Technology Trends

What would happen if all U.S. current vehicles — powered by fossil fuels — were converted to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles? In this article, Nature writes that a very detailed study from Stanford University reveals that up to 6,400 lives could be saved each year. Besides saving lives, this also may significantly improve air quality, health, and climate. After looking at several ways to produce hydrogen, the scientists have concluded that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen. It’s even cheaper if some hidden costs to produce gasoline are taken into account: gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline). Now the researchers are calling for an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy. Read more…

Let’s start with some short excerpts from the Nature article.

If all the nation’s vehicles were powered by hydrogen fuel cells rather than fossil fuels, the drop in pollutants that cause asthma, respiratory problems and other potentially life-threatening conditions could reduce deaths by over 6,000 a year. So says a study in Science conducted by Mark Jacobson and colleagues at Stanford University, California.

The work challenges a common objection to working towards a ‘hydrogen economy’, in which hydrogen replaces oil as the main fuel source. Many people argue that because hydrogen will probably be generated by burning fossil fuels, a hydrogen system is no better for our planet than oil. Both produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, although at different points in the cycle of fuel production and use.

However, the problem with the internal combustion engine is not just its carbon dioxide emissions. It also produces poisonous carbon monoxide, smog-inducing nitrogen oxides, and ozone, an eye and respiratory irritant. Worst of all, it creates microscopic soot particles that cause a host of health risks and affect climate.

The research work has been published by Science on June 24, 2005 under the name “Cleaning the Air and Improving Health with Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles.” Here is a link to the abstract.

Converting all U.S. onroad vehicles to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (HFCVs) may improve air quality, health, and climate significantly, whether the hydrogen is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, wind electrolysis, or coal gasification. Most benefits would result from eliminating current vehicle exhaust. Wind and natural gas HFCVs offer the greatest potential health benefits and could save 3700 to 6400 U.S. lives annually. Wind HFCVs should benefit climate most. An all-HFCV fleet would hardly affect tropospheric water vapor concentrations. Conversion to coal HFCVs may improve health but would damage climate more than fossil/electric hybrids. The real cost of hydrogen from wind electrolysis may be below that of U.S. gasoline.

Jacobson has put a copy of the Science article on Stanford’s servers. Here is a link to the article (PDF format, 5 pages, 462 KB).

This research work was also commented by the Stanford Report in this article where Jacobson says that an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy is needed.

The Science study compared emissions that would be produced in five cases — if all vehicles on the road were powered by 1) conventional internal-combustion engines, 2) a combination of electricity and internal combustion of gasoline, as in hybrid vehicles, 3) hydrogen generated from wind electrolysis, 4) hydrogen generated from natural gas and 5) hydrogen generated from coal gasification.

After concluding that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen, the study compares the cost of a gallon of gasoline with that of a gallon of hydrogen generated by wind electrolysis.

The cost of making hydrogen from wind is $1.12 to $3.20 per gallon of gasoline or diesel equivalent ($3 to $7.40 per kilogram of molecular hydrogen)—on par with the current price of gas. But gasoline has a hidden cost of 29 cents to $ 1.80 per gallon in societal costs such as reduced health, lost productivity, hospitalization and death, as well as cleanup of polluted sites. So gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline).

Jacobson calls for a two-step plan, generating electricity from wind and producing hydrogen using wind-generated electricity.

While wind subsidies are on the order of $100 million per year, Jacobson said, other energy sources hog subsidies of $15 to $20 billion. He advocates supporting the infrastructure needed for wind production of hydrogen to a level similar to the $20 billion recently proposed for a new natural gas pipeline from the continental United States to Alaska.

What do you think? Will Jacobson’s ‘Apollo Program’ be ever launched? Please post your thoughts below.

