November 2007 Archive of engeniusBLOG

With petroleum prices through the ceiling, and cries about global warming and climate change in the news, it's interesting to see how politics-as-usual plays a role in America. Campaign contributions reveal how the game is played.

If you look at the statistics (gathered and tabulated by the Center For American Progress)  for the November 2006 elections, you'll see some provocative revelations.

The politicians in both the House and the Senate who won close races (gaining 55% of the vote, or less), and who voted with Big Oil (against a bipartisan-proposed clean energy tax package) received a whopping ten times more in contributions than elected officials who voted for the clean energy tax amendment when it came up in Congress last June.

Keep in mind that the clean energy bill was developed in cooperation with Finance Committee member Chuck Gra...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The eco-design competitions that have popped up like mushrooms after a rain are an exciting sign that our industry has stepped up to the challenge of creating the tools we’ll need to start building a future we can be proud of. For better or worse, these competitions also raise lots of the same questions about how to actually measure a product’s EQ (environmental quotient) that we’re starting to face as the industry begins to factor sustainability into its bottom line. At this early stage, not even the questions are fully-defined, but my recent experiences with several contests illustrate the sorts of issues we’ll all be dealing with in the not-too-distant future.

The simplest eco-topics to deal with are those involving energy. Whether it’s energy conservation or renewable energy technologies, comparing watts in versus watts out makes for a well-defined way to measure a design's performance and overall goodness. When you add in a few other factor...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

About ninety minutes ago my laptop was hit by a Trojan; a series of impossible-to-close browser windows offering free malware software (which it itself was!) looking like the kind of thing that you get if you accidentally typo a URL and get taken into a near-name-clone porno site. Fortunately, McAfee was on the ball and deleted everything within seconds. I would have started this Editorial immediately afterwards, but the delay was how long it took for McAfee to run a complete scan of my machine.

I'm not running Internet Explorer: I'm currently on Firefox, where this kind of stuff is not supposed to happen and which is, supposedly, a great deal safer than IE. If I was going to stay around the environment maybe I should probably go back to Netscape -- used, for example, by about 0.2% of the visitors to EN-Genius; but there are so many sites now which simply won't load properly, or at all, in Netscape. It's probably now too deep in the noise floor for anybody to be bothered to ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Chubby drivers are influencing carmakers. Yes, that's right. Car companies around the world are designing bigger vehicles, despite the quest for better fuel mileage. Sadly, they're satisfying overweight car buyers.

Although automobile fuel efficiency is up, and the newest cars deliver better gas mileage than ever before, automobile weight is steadily increasing. The 2008 models are considerably heavier than predecessors.

Although carmakers won't admit it, industry observers say heavier cars are designed to accommodate a gush of obese drivers and passengers. Look around: obesity has increased sharply for both adults and children in the United States.

Data from two National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveys show that among adults aged 20 - 74 years the prevalence of obesity increased from 15% (from a 1976 - 1980 survey) to nearly 33% (in a 2003 - 2004 survey).

Since the mid-1970s, surveys also show increases in overweight child...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

New York City's infamous taxicab drivers are up in arms. In the past few weeks they've gone on strike twice, protesting the installment of Global Positioning System satellite receivers and transponders in their cars. The Taxi Workers Alliance, representing about 20% of the city's 40,000-plus cab drivers, doesn't want GPS equipment in its cars.

New York City fathers, on the other hand, want every last cab to be equipped with interactive GPS units, video systems, and credit card readers. Indeed, under the city's new tech-savvy rules, taxis will be required to have this gear on board to pass vehicle inspection.

If the cabbies think New York City's new rules are onerous, wait until they encounter DARPA. If the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency has anything to do with it, legalized GPS tracking is just the beginning of their problems.

Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous

In the 2001 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 106-398)...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

With several product misfires and a shrinking market share to contend with, it came as a disappointment but no horrific surprise when one of my industry contacts let me know that Conexant had abruptly decided to take its wireless products group off life support -- just in time for its quarterly financial report. I’m not sure how many of the original Harris team that pioneered the development of inexpensive, reliable wireless data still remain, but it’s sad to see such a collection of talent, decades-long in its assembly, dismantled and tossed on the trash heap because of the short attention span of upper-level management.

Once a flagship group of Harris’ Semiconductor Division, the wireless team managed to import a good chunk of spread-spectrum knowhow from the dark corners of the company’s military radio group and apply it to produce some of the best early 802.11 silicon on the market. Back in the mid-1990s, I spent some time with those folks and am ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Since humanity's early days, there have been spies. Some generations were more effective than others, and survived longer. The standouts prior to the Twentieth Century were in the days of Queen Elizabeth I. The spymaster's assets included the unlikely -- who simply fitted into their adopted life, role playing with certainty -- but they were in the right place, at the right time, listening carefully.

We have a lot less true spying than that nowadays. There is such a reliance on technology that human intelligence gathering (humint) has been less effective in the last twenty years and, in some cases, has dramatically altered and fixated the causes of a nation. If there had been enough honest humint on the ground in Iraq it would have been difficult for the Bush White House to come up with any cause for invasion. With, apparently, no decent humint on the ground in Iran, history now seems set to tragically repeat itself.

In Britain there has been, since 1911 (and mod...  -- Click Here to Read More >>