Medical Insurance Companies Suck the Big Bone
03 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
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I’ve been one of those fortunates who had medical coverage for most of my working life. However, several years ago my job disappeared. No worries. Now I could get COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) passed by Congress in 1986 that gave certain former employees, retirees, spouses, former spouses, and dependent children the right to temporary continuation of health coverage at group rates. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provided COBRA at a reduced cost, which for me meant that I would roughly pay one third, $390 per month as opposed to $1200. Still, this was a lot of money for someone who had been covered for many years through my employer. But I could meet that cost, at least for awhile. Q. What happens when COBRA expires and the iceberg starts to melt? A. What iceberg are you talking about? Q. Health coverage. You know. I figured I could not be without health coverage. As a teenager I had been in and out of hospitals with an undiagnosed case of colitis at a time when not much was known about the disease. Later, I had a serious case of pneumonia that nearly had me packing my bags to the afterlife. Both events left me with a lasting impression about the importance of medical coverage. It also singed upon my person the need to play an active role in maintaining personal health. I do not need any prescriptions. Blood pressure is good. So is cholesterol. I exercise, eat right, and have friends, which is to say I’m in great health. Once COBRA ran out I was confident I could apply to my health care provider, Kaiser Hospital, for individual coverage. But guess what? I was denied. Q. Why? A. Chronic renal failure otherwise known as lousy kidneys “But I have never been diagnosed with chronic renal failure,” I cried to myself. “Were those medical miscreants looking at someone else’s medical records?” Then the light dawned. Last year during my round of check-ups some miniscule amounts of blood were detected in my urine. My doctor had sent me in for several tests to ensure that my kidneys were in good working order. They were. However, the initial diagnosis had placed me in a medical netherworld that no insurance company would now touch. Upset not only because number one — I was being denied medical coverage — and number two – assigned a diagnosis that didn’t exist, I appealed to my doctor who sent me in for a number of very detailed tests to establish that my kidneys were in good shape. She wrote to me, “It is not unusual to get the kind of treatment you are experiencing. The bean counters in the health plan are charged with the task of letting only the healthiest patients who won’t overutilize resources get through.” There you have it. I appealed the decision and received two letters dated on the exact same day. One said that “Please be assured that we take this matter seriously and it is currently under investigation.” The second later informed me, “Our record review indicates that you have been diagnosed with chronic renal failure, stage III. This condition does not meet our KPIF enrollment criteria.” I have filed a grievance with copies of my new medical tests and await Kaiser’s next decision. In the meantime, I urge you all to file letters if you are denied coverage. Stuff email boxes. Raise your own legal hoops. Talk with your representatives. This has to stop. Our country is being taken over by people with priorities that have nothing to do with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. |
Dancing to Your Own Music
30 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
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| When an email arrived from the theater dance and performance studies program announcing a lecture “about “Doing Dance Criticism,” I decided to go.
