Adaptive Lighting Could Slash Electricity Bills

Adaptive Lighting Could Slash Electricity Bills
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

A business card-size device monitors available light and makes adjusts as needed.

According to

A new development from MIT could slash a home’s energy budget in half

. Researchers Matthew Aldrich and Nan Zhao built a system that’s able to monitor available light and adjust it automatically. The setup was made using LEDs, the most efficient form of lights that are commercially available. Unlike compact fluorescent bulbs, LEDs can be adjusted to any level of lighting intensity.
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LED lighting lasts for perhaps 50,000 hours and can be dimmed, something compact fluorescents can not be. Now adding in a smart sensor and the lighting can be more efficiently distributed.

This could have a huge effect on energy usage, particularly in commercial settings. According to the original research <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/adaptive-lighting-1119.html>, they can also use multiple LEDs of different colors to modify the color balance depending on the need.

The researchers found that they could see massive reductions in light usage, up to 90 percent. Since LEDs themselves already have one of the best light output to watt used ratios, the overall reduction could be enormous.

And I loved this quote – my bold:

Jeffrey Cassis, the CEO of Philips Color Kinetics, a leading manufacturer of LED lights, says that the team doing this work “is world-class — they are working on a hard problem and a quality, cost-effective solution has great potential.” He says that it is important to use a systems approach, as this team is doing, looking at the whole lighting system rather than just individual components. But he adds that the cost of the finished system, as well as how easily it can be used to retrofit existing lighting systems, will be crucial factors in determining its adoption.

Animals Getting Fatter Too

by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden

Animals Getting Fatter Too
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

Before you worry too much about putting on those holiday pounds, consider this: We’re not the only species with weight issues.

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This is a real intriguing observation that will open up some really interesting research. A lot of animals are gaining weight at rates not seen in past years. Even lab animals whose diet is controlled and well-known.

While there may be many different reasons, it is possible that there is a major one, perhaps the same one that has produced obesity in humans.

Perhaps it is due to endocrine disruptors such as Bisphenol A, something I wrote about before.Maybe it is something else.

So watch out as this observation is examined by many, many other researchers.

Math jokes. I smiled.

I found this at reddit. The submitter wrote As a Redditor, I *really* wanted to give this student credit. As a Math teacher, I just couldn’t…

The student should at least get extra credit.

Wow. The Macbook Air effect

Firms say that consumers want iPads, MacBooks for the holidays
[Via Infinite Loop]

According to the latest ChangeWave survey on consumer electronics spending, people plan to spend more during this year’s holiday shopping season than the past couple years. That increased spending will be particularly focused on computers and mobile gadgets, with one of the biggest beneficiaries being Apple. With demand for its notebooks and iPads at an all-time high, the company is predicted to have a “monster” holiday season this year.

Demand is strong for new laptops, with 10 percent of those surveyed planning to buy a new one in the next three months. That’s up slightly from last month, and more than a third of those shopping for a laptop—36 percent—plan to buy one made by Apple.

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Nice and steady numbers until November 2010. What big difference happened? The Macbook Air was announced October 20.

And that one announcement increased laptop enthusiasm for Apple by 10%. Not too bad.

Nothing specia about Microsoft store

LA Times Feature on Microsoft’s Retail Stores
[Via Daring Fireball]

BmNathan Olivarez-Giles reporting for the Los Angeles Times:

John Smits of San Clemente bought a laptop at the Mission Viejo store, lured by a discount he found out about on Facebook. But he said the Microsoft Store lacked the exclusivity that draws consumers to the Apple Store.

“Everything sold here can be bought somewhere else, likely for a lower price,” Smits said. “There is no exclusive product here to pull me in. But at the Apple Store, there’s all kinds of stuff I can’t get anywhere else.”

Interesting consumer perspective. It gets to the heart of the problem with Microsoft’s copycat retail strategy: they’ve created Apple-like stores but have almost no Apple-like products of their own. Just Xbox.

