Cutting edge capitalism that can change the world

 by Abi Skipp

Dot Chat: From Energy Campaigners to Solar Finance Entrepreneurs
[Via Dot Earth]

An online conversation with a young energy activist turned solar entrepreneur.

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Here we have a couple of entrepreneurs who are leading new approaches to financing the needs we will have for future energy.

What is interesting is both were clean energy activists who have taken to new approaches for raising capital to fund needed cleantech projects. Instead of fighting capitalism, they are bending it to their needs.

Mosaic allows people to make microinvestments (as low as $25) into clean energy projects with perhaps 4.5% interest on their investment. The projects were funded with hours. It has invested over $2 million using about $1000 in marketing expenses.

Mosaic raises money for solar projects and as the projects generate revenue, some of that revenue accrues to the investors. Those investors are regular people.

And they are doing this with just 3 employees focussed full time on origination, underwriting and servicing of loans. No Wall Street firm could ebven look at this with just 3 employees. (Mosaic actualy has 7 people working on its IT.)

Think of that – a financial services company with over twice as many people working on IT than working on the financial services.

It does not even build its own IT infrastructure. Mosaic uses Amazon Web Services to do its work. It can expand as much as it needs by leveraging what AWS provides.

And it does it by directly brokering projects with community investors. Wall Street is not in on the process. 

 

There are other groups using these sorts of approaches but this one is even more focussed – it just does solar.

It can work because the cost for solar panels has dropped tremendously. And crowdsourcing approaches permit them to disintermediate Wall Street brokers. 

That is, ‘notes’ can be issued for projects that would not be moneymakers for Wall Street. A community project costing $100,000 would not be worthwhile to most companies because their profit would be too low. Their models require tens of million or more for it to make money for them.

Here, being able to broker many, many notes to people  can work. They make it up in quantity, along with the drop in actually doing the process.

They take a small fee for administrating the note of 1% of the total interest. So the note is actually at perhaps 5.5% and they pay out 4.5%.

Read a prospectus to understand more. As with most investments, there are risks. But the ability to directly invest in local community projects that would have a very hard time selling binds is truly amazing.

It is like a whole new way to create bonds in the days of the Information Age.

Mosaic has over 10,000 people waiting to invest in the next projects.

And things will really change when the SEC publishes the rules about crowdinvesting. That will make it easier for microinvestment in corporations, altering the way stocks are sold in the same way this is changing the way bonds are created.

The other company is taking a non-profit approach to the same thing – letting people donate money rather than invest.

Both will be hugely disruptive to Wall Street, all while making capital flow more easily for small investors.

So expect the big guys to do what they can to stop it.

The ability of boys to control their behavior may be determined by social processes, not genetics

by 55Laney69

Boys Aren’t Necessarily Wilder
[Via Discovery News - Top Stories]

It’s a common stereotype, enforced by anecdotal evidence in classrooms across America: Boys are wild and impulsive, while girls have much more self-control.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In three Asian countries, a new study found, there was no difference in how well little boys and girls regulated their own behavior.

The findings might help boost the performance of boys in American school settings with a focus on on self-regulation, which describes a child’s ability to control his or her impulses, follow directions and stay on a task.

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 In the US, boys have a harder time with self-control that girls.Yet in several Asian countries there is no difference – both boys and girls can control themselves equally using objective testing.

And this does not seem to be caused by the expectations of teachers because in both America and in Asia, teachers believe that girls are better than boys.

So in different societies, adults state that girls can control their behavior better than boys. But when objective tests are done, it turns out that only one of the countries is right – America. 

This suggests that the ability to self-regulate is not determined by sex and that both sexes are equally able to accomplish this. So it is not genetic. It can be controlled by social norms.

Yet, it is not the social norm of teachers that is working here, since the teachers in all the cultures see a difference, even when it does not exist.

What is important is that self-regulation is important for academic achievement. The ability for boys to self-regulate in Asian cultures may be one reason for educational prowess.

Now, this study looked at kids from 3-6 years old, so things could change a lot after several years of schooling – and the pressure of teacher’s expectations.

But for young kids, it looks like there are other social constraints that determine the ability to regulate. I’d suggest the parents, not too surprisingly. It will be interesting to find out if the ability for boys to control themselves is also present at older ages.