I thought the lecture would be a healthy experiment. With a half hour before the program was to begin, I landed a parking spot and walked through UC Berkeley’s Sather Gate and located Room 315 in Wheeler Hall, which was already filled with people. There I found the famous quartet of dance criticism composed of: Sarah Kaufman, dance critic for The Washington Post, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, regularly writes about dance, music, and opera. She is the author of eight books, including The Amateur: An Independent Life in Letters and Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering. John Rockwell, former dance critic, music critic, and editor of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, is the board chairman of the National Arts Journalism Program. Lewis Segal, formerly the staff dance critic for the Los Angeles Times, is a freelance arts writer based in Hollywood and Barcelona. Sarah Kaufman referred to her experience checking in at the airport and asked, “Why do people recoil from physical contact and prefer a quick, but questionable technology,” contrasting the pat-down to the x-ray scan, perhaps thinking of the theme of her next dance article. Wendy Lesser responded to Kaufman’s question and offered, “The scan is faster.” As a recipient of two hip replacements, which requires Lesser to undergo pat downs all over the world, she said that the scan procedure means that people can keep a closer eye on their computers rolling down the security assembly line. But what about dance criticism? There were a variety of thoughts ranging from the notion that dance on stage, or to what the panel referred to as “concert dance” represents an accumulation of inputs from everyone who touches a performance. The age-old question posed by the poet, W.B. Yeats, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” was described in the same way that the poet did—we really can’t. Another panelist said that the ability to write well in evocative terms, crafting language to describe the physical experience of dance, was a big plus. The last speaker held by his motto, “We don’t make the scene; the scene makes us.” One of the critics let the cat out of the bag and voiced a concern for the future of dance criticism. As newspapers shrink and arts publications die, Rockwell acknowledged that bloggers on the Internet have challenged the relevance of dance criticism. He said, “We’re in transition to a new business model that may eventually allow some people to earn a living.” He also hinted that the Internet may evolve into a pay-as-you-go model. Segal also acknowledged changing business models, recognizing that new TV sets now offer access to the Internet. As a result, he said, the “difference between cable and websites will become blurred” and offer dance websites a viable future. However, the critics did not mention the impact of TV programs like “So You Think You Can Dance,” or “Dancing With the Stars,” in bringing dance to new public audiences, until that question was posed from the floor. Then everyone pitched in about articles they’d written on the subject. Some offered that the programs were “vulgar,” others were more positive in recognizing that dance-savvy judges offered the public an opportunity to become “dance literate.” Another critic wondered why the public needed to know about what steps composed the “Paso Robles,” for example, when they could simply discern “the movement,” which sounded like a Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” attitude if there ever was one. My take-aways? I learned that the world of dance, like every other place, is being seriously impacted by technology. I also felt that these four dance critics may be falling behind the public as You-Tube, the Internet, and TV programs legitimize forms such as B-Boy and Hip-Hop and bring dance to a new audience. Do these audiences have an interest in a criticism that can expand beyond the world of concert dance? Maybe the panelists are dancing to their own music…
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/ |
29 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
It’s in the Code, Sucka
–Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
You have to be aware of cultural differences, if marketing wants to insert periods after each letter of UK, or if the German store wants to translate into either high or low, and whether the Japanese approve of a wayward Kanji character. I start with English. There’s something pastoral about baskets on a bicycle. Think Liza’s flower basket festooned with posies. Jars of lemon curd, smoked oysters, a package of biscuits, a bottle of wine. All the makings for a picnic. In the United States, we lock-up our purchases behind bars and bail them out at the check-out counter. Do time in our homes. Shopping can be an exercise for flies on a close-out sale.
This week I didn’t need my GPS device to find my way to the office. Instead of listening to directions, I watched clouds cast shadows over the foothills, the hide of a prehistoric animal wrapped around my internal text. Light moves closer to autumn. With GPS turned on, I moved straight toward a target, a self-directed arrow that knew where to exit. No more days of getting lost, making a right and discovering a scenic look-out, a road side stand with the best strawberries ever, bits of manna. No time to go down the wrong path. See white rabbit enter building through rear security gate and swipe badge past the employee reader. Green. Down an orange hallway, engineers tuck laptops beneath their arms and run to take orders from the next table.
Past the mall towers of Hayward and Fremont I drive with a nail in the sidewall of one of my tires held together with goo that I’d injected through the tire’s stem cell, the old Nummi plant now transmogrified into Tesla, an electric car manufacturer; past Solyndra, solar panelist that was given a half a million dollars by the feds this summer to be a bright star. But what’s that I hear? KZSU, companion of these 50 minute rides down to Cupertino where the deejay is having broadcast problems because she’s doing homework at the same time that she’s doing her show. That’s her talking, not me. “Wow, it’s been a really bad day. No one has called in for tickets.” I pass cows. Really? Cows in Fremont, remnants of an orchard from a long time ago.
