nov 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: oil & gas infrastructure, brain games, Orion space capsule, extended warranties, AIDS in the USA, store security systems, Segway scooters, business investment in Africa, H2S doomsday, $100 PC revisited, green China, Amazon.com keeps on pushing, fraud-spotting software, green building certification, Russian construction, cybercrime foot soldiers, six word stories.
* KEEPING AN EDGE: An article in BUSINESS WEEK ("Chicken Soup For The Aging Brain" by Catherine Arnst, 25 September 2006) examined an emerging market in computer gaming: games designed to help the elderly maintain their mental edge. Oldsters can now play BRAIN AGE games on the Nintendo DS handheld to keep sharp, with the Nintendo program written with help from Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuto Kawashima, or try out the more aggressive "Brain Fitness Program" from Posit Science Corporation, founded by neurologist Michael Merzenich of the University of California at San Francisco.
The problem with such products is that there is no medical evidence that they accomplish very much. To be sure, an oldster who tries to remain mentally active will do better than one who doesn't, but the idea that such "exercises" actually arrest brain degradation has no clear basis in fact. The seeming effectiveness of a game may be dependent on selection effects: the sharper oldsters are attracted to the games.
Merzenich is himself convinced that his software is medically useful, believing that such gaming activity helps old folks rewire their brains and claiming that PET scans of brain function in target groups provide some evidence in confirmation. Nintendo is more conservative about the BRAIN AGE games, simply saying that they are ordinary games targeted at oldsters. The games are cheap and are wildly popular in graying Japan.
Even critics have not gone so far as to condemn such exercises as ripoffs. At the very least, as one of them said, they can provide some reassurance: "If you can still do it, then you know you haven't lost it yet."
* ED: I found this interesting because I'm now in my early 50s and my short-term memory is clearly going south. There's no way to stop it as such -- but it is possible to compensate.
Many decades ago a classmate told me: "You can't exercise your brain!" It was one of those trivial comments I never forgot, because it was, as emphatic assertions often are, wrong. It's not possible to do pushups with the neurons, but it is possible to acquire better "software", establishing procedures to work around the failures of memory. It's a simple matter to make a habit of doublechecking or even triplechecking. Sometimes leaving a physical reminder helps -- a postit for example, or maybe placing an object relevant to a chore on the kitchen table, or even on the floor where it's certain to be noticed.
I also learn not to try to do several things at a time, focusing on one until I can nail it down; make sure I leave my car keys and wallet in specific places; and spend more effort making sure I've planned things out before I go do something. Another realization is that if short-term memory drops something, it will often "percolate" back up later, and I've also learned to backtrack on what I was just doing to see if it cues the memory again.
Whether computer games could help much in this effort is unclear, but the concept certainly seems worth a shot. I do find the idea that they "rewire the brain" to be arguable; it is enough to simply improve the brain software, the schemes we use to think about things and get things done, to work around the holes -- the same way that space probes are reprogrammed to operate around faults. Still, no matter the details, in the end all that can be done is to compensate for a generally unavoidable degradation in hardware. Reminds me of the gag that the nice thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs.
* ORION IN PROGRESS: The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has been working hard to revitalize itself recently, focusing on sending astronauts back to the Moon as a first step towards an expedition to Mars.
As reported in AVIATION WEEK ("Next Up" by Frank Morring JR, 4 September 2006), in late August NASA selected Lockheed Martin to build the new "Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle", the replacement for the NASA space shuttle. The competition between Lockheed Martin and a team consisting of Northrop Grumman and Boeing was intense, with Lockheed Martin edging forward on the basis of a more aggressive schedule. NASA is in a hurry: the first human flight of the Orion is scheduled to take place in September 2014, four years after the last flight of the shuttle.
The Orion has been described by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin as "Apollo on steroids". The Orion command module will look much like the Apollo command module, consisting of a simple conical capsule with a convex heat shield on the base, but is much larger. The Orion command module has a diameter of 5 meters (16 feet 6 inches) and a pressurized volume of 19.6 cubic meters (25.6 cubic yards), with half of that available for a crew of up to six for transfer to the International Space Station (ISS).
