market. And I have alternatives - callback services, picking up a rental phone, having a second (or third) account for my most-travelled-to market, etc. When I last travelled back to Sweden, I picked up a cash GSM at the kiosk at the airport, and in 10 minutes had a new number, I called my US phone number and changed the voice message to give my temporary traveling number. Done.

Yap

“Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keyboards.”

These guys garnered sympathies when they had a serious A/V issues. Jason loved these guys and jumped to their defense - “when you see it, it’s beyond cool”.

Yap tries to create a full voice-governed experience of mobile. It looks very good, and again, seems eminently acquirable as a tech play.

This company seems to be generating a lot of interest.

Tru Tap

“Trutap is a mobile social-networking application that enables users to stay connected with offline and online friends regardless of where they are in the world. The application also claims to work with all social networks, IM clients, network carriers and mobile phone devices. Trutap is accessible through a downloadable mobile application and their web browser experience synchronizes all Trutap messages, conversations and contacts. The application lets users communicate with individuals or groups via text, picture and instant messaging. The service also enables users to link to their social networks, upload pictures and update their blogs.”

Oops, I was busy responding to comments on my posting yesterday about Jane Fonda and nuclear panel, so I missed the demo. But they beatboxed so they must be cool!

Ceedo

“Ceedo Technologies is a virtualization software company headquartered in Israel. Its patent pending approach to virtualizing the Windows’ desktop environment enables users to carry their PC-based work environment on portable devices such as USB flash drives, pocket hard drives, network drives and even mobile phones. Ceedo works well with the mobile device market. This is because it does not virtualize operating systems, which lets it load and operate more quickly while taking less drive space. Ceedo Mobile technology lets users connect their favorite mobile device to a PC without requiring installation or configuration.”

Virtualization for smart mobile devices. Launches on a PC from an application stored on the phone, and can then launch applications from that mobile phone and run them on the PC. The demo included editing Picasa pictures, and posting them to the blog. It blends understanding of what phone you have with the PC; thus if you buy music or video, it’s selected such that it’s viewable on the phone.

It’s a very clever packaging of virtualization technology, and there’s an obvious buyer with strong share price out there, so these guys should do well.

But it doesn’t work with Macs (sigh) …

LoudTalks

“Loudtalks is a free downloadable push-to-talk messaging application. It supports real time private or group voice communication in the walkie talkie style. Loudtalks is based on the peer-to-peer architecture and capable to work behind most firewalls and NATs. The software is lightweight (installer is less than 1 Mb) and unobtrusive. Normally it runs in the background and can be activated with hotkey without switching the focus or popping up the application window. The advantages of Loudtalks over existing messaging systems include speed, asynchronous style and voice messaging.”

“Push to talk for the internet.”

Not much different from gaming audio platforms like Ventrilo. Except those work quite well, whereas Loudtalks also had serious problems demonstrating.

Session 3: Community and Collaboration

Storyblender (Enfra Networks)

“Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their media for rich, interactive storytelling. Story Blender CEO Hyoung Yong Joon is the original founder of Cyworld, which is South Korea’s first and most popular social networking community. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.”

They draw an analogy with mediawiki. The CEO is presented as the “original founder” of CyWorld - I thought Cyworld was a big corporate project (SK Group)? Anyway, I don’t quite get online collaborative video editing. And when pressed on the hot issue of copyright, there was a confused answer.

TripIt

“TripIt is an intelligent travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans so that their trips go more smoothly. Travelers simply forward their purchase confirmation emails to TripIt and TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. TripIt makes it easy for travelers to print or access their trip plans from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends in their TripIt network.”

“We’re not in the travel business, we’re in the information management business.”

Tripit has a brilliant and simple idea: regardless of what travel-related web sites you use, whenever you book something online (hotel, plane, limo) you simply forward the details to a magic email address (plans@tripit.com) and it will intelligently parse the information, complement it with interesting travel-related information, and provide an environment for keeping sharing, printing, etc.

This is an excellent application of NLP/AI/semantic web etc. It’s also a real problem area. And travel is an excellent monetizing target.

This company is the one to beat so far.

Flock

“Flock is a social web browser. When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is also a powerful platform for distribution and marketing partners who receive a custom browser optimized for their business to drive engagement and incremental revenue from their communities both on and beyond their site. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo.”

