Smart
I’m writing a scientific article. It will, probably, be called:
“Nobody actually knows what the f*ck a Smart Grid is or will be”
Liberalização da electricidade atrasada devido à falta de concorrência
Em entrevista à agência Lusa, o primeiro presidente da ERSE defendeu que, “quando a tarifa regulada é inferior aos custos, é muito difícil ou impossível para quem está no mercado competir”, considerando que “enquanto esta situação se mantiver não se pode ter uma concorrência saudável nem uma liberalização eficaz”.
“Este é o problema principal da liberalização do sector eléctrico”, disse, realçando que “o desafio é acabar, de uma vez por todas, em Portugal e em Espanha, com esta fixação político-administrativa dos preços e deixar o mercado funcionar”.
O especialista em energia disse que “é difícil explicar esta fixação com a energia eléctrica”.
“Fazia, por exemplo, mais sentido preocupar-nos com o preço dos combustíveis”, defendeu, adiantando que estes têm tido aumentos mais acentuados do que a electricidade e representam uma despesa maior no orçamento da família média portuguesa.
Jorge Vasconcelos – Jornal de Negócios
You Can’t Tell That This New, Cheap Egg Substitute Is Made From Plants
Sound disgusting? Maybe. But perhaps you haven’t seen the insides of a battery chicken shed recently, or imagined how much more antibiotics we’ll have to use as the world nears 9 billion. “Our food system is abysmally broken,” says Josh Tetrick, CEO of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek Foods, maker of the Beyond Eggs egg-substitute. “It’s not about the morality of eating animals or not. It’s about the conditions that a lot of these animals are raised in. These hens are kept inside a cage for two years, pumped full of feed and antibiotics, and it’s just cruel. We don’t all have to stop eating eggs. But we should ask if we want to participate in that.”
Tetrick’s team has deconstructed the egg, analyzed its 22 special functions, and replicated it with plant-stuffs like sunflower lecithin, canola, peas, and natural gums from tree sap. By all accounts, the substitute tastes just like the real thing–even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s sold as a gray-green powder that you need to hydrate before use.
Tetrick, who eats only plant-based food himself, insists he’s not on an anti-meat crusade. He applauds that companies like Chipotle are turning to sustainable sources of meat. The main idea is to replace the eggs currently used to make things like mayonnaise, ranch dressing, and factory-made muffins or cookies (i.e. not your Sunday fry-up). That’s about a third of the 79 billion eggs laid in the U.S. every year.
Avoiding the Curse of the Oil-Rich Nations
Every nation wants to strike oil, and after it happens, nearly every nation is worse off for it. It may seem paradoxical, but finding a hole in the ground that spouts money can be one of the worst things that can happen to a country.
Oil-dependent countries, writes the Stanford professor Terry Karl, “eventually become among the most economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most conflict-ridden in the world.” This phenomenon is called the resource curse.
Oil is the world’s most capital-intensive industry, so it creates few jobs. Worse, it obliterates jobs all across the economy. The export of oil inflates the exchange rate, so whatever else a country manufactures is less competitive abroad.
Avoiding the Curse of the Oil-Rich Nations
Every nation wants to strike oil, and after it happens, nearly every nation is worse off for it. It may seem paradoxical, but finding a hole in the ground that spouts money can be one of the worst things that can happen to a country.
Oil-dependent countries, writes the Stanford professor Terry Karl, “eventually become among the most economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most conflict-ridden in the world.” This phenomenon is called the resource curse.
Oil is the world’s most capital-intensive industry, so it creates few jobs. Worse, it obliterates jobs all across the economy. The export of oil inflates the exchange rate, so whatever else a country manufactures is less competitive abroad.
The hum that helps to fight crime
suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack, and the police want to use this evidence in court. Or someone has been captured on CCTV threatening an assault.
Increasingly, recordings like these are playing a role in criminal investigations.
But how can the police be sure that the audio evidence is genuine, that it has not been tampered with or cleverly edited?
Forensic scientists have come up with the answer: they can authenticate these recordings with the help of a hum.
For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity.
It is an all pervasive hum that we normally cannot hear. But boost it a little, and a metallic and not very pleasant buzz fills the air.
“The power is sent out over the national grid to factories, shops and of course our homes. Normally this frequency, known as the mains frequency, is about 50Hz,” explains Dr Alan Cooper, a senior digital forensic practitioner at the Met Police.
Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source, be it plug socket, light or pylon, will pick up this noise and it will be embedded throughout the audio.
Os dois parágrafos sobre a relação entre a frequência e o equilíbrio entre Procura e Oferta estão espantosamente ao contrário da realidade, mas de resto esta é uma ideia bastante interessante e prática de autenticar gravações sonoras e outros eventos onde se possa registar o espectro electromagnético.
Government to begin checking thyroids of children from outside Fukushima
The Japanese government has stated that it will have medical experts check the thyroid of roughly 4,500 children at three different locations outside of Fukushima. This is being done to double-check and confirm that the earlier diagnoses of thyroid growths in 36% of Fukushima children are directly related to the March 2011 nuclear disaster. Officials say they will test children 18 year old or younger using similar ultrasonic thyroid examinations, and will continue through the end of March 2013.
[...]
The Fukushima Prefectural Government says that out of 38,114 children tested through the end of March this year, 13,646 have been found with irregular thyroid lumps. But most doctors say that it is too early to know without a doubt that the cause was nuclear radiation. Some health officials say it can sometimes take four or five years for the effects of radiation exposure to be fully present.
Se calhar a próxima vez que o estimado Patrick Monteiro de Barros vir tentar vender salvar-nos com a sua central nuclear, e nos falar do alto número de pobres instaladores de painéis solares e turbinas eólicas que caem dos telhados e torres respectivas e falecem ou ficam incapacitados, este exemplo de Fukushima seria um bom exemplo dos riscos reais associados e de pessoas que não tem nada a ver com o negócio nem beneficiam dos seus lucros.
Open-Source Ecology
A ideia é bastante interessante, mas tem alguns problemas. Acima de tudo, que estas máquinas exigem já alguns recursos de base para as construir. Extrair metal do solo não é de todo tão fácil como ir buscar scrap-metal a algum lado, mas aceito que seja suficientemente fácil fazê-lo mesmo na África profunda.
Outra questão é o consumo energético. As máquinas actuais são tão “frágeis” porque exigem muito menos energia para a sua operação (e talvez no fabrico) trocando esta por controlo e informação via electrónica. Estas máquinas com a sua robustez (através de mais peso) e motores exclusivamente mecânicos consumirão bastante mais que as suas alternativas modernas.
No entanto é sem dúvida um projecto extremamente interessante e a seguir. Não me importava de tentar brincar com um destes blueprints assim que a minha sabedoria no DIY hardware subir de nível.