He bent me through the prism of whomever he thought I was, which hurt. So I composed an email, which didn’t help. Soon I found my way to Lake Tahoe, which wasn’t Lake Tahoe, but the Great Salt Lake, so many conference rooms named after lakes where I was invited to sit around the table with helpings of stale pretzels and fudge cookies to thrash out the next business requirements document with team members dialing in and hooked up through a bridge. I sat and took notes while everyone clarified business process issues. Yellow stickie notes on a white screen, an entire wall covered in arrows and boxes, petroglyphs from a high-tech era. When I returned to my desk, my email was empty.
I got my first café latte this evening and it was good. Then I toured a management tool and visited products, assorted together in all digital manner, parents and children gathered under one roof. In God We Trust. Scaled down design with a special spigot at the sink that offers cold drinking water. Forget your bottle. I notice a defibrillator cabinet installed outside the bathroom where toilets have both automatic and manual flushing options. Beatles today on the front cover of the web page, and they look like high-tech employees, Men in Black. On the late-night shift, I talked with Elena who gathers up the day’s refuse and inserts a plastic liner into baskets and also stacks towers of cups beside the coffee maker. She’s looking for a better job in the cafeteria where it pays more.
Time is tied to the device. There are no clocks anywhere. I walk softly and try not to look like an idiot. At the coffee bar I wanted to sprinkle cinnamon on my coffee, but instead I dusted the counter. D’oh! At meetings today with a Russian program manager, also with a director from England who’s hoping that her boss doesn’t get his knickers twisted around his neck when he hears about new due dates. There’s going to be a Linux server with a need to pinpoint a team working on inventory. My notebook floats in acronyms. Everyone says that it will take at least six months before I understand what’s going on. In the meantime, I want to appear like I have my feet beneath the table.
Invite polarities within the container of a circle. There’s no tooling around. I’m in the throes of database archeology. Morning. Ask not for whom the grass blower whines. Outside my window and sitting on a Jeffrey Pine, a crow croaks. It’s time for coffee with a dose of Dr. Oz. Working on swing shift has opened up a new world of late night television, Jewelry TV with its siren call of tanzanite and mocha diamonds. I put the program on mute. Odysseus was on to something. Boot up the computer on my living room table layered with a history I never learned. It’s the story of Genghis Khan whose armies made no technological breakthroughs. Instead, they collated and passed skills through mountains, rivers, plains, from one civilization to the next.
Wouldn’t it be a century birthmark if a company chose to strategically invest its capital in developing great tools for its employees? I’m not talking about computers–but software tools that employees use to hold up the company’s electronic face. Rather than a hodge-podge of mismatched code and out-of-date text assets, an intuitive interface engineered across countries and teams. Beautiful tools. A well-honed axe. A stone awl. Is there some kind of law that says behind the face of simplicity must lie tangle, which is permanently in need of being untangled? But isn’t Nature always using conditioner and how does she do that? It’s in the code, sucka. I’m not talking about the relationship between simplicity and complexity, but an inner electric vocabulary that can be exchangeable, copiedleft. Just imagine. If employees had the same wonderful tools on the inside as consumers did on the outside, what would products look like then? Boundaries falling down.
I’m having an out-of-cart body experience. Jewelry TV says there’s only 60 more seconds left on the tanzanite cross. I’ve passed by that station. After all, I’m not even a Christian. Genghis Khan assembled representatives from the world’s religions for a theological bake-off. No side was able to convince the other of anything. Soon alcohol took center stage. Christians stopped with the logical arguments and started to sing. Muslims, who did not sing, responded by reciting the Koran, and Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. It was Shabbos for the Jews. Unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone too drunk to continue. There was a real toad strangler last night and in the morning, tree branches were clenched in prayer.
Winners and SemiFinalists’s at in the Cleantech World
11 Oct 2010 Leave a Comment
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What organization has raised 280 million dollars in the last five years for clean technology companies? A few hints: It’s an organization with nary three paid full-time staff members. The group currently runs five regular business competitions covering 22 states in the U.S. Oh, yes in another month they plan to award $200,000 to a national prize winner.