The end of TED talks? Good speaker. Bad speaker. You learn the same from each.

by jurvetson

Here’s How to Fool People Into Thinking They Know More Than They Do
[Via Kevin Drum - Mother Jones]

Which do you learn more from? A presenter with good speaking skills and professional visual aids, or someone reading badly from prepared notes? Oddly enough, a team of psychologists actually decided to test this. Their test subjects, as usual, were university students:

Afterwards the students answered questions about how much they felt they had learned. As expected, students who had watched the lecturer with better presentation skills expected to remember more of the material, believed that they understood the material better, and rated their interest and motivation more highly than the students who watched the dud instructor.

The twist came when the students took a test that investigated their memory and understanding of the Calico cats concept. The students who watched the skillful (or “fluent”) lecturer barely outperformed the students who watched the “disfluent speaker.” But they did much poorer than they expected to do, whereas the other group did about as well as they expected.

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So, the kids learn the same when tested, no matter how great  or bad the presenter was. The only difference was that the ones who saw the great presenter “thought” they knew it better.

A good presentation can affect us emotionally and cloud our perception but not really communicate knowledge better.

We will just have to see if this data hods up. Maybe it just means that the testing method cannot really separate out the intellectual differences. Maybe after 6 months there could be a difference?

Or maybe the only real need for a great speaker is to convince us of something not just inform us. Theory would suggest this is correct,

So what would you do if a drone coptor showed up outside your bedroom?

by Don McCullough

How Low Can Drones Go?
[Via Techdirt]

As we’ve pointed out in a few stories, drones aren’t necessarily something to worry about. Like any technology, they can be used for good and bad purposes, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But determining where exactly the line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is tricky, as the following story from the Capitol Hill Seattle blog shows:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day.

So how close does a drone have to be to someone’s home before it becomes intrusive? Clearly, at some height the air is part of the sky commons that belongs to everyone, as a famous 1946 US Supreme Court decision laid down:

The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea.

The post continues:

After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

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So, what happens when a citizen, standing on public sidewalks, operates a drone in the air over private property? How about if he was on his own property? What happens if he uploads video he took while operating the drone? What happens if you destroy his drone while it is operating over your property? Do you get to keep it if you capture it? Can you legally block the signal controlling his drone? Will there be a market for a directed device that can incapacitate someone’s drone?

Some interesting questions will be hitting the courts soon.

First ‘tricorder’ as a crowdsourcing project for FDA approval

Scanadu asks Indiegogo users to test its “tricorder,” but don’t call it a pre-order
[Via PandoDaily]

Scanadu, the healthcare company trying to build a real-world version of “Star Trek’s” tricorder, is looking to raise $100,000 on Indiegogo, but it would prefer that you don’t refer to its campaign as crowd-funding or pre-ordering its Scout device. It’s using Indiegogo to crowd-source the hunt for willing participants in a usability trial required by FDA — the money is secondary, or at least that’s how Scanadu views the initiative.

“We’ll learn a lot about how end users are going to treat the medical readings,” says Scanadu CEO Walter de Broweur. “If they want to, and are going to, change based on these readings.” He says that interest in the company’s product has far exceeded expectations — unsurprising, given the constant “Star Trek” references — and the campaign will allow Scanadu to learn from a few of its more fervent fans.

Scout has changed since last November, when de Brouwer showed me the device’s capabilities in a crowded Starbucks. It’s more circular and more powerful — de Brouwer says that it’s the same size but weighs a bit more — and, due to popular demand, is no longer restricted to one user per device. The new Scout will allow you to collect your children’s and parents’ heart rate, blood oxygenation, and, yes, temperature, among a slew of other stats.

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An innovative way to garner FDA approval! This is how they descirbe this effort:

We are creating a medical-grade device, which is not yet fully accurate and not FDA-approved. Hence this is not a medical device. Via this campaign, you may contribute and your input may affect the final design and characteristics of this revolutionary tool.

The exploratory version of the Scanadu Scout™ is not a medical device and makes no medical claims. As a research tool, it can be used to collect data that will be submitted in a marketing application to the regulatory authorities.

Before Scanadu Scout™ can become a medical device it will have to go through the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval process and this is where your help comes in. With the Scanadu Scout™ you will help us by Scouting yourself and giving us feedback to refine the Scanadu Scout™.

This will happen in the framework of official clinical studies in which you will be invited to partake, ONLY IF YOU OPT-IN. For each study, some of you will be contacted and will have to sign an Informed Consent form. With your help we can put Scanadu Scout™ through FDA to become an over-the-counter consumer-grade diagnostic tool.

