A team at the Swiss equivalent of MIT has revealed a dense knot of power and ownership interconnections within a particular subset of the world’s transnational corporations. It will come as no surprise that these companies are overwhelming financial firms… but this is the first time that anyone has really been able to lay out the structure of this network of power that runs the world in detail, accounting for all of the subsidiary ownerships and mutual shareholding. Tyler Durden would be inspired. The research paper will be published in PLoS One here Real Soon Now.
Vote for local, transparent regulation: Vote Yes on 2B and 2C
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) regulates Xcel Energy; they have final say over the rates that the company is allowed to charge, and which investments they make in our energy future. In the past four years, the CPUC has approved 3 rate increases. The commission also allowed Xcel to build the state’s largest coal-fired power plant — Comanche 3 — at a cost of nearly one billion dollars, waiving their own rule that such large projects be bid out competitively. By doing so, they handed Xcel a windfall profit. Now Xcel wants to double down its long-term bets on coal by spending nearly $400 million to refurbish the aging Pawnee and Hayden power plants, tying Colorado to this polluting and climate damaging fuel for decades to come, and making all of us pay for the privilege of burning it.
The CPUC is allowing Xcel Energy to make choices that are bad for our rates, good for their profits, and which degrade our environment both locally and globally. Furthermore, the commission has — at Xcel’s request — begun barring citizen participation in their proceedings. Decisions about our rates, fuel mix, and the huge capital expenditures made on our behalf thus stand to be approved without any direct public participation. If we stick with Xcel, we will be stuck with this impenetrable regulatory system indefinitely. In contrast, the governance of a local Boulder utility would be far more accountable, accessible, and transparent. It would not involve constantly battling a well funded corporate adversary. It would be able to reflect Boulder’s core values of sustainability and innovation — values unfortunately not universally shared by our fellow Coloradans. We would also be able to effectively leverage our vibrant community of clean energy entrepreneurs.
We have vastly more access to our City Council and the commissioners they appoint than we will ever be able to get at state level. Whatever decisions are made locally, we can be confident that our community will have a voice in the process and truly influence the outcome. Vote Yes on 2B and 2C and give us the power to control our own energy future!
(this post is a slightly longer version of the Letter to the Editor that I wrote with Amy Guinan)
Eureqa
A genetic programing system called Eureqa from the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which is capable of working out the mathematical relations behind large datasets. Now being applied to biological and (actually) genetic systems.
All your (drone) base are belong to us!
The virtual cockpits from which the US drone fleet are operated have been infected by a virus, anonymous Air Force sources tell Wired. Not only that, but officials at Creech AFB in Nevada where the deathly video games are played, apparently didn’t notify the Air Force’s network security organization of the breech. When you put this together with the extrajudicially authorized overseas executions of US citizens, well, it’s just a little bit too SkyNet for me to feel good about.
Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware
A scathing review of an official German government trojan by the Chaos Computer Club. They decompiled the binaries and reverse-engineered the software, and found that not only did it fail to comply with the German constitutional court’s mandate to limit its capabilities, but was so poorly designed and secured as to enable “even attackers of mediocre skill” to completely compromise any machine on which it had been installed. Clearly not the best of German engineering!
Legalizing Crowdfunded Startups
Crowdfunding, Why the SEC Bans It, Obama Wants It, and Banks Fear It. Kickstarter would be illegal if you were making investments in a business, instead of donations to a cause. Even so, people have raised on occasion hundreds of thousands of dollars via the site for honor-system bound innovation. Hopefully this will be legitimized soon.
Appalachia faces steep coal decline
Appalachia faces steep coal decline. Peak Coal is the present day reality in all of the eastern coal basins. How will it affect eastern energy politics? The Powder River Basin has enough coal to power us… if we want to pay for it and dig it out of the ground, and we can ship it to the rest of the country. But at what point does it cease to be even the economically reasonable thing to do, if you don’t care about the future.
The Coming Decline and Fall of Big Coal
The Coming Decline and Fall of Big Coal. Appalachian mountaintop removal mining has taken off in recent years in no small part because there’s not much left worth mining underground. All the eastern coal fields are in declining production, despite these extreme techniques, and large increases in hiring. Yet somehow, these developments are being couched by the industry as resulting from the Obama administration and environmental regulations. Really it’s a geological special case of that Sagan quote: “The Universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
Debunking the Cul-de-Sac
Highlights from a study looking at how different street network designs affect things like health and safety. Traditional interconnected grids fare better in just about every way than the dendritic cul-de-sac neighborhoods of the automobile dominated late 20th century.
Solving protein structures with social computation
In just 16 days gamers solved a protein structure that had eluded computational methods for a decade. Distributed social computing? What other computationally difficult problems are susceptible to this kind of approach?