Give up? Cleantech Open is a five-year old organization that “finds, funds, and fosters entrepreneurs with big ideas,” according to Executive Director, Rex Northen who spoke at the October 8 California Regional Cleantech Open hosted by Chevron in San Ramon, California. At the end of the day, six new companies each walked away with awards of $18,000.
Many fledging companies have been assigned mentors and are given business plan assistance. Cleantech wants to help commercialize clean technologies. Corporate sponsors also are part of the backbone with expertise and support from companies such as Autodesk, Chevron, Kauffman Foundation, Google, PG&E, Reed Smith. San Diego Gas and Electric, and Wells Fargo, and others.
Andrew Hargadon, Professor and Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis gave the keynote. Hargadon focused on assembling a network around an idea. Citing Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, neither of whom actually invented anything, Soderquist advised to “Find the path to deliver to as many people as you can as fast as you can. And if it takes several centuries that’s not scale—it’s change.”
In the judging panels and during the “innovation exchange,” many venture capital firms were on hand, Both Nancy Floyd, Nth Power, and Nancy Pfund, DBL Investors, acknowledged that environmental companies are at the “tipping point.” Don Riley of Chevron Technology Ventures extended an open invitation for entrepreneurs “to contact me.”
I served as a scribe on the Energy Efficiency Judging Panel and heard about a slew of technologies, everything from a specialized pump and software algorithm to collect the natural gas spill-off from oil rigs, a new resin insulation for the high-speed transmission of electricity, and a social networking utility to allow people to track their carbon footprint.
Congratulations to the six regional California winners and semifinalists. Here’s how they stacked up:
The six finalists participate in the national judging on November 15th and 16th. National awards are held on November 17th at the 2010 National Awards and Expo, at Parkside Hall A, 271 South Market Street, San Jose.
Lenore Weiss http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/ |
How to Impact Green Legislative Policy
04 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Green
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SARTA (Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance) sponsors a leadership series to give local entrepreneurs and students of emerging technologies an understanding of how green business works. The desired outcome is to speak with state energy agencies and venture capitalists about solving real problems with new energy efficient products and saving people money. The topic of the Leadership Series Clean Tech Track, held at Drexel University on September 2 was, “How to Influence and Impact Clean Tech Regulatory and Legislative Policy.” Drexel offers eleven doctoral and master’s programs, including in all things entrepreneurially green. The September 2 discussion included instructors Michael Faust, CEO and President of the Northern California World Trade Center; Will Gonzalez, Owner, Gonzalez Public Affairs; Jan E. Schori, Of Council, Downey Brand, and Jan Smutny-Jones, Executive Director, Independent Energy Producers Association (IEP). Places on the Internet to start getting informed include high-priced and free publications. Possible sources with a mixture of both are:
Don’t forget about using Google Alerts with specific keywords and TweetFeeds to get information about the energy movers and shakers of the moment.
“Get in Early, Tell Your Story, Keep it Simple”
High on the list of questions was how to go about identifying the leaders in any community once there’s a real product in hand. The advice was to:
The district director of any federal or state legislator can be of tremendous assistance in identifying local leaders and subject matter experts, advised Michael Faust.
Policy Highlights
There were many other tidbits including the fact that Southern California is probably more fertile ground right now for green products since they are dependent on coal to meet a large percentage of their energy needs. Talk with Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power if you have a solution to that particular problem. With the coming of electric vehicles, there will be tremendous drain on “the grid” which has a whole other crop of officials grinding their teeth. Bundling home audits with grid pricing, suggested Jan Schori, may be one innovative way to package a solution in this area. Lastly, the speakers recommended to thoughtfully attend conferences with a game plan. Don’t feel badly if you can’t contribute money to a politician’s fund because in the long run, it won’t do that much good, said lobbyist Will Gonzalez. And finally, even if AB32 gets clobbered with a yes vote on 23, there’s enough legislation in place to keep energy regulations going. On the other hand, said Schori, a yes vote will send a message to venture capitalists that California is turning away from its commitment to clean energy, which will not be a good. I wanted to end this discussion on a high note. Be sure to check out the upcoming SARTA Clean Tech Showcase, Tuesday, October 26 at Sacramento State, the region’s largest event highlighting the clean tech sector’s innovators, investors, educators and companies. And contact Lenore Weiss if you need a great writer to communicate a strong message that will get your customer’s attention. Lenore Weiss |
What is a Passive House?