Based on the Mozilla web browser, Flock strives to make Mozilla into an excellent social networking environment. They today announced version 1.0, so they’re going one-dot-oh.

Flock looks like it’s getting really interesting. I’m not sure how it’s to be monetized, or how to hold up against open source alternatives being rolled into Mozilla. But it’s worth watching.

MusicShake

“MusicShake is a Korea-based online music creation service developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp that provides music composing solutions aimed at the general public without previous musical knowledge or expertise. The service lets users create personalized, professional quality music using various tools and pattern-combination methods. They hope to meet the growing demand for customized ringtones and personalized music that mobile phone users and Internet users have for adding personalized creativity to their personal blogs, websites and social network pages.”

This is an application, basically aiming to topple software like Garageband in making it simpler to put together simple music. Not sure what the business model is, even if they have a slide saying “We have lots of ‘REAL’ business models”. It looks like cool software, but packaged software is packaged software.

8020 Publishing

“8020 Publishing is a media company that allows online communities to take an active role in creating 8020 Publishing’s published print magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. They let their online users handle the heavy role of creating the content. They also let them critique and vote on the print content. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. Their editors act more like curators letting their contributors the online communities provide the raw content. Taking this approach has provided them with a built-in magazine subscription audience not to mention loyal online communities. It has even led to them receiving two industry awards in 2007, Circulation Innovation of the Year and Best Use of Viral Marketing for Audience Development.”

One of Jason’s favorites. “Community created magazines” is very, very interesting. They are seeking to combine the benefits of web collaboration with the magazine structure. They launched JPG a year ago that went well; today they are announced Everywhere Magazine, which will launch in a few weeks.

There’s is a middle ground somewhere between blogs and printed newspapers. 8020 seems to be exploring it in a very focused manner.

Session 4: Crowd Sourcing

Cake Financial

“Cake Financial is a social investment service that lets people safely and securely track all their investment portfolios in one place. The service allows individual investors to track and analyze their historical performance up to ten years. Users can also view the real-time portfolios and performances of their friends, family and top investors all without disclosing net worths, shares owned, portfolio sizes, etc.”

“You can’t game the system.” Hm. Ok, I admit, I don’t get it. I don’t see friends and family sharing this sort of information to this extent. And if it’s strangers, it’s back to the monkeys-and-WSJ: if you have a few hundred throwing darts, some of them will do a good job of picking stocks. And what is your interest as an individual contributor. The panel gave Cake a hard time.

DocStoc

“Docstoc is an online community and professional network geared around user generated, professional documents. The site integrates the most useful features of private online file storage with the ability to store, categorize, and share content found anywhere on the web. Users can search for documents by categories or by keywords and then preview the documents online and download or store any content for free. They can filter search results by views, downloads, ratings and comments.”

Nice thought, but where do the documents magically come from? Tags on Google search help me find various documents on the Web, and has for years. So is this just a semantic filter? I think it’s a great concept, but getting the squirrel wheel spinning can be tricky; they might want to focus on one topic (vertical) to start.

TeachThePeople

“Teach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set share with the Teach The People communities. Users get to create individual profiles and contribute content to topics such as computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music”. The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, content views or content downloads. They can also share in site advertising revenues.”

These sorts of “fat verticals” I think are the model for finding good revenue sources.

CrowdSpirit

“CrowdSpirit is a crowdsourcing community built around designing electronic products and staying involved throughout their product life cycle. Users submit ideas for innovative electronic products that the community fine tunes and votes on. The best ideas and their product specifications rise to the top where investors provide financing and development partners make prototypes. Once products have been made they are tested by the community and recommended to retailers. Users involved with product creation can earn a share of the product revenue. Typical products will include MP4 players, DVD players, computer peripherals, headphones, etc.”

There’s a fine line between effective crowdsourcing and design-by-committee. Is this project management software? I don’t see it.

Designing a product and bringing it to market is extremely difficult to do well. The examples cited are extremely competitive product segments.

Ponoko

“The world’s first personal manufacturing platform, Ponoko is the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a distributed network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas, on demand.”

