The internet v the world part 1 gatekeepers lose control as we connect

Crikeys Bernard Keane has some thoughts on the challenge to gatekeeping institutions posed by the internet - The internet v the world part 1: gatekeepers lose control as we connect .

Here are some scenes from the internet in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the 21st, in no particular order.

* The internet versus music and movies. The digitisation of audio-visual content and higher internet bandwidth enables mass downloading of music, movies and television programming entirely outside the legal copyright system. In Australia, much of it is driven by the FTA television networks’ refusal to screen foreign programs for many months after they’ve screened in the US. The response of copyright owners and media companies is to prosecute individuals, websites or companies that download illegally, or facilitate downloading, and convince governments to impose new, often draconian, copyright laws. Their efforts are futile. About 25% of global internet traffic is estimated to be file sharing, nearly all of it illegal.

* The internet versus lawyers. Lawyers in jurisdictions across the world become increasingly concerned about jurors using the internet to find out about cases. Judges take to threatening jurors with contempt of court if they breach agreements about using the internet. In 2008, a Victorian judge demands the suppression of an episode of Underbelly. As soon as the banned episode is broadcast elsewhere, it is available online and downloaded thousands of times. In 2009, a judge orders Australian websites to take over 1500 articles offline about an individual on the basis that they will prejudice a trial jury. The material remains easily accessible even after removal by the sites in question.

* The internet versus gambling opponents. Moral panic over gambling and pressure from casinos prompts the Australian Government to ban online gambling in 2001. According to the Productivity Commission, the ban fails to prevent continued growth in online gambling at rates similar to other countries. The ban ensures Australians’ money goes to poorly-regulated foreign sites and not safer local sites and Australian taxpayers.

* The internet versus government secrecy. The website Cryptome began publishing classified and confidential government information in 1996. Similar sites like Cartome, Eyeball Series and Cryptome CN also offer other types of information governments want suppressed. Cryptome’s founders claim FBI harassment, the site has its server capacity removed and companies like PayPal refuse to enable contributions to the site. But as WikiLeaks will demonstrate, the harassment appears to have no noticeable impact on the release of material.

* The internet versus transnationals. In October 2009, the transnational energy company Trafigura, which has successfully used the UK courts to suppress reporting of evidence it released toxic waste in Cote dIvoire, obtains a "superinjunction" against the Guardian on the same issue. But "Trafigura" becomes a trending topic on Twitter, and a number of websites and WikiLeaks publish material on the case. The company abandons its attempts to suppress efforts to expose it.

* The internet versus journalists. Some Australian p olitical journalists, angry at criticism of their coverage of the 2010 election, lash out at "parasites", "free riders" and "armchair critics" online. "Just let the professionals do their job" demands one on Twitter. But the editor of The Australian goes further. Angry that online critics are routinely deriding the paper’s partisanship and anti-science stance on climate change, he threatens to sue an academic over tweets made about a presentation at a journalism conference -- though not the presenter herself, a former journalist at his own paper -- and boasts about bringing his lawyers into the matter. His Media Editor then threatens to report another academic to police over a Twitter comment. The result is extensive coverage of the original presentation here and overseas.

* The internet versus the Australian Government. In response to WikiLeaks releasing US diplomatic cables, the Australian Prime Minister labels the act "illegal" and her Attorney-General talks about measures to prevent the release of national security material in the media. He writes to mainstream media editors with the goal of developing a protocol to do so. Later, Australian police advise that WikiLeaks has not broken any Australian laws, and the Prime Minister is forced to carefully parse her claim about illegality.

* The internet versus Big Retail. Australia’s major retailers, used to earning oligopoly profits, are unhappy Australians are using the internet to shop online at overseas sites. They demand the Government take "decisive action" in the form of higher taxes to deter consumers and protect their profits.

The common theme across these examples is that the gatekeepers and the privileged intermediaries of late twentieth century Western economies -- politicians, lawyers, the mainstream media, large corporations -- are threatened by the connectedness that the internet enables.

Humans are, to nick a phrase from David Attenborough, compulsive communicators. The urge to converse, debate, joke, fight, trade, play and form relationships with each other is hard-wired into us. And the internet dramatically expands the community within which we can do that, from one constrained by geography to one only constrained by technology.

And it directly undermines the power of those who want to regulate that interaction, or profit from it. Governments that want to police it. The media that profits by connecting us. The corporations that rely on consumers knowing less than they do. The courts that regard jurors as easily-swayed fools who need to be treated like mushrooms. All now confront interconnectedness on a scale far greater than ever seen before, with far fewer opportunities to regulate or exploit it.

But the gatekeepers and intermediaries are unwilling to let their power go easily, even as it slips away from them. And they reflexively resort to litigation, regulation and prohibition to maintain their power.