Sources: Philip Ball, Nature, June 23, 2005; and various web sites

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I’ve read several very interesting stories about social networking recently. In “From Contact to Contract” (neat title), Employee Management writes that many entrepreneurs and even professional recruiters are using services such as LinkedIn, Ryze.com, Spoke.com, or one of the two other dozen social networking sites to fill professional positions, even executive ones. Of course, human resources consulting firms are still also relying on more traditional tools, like their ‘real’ social networks. But in “‘Social Web’ Has Far To Go, But Much Promise,” the American Reporter is more skeptical about the usability of these social networking sites, saying that they are making contacts more difficult instead of easier. And Stowe Boyd, from Corante, concurs, by unlinking from social networking applications he subscribed to in a recent past (links to part 1 and to part 2). So what do you think about these applications? Have you ever used one? And if yes, have you seen some benefits? Read more before answering these questions…

Let’s start with the positive side, as reported by Employee Management.

“These tools take networking to the next level,” says Gerry Crispin, principal of CareerXroads, a human resources consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J., and president of the New Jersey Metro Employment Management Association, a Society for Human Resource Management chapter. “These [sites] are no more than advanced databases that are extremely user-friendly.”

May be they are user-friendly, but are they efficient?

While the sites can be user-friendly, return-on-investment can vary. Social networking sites are best for finding passive candidates and for filling positions that are too specialized to be filled via traditional methods, users say.

Although LinkedIn boasts 1.2 million members, Crispin says fewer than 5 percent of corporate recruiters use social networking sites. The reason, he says, is partly because the sites are relatively new — most having started in the past three years — but also because it is easier to rely on traditional, familiar methods.

But recruiters are still experimenting new methods.

“The best recruiters I know say, ‘I use it some. I find people on LinkedIn, then I Google them and contact them myself,’” says Don Steiny, president of The Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy, a California-based nonprofit that studies social networking applications. “The best recruiters I know are fearless, and they’re just going to call them up.”

This long article also tells us about the dark side of social networking sites: sharing information.

“I don’t mind sharing that information with friends, but if it’s coming from a business computer, who else has access and how are they using it?” says says Susanne Wetzel, a computer science professor at The Stevens Institute for Technology in Hoboken, N.J., who specializes in computer security. “Too much of our information is floating around out there, and technology is becoming more and more sophisticated.”

Andy Oram, for the American Reporter looks less to privacy and more to ineffiencies.

I expect most members of online social networks are as inactive as I am, having tried them out and been unimpressed. For one thing, these networks are technologically rudimentary. They rely heavily on email, which is a reasonable place for a new medium to begin because it’s universal among Internet users. But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating! [...] Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.

Second, the current offerings of social networks are imitations of things already available on the Internet: newsgroup, searches, and chat. There’s nothing here you can’t get elsewhere. The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.

This leads to the third major problem I’ve found with social networks: they make contacts more difficult instead of easier. Yes, broadcasting to friends of friends is trivially easy, so much so that I’ve tried to avoid checking my account because there’s so many irrelevant messages (often in languages I can’t read). But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.

So Andy Oram is not very positive. But what do you think of Stowe Boyd, which writes in Corante that he’s totally giving up with these social networking sites? Here are some short quotes about his motivations.

I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.

I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam.

And as Boyd says, it’s not always easy to exit such a network.

I am annoyed that the SNAs [Social Networking Applications] don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.

I know, I’m asking you to read lots of interesting thoughts. But please do it before answering the above questions about the interest of social networking sites.

Are you using them or planning to dump them? Have they been useful for you? Have you ever fill a very long form asking for your interests? Finally, do you think these sites should be more user-friendly? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Lisa Daniel, for Employee Management, Winter 2005, Vol. 10, No. 1; Andy Oram, The American Reporter, Vol. 11, No. 2,588, February 23, 2005; Stowe Boyd, Corante, February 24 and February 28, 2005

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It’s not the first time I choose to tell you about wireless sensor-network technology (check below for previous references). But this article from InformationWeek gives me the opportunity to revisit the subject. The story describes several current projects, from the Department of Homeland Security that wants to secure the U.S. borders, to British Petroleum (BP) monitoring its plants and chips. Hewlett-Packard and Intel also are experimenting with wireless networked sensors in some warehouses and factories. As the market is growing, research companies are trying to figure its size. For example, Harbor Research says that the number of wireless sensors in use will grow from 200,000 today to 100 million in three years, adding that this will be a $1 billion market by 2009. I don’t know if these numbers will be reached, but it’s true that wireless sensor-networks, especially mesh networks, are really attractive because of their low costs of deployment. Read more…

As InformationWeek describes various applications, let’s select BP’s experiments.