10 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in Green
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What exactly is a passive house ? A refuge for passive-aggressive types? A space where the lights are out all the time and its inhabitants sit in quiet contemplation before a burning candle? Well, actually none of the above. I was hoping to find out more about passive houses at a talk presented by Build It Green in Berkeley. Build It Green, a nonprofit membership organization that offers training and certifications in green building from Sacramento to Downey, California. Amid a lovely dinner served with ample bottles of thirst-quenching waters and sparkling ciders at Truitt & White, a roomful of building types gathered to hear more about the building of the first Passive House in California on a land trust in West Marin County at 11560 California 1. According to Build It Green, about 20,000 passive houses have been designed, built and retrofitted over the last 10 years in Europe, 12 in the United States, and one in California that may offer another reason to drive to Pt. Reyes. Most simply put, a Passive House receives and captures energy. In doing so, it slashes heating and energy costs by 90 percent. Of course this is a loosey-goosey definition. There are Passive House standards that a building must meet to be certified. The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), is a software package constructed like the popular TurboTax income tax program, allowing builders to plug in numbers and to receive automatic calculations for projections of heat load, loss, and energy usage with updated calculations for climates around the world. It’s a package that continually improves with updated data. Here’s a bit of history. The notion of the Passive House (“Passivhaus”) was first developed in Germany in the early 1990s by Professors Bo Adamson of Sweden and Wolfgang Feist of Germany. They put together solar design ideas from North America with “low energy” European building standards to create the notion of a house that could maintain a comfortable interior climate without conventional heating and cooling systems. A Passive House can be operated without the help of large “active” mechanical systems (i.e. furnaces and boilers), thus the “Passive” moniker. In 2003, Katrin Klingenberg, a German designer, built the first Passive House in Urbana, Illinois. Klingenberg established the;Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) in Urbana with builder Mike Kernagis. In January 2008, PHIUS was authorized by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt as the official certifier of Passive Houses in the U.S. Got it? Now back to Berkeley where James Bill, Katy Hollbacher, and Terry Nordbye, architect, engineer, and builder who worked together on West Marin’s Blue2 House, discussed what it took to build California’s first certified Passive House that soon will be occupied by a family. All agreed that the Passive House model goes far beyond Energy Star standards, a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy’s effort toward more cost effective environmental solutions. “In the past compliance, not energy usage, is what people looked at,” said Hollbacher. Retrofitting an entire home to meet Passive House standards may not be cost effective for the average homeowner in the temperate Bay Area. However, the Build It Green presenters agreed that incorporating different aspects of the PHPP methodology may be the incremental best way to go. In any case, it’s going, going, going green. Lenore Weiss http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/ |
Van Jones is a Green Horn Looking to Create Investment
03 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
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Listening to Van Jones speak at the Commonwealth Club last week, which is one of my new favorite hang-outs, gave me a glimpse of our green future.
Jones, a former Obama administration appointee as Special Advisor for Green Jobs who was smeared by Republicans last year as a radical and finally resigned his office so as not to distract from the discussion about health-care legislation, said that our green future is part of a movement for a “voter-owned rather than a corporate-owned democracy.”
With the vision and courage to speak his mind, it’s easy to understand why Jones would ruffle a few feathers. This was my first time hearing him in person although many Bay Area folk know him as the founder in 1996 of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a California non-governmental organization (NGO) that is now focused on a green jobs campaign in addition to reducing violence. While many of us only knew to associate Saint Patrick’s Day with the color—Jones has been a green activist for a long time, building organizations and advocacy groups toward that end.