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Zinc Battery Seen as Way to Cut Heat Related Power Losses

The heatwave in the northeast US seems to be setting new records for power consumption - the NYT has an article on interest in increasing energy storage capacity to help make the grid more reliable - Battery Seen as Way to Cut Heat-Related Power Losses.

As scorching weather envelops the Northeast and the Midwest, electric utilities are scrambling to keep the power on while air-conditioners strain utilities’ capacity. By Tuesday afternoon in New York City and Westchester County, for instance, Consolidated Edison had logged nearly 7,700 interruptions since the heat arrived on Sunday, and it had dispatched crews to restore almost all of the power.

Such disruptions have plagued utilities for years: how do they keep extra electricity on hand and ready to go, avoiding the need to cut the voltage in stressed neighborhoods and lowering the risk of blackouts?

Now, several utilities, including Con Edison, National Grid and the large European utilities Enel and GDF SUEZ, have signed up to fine-tune and test what they hope could lead to an answer — a battery half the size of a refrigerator from Eos Energy Storage, the company said Tuesday. If the testing goes well, the batteries hold the promise of providing storage that until now has been unaffordable on a large scale. “Energy storage is no longer an idea and a theory — it’s actually a practical reality,” said Steve Hellman, Eos’s president. “You’re seeing a lot of commercial activity in the energy storage sector.”

Part of the appeal is economic: utilities could buy power from centralized plants during off-peak hours, when it is cheaper, and use it to feed the grid at peak hours when it is typically more expensive. That could also relieve congestion on some transmission lines, reducing strain and the need to spend money upgrading or repairing them. In addition, batteries could help integrate more renewable sources like solar and wind into the power grid, smoothing out their intermittent production.

“Energy storage in general has been kind of a holy grail for utilities — a lot of the generation and demand is instantaneous,” said Joseph Carbonara, project manager in research and development at Con Edison, who is managing the Eos program. “The utilities have always been looking to buffer that.”

Utilities and institutions across the country, many with grants from federal or state energy departments, are testing energy storage technologies. Con Edison and the City University of New York are using a different zinc-based battery from Urban Electric Power to help reduce the school’s peak energy use as part of a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority program. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric is studying sodium-sulfur batteries that can store more than six hours of energy. And Duke Energy is working with lead acid batteries from Xtreme Power that are linked to a wind farm in Texas.

At the same time, there are a host of start-ups racing to develop different technologies for a wide range of applications, and already there are some large-scale batteries tied to the grid. But the technology has generally proved too expensive for widespread adoption.

Eos says it has gotten around that problem. Its battery relies on zinc, a relatively plentiful and cheap element. The company projects that its cost will be $160 a kilowatt-hour, and that it would provide electricity cheaper than a new gas power plant built to help fulfill periods of high demand, Eos executives said. Other battery technologies can range from $400 to about $1,000 a kilowatt-hour.

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Green algae as a source for hydrogen production

Hydrogen is considered by many energy experts as one of the most promising future fuels, mostly because of its almost unlimited potential. There are many ongoing researches which study different options on how to produce hydrogen directly from sunlight because by doing so hydrogen is both  renewable as well as environmentally friendly energy source.

There are different biological ways that allow the production of hydrogen with one of the most interesting being using photosynthetic microorganisms such as green algae. During the process of photosynthesis water is split into hydrogen ions (H+) and electrons (e-) which can later be combined into hydrogen gas with the use of special enzymes.

It has been know for quite some time that green algae can use energy from the sun through photosynthesis to produce hydrogen through their own metabolism, however this process is usually accompanied with insufficient efficiency.

The latest study from Swedish scientists has discovered that most of the hydrogen production is driven directly by solar energy meaning that there is a good possibility that in the future it will be possible to control the green algae so that the efficiency becomes significantly higher than it is today.

The previous studies, on the other hand, claimed that most of the hydrogen gas gets its energy from other paths in the metabolism of the green algae. This would lead to conclusion that green algae are no more efficient as energy crops than plants.

This new study gives hope that green algae could become major fuel source in years to come.


 

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China consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined

Stuart at Early Warning points to this article on Chinese coal consumption - good for Australian coal miners (other than when they get flooded each year), bad for everyone else - China consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined

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Origins of brains as sensory organs

Recently (well, not too long ago) I posted (here) a bit about how elements of the modern nervous system of vertebrates can be traced back to some of the most primitive animals – sea sponges.