Very cool, very clever, but I don’t see it becoming big.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

An appropriate wrap to the presentations! Good luck to each and every one.

Levitt and Dubner takes a look at why nuclear power only accounts for 20% of electricity production in the US, and playfully blames Jane Fonda. It’s a cute narrative, but Levitt and Dubner ignore a number of economic aspects of the energy sector in their column, which is interesting since, *ahem*, Levitt is a brilliant economist.

If you haven’t read Freakonomics yet, you really should. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner do a marvelous job of applying critical thinking (or as they term it, “economics”) to some non-typical problems and arrive at some thought-provoking conclusions. E.g., crime rates don’t drop because of “get tough on crime”; the only statistically significant factors are (a) the number of cops and (b) legalization of abortion; and backyard pools are more dangerous than guns.

Ok, that’s enough of a plug for their book and my own affiliate kick-back.

The Freakonomics blog is an extension of the book, and continues Levitt’s tradition of revisiting old topics with a fresh, critical eye. And eyebrows were raised over the weekend as he took aim at Hollywood. In an expanded article in today’s New York Times Magazine, Levitt argues that Hollywood, with “The China Syndrome”, which coincided with the Three Mile Island incident, helped derail US exploitation of nuclear power, and so playfully blames Jane Fonda for global warming.

A wonderful headline, to be sure. But this is a troublesome perspective, for a number of reasons.

First, it’s hardly news that Hollywood is disingenuous at best in portraying anything in a realistic fashion. It’s just an element of popular culture, which overall is prone towards dumbing down the audience. It’s simply easier to make a buck if you cater to the lowest common denominator. As a techie I cringe at depictions of young hackers breaking into government systems, but at least that doesn’t kill people. There are tens of thousands of gun-related deaths in the US every year; what’s Hollywood’s “cut” of that death toll from their steady drumbeat of celebrating the gun culture? Should we pin Jodie Foster, starring in the recent vigilante film “The Brave One”, for next year’s home accidents involving kids and guns? Hollywood doesn’t drive opinion a much as it captures it.

Blaming, even in jest, Jane Fonda for the public disenchantment with nuclear energy is to be guilty of similar pandering. Countercritics (e.g. critics of the anti-nuclear-power groups) have long implied that silly movies like the China Syndrome was to blame for convincing a foolish public of the evil of nuclear power. It’s a nice narrative: the proponents of nuclear power are wise and rational and not influenced by dumb Hollywood scripts; opponents are immature and easily influenced by emotions. It’s a cute narrative. But it’s false.

Before I get to the heart of the matter (the price of coal), allow me to first take issue with their notion of there being wiser people out there than the dumb yanks:

Could it be that nuclear energy, risks and all, is now seen as preferable to the uncertainties of global warming? France, which generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity by nuclear power, seems to think so. So do Belgium (56 percent), Sweden (47 percent) and more than a dozen other countries that generate at least one-fourth of their electricity by nuclear power.

Now, this is in fact the section that got me interested. This statement is blatantly false. Energy production doesn’t shift that quickly. The notion that France, Belgium, Sweden, or any other country have significantly altered their energy policies as a consequence of the global warming debate is absurd. The debate simply isn’t old enough.

But there’s more to it than that. I don’t know much about Belgium, but I do know a bit about Swedish and French nuclear politics.

Sweden and nuclear power

Nuclear power has been an extremely sensitive political issue in Sweden. Sweden has built four nuclear facilities for commercial electricity production, and they went into operation in the period 1975 through 1980, with the last reactors being added to these locations in 1985.

As an aside, one of these facilities was shut down in 2005 (well after the global warming debate began in earnest), leaving three in operation. The facility in question was located across the straight from Copenhagen, Denmark, and had been a source of political friction since Three Mile Island (though Denmark had initially thought it was a good idea to place it close to “market”).

In 1980, heavily influenced by Three Mile Island, the Swedish public voted in a national referendum on the issue. To make a long story short, the Swedish parliament decided to shut down all nuclear power plants no later than 2010, and that the last date for already under-way projects to complete was five years out (1985). In 1984, the government made it illegal to make any sorts of plans for, or research in support of, new nuclear power plants (a controversial “thought police” law that wasn’t repealed until 2006).

So much for Swedish enthusiasm for nuclear power.