The pressure shell of the Orion command module will be made of aluminum-lithium alloy. It will be protected from micrometeorite and space debris strikes by blankets made of Nextel and Kevlar. The current concept for the heatshield envisions it as being made of phenolic impregnated carbon. The command module has an off-axis center of gravity, allowing it to perform maneuvers on reentry.
The current concept envisions the Orion command module as landing on solid ground, just as does a Russian Soyuz return capsule, using a four-parachute array fitted with a retrorocket that will fire just before touchdown, with a crushable structure underlying the heat shield and shock-absorbed crew seats. Ground recovery would eliminate the expense of operating an ocean recovery fleet, but the capsule will still be able to land at sea if there is a launch abort. Studies are also being performed to see how much of the command module will be recyclable; obviously the heat shield will have to be replaced between missions, but it remains unclear for the moment just how much of the spacecraft will be flown again.
The Orion service module is only vaguely like the Apollo service module. It consists of a stubby cylinder with a main propulsion unit, maneuvering thruster arrays, communications antennas, and twin "pizza pan" solar arrays. Apollo used fuel cells, but Orion is being designed for longer missions and needs a more continuous source of power. The main propulsion unit will be a rocket engine derived from the shuttle's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS), providing 33.4 kN (3,400 kgp / 7,500 lbf) thrust. The reaction control jets in the thruster arrays will use non-toxic propellants. Avionics, life-support, and propulsion systems are being designed to ensure that the spacecraft and crew can survive failure of any two primary subsystems.
On lunar missions, the Orion will carry a four-person crew, which will descend to the surface on a new lunar landing vehicle, the "Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), while the Orion remains unattended in Moon orbit. The Orion will be launched by the Ares I booster, which will be derived from the shuttle's solid rocket motors. An escape tower fitted with a solid-rocket motor will allow the crew to blast free of the booster in case of a launch accident.
The Lockheed Martin team includes Aerojet, which will make the propulsion systems; Honeywell, which will build the avionics, health management system, and crew interfaces; Hamilton Sundstrand, which will develop the environmental control, life-support, and power systems; Orbital Sciences, which will build safety systems, including the escape tower; and United Space Alliance, which will handle launch processing. Lockheed Martin will perform overall design and integration, as well as pre-launch final checkout and post-mission refurbishment.
Total program costs are given as about $8 billion USD into 2019. This is not a massive sum for a space technology program of such magnitude and emphasizes that the Orion is a conservative design, levering off existing technology where possible. First launches of the Aries 1 are expected in 2009, with about a half dozen test flights before the first Orion human flight in 2014. Human flights to the Moon will require development of the Aries 5 shuttle-derived booster.
* EXTENDED WARRANTIES: It is the season to buy Christmas toys, and in buying up expensive toys there's the question of whether to buy an extended warranty for them. According to a NEW YORK TIMES article ("The Word On Warranties: Don't Bother" by David S. Joachim) cited on CNET News, it's probably not a good idea.
Calculations of the costs of an extended warranty versus the actual odds of a failure indicate that extended warranties are a waste of money. Says Andrew Housser of the personal-finance site Bills.com: "Extended warranties are basically overpriced insurance products. At times it makes sense to buy insurance. It's a good idea to buy home, car, life insurance. But those are priced in a very efficient marketplace."
Profits in the insurance marketplace run to about 15%, while profits for extended warranties run to about 80%: the extended warranty just isn't that necessary. In fact, some electronics retailers make far more profit on the extended warranty than on the items they sell covered by the warranty, which is why they push them so hard.
CONSUMER REPORTS (CR) magazine has long told readers to ignore extended warranties on most products, such as cars, appliances, and televisions. CR researchers have analysed repair records and found that the warranties just aren't usually needed. CR senior editor Tod Marks says they are particularly ridiculous for popular consumer digital electronics products like personal computers, digital music pods, digital cameras, and smart phones.