He spoke for the need for a climate and energy bill to ensure that no one gets to pollute for free. Jones maintained that the oil companies are “baking the planet and have been able to do that since the Industrial Revolution.” He advocated for the government to serve as a midwife to create a “New Green Deal” both in the United States and other industrialized nations. “If you want to solve problems,” he said, “you have to unleash market forces by bringing investment into green technology,” which is the only way he said that we are going to get out of the current recession.
Describing a moment for change that includes every “color, class, gender, and sexuality,” Jones said that going green is not about jobs versus the environment. “The government doesn’t count what counts,” he said. “Our metrics are off. There should be a movement like ‘Accountants for Transformative Change.’”
If you’d like to get more detail about the new economy, pick up a copy of his new book, or set your Kindle or iPad to “The Green Collar Economy” with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that ends, “Let the revolution begin.” While the sixties were about the struggle for political and social equality, perhaps a new chapter is opening up about the struggle for economic justice.
Lenore Weiss http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/ |
Plug Into Your Electric Vehicle (EV) Future
22 May 2010 Leave a Comment
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Surely you’ve heard about the May partnership announced between Toyota and Tesla to start building electric cars at the recently closed NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) plant in Fremont, California. For the past 25 years General Motors and Toyota had worked to manufacture cars together, seeing it as an opportunity to learn about each other’s production methods. The plant was closed earlier this year by Toyota as a cost-cutting measure; now it is being resurrected in the name of electric car development. And who is Tesla? The only manufacturer of EVs in the United States at prices that none of us can afford. But that may change with Toyota acquiring a $50-million stake in Tesla and the two companies poised to rumble on the assembly lines together…but don’t look now…the Tesla-Toyota partnership may have competition. At a Commonwealth Club meeting in San Francisco this month, speakers representing different spectrums of EV car development including a representative from General Motors, discussed the possibility of these electrically powered cars becoming the future vehicle of choice. Tony Posawatz, Vehicle Line Director of General Motors’ New Chevy Volt and also Co-Chairman of the Electric Drive Transportation Association, announced that he had driven a Volt to the meeting, and offered that the car will be in retail development by the end of this year “with GM being the first to mass market electrically driven vehicles in the U.S. and around the world.” Currently, the Volt has a 40-mile range with an extending gas generator that produces enough energy to power the car along further on a single tank. Posawatz spoke of that initial range being upped from 40 to 100 miles and that the Volt is not “a single play for GM.” Look around the corner. Motorcycles also are being slated for electric development. Jit Bhattacharya, CEO of Mission Motors whose new Mission One Motorcycle (funded with help from Silicon Valley venture capitalists) claims to be the fastest production electric motorcycle in the world, said that the company is looking to “improve range, performance, and cost.” Current EV technology is based on lithium-ion batteries, commonly housed these days in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and the Toyota Prius. Mission Motors is exploring a partnership he said with China, which is using electric bikes and scooters to help address the issue of smog. This was an environmental problem that was highlighted during the Beijing Olympic 2008 games. Apart from all other considerations, “The electric motorcycle is just more fun to ride.” More fun, but what about practical, what about the massive infrastructure and development that needs to support the transition to EV? What about the growing demands on the power grid? Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an independent, nonprofit center for public interest energy and environmental research which receives most of its funding from member electric power companies, said “The industry has a responsibility to serve with a job to just deal with it.” He cited how power companies have stepped up to increase service as newer technologies like computers and plasma TVs draw more juice from the grid. Technology is improving here also with the development of what many refer to as the “smart grid” giving buildings, most immediately those owned by the government, the ability to monitor light and heat usage by wiring systems together and controlling them from a central software panel. Ultimately, we will be able to monitor energy usage in our homes. All of this will require massive amounts of capital investment. The Feds have already kick-started the process, he said, with a 130 million dollar investment, but suggested that power usage may get more expensive with different pricing tiers, encouraging consumers to power up EVs during off-peak hours. There’s even talk about being able to sell power from a EV car battery back to the power grid, much the way people today with installed solar sell electricity to local power companies. Yeah, and what about plugging in