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If your store has nothing special in it, why will people visit. Simply because Apple has a store does not mean Microsoft has to have one.

Thing is, Apple had a store from the beginning that was like no other. You could play with the Apple hardware to your heart’s content, talk with knowledgeable people and walk out with hardware and software no available in other stores.

And Apple’s physical store went hand in hand with its online store. All geared to bring people in. What does MS have to bring people in?

I kind of visualize the MS store like the old one from Saturday Night Live – the Scotch Boutique.

Satire is a great approach

Tom the Dancing Bug: A Security Issue at the Office
[Via Daring Fireball]

“As you know, somebody stole peanut butter from my jar in the break room’s fridge.”

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The TSA makes it way too easy. Too bad they can still have people arrested.

Everyone thinks they are above average

Don’t know enough to know that they don’t know
[Via The Panda's Thumb]

Some of our more recent trolls have reminded me of an article, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University. Briefly, Kruger and Dunning demonstrated that college students who scored in the lowest quartile on several tests grossly overestimated their own abilities compared to everyone else’s, probably because they did not know enough to know that they did not know. Oddly, students in the highest quartile slightly underestimated their own abilities.

Figure 1 is a graph redrawn from the paper by Kruger and Dunning. It plots the students’ predicted scores on a particular test on the x-axis versus their actual scores on the y-axis. On average, 66 % of the students thought they were better than average at performing that test; in reality, only 50 % of the students could have been better than average. More interestingly, the students in the lowest quartile estimated their abilities at around the 60^th percentile, whereas in fact they should have got the 12.5^th percentile. By contrast, the students in the 4^th quartile estimated their abilities at around the 75^th percentile, whereas in fact they should have got the 87.5^th percentile. Kruger and Dunning provide 3 more graphs that pertain to other tests, but they all look roughly the same. There is more, but I won’t bother you with it; let it suffice to say that the least competent students vastly overestimated their own abilities. Remind you of anyone?

Figure 1. Students’ actual scores on a certain test versus their predicted scores. The weaker students substantially overestimate their abilities compared to everyone else’s, whereas the stronger students slightly underestimate theirs. [After Kruger and Dunning’s Figure 1.]

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Interestingly, the people who actually are above average underestimate their scores. So, those above average underestimate their abilities and those below average overestimate their.

And perceptions can be telling. The bottom 25% thinks that it is almost as competent at a variety of skills as the top 25% (60th percentile vs. 75th percentile). Yet in reality it is 12.5 vs. 87.5. The top 25% really can do things better.

So the bottom 25% can complain about an ‘elite that thinks it really is better’ because the bottom really does ‘think’ its abilities are almost as good as the top. Thus those ‘elites’ are putting on airs.

Unfortunately for the bottom, the guys at the top really do score better, their abilities really are greater and the difference in abilities really exists.

The Dunning-Kruger effect has been well described. Incompetent people do not recognize their inabilities. Competent people underestimate theirs.

Remember, if someone tells you just how good they are at something, the are chances are they aren’t. At least not as smart as they think.

This sort of bias seems to be socially driven, as this great a dichotomy between perceived and actual abilities is greatest in America. In fact, in Asian cultures there seems to be a better matching of the two curves, although they actually seem to underestimate their abilities at all levels.

Only in America do the bottom percentiles not really perceive a need to improve, because they already see themselves as almost as good as everyone else. So they actually never learn to try and get better. If someone shows them data indicating that their perception is not correct, they simply ignore the data. Ignoring data that does not fit perceptions is a classic case of a Cargo Cult World.

Just one per lamp pole, please

Bike lock that hoists your bike up a lamp-post
[Via Boing Boing]

The German toy/model company Conrad ran a TV advert featuring an amazing Rube Goldberg bike lock that used motorized skateboard wheels to raise your bike several meters off the ground and up a lamp-post; here’s a making-of video showing the R&D that went into this fantastic gadget.

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A nice demonstration of a interesting idea. Plus, I love watching people actually do the machining of metal and the soldering of electronics. Reminds me of my college days.