Now it transpires that the origins of specific brain subsystems can also be found in invertebrates. In this case, the subsystem is the hypothalamus. One of the interesting things about the hypothalamus is that it is not only an important part of the central nervous system, but also part of the endocrine system. As such, it causes production of a number of important hormones itself, such as melatonin, oxytocin, and corticotropin-releasing hormone. It is further tied into the endocrine system via its direct connection to the nearby pituitary gland. Some of these hormones appear to have invertebrate origins the same as the hypothalamus itself:

Modern Brains Have An Ancient Core

Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body.

Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-like ancestors. In this weeks issue of the journal Cell they report that hormone-secreting brain centres are much older than expected and likely evolved from multifunctional cells of the last common ancestor of vertebrates, flies and worms.

The invertebrate in question here is the marine ragworm Platynereis dumerilii. And if the foregoing findings werent interesting enough, it seems that not only vertebrates share a common ancestor (Urbilateria) with P. dumerilii, but so too do insects and other worms. Furthermore, P. dumerilii has two types of light-sensing cells – one type of which is found in insects, and the other is found in vertebrates.

Marine Worm Has Insectile and Vertebrate Eyes

Scientists today believe that the eye could evolve from a single light-sensing cell. Scientists disagree over whether it evolved just once, or many times.

It turns out that Nature is both creative and generous with her gifts. Recent research has shown that the tiny marine worm Platynereis dumerilii has two types of light-sensing cells. The eyes of the worm have rhabdomeric photoreceptors, a compound lens formation that is seen almost exclusively in insect eyes. Rhabdomeric photoreceptors are covered in little finger-like protrusions. In its brain, however, it has a different kind of light-sensing cells - ciliary cells that are seen in vertebrate animals. Ciliary cells have hair-like cilia that extend outward and branch out like tiny umbrellas. Two different ways of sensing light in a single organism!

In light of this circumstance, the following, from the first-mentioned research announcement, is especially interesting:

Both of the cell types studied in Platynereis and fish are multifunctional: they secrete hormones and at the same time have sensory properties. The vasotocin-secreting cells contain a light-sensitive pigment, while RF-amide appears to be secreted in response to certain chemicals. The EMBL scientists now assume that such multifunctional sensory neurons are among the most ancient neuron types. Their role was likely to directly convey sensory cues from the ancient marine environment to changes in the animals body. Over time these autonomous cells might have clustered together and specialised forming complex brain centres like the vertebrate hypothalamus.

"These findings revolutionise the way we see the brain," says Tessmar-Raible. "So far we have always understood it as a processing unit, a bit like a computer that integrates and interprets incoming sensory information. Now we know that the brain is itself a sensory organ and has been so since very ancient times."

Tags: hypothalamus, endocrine gland, hormones

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Gas prices to double in 20 years as demand explodes Santos predicts

Santos is tipping much higher natural gas prices for Australian consumers and a boom in unconventional gas - Gas prices to double in 20 years as demand explodes, Santos predicts.

The only way to meet a tripling in natural gas demand in eastern Australia is by allowing unconventional gas projects, such as coal seam gas, oil and gas producer Santos says.

Santoss eastern Australia vice-president James Baulderstone told a conference that he expected gas prices to more than double within two decades, driven by demand and linking it to oil prices. Soaring global demand for liquefied natural gas is expected to contribute to Australias wealth and make it one of the worlds biggest exporters of the commodity. ...

The five LNG trains already sanctioned, with more planned, represent a quantum change in eastern Australian natural gas demand, Mr Baulderstone told the Opportunities and Challenges for Australian Gas conference yesterday. Provided natural gas development activity is allowed to proceed at the right pace, and the market is willing to pay the increased cost of extraction, there is sufficient gas in eastern Australia to meet this demand. But he added that it was not viable to develop much of the gas reserves to meet the new demand at current Australian gas prices of about $4 a gigajoule.

Australian gas prices were some of the cheapest in the developed world, Mr Baulderstone said. He predicted prices would move to $6 to $9 a gigajoule.

The Australian (now beginning to paywall itself into oblivion) reports that AGL are already seeing much higher prices - AGL secures east coasts most expensive gas deal.

AGL Energy has snared the east coasts most expensive domestic gas sales contract in what is thought to be a 50 per cent price jump forced by the expected demand from Queenslands coal-seam gas export plants. AGL is believed to have secured a price of about $6 a gigajoule for gas that will be used to supply miner Xstratas Mount Isa operations for 10 years from 2013.

The SMh reports that fracking for coal seam gas now has a new cause for concern - earthquakes - Fracking shock reignites concern.

DEBATE over the safety of fracking in Australia has reignited after a gas project in Britain was named as the likely cause of 50 tremors this year.