those vehicles? How is that going to happen? Richard Lowenthal, a former Mayor of Cupertino, California, and founder and CEO of Coulomb Technologies, Inc., acknowledged as a leader in electric vehicle charging station infrastructure worldwide, anticipates that this will happen differently depending on different situations. For example, in an urban area like San Francisco where the majority of people do not live in single-family houses, drivers may plug-in vehicles while they are shopping. “Most stations probably will not charge because businesses want people to shop in their areas.” He anticipates charging stations becoming “a normal piece of parking lot furniture.” He also said that the home permitting system is changing to allow for these stations. “It’s just like installing an appliance. It’s not a big deal,” although Lowenthal did acknowledge that older homes will have to do “a lot more work.” More immediately, the future of EVs “will be blended,” said Posawatz, with an exploration of lithium-ion batteries augmented by biofuels and flex fuels. The EV “is not only for enthusiasts and early adopters. This is a car every one will love.” Who knows? The American automobile industry, supported by power companies and infrastructure development, may have some life in it yet. What do you think about our EV future? |
Posted via email from TechTableTalk: “It’s Not Over Your Head”
Choosing HTML5 Over Watching American Idol
13 May 2010 Leave a Comment
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Sure I wanted to see the last four contestants engage in their duet duels on national TV. But we’re talking HTML5, the next generation in hypertext markup language that the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) international standards organization has been hard in work in developing. Plus, it was a total geek-out held at Microsoft’s San Francisco offices on the heels of the Web 2.0 conference at Moscone Center and sponsored by three local user groups: PHP, Java, and HTML5. I stood my place in line waiting to grab a slice of pizza, and a cup of broccoli salad. (Mixed with currents and red onions, the stuff was tasty!) Many around me consorted with their cell phones while I grabbed a seat and gazed up at dual screens on either side of the room with the speaker podium placed <align=”center”>. Sponsors introduced themselves (Google, Guidewire, JetBrains, Kaazing, Marakana, Medallia, Oracle, O’Reilly, and Teksystems), and then it was on with the show. So what is HTML5? Very roughly it’s a markup language for the Web that originally made its debut around 1990 and has been progressively upgraded since then to allow for the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the implementation of AJAX with Javascripting to create in the eyes of the beholder, a more information-rich Web. The lessons learned using HTML these past 20 years are being incorporated into tags and objects that may have previously existed as JavaScript work-arounds to satisfy growing user expectations, an approach one speaker called “paving the cow paths.” Browser support isn’t totally there, but Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft’s Internet 9.0, are all mapping the divide. The first speaker was Brad Neuberg from Google’s documentation team. Neuberg painted a wide HTML5 swath, demonstrating how the new standards matter to consumers and developers. This includes a new specification called “workers,” which allows developers to run code that won’t block the browser, meaning that it will remain responsive while it’s parsing lots of information. With the growing use of maps, there’s a geolocation object that will pass browser latitude and longitude coordinates to a browser for map display, handy for social networking sites. There are semantic tags to break content into more discrete sections, including the printed page’s “sidebars,” all allowing for better search engine indexing.There also are new link relations to define icons (think mood icons) and pingbacks. SVG (scalable vector graphics) will be available via new CSS selectors to offer the automatic definition of column number, text stroke, opacity, rounded corners, gradients, and controls to play audio and video (think YouTube on steroids and beyond). Microsoft’s Giorgio Sardo, took the stage, explaining how Explorer 9.0 is using the memory stored in GPUs (Graphic Processing Units), and in the double-core of “double-core” computer processors to allow for the display and resolution of HTML5 elements, pushing browser technology to a new level. The last speaker was<a href=" Peter Lubbers from Kaazing and co-author of Pro HTML5 Programming (Apress 2010). He dove into a subject that was near and dear to the hearts of many developers who have been using household web development techniques such as “AJAX” and “Comet” to simulate real-time information on the Web. The truth of the matter is that information can only flow in “half-duplex,” or in one direction, which is the reason, Lubbers explained, that the recent “Times Square bomber” (Faisal Shahzad) was not immediately intercepted on his way out of the country because the “no-fly” list cannot be updated in real time. HTML5 brings a full-duplex solution to the table and it’s called “web sockets.” As all this settles, browser support will be spotty, but certain HTML5 elements are available in Chrome, Opera, and Explorer 8. You can inject a certain amount of browser HTML5 muscle into Internet Explorer by adding a meta tag, Google’s Chrome Frame. Got to go. Need to turn on the results show for American Idol.