The potential for cost savings over traditional wired sensors is enormous. BP installed five wireless sensors over Christmas at its Cherry Point refinery in Washington to monitor the temperature inside giant on-site fans. Using the motes will probably cost about $1,000 per measurement point — and maybe $500 within a year or two, says Harry Cassar, technology director in BP’s emerging-tech group. Each connection measured the old way cost $10,000. BP achieved the $500-per-point measurement in a test last summer to measure conditions in the engine room of an oil tanker.

And BP envisions using wireless networks of sensors to monitor industrial plants and ships, remotely adjust lighting and heat in office buildings, test soil for pollutants, and detect whether chemicals are stored properly. “Wireless mote technology has got applications in almost every part of our business,” Cassar says. “We’re not going to be putting in tens of these devices, or even hundreds. Ultimately, it’s going to be thousands.”

Now, let’s look back at the technology itself.

Wireless sensor devices, or “motes,” package together a circuit board with networking and application software; interfaces to sensors that can detect changes in temperature, pressure, moisture, light, sound, or magnetism; and a wireless radio that can report on their findings–all powered by a pair of AA batteries. Enabled by the fusion of small, low-cost chips, low-powered radios, and the spread of wireless networking, motes are a giant leap ahead of traditional sensors that for decades have measured everything from temperature in buildings to factory machines’ vibrations.

Those sensors require wiring to electrical systems, which can cost $200 to $400 per sensor, and are expensive to service. Motes cost about $100 each, and are much cheaper to install. That price could drop to less than $10 in a few years, as mote components follow computing’s march toward higher volumes, better performance, and lower prices.

If this kind of network is attractive, some challenges remain, especially for software. More standards need to be defined to ensure a perfect interoperability between different sensors and “motes.” And software needs to be embedded within these sensors to ensure better reporting. Finally, there are currently no software tools to manage entire wireless networks.

Here are some short quotes from specialists in the field.

“Sensors are just a part of an ecosystem of wireless devices,” says Feng Zhao, a senior researcher at Microsoft who joined the company last year from PARC to head up a new sensor nets research group on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus. [...] “We need to figure out how to organize these systems and develop interesting applications for them” for real-world use, adds Zhao. “For all these apps, writing software is very challenging. That will probably be a stumbling block between sensors and killer apps.”

“It’s kind of like the beginning of the Arpanet days for this sensor-net technology, where there’s no killer app yet,” says Teresa Lunt, manager of the computer-science lab at PARC.

For more information, you also can read these two interviews of Teresa Lunt and Hans Mulder, associate director, Intel Research.

Sources: Aaron Ricadela, InformationWeek, January 24, 2005; and sidebar stories from InformationWeek

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The World Social Forum (WSF) (choose your language on the site), which ends today in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has less money to spend on computing than the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland. But at both events, many different languages were spoken, meaning that simultaneous translations were an absolute necessity. If the WEF can afford professional translators and costly computers, in Porto Alegre, translators are volunteers, and the software to distribute the translations is open-source. The NIFT (Nomad Interpretation Free Tool) was already used for the 4th WSF held last year in Mumbai, India. The free software, which runs on a simple PC, collects and digitizes the translations from the interpreters before broadcasting them to a variety of devices. In fact, the technically-advanced NIFT allows for real-time streaming over the Internet of speeches in several different languages. Read more…

First, here is a short description from Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, as told in this article from the January 2005 issue of Red Pepper (scroll towards the middle of the article).

Babels, the network of volunteer interpreters and translators, is another good example of prefigurative politics. From its birth in a squatted medieval tower in Florence to its difficult coming of age in London, Babels offers a non-market alternative to professional translation services — relying on solidarity and a massive collective effort of voluntary labour to make the Forum a space in which language diversity (and, through that, political and cultural diversity) can flourish. As such, it is a political actor within the space of the Forum and not simply a ’service provider.’