When do I get to sign the Informed Consent document? At several moments. When you receive your Scanadu Scout™, you will also be receive the Informed Consent document which will enable you to take part in the community, participate in our usability study, and help us define the final properties of the device.

Damn. I’m too late to get the special deal. And their project is already well overfunded. 

The Scout will be able to determine a lot of useful information. 

But what is kind of cool here is that the FDA requires all sorts of validation data for medical devices. Usually the company has to pay a lot of people to accomplish this. Validation costs  money.

Here, they are recruiting 1000 people – who all paid to be part of the trial – to help gather the data the FDA requires. A great idea.

And they will be validating their ScanaFlo – a urine testing device – in a similar fashion. Stay tuned.

Reducing the distortion from journal impact factors

by webtreats

Scientific insurgents say ‘Journal Impact Factors’ distort science
[Via EurekAlert! - Business and Economics]

(American Society for Cell Biology) An ad hoc coalition of unlikely insurgents — scientists, journal editors and publishers, scholarly societies, and research funders across many scientific disciplines — today posted an international declaration calling on the world scientific community to eliminate the role of the journal impact factor in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness.

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JIF were developed to help librarians make subscription decisions.  They have morphed into a requirement for tenure.

They have a lot of problems, can be gamed by authors and have little transparency regarding their determination.

The document makes several recommendations Tey generally fall along these lines:

• the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations;
• the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and
• the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).

For example, a researcher can actually receive higher marks by writing a review article on other people’s research than writing about their own. That is because many researchers reference review articles much more often than original papers. So, write an review article on a hot topic and your metrics can go way up.

The fact that old guard journals such as Science are working with new fangled publications like PeerJ suggests that this might have some legs.

Best music video from outer space

I’m a little late for this but:

Just awesome. A guitar is space. Earth through the viewglass. Weightlessness. 

Wikipedia can’t stop all vandalism. It simply makes it easy to fix

Crowdsourcing doesn’t inoculate against corruption
[Via Making Light]

I really don’t want to get back into the business of being a big critic of Wikipedia, a site I use every day. But if, like me, you use it and care about it, you really should read the article Andrew Leonard has on Salon today: ““Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Wikipedia.”

As Andrew asks: if this has been going on, with (up until today) no consequences to its perpetrator, what else don’t we know about?

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I started reading the Slate article – another one about how people can manipulate the content of Wikipedia – but I had to stop halfway through.

The guy was caught. His edits were changed back, often within a short time. The works were fixed from his ‘vandalism.’

That is what Wikipedia is. It took me some time to get it myself. Anyone can change anything, within limits. And, those changes can be reverted trivially.

Why vandalize when the vandalism disappears? And everything is timestamped making it trivual for the details to come out with all edits, even years after they occurred.

It took some time to unmask this guy but that is because he was working within the rules so much. His works were not grand instances of vandalism such as Colbert has espoused.

So, yeah, a determined critic could work within the system. But so many people are looking all the time and with such strong social norms that the effort eventually becomes meaningless.

Tis is one reason peer-review of scientific publications works. It does not prevent someone form gaming the system but it makes it much easier to identify and fix when it does. It uses social norms to control bad human behavior.

As with most lies, it eventually becomes simply easier to tell the truth.

Wikipedia is not infallible. But it is self-correcting in a fashion not seen previously. That is its innovation. 

Westworld’s effect on special effects

How ‘Westworld’s’ killer android created movie pixelation
[Via The Verge - All Posts]

Every time a reality TV star’s mouth is pixelated to obscure a curse, the producers are using a technique pioneered for Yul Brynner’s killer robot in Westworld. John Whitney Jr., who created the effect for director and writer Michael Crichton, wanted to simulate how an android might see the world. To do so, he divided the screen into tiny squares, calculating the average color of each one, and filling them with that color, creating a shifting low-resolution version of normal vision. It was a simpler, cheaper design than Crichton’s desired “bizarre, computerized image of the world,” but it also likely proved more timeless: it’s since become an accepted convention for obscuring a video.

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Before Jurassic Park served as a admonition between combining cutting edge science and Disney world rides, Chrichton had done the same with Westworld.

Yul Brynner – creating a technological reincarnation of his iconic character from The Magnificent Seven – provided more than just a fearsome foe.