An extended warranty, said Marks, is a "sucker's bet", with the purchaser betting that the item will break in the warranty period -- which according to CR data is rarely the case -- and that the cost of the replacement if it does break will be more than cost of the warranty -- which is usually flat wrong. Prices of things such as digital cameras have been falling, and a few years down the road a purchaser will likely be much better off to buy a new camera at a lower cost and with new features. CR does say that an extended warranty on some products may pay off. Rear-projection TVs have traditionally been unreliable, with the high-intensity lamps burning out often and requiring an expensive replacement. Otherwise, extended warranties are usually a joke.
* AIDS IN AMERICA: Most news on the HIV-AIDS pandemic focuses on the undeveloped world. With the widespread availability of anti-AIDS drugs in America, there's a certain tendency to perceive that the problem has gone away here, but as reported in THE ECONOMIST ("Ignorance Is Not Bliss", 30 September 2006), the truth is that AIDS is still at large and dangerous in the USA.
It is estimated that a million Americans have AIDs; compounding the problem is that about a quarter of them don't realize it, meaning they not only are not obtaining treatment, but are passing on the disease to others. The number of new HIV infections per year has been stable in the US since the late 1990s, despite all attempts to bring the rate down. In response, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has recommended that all Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 be regularly tested for HIV. Although the CDC is not specifying that the tests be compulsory, clinics are being encouraged to test incoming patients by default and not wait for them to ask.
Not only would an early diagnosis of HIV infection help reduce the spread of the disease, HIV is easier to treat if it hasn't developed into full-blown AIDS. Most emergency rooms don't test at present, mostly because of the bureaucracy, which requires the signing of consent forms and a lecture about safe sex. The CDC wants to do away with these processes so that clinics will have no problem administering the test, which is cheap and simple. In addition, making testing commonplace would eliminate the stigma that has been attached to it in the past.
AIDS hits black Americans the hardest. Despite being only an eighth of the population, they account for almost half the new infections, with studies showing that young gay black men are four times as likely to be HIV-positive than their white counterparts, and twice as likely as Latinos. Another study of gays in Washington DC involving a query as to HIV status and an HIV test showed that only 18% of the white subjects were not aware they were HIV-positive, while two-thirds of the black subjects didn't know.
Part of the problem is the black person's distrust of the system -- the idea that if a black man is found out to be HIV-positive, it will be reported to the authorities, affecting his job and family relationships. There is also the fact that mainstream black culture is strongly homophobic, and so black gays tend to be more closeted than white gays. In fact, the prejudice is so strong that many blacks who engage in male-on-male sex refuse to acknowledge that they are gay.
No other rich country has established routine testing for HIV, but no other rich country has as bad a problem as the US. Lawmakers, hospitals, and insurers don't have to implement the CDC's recommendations, but the CDC has authority and the recommendation is not going to be simply ignored.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- OIL & GAS (7): Now consider a refinery in terms of its organizational arrangement instead of its individual components. The "crude unit" is where the crude oil is initially processed; in the old days it did all the processing there really was to do, but nowdays things are more complicated and it's only part of the system.
The crude unit is a distillery with three main parts: a feed header, an atmospheric-pressure distillation column, and a vacuum distillation column. The vacuum distillation column is also called a "flasher"; unlike the atmospheric column, which is tall and slender, the flasher is relatively short and has a bulge around the middle.
The feed heater gets the crude oil hot before it is fed into the atmospheric column. "Light ends" -- methane, ethane, propane, and butane -- are drawn off from the top. Below that is "straight-run gasoline", which used to be the only gasoline there was, but there's more in the mix now, as discussed later. Other fractions drawn off further down the column include naptha, heavy naptha, kerosene, "gas oil" -- and finally what is known as "residual oil" or "resid", which won't boil in the atmospheric column.
Heating the resid up more would just make it break down, so it is instead fed into the flasher, the vacuum tower, where it boils at a relatively low temperature. The flasher doesn't provide a hard vacuum, by the way -- it's at about a third of atmospheric pressure. The "tops" of the flasher are used to make motor oils and other lubricants. However, not all the resid will boil even in the flasher. The "flasher bottom" is partly used for asphault, but it's mostly a nuisance.