Babels was also involved in the creation of NOMAD, an international network of people, committed to putting the essential technologies into the public domain.

The aim of Nomad is to extend the GNU perspective to other technological issues, including the re-appropriation of the knowledge and the control of the technologies by the users in their digital, electronical and analogical forms. The Nomad’s sphere of activities at present ranges from communication to renewable energy.

This issue of re-appropriation of knowledge is closely linked to the political perspective of developing local production in an economy based on solidarity. The Nomad network is not a technical service provider but a political network run on a voluntary basis.

Now, let’s return to Red Pepper for a brief description of NIFT.

The Nomad Interpretation Free Tool (NIFT) combines a piece of free-software to record and transmit different translated versions of speeches, with various forms of audio transmission (such as FM radios or magnetic hearing-aid loops). To fully appreciate NIFT, it is worth thinking of it in terms of the existing professional interpretation equipment. NIFT is technically more advanced than these systems in several respects because it is fully computerised. This has positive side effects in terms of the number of different languages that can be offered simultaneously or, even more innovatively, in allowing for the real-time streaming over the internet of speeches in several different languages.

The diagram below shows the network infrastructure used at Porto Alegre (Credit: NOMAD). You can find a larger version of this image on this page.

And on this photograph taken during the preparation of the summit, you can see that the equipment used is far from being sophisticated (Credit: NOMAD). There are many other photographs available on this page.

As NIFT is an open-source project, you’ll find more technical information, including all the files if you want to use the software yourself, on this SourceForge.net page.

If you want to listen to some audio streams from the Forum, this page contains all the necessary instructions.

Finally, I didn’t find a single press review about the use of NIFT at the WSF. I just heard a 30-second airing segment on a French radio which stated that even if the translation system was cheap, the organizers didn’t have enough money to fully equip the Summit. Apparently, only 4 of the 40 rooms were equipped. If anyone has first-hand information about this particular aspect of the WSF, please post your comments below.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, January 31, 2005; and various websites

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Here is December, and countless articles are published every day about gifts for the holiday season and forecasts about the year to come. Red Herring chose, cautiously, to focus on technology in the Top Ten Trends for 2005. By limiting itself to predictions for only next year, the online magazine doesn’t take much risks. However, the link above will lead you to no less than ten different stories. Some trends started this year, such as the war for searching files on your desktop or for putting double cores on computer chips. Other articles talk about Internet telephony, the battle for your digital home, fuel cells or biotech advancements. But the one which caught my eyes is about baby boomers and the exploding market for the global medical devices market, which could reach $160 billion worldwide next year. Read more…

Just for fun, here is the introduction of the Red Herring article looking at some past predictions.

Laying out technology trends is a treacherous undertaking. Those predictions can end up haunting the luminaries who pronounced them after they’ve proven to be ridiculous. Just consider these: Bill Gates was quoted in 1994 saying, “we’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time.” And George Gilder proclaimed in the pages of Forbes in 1992, “just as the old integrated circuit made transistor power virtually free, the new all-optical network will make communications power virtually free.”

Now, let’s jump to “Baby boomers left to their own devices,” aptly subtitled “As an aging population continues to seek the fountain of youth, the medical equipment market promises answers.” Here is the opening paragraph.

Living longer is no longer the goal. Living longer, while looking and feeling young, is now baby boomers’ big wish — and the market’s command. As more than one-quarter of the U.S. population, 40- to 60-year-olds represent huge potential profits for successful treatments.

Below are selected excerpts.

Along with cosmetic improvements, spine conditions are getting a lot of attention, as herniated discs, misaligned vertebrae, degenerative disc disease, and spinal fractures are quite common among the elderly. The boomers are a large and savvy group that demands solutions, however expensive they may be, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Alpesh Gandhi. “Baby boomers are more aware of a lot of the products and procedures,” he says. “They do more research and are more aware of what treatment they need.”

And the market for these medical devices is huge.

The global medical devices market is currently estimated at between $135 and $145 billion, according to Frost & Sullivan figures. The high estimate for 2005 is $160 billion. That makes it even bigger than biotech, which is now between $110 and $120 billion and is expected to grow to nearly $128 billion in 2005, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Vikram Wadhwani.