So why is the percentage of electricity production so heavily nuclear? (47% according to Levitt and Dubner.) Looking at statistics from the Swedish energy authority (in Swedish, over at www.energimyndigheten.se, which since I’m Swedish I happen to be able to read), the contribution of nuclear power to the overall consumption of energy has stayed fairly constant since the mid-1980s; indeed the net growth in energy demand from 1985 (when the last nuclear reactor was opened) to today has been modest. Efficiencies in energy consumption combined with not-very-exciting economic growth has more or less created a steady state.

So those are the numbers from Sweden. Contrary to Levitt and Dubner’s presentation, the high use of nuclear power in Sweden has nothing to do with global warming, or indeed with anything that has happened since Three Mile Island.

By the way, the Three Mile Island event is known in Sweden as the “Harrisburg accident”. Levitt and Dubner write “What it [the movie China Syndrome] did produce, stoked by “The China Syndrome,” was a widespread panic.” Well, yes, the movie premiere was eerily close to TMI (twelve days), and the movie tag line, after all, was “Today, only a handful of people know what it means… Soon you will know.”

But 1979 was well before digital cinema. The China Syndrome didn’t premiere in Sweden until August 13th, so had little impact on the debate. With all due respect to Jane Fonda, she’s just not such a big political factor in Sweden. It was the “Harrisburg accident” that gave the anti-nuclear environmentalist movement steam.

The French

Ah, yes, the French and nuclear power. “Nearly 80%” of electricity production in France is nuclear according to L&D (the actual number is 78%). France stands out among nations in their exploitation of nuclear power. But there are some very specific reasons for this. And none of them have to do with global warming.

Let’s begin by rolling back the clock a century or so.

It’s a little tricky for an American public to understand the French strategic perspective coming out of World War II. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 led to the siege, and fall, of Paris, and as a political consequence the final unification of Germany, as well as social upheaval in France including the infamous Paris Commune. The Great War (World War I) was in the west mostly fought on French soil; some 11% of the French population were killed or wounded in the war, an extraordinary number - some one thousand times higher than the US casualty rate in the current Iraqi conflict! And of course World War II led to the invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany for four years.

The ruling elite in France after WW2 were painfully aware of all this history, of course - Petain was born in 1856 and was a teenager during the “War of 1870″; de Gaulle was born in 1890 to a highly political Parisian family. This all set the nuclear political stage.

Besides this political history, France is proud of it’s early scientific work. And rightly so. Antoine Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie were not only both French, but both were born in Paris. Together with Pierre’s Polish wife Maria Skłodowska-Curie, they discovered and characterized the phenomenon of “radiation”, for which they all shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics. Both the Curie and the Becquerel are today units of radioactivity (the latter being the SI unit).

The French government under de Gaulle founded the French Atomic Energy Commission in 1945, and already in 1956 began work on commercial production of electricity from nuclear power [3degc4]. In 1960, France detonated it’s first nuclear bomb, and proceeded to develop a nuclear capability independent of Great Britain and the United States. As de Gaulle said in 1968, “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent” [3ey39w]. The French nuclear capability was initially outside the NATO chain of command. Given the option, the French were not about to allow themselves to be invaded again. Today, France still maintains the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.

To these two factors - strong political desire for independent strategic defense, and historic sense of connection through the discovery of radiation - we now add a third. The clincher.

France has hardly any fossil fuel reserves to speak of [2fprh8]. Not coal, not natural gas, not oil. The oil crisis of 1973 was just another impetus: in 1974 the french government embarked on an aggressive expansion program of nuclear power production.

Public sentiments and atomic energy

The key to understanding “The China Syndrome” is that it captured the trend, it didn’t cause it. It’s a cultural reference point, as is Three Mile Island (TMI), as is Chernobyl. But they’re not the cause. If anything, the China Syndrome was an exclamation mark at the end of a process, rather than the opening salvo. By 1979, skepticism of nuclear power had combined with economic factors to effectively cap the growth.

There were several reasons that led to the build-up of public resistance. The initial source was distrust of the government. General MacArthur and the US military censors did their best to paper over reports of “atomic plague” - radiation poisoning - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is still a sensitive subject, as William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for the New York Times, is being posthumously criticized for being on the Pentagon payroll at the time [3by99t].