He gave us the first look at how a robot would see the world and the technology developed to do that is now so ubiquitous that we often do not even recognize it anymore.

Here is how the world looked to the robots and where pixelation entered our world:

And also a great demonstration of how enhanced infrared sight might not work so well.

What happens when robots win and there are no jobs?

by 2.

Will robots take all the jobs?
[Via Boing Boing]

In a fascinating installment of the IEEE Techwise podcast [MP3], Rice University Computational Engineering prof Moshe Vardi discusses the possibility that robots will obviate human labor faster than new jobs are created, leaving us with no jobs. This needn’t be a bad thing — it might mean finally realizing the age of leisure we’ve been promised since the first glimmers of the industrial revolution — but if market economies can’t figure out how to equitably distribute the fruits of automation, it might end up with an even bigger, even more hopeless underclass.

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Will the Luddites finally win? Or will it spawn a time where all basic comforts are provided without cost, where basic needs are free?

What will this sort of economy look like? How will we get there?

I personally feel that there will always be some things that robots simply cannot provide – at least for quite some time – and that are the social interactions between people. I think George Jetson may have shown us what it will be like.

They will always want to hear music in a live performance or buy a hand-made fly to fish with or buy a book about a far-off world.

Now what happens when AI can accomplish the same thing? Perhaps we will see what Asimov predicted – out right banning of such humanoid machines by society.

Being awed by what we understand because our survival depends on it

by USFWS Mountain Prairie

The Beauty of Reality
[Via Bad Astronomy]

After the particularly foul episode I put you through this morning, let me offer this by way of an apology: a superb and compelling time-lapse animation of the night skies over Michigan called North Country Dreamland, by photographer Shawn Malone.

Ahhhhh, that’s better. I think my favorite part is right at the very beginning, when you can see the stars of the Big Dipper reflected in the lake, slowly gliding across the water, distorted and fuzzy compared with the crisp clean pinpricks of their counterparts in the sky. The blue heron phasing in and out of existence one minute in is another delight.

And, of course, the dancing aurora, the individually feeble but collectively mighty glow from countless atoms and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen high in the atmosphere, wounded by subatomic particles blasting in from the Sun, their green and red and purple and pink light an announcement that they have healed from the onslaught. What I would give to see this with my own eyes.

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Our ancestors were awed by the stars and the night sky because it is beautiful and unknowable. It is still beautiful but I am also awed that we actually know so much about it. we know what stars are. We know why they move across the sky. We know what the aurora is. We understand.

That is why Phil and I get so angry at those who refuse to permit understanding. The hallmark of denialists who inhabit Cargo Cult Worlds is that they strive to completely cut off any further understanding. They wrap themselves in a copy of reality in order to hide from reality.

They create a world where inconvenient facts cannot harm them because they refuse to understand. They know and thus no longer look.

Mercury did it. End of story. It has been warm in the past. End of story. God did it. End of story. It does not matter if their facts are wrong. All t hat matters is that they strive to STOP understanding any more.

The story is over.

But any scientist – and in fact, anyone living in the real world is by definition a scientist – knows that the story is never over, there is always a new chapter.

We cannot solve the complex problems facing us today by halting our understanding. Yet, that is exactly what denialists try to accomplish.

If we stop understanding, we will die. Denialism is anti-human.

Elon Musk is not Tony Stark. He is Delos D. Harriman.

by cdrummbks

There has been a meme going around comparing Elon Musk to Tony Stark. But the comparison is only superficial, in my opinion.

Elon Musk is the embodiment of a classic science fiction trope – the capitalist who moves us into space. But he seems to be following one in particular.

Robert Heinlein wrote about one such capitalist who was the first to create private exploration of space. This man – Delos Harriman – is discussed in in several classic Heinlein works, in particular The Man Who Sold the Moon and Requiem.

The former describes how Harriman put together the first private explanation exploration of the Moon and the latter describes subsequent events.

But there is more of a resemblance than just an entrepreneur trying to become the first successful private user of space. There is also the dreams each man has.

Harriman wanted to die and be buried on the Moon. Elon Musk has said the same thing, only with regard to Mars.

I hope he qets his wish. And, I think it would be amazing if he had the same epitaph that Harriman had – Robert Louis Stevenson’s great work, Requiem:

UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

I get tears in my eyes everytime I read that, mainly because of Heinlein’s wonderful works.