* The light ends are sorted out in the "gas unit", which has a set of tall, narrow distillation towers. The height is needed because the light ends are hard to separate from each other. The towers are under pressure -- about 14 atmospheres. The light ends have various uses:
At the other end of the spectrum, the less desireable flow from the flasher is fed into a "catalytic cracking" unit, which breaks down tarry long-chain hydrocarbons into shorter, more useful molecules. The process is based on "zeolite" catalyst, with zeolites being a sort of crystalline clay that is full of small pores where hydrocarbon molecules can be cracked into smaller pieces. Think of the zeolites as providing a template or form where molecules can be broken apart more easily than if they were floating around freely.
The zeolite is crushed into a fine powder that flows, with the powder and feedstock mixed at high temperature and fed into a reaction chamber. The catalysis takes place quickly, and then the products are separated from the catalyst using a cyclone system. The products end up in another distilling tower to be separated into fractions. The catalyst is reused -- catalysis by definition does not consume the catalyst -- but it has to be run through a "regenerator" first since the zeolite crystals are fouled by carbon. Hot air cleans up the crystals so they can be sent back through the cycle again.
The carbon fouling occurs because hydrocarbons, as their name implies, consist of carbon chains with hydrogen atoms around the "edges". The ratio of hydrogen to carbon atoms tends to get lower as the length of the chain increases, and so breaking a long chain into smaller molecules means that there's not enough hydrogen available to make use of all the carbon, leaving a residue. A scheme known as "hydrocracking" adds a hydrogen gas stream to eliminate the excess carbon. Since fouling is minimized, the catalyst is provided in a fixed bed, not cycled through a regenerator.
Catalysis is used in other parts of the refinery process as well. A "reformer" unit takes straight-chain molecules and turns them into branched chains or rings that burn better in piston engines. The reformer is a high pressure reaction vessel using precious-metal catalysts like platinum and rhenium. The catalysts are expensive and have to be replaced every few years. The "alkylation" or "alkyl" unit performs something of the reverse function: it glues together small hydrocarbon molecules to make more useful molecules. Instead of a feed heater, it has a chiller unit that cools the flow down to the temperature of cold water, and instead of platinum and rhenium, it uses sulfuric acid as a catalyst.
The bottoms of the flasher unit are, as mentioned, a nuisance. It is usually fed into a "coking unit", where it is heated to turn it into nearly pure carbon or coke, which as mentioned earlier in this series is used in steel production. The coking unit looks like a row of big drums with a drilling derrick, of all things, on top of each drum. The drums fill up with solid coke and the drill is then used to break up the coke so it can be removed. Coke obtained from refineries is usually too fouled with pollutants to be used in countries with high air-quality standards, so it is usually shipped elsewhere.
* The fuels resulting from this process include gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil, and so on. Relatively pure form of kerosenes, taken from fairly narrow ranges of the fuel "stack", are used as "jet propellant (JP)" for jet aircraft. An even purer form of kerosene taken from a very narrow range of the stack is used as "rocket propellant (RP)". RP has to have consistent properties, since if it didn't the performance of the rocket engines would be unpredictable and the launch mass of a large booster might vary by tonnes, with disastrous results. I recall a TV show where an arsonist was using RP to set fires, which was ridiculous: it would hard to tell it from ordinary kerosene, and though it may burn better because of its purity, it wouldn't be by an order of magnitude.
Automotive gasoline is a blend of gasoline and other fuels, butane being one major constituent, with the volatile butane making engine starting easier. It's the butane that is vaporizing when you fill up your gas tank, not the gasoline. In cold climates, more butane is used in the blend since it it's otherwise harder to start cars, and it won't evaporate away as easily as it does in a cold climate. Ethanol is also often blended these days since it results in cleaner-burning fuel, reducing emissions.