This intellectual dishonesty continued into the early nuclear power program. The “Atoms for Peace” initiative presented by Eisenhower to the UN in 1953 began a process of capitalizing on the “peace dividend” (as we would call it today) of the nuclear bomb [y2hdfo]. In this atmosphere, an honest discussion of the pros and cons of atomic energy was hardly encouraged.

It was in that early context that Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the new Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954 made the famous comment that became a headline in the New York Times the following day: “too cheap to meter” [3xcpk2]. Though not quite the true sentiment of the AEC at the time, it became part of a lopsided optimism over the potential of atomic energy.

If you want to talk about the influence of movies on the nuclear debate, you should mention Hiroshima mon Amour from 1959. It was the first graphic depiction of the horrors of nuclear war to reach a broader audience, and so politically sensitive at the time that Cannes had to put it in a special category. Now that movie had some real influence.

It is also easy to forget today how tense the world became in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Sputnik flew in 1957 and heralded the age of ICBMs, France detonated their first bomb in 1960, the Berlin Wall began to be built in mid-1961, in late 1961 the Soviet Union detonated their 50-megaton “Ivan” hydrogen bomb, Khrushchev spoke of a 100 megaton bomb, and in 1962 we had the Cuba Missile Crisis.

Whatever room for optimism around atomic energy was made guilty by association with the nuclear arms race of the 1960s. And Vietnam didn’t help.

By the time the 1970s came around, the anti-nuclear movement was in full swing across the west. Fair or not, the atomic energy industry was grouped with the nuclear weapons industry.

But all that being said, though public support for nuclear power fell around the time of TMI and the China Syndrome, they never fell very far. With few exceptions, every year the public was polled, a majority favored nuclear power, and it’s been growing at a steady clip since the late-90s [ypmvfx].

If nuclear power had been of strategic significance to the US, the political support would have been there, once emotions after TMI had calmed a bit. So what actually did happen?

It’s the coal, stupid

It’s not true that nuclear power has not grown in the US. No brand new sites have been built, but the existing ones have been upgraded, expanded, and tuned over the years, to the extent that total nuclear-energy power production since 1979 has tripled in the US [2qf6dw].

The real dilemma facing nuclear power adoption in the US is not public opinion. It’s economics: the price of coal is too low. Estimating the cost of electricity produced from nuclear power is very hard, but various sources today agree that it’s a little below 2 cents per kWh. The problem is, that’s about where the cost of electricity from coal is. (L&D assert that nuclear has a clear cost advantage vs coal, 1.3 vs 2.2 cents, but pinning down actual costs of nuclear is much more difficult than they imply.) And coal plants can be built smaller, more quickly, and in a much simpler regulatory context than nuclear power. But, of course, the price of coal doesn’t have to carry the external cost - CO2 emissions.

As the IAEA points out [38xnsx], the turnkey systems initially built in the early 1970s ended up being non-profitable. The National Environmental Policy Act was passed in 1969 and created both new requirements and new regulatory institutions. These were all good things, but the consequential demands on new licensees, notably of environmental impact statements, added to the rising costs.

By 1975 the curve of new orders world-wide had already reached it’s peak.

Furthermore, in the 1970s, and the 1980s, two other (economic) factors played in. Firstly, the western economies started to become more energy efficient. Measured as thousands of Btus per dollar, the US economy started to become significantly more efficient after the oil crisis; as the EIA numbers tell the story [222yvo], from holding steady around 17-20 from 1949 through the early 1970s, they then started to fall to last year’s estimate of 8.75.

In other words, the US economy doubled it’s economic energy efficiency. Demand for electricity would simply not grow at historical rates. The beginning of this trend coinciding with the peak of nuclear power plant orders is real. This is what free markets are good at: sensing a change in long-term demand trends.

And yes, the oil crisis. Many readers will be too young to remember the 1973 oil crisis. On October 17 of that year, the bulk of arab oil-producing countries decided to embargo the west for it’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This caused the prices of crude oil to triple, triggering a global recession. But even though those prices came back down somewhat, at least until the Iran/Iraq war [au6qc], the era of cheap oil was pretty much over. But that affects electricity prices very little.

