Green Technology

It was starting to look like battery-swapping was DOA, or at least not going to happen for a while, but Tesla seems to want to revive the idea.

GooseWatch NYC volunteers hope to stop goose killing in the city's parks.

They will stay in the city until June 20th. After that, they continue their journey which will end in Norway.

Instead of concentrating on becoming a reputable certification system, it trash-talks the competition.

One of the great scientific questions has now been answered. No, it's not something about the Higgs Boson or the Riemann hypothesis...

GE wants to be a big data company. In a presentation in San Francisco Tuesday, the industrial giant announced a platform of products, including predictive software products, a Hadoop-based big data appliance for ingesting and managing industrial data and a relationship with Amazon Web Services to share industrial data in public clouds. All of this is key to its industrial intent vision, where connected sensors on machines talk to the cloud and companies harness the power of industrial data in real time to automate industrial processes. GE has estimated that connecting devices to the “industrial internet” could boost global GDP to the tune of $10 trillion to $15 trillion by 2030. GE’s new data and cloud products GE is building a big data appliance called the Historian that uses Hadoop to manage time-series data to help industrial customers track their rising industrial data. GE’s Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center, pointed out that industrial data is growing at twice the rate of other types of data. For example, GE generates about 5 terabytes of data a day in its labs. The Hadoop part of the box allows the data to scale across multiple nodes, while the time-series component of the software helps manage the influx of tiny pieces of data that comes in almost constantly. Time-series data isn’t huge, but it’s always coming in, adding up to millions and billions of records over a relatively short amount of time depending on how often it is collected. The partnership with Amazon (Amason CTO Werner Vogels attended the event, and he’ll also speak at our Structure event tomorrow in San Francisco) means the cloud giant will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its industrial internet platform. It’s not clear yet, if Amazon will use GE’s Hadoop appliance in its cloud or if there are just some API links being built. In some ways the demonstrations that GE showed off, are taking direct design strategies from consumer applications such as Facebook, and its software options, called Predictivity are designed to connect the data coming in from machines to people in user-friendly ways. The goal behind all of these products is to bring the internet of things back to the enterprise realm. It’s nice to connect your home, but when you can connect power plants you can drive a lot more results in terms of energy efficiency and even cost savings. And because the money is there, we’ll see a lot of interesting software to solve the problems associated with managing, analyzing and running predictions against data. I’ll update the story with more information after the event. “Now for the first time I think we’re going to see innovation coming out of the industrial space and not just the IT space, “said Paul Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal, a company that GE recently invested $105 million in. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionAnalyzing the wearable computing marketLocating data centers in an energy-constrained world

I hate the phrase “Innocent until proven guilty.” When serial killer Ted Bundy killed his first victim, he wasn’t innocent just because a court had yet to convict him. The correct phrasing — which practically nobody uses — is “Presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Yet nearly everyone says that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Most people know what is meant when someone says this, but there is the potential for confusion. Language is important. The way we write and say things is important. I can’t count the number of times I have seen a news headline that would lead most people to conclude something entirely different than what the data actually suggested. Take the recent release of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013. There are a number of key takeaways from the report, and I will be delving deeper into the data in upcoming articles. Some of the important points were: Consumption growth of all forms of fossil energy grew by 1.8% year-over-year, below the 10-year average of 2.6% The US recorded the largest oil and natural gas production increases in the world, and the largest oil production gain in US history Coal remained the fastest-growing fossil fuel, with China consuming half of the world’s coal for the first time China and India alone accounted for nearly 90% of the net increase in global energy consumption Global nuclear power output had the largest decline ever I have seen the first point above misreported as “Global Fossil Fuel Energy Consumption Slows.” I have seen others write about the reduced demand for oil. That’s about as accurate as “Innocent until proven guilty.” For instance, in 2011 global oil consumption was 88.9 million barrels per day (bpd). If global oil consumption slowed in 2012 — as some sources have written — what would consumption need to be relative to 2011? Less than 88.9 million bpd. But according to the BP report, in 2012 oil consumption was 900,000 bpd higher than in 2011 — a new all-time record. What is correct is that growth in oil consumption slowed in 2012. From 2009 to 2010 global oil consumption increased by 2.8 million bpd. From 2010 to 2011, consumption increased by another 1 million bpd. But in failing to note that it is the growth in oil consumption that fell, and not actual oil consumption — many are left with a false impression that perhaps the world is beginning to wean itself off of oil. To the contrary, this is an accurate headline: “Global Oil Consumption in 2012 at New All-Time High.” Link to Original Article: Did Global Oil Consumption Slow in 2012? By Robert Rapier

This summer some odd-looking pieces of public sculpture will start popping up in pedestrian-heavy parts of New York City. Like a cross between a pogo stick and a helicopter, these contraptions are actually solar-powered charging stations for mobile phones, and they’re being installed throughout the city by solar charger maker Goal Zero, design firm Pensa and AT&T. Each Street Charge terminal comes equipped with three 15 watt solar panels mounted on overhead flanges, and a big 168 watt-hour lithium ion battery pack, capable of charging six devices simultaneously and maintaining a reserve power reservoir during the night. iPhone owners will have access to Lightning and 30-pin connectors, while there is a micro-USB plug for other phones. Each station also comes with three female USB ports for people who carry around their own cables. Pensa created first created a prototype of Street Charge last year and installed it in a reclaimed public area in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighborhood. Pensa then teamed up with Goal Zero to build the kiosks using its solar power technology and with AT&T to deploy them. The first of the newly designed stations went up in Fort Greene Park, but AT&T plans to install more this summer in other high-traffic pedestrian areas, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, Coney Island, Riverside Park, Rockaways, Summerstage in Central Park, Randall’s Island, Governor’s Island, Union Square, and Hudson River Park. With stark memories of Hurricane Sandy still vivid in many minds, New Yorkers don’t need to be reminded of the importance of an off-grid power source. After the storm, a city-wide power outage saw New Yorkers sharing generator power to charge phones and laptops. A handful of solar-powered kiosks isn’t going charge the entire city’s cellphones if there is another natural disaster, but they’re definitely a step toward creating a sustainable alternate power supply. The charging service is free to use, but there looks to be plenty of monetization opportunities for the kiosks. The stations include panels for display advertising, and a Wi-Fi hotspot could easily be incorporated into its design. The kiosk could also be used as an information kiosk, incorporating digital maps with points of interest, or even as means of providing solar-powered lighting at night. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.A look back at mobile in Q1Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionWhat to watch in mobile in 2013

A journal that published an ambitious plan for New York State to go fossil free in a few decades now runs a critique.

How can our cities function like healthy ecosystems?