* A refinery will have a set of "flare stacks", tall pipes with a burner at the top, that burn off escaping methane and other gas. Flare stacks were once used continuously to get rid of gas that was too uneconomical to sell, but with rising energy prices there's hardly any uneconomical fuels any longer. The flare stacks are just to get rid of the gas if there's a problem, since their buildup would produce an explosive hazard. Interestingly, some of the burners on the flare stacks inject steam into the burning gas, which makes it burn cleaner.
Sulfur in the crude oil generally ends up in the form of smelly hydrogen sulfide, H2S. Once upon a time, the H2S was generally vented to the atmosphere, but it was too much and too noticeable a pollutant. These days, just like a copper smelter, a refinery will have a sulfuric acid production unit to turn the H2S into a useful and salable product. At some plants, it is turned into elemental sulfur instead. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) is famous for its robotics department. According to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, one the latest intriguing robots to come out CMU is the "ballbot", designed by a group under CMU researcher Ralph Hollis.
Dr. Hollis was looking at how robots tended to be bottom-heavy just so they could be stable and wondered if there was a smarter way to do things. The result, the ballbot, looks like nothing more than a post that rolls around on a ball on the bottom. The post contains a battery power supply, a control processor, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and a drive system for the ball on the bottom.
The IMU features three fiber-optic gyros and three microaccelerometers, with a gyro and microaccelerometer for each of the X, Y, and Z axes. A sophisticated control algorithm executed by the processor allows the robot to move around, and even simply stand up straight without moving; the ballbot can deploy a tripod system for support before turning itself off. The ball drive system is conceptually based on the mechanics of a computer mouse. A mouse has a ball that rotates against two rollers at right angles to each other, with the rollers driving optical encoders -- slotted spinning wheels that are scanned by a LED-phototransistor assembly -- to give X-Y coordinates. The ballbot drive system is along the same lines, except that there are three rollers and instead of being driven by the ball, they are linked to motors to drive it. The motors are fitted with optical encoders so the processor knows exactly how fast they are rotating and how many rotations they make.
Visitors to the lab reportedly find the ballbot absolutely fascinating to watch. I did find an online video but it was unspectacular, with the robot simply moving a few times and then standing still. The CMU group is working on an improved ballbot with arms and a rotating video-camera head. Like a lot of robotic experiments, it's hard to say if something like this sounds like it would be useful any time soon, but it certainly looks like a cool toy.
* A BBC WORLD Online report discussed another interesting robotics technology, the "snake-arm robots". Traditionally, robot arms are jointed affairs, not so different in concept from a human arm, but over the last three decades there has also been research into robot arms consisting of a large number of short segments linked together.
The advantage of a snake-arm robot is its flexibility, its ability to reach into corners that would be too difficult for a traditional robot arm. The disadvantage is cost, and so far snake-arm robots have been lab toys or specialized tools. They are being used, for example, in troubleshooting nuclear power plants, where their ability to crawl into tight mazes of piping is irreplaceable.
Backers of the technology believe that it has more potential, if the costs can be reduced. That means simplifying and modularizing the construction of the arm, as well as figuring out smarter ways to control it: writing the software to get a snake-arm robot to do what it is commanded to do is not trivial. There is interest from a wide range of industries, including aircraft manufacturers and doctors looking for improved surgical robots.
* As reported by AVIATION WEEK, San Francisco International Airport is now performing trials of a "4D" -- space and time -- flight control system that reduces jetliner fuel consumption by sequencing arrivals in a way that an aircraft can come straight in to the runway, without any go-rounds. The 4D system tracks the flight path of the jetliners and gives their flight-management systems continuous updates for the most efficient arrival path.
* According to WIRED Online, the town of Bocastle in southern England is prone to nasty floods, with one in 2004 badly damaging the place. The town's rain gauges had not indicated the downpour was heavy enough to cause a flood and the townspeople had no warning.
Now a team of engineers from Lancaster University is setting up a sensor network with 10 to 20 nodes, run by tiny processors known as GumStix and communicating over wireless links. The sensors in the "GridStix" network track water levels, taking measurements on intervals to conserve power, and relay their findings to a central computer at the UK's Meteorological Office. The central sees if the data indicates a flood coming up and sends out an alarm if it is. The nodes are generally idle, waking up when the rain starts to fall. They use cameras to observe water flow from debris coming downstream and switch from BlueTooth wireless to Wi-Fi wireless to handle the heavier data stream.