The real driver of electricity prices in the US is coal. Coal is the source for half of the US electricity production.

And though coal prices did jump in 1974 and 1975 [yr5o8t], they came down, and have stayed down, shortly thereafter. Coal in the US, on a real dollar basis, is pretty much as cheap as it has ever been.

And it’s easy to see why. US coal reserves are gargantuan. Looking at the 2005 numbers (the next update is in fact due this month), the US has estimated reserves of 500 billion short tons. Since the current annual production is about 1 billion short tons, we have enough for 500 years. And that reserve estimate has been growing, not shrinking. I checked the EIA 1997 reports, and that was 500 billion tons, too. Who knows how long our coal will last. But it’s a long, long time. Our current consumption is within the error bar of our reserves. And barring regulatory changes, it will stay cheap. That’s how free markets work.

Have the columnists looked at this economic data? They write:

And so, instead of becoming a nation with clean and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels.

If you look at the actual numbers [3y7brd], this statement is misleading, at best. It sounds like they are saying that our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity has increased since 1979. The reverse is true. Fossil fuels accounted for over three-quarters (75%) of electricity production in 1979. Since then it fell distinctly to around 70% around 1990, and has stayed there since. What has stepped in to take it’s place? Nuclear power, which went from around 10% to today’s 20%, and has also picked up the slack from hydro.

Sure, you can argue that we should be replacing fossil fuels with nuclear at a faster clip. But that’s a different argument. Their implication that our dependence on fossil fuels for electricity production has increased is simply flat wrong.

The confusion continues

And so the debate about the environment, nuclear power, global warming, etc, continues it’s confusing path. The true dilemma with energy is that it is a really complex problem, and thus it’s very difficult to pursue an intelligent public discourse.

Blaming Jane Fonda doesn’t help.

• Noel Sheppard relishes a “liberal publication” slamming Jane Fonda
• The Huffington Post has a lively comment section on the topic
• Larry Ribstein views it as a general example of big-company bashing by Hollywood. He refers to an earlier posting where he says “the fantasy about business that audiences see presented in films has real world political effects in government regulation of business”
• Blue Collar Republican is quick to add “Greenhouse Fonda” to “Hanoi Jane”.
• Harto over at the Democratic Daily sees it as part of “a low-key PR campaign that’s been going on for the past few months, to sell the nuclear industry to a new generation of voters too young to remember Three Mile Island or Chernobyl”
• Ed Driscoll recollects a purported Pete Townshead quote from 1980: “I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.”
• Dean Baker notes that at the heart, corporate accountability remains a challenge: “the executives at the companies that operate these facilities care far more about saving their careers than ensuring that their plants operate safely”
• We Support Lee notes that “the conclusion to the column is weak and overlooks the important economic factors of electriciy [sic] demand, costs of construction, and the possibility of a carbon tax that could make fossil fuel combustion more expensive relative to non-fossil fuel energy sources.”

The best way to migrate your Outlook contacts to the Macintosh Address Book is by way of the Mozilla Thunderbird installation wizard on the Windows side; Thunderbird will then export to LDIF, which Address Book can import. And you’re done. This tip took me a while to find amongst all the options, and with an increasing number of friends and acquaintances switching from Windows to Mac these days, I thought I would share it.

When Apple announced Core 2 Duo laptops, I switched back to the Mac as my main platform for the first time since 1995 (back when MacOS 7.5.2 looked weak compared to NT 3.51, to put it gently). Over the next several months, I migrated pretty much everything, including installing Office 2007 on Parallels. The one challenging piece was how to get my contacts across from Microsoft Outlook to Apple’s Address Book.

I was planning to solve this by using my Treo, but got stuck figuring out how to set up native Mac support for it. That little exercise reminded me why Palm stock isn’t doing so well, but that’s another story.

When Apple announced the iPhone, I knew the Treo was history. So I wasn’t going to invest more time. That left the question, how best to get the contacts across?

