Stephan: Here is a report on a interesting technology that turns CO2 into stone. I can see several places where this could go wrong, starting with injecting things into the earth, witness Oklahoma. But I can also see how this could work well in certain places in the world. We will see over time. I find it also important because it shows an increasing awareness of the CO2 problem.
For several years an international team of scientists has been working on a novel way to turn captured CO2 into solid minerals. The project is dubbed CarbFix and involves bounding the CO2 to water and then pumping it 700 […]
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Thursday, October 19th, 2017
APRIL DEMBOSKY, - npr KQED
Stephan: I have chosen this article for two reasons. First, this is good news from California that may beneficially affect the entire nation given the size of California's economy. It is a much needed first step in reducing the power of the pharmaceutical industry, which strongly opposed this legislation.
Second, this report and the next one clearly illustrate the difference between wellbeing oriented Blue value governance and social policies, and their Red value equivalents. A child can see which is superior. Adults, apparently not so much as measured by their voting.
Credit: Shutterstock
California Gov. Jerry Brown defied the drug industry Monday, signing the most comprehensive drug price transparency bill in the nation that will force drug makers to publicly justify big price hikes.
“Californians have a right to know why their medical costs are out of control, especially when pharmaceutical profits are soaring,” Brown says. “This measure is a step at bringing transparency, truth, exposure to a very important part of our lives, that is the cost of prescription drugs.”
Brown says the bill was part of a broader push toward correcting growing economic inequities in the U.S., and called on the pharmaceutical leaders “at the top” to consider doing business in a way that helps those with a lot less.
“The rich are getting richer. The powerful are getting more powerful,” Brown says. “So this is just another example where the powerful get more power and take more… We’ve got to point to the evils, and there’s a real evil when so many people are suffering so much […]
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Thursday, October 19th, 2017
JON MARCUS, - The Atlantic
Stephan: In contrast to the previous article here is an example of Red value governance and policy making. It is trashing the American infrastructure built up over centuries; undermining the foundation of our culture.
Republican governance in every instance, based on social outcome data, is inferior. Period.
Four floors above a dull cinder-block lobby in a nondescript building at the Ohio State University, the doors of a slow-moving elevator open on an unexpectedly futuristic 10,000-square-foot laboratory bristling with technology. It’s a reveal reminiscent of a James Bond movie. In fact, the researchers who run this year-old, $750,000 lab at OSU’s Spine Research Institute resort often to Hollywood comparisons.
Thin beams of blue light shoot from 36 of the same kind of infrared motion cameras used to create lifelike characters for films like Avatar. In this case, the researchers are studying the movements of a volunteer fitted with sensors that track his skeleton and muscles as he bends and lifts. Among other things, they say, their work could lead to the kind of robotic exoskeletons imagined in the movie Aliens.
The cutting-edge research here combines the expertise of the university’s medical and engineering faculties to study something decidedly commonplace: back pain, which affects as many as eight out of every 10 Americans, accounts for more than 100 million annual lost workdays in the United States alone, and has accelerated the opioid addiction crisis.
“The growth of the technology around us has become so familiar that we don’t question where it comes from,” says […]
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Wednesday, October 18th, 2017
JAMES SOMERS , - The Atlantic
Stephan: We don't think much about it, and most of us not only don't understand it we can't even conceptualize it but in the background, day-to-day, our world is run by software. A myriad of things once done by people, or mechanical systems now live in the virtual space of computers. What would happen if it went wrong?
This piece is the best thing I have read about the new world, how it operates, and how vulnerable we are to its weaknesses.
Credit: The Atlantic
There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.
The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.
Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was used to generate a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. And because […]
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