* BETTER MOUSETRAPS: The war being retailers and shoplifters has been going on for a long time, and as reported in a BUSINESS WEEK article ("Attention, Shoplifters" by Elizabeth Woyke, 11 September 2006), the retailers have as of late been acquiring some high-tech armament for the fight.
Everyone is aware of the video cameras in stores these days -- six million in the USA alone -- but it comes as a surprise that a few leading-edge retailers have very smart video systems that can spot unusual activity automatically. Such a system will take notice if somebody picks ten items off a shelf or opens a case that's normally kept closed, providing an alarm to security to allow them to look the matter over. It can predict the spots where shoplifters would be out of general sight, and can also identify spills, alerting a cleanup crew immediately. The video system will also observe and track breakins.
Such a smart video system is expensive, but retailers find it worth the money. These days, shoplifting isn't the domain of loose teenagers; organized gangs have moved into the business, looting stores for specific high-value items that they resell at a discount. The average value of shoplifting incidents has tripled since 2003.
That means that retailers have plenty of incentive to invest in defenses. One common scam is to simply walk out the door with a loaded shopping cart, a trick called the "push out". Gatekeeper Systems of Irvine, California, has introduced an "electronic fence" for carts that uses RFID transponders an a network of antennas around the store to keep track of carts. If somebody tries to push out of the store without going through a checkout -- or if somebody who has gone through the checkout then tries to take the cart out of the parking lot -- the wheels of the cart lock up. Target has signed on to the scheme.
Another trick with carts is to hide goods on the bottom rungs in hopes of sneaking out of the store with a score. A number of US grocery chains, are now testing "LaneHawk", developed by Evolution Robotics Retail INC, which uses cameras mounted in the checkout stand just above the floor and pattern recognition to spot packages on the bottom rack and then add the price to the bill.
Criminals are notoriously quick to catch on to store defenses, and so much work is being done to make the defenses as invisible as possible. Although "electronic article surveillance" tags have been around for a years, they are increasingly unobtrusive, having been reduced in scale to a cylinder about as long as a toothpick and maybe twice as thick. Of course, anybody who buys DVDs is used to taking out the EAS strip, which is stuck inside the DVD case before the case is wrapped. J. Crew sews EAS devices into clothing labels.
The big buzz is of course the latest generation of RFID tags, which are small and highly capable. EAS tags are only activated at the store exits, but RFID tags allowing tracking and provide detailed product information, anyplace in the store. Wal-Mart and Target are big RFID fans, though they mostly use the technology for tracking crates of inventory in the back room. The reason is that RFID tags cost from 7 to 20 cents these days, and they need to be cut to 5 cents or less to be cost-effective for all items on the shelves. However, even at 20 cents they are cost-effective for high-value items.
The cash register is also being improved to help fight theft and identify other problems. Software is now available to identify peculiar register usage patterns, for example spotting repeated returns of the same or similar items, suggesting a scam in operation; or an employee who performs manual credit card number entry an unusual number of times, suggesting credit-card number lifts. Of course, the manual entries also may suggest the card reader needs to be fixed, but that's good to know in itself.
One of the problems with adding all such high-tech defenses is that they cumulatively produce floods of data, allowing anomalies -- thefts -- to get lost in the noise. Now software is available to perform "fusion" on all the elements, screening through the routine to flag the unusual to store security. RFID tags can cue video cameras, which then automatically check for suspicious activity, with the system correlating the events to checkout counter data -- or lack thereof.
Researchers in the field of security systems believe that the next step will be to integrate summary data streams from individual stores over wide regions, to allow law enforcement to search for patterns of criminal activity. There's some work on using video cameras to get license plate numbers and perform facial recognition, allowing patterns to be pinned down to individuals.