Nearly half of medical devices revenues, about 45 percent, represent the U.S. market — the world leader. Several factors help the U.S. dominate. Europe is slower to adapt new products where distribution is more complex, U.S. patients and doctors are more open to newer technologies, and technology that’s developed in other countries, namely Japan, eventually migrates over to the U.S. because it is a better market, according to Mr. Gandhi.

Red Herring adds that the approval process by the FDA is shorter for medical devices than for drugs, so it’s easier to make money for the companies investing in non-surgical solutions for example.

Another trend is finding non-surgical solutions, says Robert Bellas, a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, which invests heavily in seed-round medical device startups.

A big market for less-invasive procedures offers alternatives to cosmetic surgery. One startup that Morgenthaler helps fund through its incubator, The Foundry, is Thermage, based in Hayward, California. The company’s product, Thermacool, has been approved by the FDA and is being used by dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Thermage claims its non-surgical device uses radio frequency to increase the amount of collagen below the skin’s surface, promising similar effects to those of facelifts and liposuction, minus the downtime.

For more information, please read the whole collection of Red Herring articles — today and next year.

Source: Red Herring, December 13, 2004

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Many recent studies conclude that we don’t sleep enough during our working week. For example, the National Sleep Foundation — the other NSF — says that 40% of adults admit that the quality of their work suffers when they’re sleepy. So what should we do? Take a nap during the day. But this practice is not widely supported by companies — to say the least. If you live in Manhattan, a small company, MetroNaps, has a solution for you and is even “profiting from nonproductiveness,” according to Wired News. All you have to do is to go to a suite in the 24th floor of the Empire State Building and pay $14 for a 20-minute nap in an adjustable and ergonomic chair. For people who don’t live in Manhattan, Metronaps can rent you one of its pods for installation in your office. But you’ll have to convince your HR department that you’ll be more productive after a nap. Try to get an appointment in the morning, when you don’t need this refreshing nap. Read more…

Before going further, where will you take this nap?

Now, why do we need naps during our working days?

According to the stats on America’s need for sleep, plenty of people could use a nap. More than 50 percent of Americans are sleep-deprived, nap expert and Boston University professor Bill Anthony said, and the average American gets fewer than seven hours of sleep per night — less than the prescribed gold standard of about eight hours, Anthony said.

Sleepy employees can be bad for business, encouraging errors and injury. People who nap — be it for a few minutes or a few hours — can improve their mood and productivity, Anthony said.

But very few companies have nap rooms, and napping at work is not even considered as acceptable behavior by lots of companies. This is why Metronaps developed its concept.

Enter MetroNaps, where company creators Arshad Chowdhury and Christopher Lindholst are hoping Manhattanites looking for a midday pickup will stop by their office, kick back in one of their eight adjustable chairs and catch a light snooze, for $14 a pop.

People appear to be biting, as a new store is opening in Canada’s Vancouver International Airport in December. MetroNaps hopes to franchise its business model to other locations in the near future, and is exploring the possibility of leasing the nap pods to companies for employee use.

The company spent several years to refine the nap environment, paying particular attention to sound and light in the nap room.

And apparently, this napping concept is well received.

All different kinds of people come to nap, Lindholst said. While many of them are employees of the hundreds of businesses located within the Empire State Building, local teachers, Broadway actors and people from nearby firms also come in, as do tourists. Some building residents have sent their own employees over to MetroNaps and allowed them to expense the experience, Lindholst said.

“A lot of people who come here, they say … that they have been looking for a place like this. Sometimes they take naps in their office. For a lot of them it’s about time something like this came” along, Lindholst said.

So, now you have two reasons to go to the Empire State Building while you’re in New York.

First, take the elevator to the 86th floor and think about the 1957 movie from Leo McCarey, “An Affair to Remember,” in which Cary Grant waited in vain for Deborah Kerr. Then, take the elevator down to the 24th floor and take some rest.

Sources: Rachel Metz, Wired News, November 15, 2004; and various websites

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