 

 

Funny changes in Apple share while the rest of us were asleep

Chart: Apple’s wild weekend
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

Some strange doings in Apple’s share price while the markets were asleep.

FORTUNE — Can anybody explain what happened to Apple (AAPL) between the close of trading Friday and Monday’s opening bell?

I can almost wrap my mind around the 4.55 million shares traded at exactly 4:00 p.m. Friday and the temporary $3.08 drop one clock tick later. A bunch of Apple weekly options had just expired, and the market had a ton of trades to unwind.

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Here is the graph:

The telling peak is at 4 am on Monday when over a million shares changed hands and the stock spiked to $429, virtually the same price the stock reached by noon today. Could someone have known because they knew the stock was going to reach that point soon? Someone was going to manipulate the stock to that point?

The stock is now at about $431.

Study indicates that there is no shortage of STEM labor

 by Marcin Wichary

Guestworkers in the high-skill U.S. labor market: An analysis of supply, employment, and wage trends | 
[Via Economic Policy Institute]

This paper reviews and analyzes the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market and workforce and the supply of high-skill temporary foreign workers, who serve as “guestworkers.” It addresses three central issues in the ongoing discussion about the need for high-skill guestworkers in the United States:

• Is there a problem producing enough STEM-educated students at sufficient performance levels to supply the labor market?
• How large is the flow of guestworkers into the STEM workforce and into the information technology (IT) workforce in particular? And what are the characteristics of these workers?
• What are the dynamics of the STEM labor market, and what are the employment and wage trends in the IT labor market?

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Some interesting numbers here. For every two students that graduate with STEM degrees from American colleges, only one is hired into a STEM job. Computer science majors who do not get an IT job say it is because there are no IT jobs (30%) or they can make more money elsewhere (53%). Almost half of all new IT employees are foreign guestworkers.

Salaries have remained flat, even while technology has greater and greater impacts on out economy.

One of their main conclusions:  ”Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.”

They look at STEM education in the US and what the prospects are. It turns out that only 4% of High school graduates get a STEM college degree. This sounds very small but because the US produces so many High School graduates compared to many other countries, it also produces a huge supply of the world’s high performing students.  A third of the best test scores in science come from the US, twice the  number of the next closest country.

In 2011, over 372,000 guestworker visas were given. We graduated about 250,000 college students with STEM degrees. And half could not find a job. I wonder why?

About 80,000 got degrees in computer science. Yet over 160,000 guestworker visas were given in 2011 for IT jobs. No wonder over one-third of these American graduates were not working in their field after graduation.

If there was a shortage of STEM workers, we would expect to see salaries rise. Yet the average salary nationally  in the IT industry has not changed at all since 2001. There is no shortage because of immigrant visas.

By using immigrants, the industries have been able to access a supply that permits them to keep salaries low. Yet we still keep producing more American graduates than we now need.

So, instead of raising salaries in order to attract more of these American graduates, the STEM industries want to import more talent and pay them lower wages. The jobs that can’t be outsourced any more are being in-sourced, leaving more and more Americans working in fields they were not trained in..

We need to stop telling those being trained in STEM that there is a shortage that they need to fill. We produce more than enough graduates to fill any shortage if that was all that was needed by corporations. What is needed by corporations are large number of cheap employees. There is no shortage there as long as corporations can tap the foreign market and keep salaries down.

Nothing particularly wrong with that but stop stating that there is a shortage and there are not enough Americans to fill it. There are – they just want more money.  If we care about jobs for Americans, we would reduce the visa allotments. If we care about corporate profits, we would increase them.

It is all about money, not about jobs.  So stop saying it is about jobs.

Cost for solar will soon beat coal/natural gas

Hurray! We are not headed for a disaster of biblical proportions
[Via Boing Boing]

Ramez Naam says: “Back in November, you posted about investor Jeremy Grantham’s argument that ‘we’re headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.’

“I have a rebuttal up at Business Insider, based on my new book on saving the planet [The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet], that I thought you might in interested in.”

[More]

Hundreds of billions of dollars go to subsidizing fossil fuels, every year. It might be multiple trillions! That helps keep their prices low.

Perhaps 100-fold less is spent supporting solar power. Yet it will soon cost about the same as heavily subsidized coal and natural gas.

Then we will be subsidizing fossil fuels in order for them to be competitive with solar. Is that messed up or what?