Quieter Wind Turbines More Power

Energy Matters has a post on designing quieter, more efficient wind turbines - Quieter Wind Turbines = More Power.

GE has been conducting research into new low-noise wind turbine blade design. Its not about addressing infrasound - which has already been shown not to be an issue in areas surrounding wind farms - it’s all about producing more power.

“There’s no question, aerodynamic noise is a key constraint in wind turbine blade design today”, says Mark Jonkhof, Wind Technology Platform Leader at GE Global Research. “By using high-performance computing (HPC) to advance current engineering models that are used to predict blade noise, we can build quieter rotors with greater blade tip velocity that produce more power. This not only means lower energy costs for consumers, but also a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Aerodynamic noise refers to the “swooshing” sound created as the leading edge of a turbine blade moves through the air. GE predicts that a mere one decibel drop in this sound would lead to an annual two percent increase in power per turbine. With an estimated 240 gigawatts of wind power to come online globally over the next five years, GE says this would be the equivalent of 5 gigawatts of added wind energy capacity.

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More Signs of ‘Peak Us’ in New Study of ‘Peak Oil Demand’

Andrew Revkin at the NYT has an article looking at a study on peak oil occurring due to demand factors rather than supply factors - More Signs of ‘Peak Us’ in New Study of ‘Peak Oil Demand’.

Back in 2010, I asked this question: “Which Comes First – Peak Everything or Peak Us?” My focus was whether humans could use the gift of foresight to curb resource appetites in ways that would avoid having the peak imposed on us by shortages or human-induced environmental shifts like climate disruption.

There are growing signs the answer is yes. First came work pointing to “peak travel.” Then I wrote about a study foreseeing “peak farmland” — an end to the need to keep pressing into untrammeled ecosystems to expand agriculture.

Now comes this fascinating paper in Environmental Science & Technology: “Peak Oil Demand: The Role of Fuel Efficiency and Alternative Fuels in a Global Oil Production Decline.”

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Beautiful politicians win more votes

This is sort of in the same vein as a recent post here:

Beautiful politicians win more votes: study

Beautiful politicians win more votes, according to Australian National University research released today that asked an independent group of ‘beauty raters’ to assess the looks of 286 major party candidates who ran in the 2004 federal election.

The study, conducted by ANU economist Dr Andrew Leigh and University of South Australia student Amy King, found that voters tend to opt for the better-looking candidate.

“Compared to the average-looking political candidate, a candidate at the 84th percentile of the beauty distribution, as judged by our independent raters, receives an extra 1½ to 2 per cent of the vote. In some seats, this is the difference between winning and losing,” Dr Leigh said.

And it isnt really news, is it? After all, people learn at an early age to treat elections as popularity contests. And who is it that wins student elections in high school anyway?

Unfortunately, thats not a good way to judge competence or good government policy. Never has been, but now that televised coverage of politicians and elections is so pervasive...

Perhaps its worth thinking about the value placed on "beauty" and "good looks" for elected public officials. Heres one thing that Wikipedia says about physical attractiveness:

Prototypicality as beauty

Besides biology and culture, there are many other factors determining physical attractiveness. It is seen that when many faces are combined into a composite image (through computer morphing), people find the resultant image as familiar and attractive, and even more beautiful than the faces that went into it. One interpretation is that this shows an inherent human preference for prototypicality. That is, the resultant face emerges with the salient features shared by most faces, and hence becomes the prototype. The prototypical face and features is therefore perceived as symmetrical and familiar. Apparently, this reveals an "underlying preference for the familiar and safe over the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous"

In other words, people who are considered attractive within a population are those who are most "typical" or "average". Or inversely, least atypical, least different from the largest number of people in the population. People who are considered less attractive have facial features that vary a lot from the norm, such as lips that are too thin or too thick (compared to the average), eyes too far apart or too close together, eyebrows that are too sparse or too bushy.

And what makes these "unattractive" is that they are "unfamiliar and potentially dangerous".

Surprising? Nope. Just not a good way to judge things like competence, ability, common sense, etc. Funny thing is, our culture has sensible maxims like "you cant judge a book by its cover."

But everyone has some tendency to judge by the cover anyhow. Its a decision-making heuristic based on understandable factors.

Just not a good heuristic, because its based on unanalyzed assumptions that arent appropriate.

Tags: political science

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