It would be simple if Microsoft Outlook supported LDIF. But, surprise, surprise, they don’t. The solution is simple, but took me hours to find, and apparently it still stymies people. So I thought I’d repeat the Best Practice solution here, which I originally found on MacOS X Hints, by Christopher Breen:

Or you can use a go-between application to get the contacts out of Outlook and into an application that offers more flexible export options. That application is the Windows version of the free cross-platform email client, Thunderbird. Within Thunderbird you’ll find the Tools -> Import command. Choose it, select the Address Book option, click Next, and in the Import window select Outlook and click Next to import your Outlook contacts into Thunderbird.

Select all your contacts in Thunderbird and choose Tools -> Export. In the Export Address Book window that appears, choose LDIF from the Save as Type pop-up menu and name and save the file.

Finally, move this file to your Mac, launch Address Book, and choose File -> Import -> LDIF. Navigate to the LDIF file you brought over from Windows and import it. Your Outlook contacts will (finally) appear in Address Book.

I was reminded twice recently that this method remains relatively unknown. First my neighbor had the same problem. Then Walt Mossberg wrote about it in his mailbox, but failed to include the Thunderbird solution.

This method works well. Walt also mentions software from LittleMachines that will move all your Outlook data to MacOS X, but I haven’t tested it (nor do I know anybody who has).

There’s also an open source project Outport, but it doesn’t seem to have been tested with Outlook 2003 or later.

Yes, you could try and use CSV, but that won’t handle character sets properly, nor long fields.

The international reporting on the KILM report mostly rehashed the original Reuters report, and failed to emphasize the most interesting tidbit: that of the three economic activities - farming, industry, and services - farming is no longer the largest global employer.

Living in a post-industrial society - perhaps even post-information society - it’s easy to lose perspective sometimes. Today’s wire from Reuters about the ILO’s Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM) was widely reported, including the New York Times coverage where I first read it.

The business and mainstream press focus on our own economic competitiveness vis-a-vis China and Europe. E.g. NYT opens their reporting with “American workers are the world’s most productive, followed by the Irish, though productivity is rising fastest in China and much of the rest of Asia, according to the International Labor Organization.” Wall Street Journal leads with “U.S. workers continue to lead the world in productivity, though many East Asian economies are quickly advancing, according to a new report by the International Labour Organization.“

They go on to note various interesting details, for example if you take into account the number of hours worked, the US falls to second place after Norway (Americans are noted for working many hours). More significantly, the productivity head start that the west has over China and other East Asian economies is shrinking; output per worker grew to one-fifth that of an western economy industrialized worker, from one-eighth ten years ago, a dramatic improvement. The economic growth in Asia led to the number of working poor falling by half, though in south-Saharan Africa it is getting worse. World unemployment fell from 6.4% to 6.3%.

By and large the report shows some serious progress in the world economy, coupled with some regional setbacks. But there was a small item about farming that prompted me to dig up the actual KILM report and look through it.

Here’s what the report writes (in Box 4b on page 6 of KILM04):

In recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the services sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture. As for the industry sector, it represented 21.9 per cent of total employment, which is almost unchanged from ten years ago. Although textbook theory suggests that economic development entails a structural transformation with a shift away from agriculture to the industry sector, this no longer seems to be reflected in reality. Instead of moving into high-productivity jobs in the industry sector, people are moving directly into the services sector, which consists of both high- and low-productivity jobs.

Therefore, it is unclear if the sectoral shift goes hand in hand with productivity increases and thereby a better utilization of the workforce. Agriculture is still the main sector of employment in the world’s poorest regions. Two-thirds of workers in sub-Saharan Africa and almost half of workers in South Asia and South-East Asia & the Pacific are in agriculture.

So, firstly, modernization of large economies is largely bypassing industrialization and going straight to the service sectors - in the western economies the service sector was about two-thirds of the economy, and has grown further (to 71.2%). But the so many workers are moving straight to service industries that their roles have changed. Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, the service sector has overtaken farming on a global scale.

To me this stuck out as the news of the day. This is a huge milestone. In the west we’re accustomed to the farming sector being 4-6% or so, but that certainly has not been true in most of the word. You might think the industrial revolution was a long time ago, but the reality is that farming has remained the center of the overall human condition. Until sometime in these past few years, that is.

And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species. Farming, invented around 8000 BC, quickly dominated human activity and has continued to for some 10,000 years. And we even find that the agriculture->industry->services transition doesn’t hold up globally. The industry segment simply isn’t big enough, so increasingly workers go directly from farming to services.