A panel of seismic experts has found it highly probable that fracking conducted by Cuadrilla Resources - 41 per cent-owned by Australian drilling company AJ Lucas - was the cause of two significant tremors and 48 aftershocks near the British town of Blackpool in April and May. The findings come after the independent MP Tony Windsor told the federal government this week he would not support its mining tax unless more was done to investigate the safety of fracking in Australia.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a controversial gas extraction technique that uses high pressure solutions to fracture rocks deep underground. The process is used in both coal seam gas and shale gas extraction and, if poorly executed, can contaminate groundwater and trigger seismic activity.

Fracking is most common in the United States but is fast spreading to other nations like Australia and Britain, where Cuadrilla hoped to develop a gas source near Blackpool. The company was forced to launch an investigation after tremors of magnitude 2.3 and 1.5 appeared to follow a series of fracks.

The report - commissioned by Cuadrilla - confirmed the fracking was most likely to have caused the tremors but said the region had rare geological factors that were one of many factors which coincided to induce these seismic events.

AJ Lucas services the main coal and coal seam gas basins in Queensland and NSW, including in the Hunter Valley, Bowen Basin and Surat Basin.

The Cuadrilla revelations are not the first time fracking has been linked to tremors, with regulators in the US state of Arkansas expressing concern that two shale wells - now owned by BHP Billiton - were responsible for causing earthquakes.

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Reality as a failed state

Bruce Sterling points to this interesting screed on the impossibility of getting everyone to agree on a set of facts in the modern media / psychological landscape - Reality as failed state.

So maybe what we have today are not problems, but meta-problems.

It is very useful to confirm our understanding with others, to meet with fellow humans – preferably face-to-face – strength flows from this.

However, disquiet remains - no pre-catastrophic change of course seems in any way likely. What we might call ‘Fabian’ environmentalism has failed.

Occasionally a scientist will be so overcome with horror that he will make a radical public pronouncement – like the drunken uncle at a wedding, he may well be saying what everyone knows to be true, pulling the skeletons out of the family closet for all to see, but, well, it just doesn’t do to say that sort of thing out loud at a formal function.

This is all a little bit strange.
We understand the problems. We also, pretty much, understand the solutions. But their real-world application is a whole unpickable, integrated clusterfuck.

I believe part of the meta-problem is this: people no longer inhabit a single reality.

Collectively, there is no longer a single cultural arena of dialogue.

What many techno-scientists fail to understand - and thus find most frustrating - about dealing with climate change deniers is that the denier has no real interest in engaging at the scientist’s level of reality.

The point, for the climate denier, is not that the truth should be sought with open-minded sincerity – it is that he has declared the independence of his corner of reality from control by the overarching, techno-scientific consensus reality. He has withdrawn from the reality forced upon him and has retreated to a more comfortable, human-sized bubble.

In these terms, the denier’s retreat from consensus reality approximates the role of the cellular insurgents in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the American occupying force: this overarching behemoth I rebel against may well represent something larger, more free, more wealthy, more democratic, or more in touch with objective reality, but it has been imposed upon me (or I feel it has), so I am going to withdraw from it into illogic, emotion and superstition and from there I am going to declare war upon it.

So, from this point of view, we can meaningfully refer to deniers, birthers, Tea Partiers and so forth as “reality insurgents”, and thus usefully apply the principles of 4GW to their activities – notably, they are clearly operating on a faster OODA loop than the defenders of mainstream reality, and thus able to respond more quickly, with greater innovation, than the sclerotic bureaucracy of institutionalised reality. [Open source bazaars – media-effective denial memes spread virally through community far quicker than effective strategies of rebuttal do.]

(n.b. There is a problematic tendency with a certain type of intellect – the scientist, the technocrat – which assumes that, because it is prepared to organise and change on the basis of dry statistics and data, then, if only everyone else could be exposed to the same data, there would be instant consensus for change. In fact, of course, the majority of human beings do not work like this.

Indeed, there is a positive, indeed, cognitively vital, aspect to intuitive thinking, and the realm of myths, narratives, paradigms of meaning, purpose and significance underlies even the worldview of the technocrat-scientist. Without an ability to engage with and understand the deep psyche, the techno-scientist is doomed to repeat his statistics into the ether without meaningful effect.)

The deniers are operating from a different ontological platform – an emotional reading of reality where there are forces wishing to control them and restrict their personal power and agency, and there are the forces of freedom, which is the side they believe they are on.

They are wrong, of course, but it is important to demonstrate to them that they are wrong on the level they are operating from – not by citing more climate statistics at them, but by demonstrating that the forces they are serving are actually the most vicious extant representatives of the control they profess to hate.

And all this is but one example of the ways in which the traditional ideological blocs of the Cold War have fragmented into complex multipartite civil reality wars.

Reality, you might say, as failed state; its interior collapsing into permanent conflict under the convergent pressures of deviant globalisation, its coasts predated upon by new mutant forms of memetic pirates.

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