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Bill McKibben and 10/10/10: Show the Fossil Fuel Industry the Emergency Exit Now
26 Apr 2010 Leave a Comment
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Bill McKibben looks like an aging basketball player, tall and lanky, when in actuality he is a Methodist Sunday school teacher in Vermont who has spent a great deal of time according to his own account, “in a basement coloring.” But looks don’t tell the whole story. Bill McKibben also is an educator, environmentalist and author of more than 10 books on climate change. He helped to organize the most widespread day of political activity on the planet when on October 24, 2009, 5,200 separate events were held in 181 countries including beneath the ocean at the Great Barrier Reef. Speaking April 23 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley to publicize his latest book, “eaarth,” McGibben wore a t-shirt with the numbers “350,” a commitment to limiting the amount of C02 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, which according to scientists is compatible with life on the planet. The number currently hovers at 390. McGibben built the climate change case from ground-up evidence and discussed how there is now 25 percent less ice in the world including the glaciers of Greenland and the Andes. Scientists are now panicked, he said, with “every visible system beyond the top of its boundaries. Last summer typhoons marched over Asia with 9 ½ feet of rain,” he said. With five percent more moisture in the atmosphere, there’s also more evaporation, and more drought. “Even things that are too big to change are changing,” he said, “causing problems for organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Global warming and fossil fuel emissions are creating more acidic oceans. Some at the top of the food chain like cruise liners are being denied anchorage in places like the Maltese Islands, a country that is reallocating its tourist dollars to moving their population before the island is flooded due to global warming. Instead of continuing to build starter castles for entry-level monarchs and listening to people like Alan Greenspan, “the tiny tired wizard behind the curtain,” McKibben flatly said “our civilization stands at collapse.” While acknowledging the growth in the number of organic farms within the last 50 years, he also noted that assuming a six or seven degree temperature increase, many of those farms will not be successful. Nor will changing to energy efficient light bulbs impact the affect of global warming. McKibben counsels that our entire civilization needs to transition from fossil fuels and learn new habits for a new planet. “Gas, coal and oil is the single most profitable enterprise in the history of the world,” which is why the world looks the way it does, he said. “The only moral response is to do everything we possibly can to change the odds and that requires our full participation,” which brings us back to the idea of “350” a measurement that was proposed by James Hansen and his team at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Hansen was one of the earliest scientists to raise broad awareness of global warming. Today he advocates a rising price on carbon emissions with fees collected to promote other energy sources, a proposal that doesn’t sound totally unlike levying taxes on cigarette smoking with money going toward prevention. Earlier this year at the Copenhagen Climate Change Accord, 117 of the poorest and most vulnerable countries who directly understand the affects of global warming, agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 2020. But the United States still has not planted its feet firmly on that terra firma. McKibben and others involved in organizing a global 350 movement, want to continue turning down the fossil fuel heat. They announced that this coming October 10, (10/10/10) will mark a “global work party” toward reducing carbon emissions. Go to www.350.org to sign up or to create a work party in your local area. Also keep your eyes peeled for discussion in the coming weeks about a bill that is being introduced as a “New U.S. Senate Climate, Jobs, and Energy Bill by Senators John Kerry, (D-Mass.) Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut), and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) “It’s a giveaway gift to the industries that created the problem,” said McKibben. Find out more by reading the bill that will be published in coming weeks on Senator Kerry’s website. |