So despite what they tell you at coffee tomorrow about the adoption rates your marketing people expect for your product, you might want to point out the longest paradigm shift of all time; farming handed over the crown to the service sector only just about now.

I’ve been enjoying hanging around at GetSatisfaction lately, and for some reason decided to research the issue of what to do when you spill liquids on your electronics. This isn’t the usual heady strategic stuff that I prefer to write, but odds are this is actually more useful. I haven’t really found a good general online guide for this, which is bizarre since this is really something that basically every modern adult should know. If you’re anything like me, then it’s not a question of if you’re going to spill something on your laptop or mobo, but when. I suspect if you know me and my blog you probably know this stuff, but odds are you have friends and family that don’t.

Well this advice may be too late, but this is an area that is broadly misunderstood, so this might be of general interest. I learned the bulk of this stuff years ago, but after freshening up with some online guides, here’s the dope on liquids and electronics:

Water per se doesn’t hurt electronics, nor in general do common liquids (coffee, beer, etc) with some notable exceptions (e.g. acidic soda).

It’s the residue once it’s dried that can cause problems (sugar, calcium, salt, etc), shorts caused by small amounts of liquid, and rust (which can occur quite quickly).

In general when you get any liquids on electronics, it’s important to *immediately* power down and unplug *all* power sources (including all internal batteries). Just pull the plug instantly and rip out any batteries. In this phase, fractions of seconds count. Don’t worry about saving the file you were working on, you have other priorities! So no soft shutdowns, please. Don’t think twice. Pull the plug. And pull any other cables that might feed power indirectly - like an external video cable to a separately powered monitor, or a USB cable to a separately powered hub. Pull it all. NOW!!

Once free of voltage, you can set about fixing your device, and now you’re in phase 2, where seconds no longer count but minutes do. And I can stop using exclamation marks.

If what you spilled contains sugar (coffee, tea, soda, wine, yogurt, etc) then first wash it (profusely) in running warm tap water. The more the better. Shake it dry as best you can. No point in using detergents unless there’s fat in the liquid, in which case just use gentle stuff, like ordinary liquid soap. This way, you will have washed the device free of most of what’s in the liquid besides H2O. Be generous, better to wash with lots of water for a long time. Remember, as long as you don’t have power sources, odds are that there’s nothing in the device that is hurt by the tap water.

Now you have a device that’s been soaked in water. At this point, you can let it dry and hope for the best. But tap water has impurities that will dry onto the circuit board and other components. To be safe, you move on to phase 3; as with phase 2, you want to do this as quickly as possible while the residue is still dissolved in the water droplets somewhere in the device.

The simplest next step is to simply wash everything in deionized or distilled water, and then just leave it out to dry. If you want to speed up the drying process, you can use pressurized air of some form (make sure everything is nicely grounded) or instead wash/clean with isopropyl alcohol. Or if you want to get sophisticated, try WD-40 or some other moisture displacer.

And try to dry it as much as possible before leaving it to dry, so to speak. If too much liquid is left inside nooks and crannies, you may get rust issues. Shaking and pressurized air works well (hairdryer will work but make sure things are grounded; be wary of static electricity, and skip the max heat setting since that might actually melt stuff if you’re overly zealous).

You’re probably better off taking the device apart for the above efforts, of course, but you often don’t need to; and if you’re unsure of how to take it apart, then you might be damaging the gear more than imperfect cleaning will. And if trying to take it apart will slow you down too much, again, that forces a tricky trade off.

If a liquid has been allowed to dry already, then you’re more likely to need to take the device into parts and use a q-tip and/or a toothbrush to get rid of residue and rust, applying isopropyl alcohol as cleaning agent. (If you chose stronger cleaning agents, make sure they’re actually intended for use with electronics.)

Btw if you have a battery-powered device that gets completely immersed in liquid (e.g. you drop your cell phone into a pool), remove the battery (if you can) while the device is still in the water! While it’s submerged, the water will provide a perfect short and protect any components. It’s the instant you take it out that problems begin.

And please, resist the urge to “test” the device to see “how much damage” the liquid has done. It’s the test that will do the damage! Make sure things are completely dry before assembling and adding electricity to the mix.