Retailers are generally quiet about their security systems, and not just to make sure that thieves don't get wise to them. There's also consumer resistance to the idea of wiring stores with video surveillance and RFID systems, since such technologies do have real privacy implications. Confronted with energetic crooks, retailers find the concerns exasperating, responding that shoplifting increases prices for shoppers as well. The security systems also perform inventory control, making sure that items remain in stock. Still, it can be a bit unsettling to realize during a trip to the supermarket that "Big Grocer is watching YOU."
* GOING SOMEWHERE? The Segway "Personal Transporter", a two-wheeled electroscooter that looks like an old-fashioned push lawnmower that you stand on, got a lot of attention when it was introduced in 2001 in a blaze of publicity. According to an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("Reinventing The Wheel, Slowly" by Mark Gimein, 11 September 2006), inventor Dean Kamen and his backers thought the Segway would revolutionize urban transportation.
The reality quickly set in: "You want five thousand bucks for this thing? It's cute -- but who are you kidding?" The WASHINGTON POST called "the invention that runs on hype". It was certainly a clever piece of gear, using computer-controlled electric motors that kept that vehicle balanced even when it hit bumps, and it has been adopted by police as well as disabled persons, who swear by it. However, so far sales have been in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
The company has not given up, though under new president James D. Norrod the vision has changed to reflect reality. Norrod sees the technology developed for the Personal Transporter as widely applicable, for example to implement highly maneuverable unmanned vehicles for commercial or military use, and even as the basis for electric or hybrid automobiles. Segway has already built a four-wheeled prototype vehicle. Says Norrod: "If people want four wheels, I say give them four wheels."
Kamen, still company chairman, had hoped for more: "Life is too short for incrementalism." The reality is that a giant step may require generations of fussing and fiddling before things come right, and Segway is adjusting to that reality. Don't count the idea out yet.
* INVESTING IN AFRICA: The traditional perception of Subsaharan Africa is that the region is a hopeless basket case, but as reported in an article in THE ECONOMIST ("The Flicker Of A Brighter Future", 9 September 2006), things have been looking up in the last few years, and many businesses think there's money, even big money, to be made there. Says an official of South Africa's SABMiller, the world's second-largest brewer: "If there was any more of Africa, we'd be investing in it."
Although the subcontinent is still plagued by poverty and AIDs, the economy has been growing steadily as of late, though this is partly due to a massive write-off of debt. However, peace, stability, and better governance have contributed as well.
Investing in Africa is not for the faint-hearted. Governments are still often whimsical in making and enforcing the rules, with the wheels of commerce bogged down by incompetence, corruption, and bureaucracy. Much of the economy in the region is informal, because few want to have to go through the red tape of setting up a formal business. Trying to move goods across borders is troublesome, roads are bad, electrical power networks are spotty, and the local citizenry -- though often clever and industrious in their efforts to get out of poverty -- have a low level of marketable skills. Africa only gets about 3% of the world's foreign direct investment, and much of that is from mining and oil companies.
Those companies that do have the nerve to take the plunge are often pleasantly surprised at the results. Celtel, a cellphone company that was organized in the Netherlands to do business in Africa, set up shop in the relatively urbanized regions of Zambia in 1998, with the assumption being that the pickings would be too thin elsewhere. In 2003, Celtel moved into the rural market -- to encounter an astonishing level of demand.
Most of the rural customers never had a phone, but they understood how useful such a gadget was and felt it was worth a good portion of their meager earnings. As noted in previous articles in these pages, Africans prefer a "prepaid" model for phone service as opposed to the subscription model used elsewhere, generally buying prepaid phone cards to get a fixed amount of time. Celtel then added a "Me2U" service that allowed one user to transfer prepaid cellphone credits to another user via cellphone text-messaging, and discovered they had just created a form of electronic currency, with the Me2U service used for personal payments and even purchases of goods. Shopkeepers could accumulate credits and sell them off for hard currency to operators of "phone kiosks", who rent out phone time for small sums.
In 2004, Celtel had 70,000 customers in Zambia; now it has a million. The company is enjoying success in a number of other Subsaharan African countries as well. The secret is to understand local tastes and needs, and to figure out how to accommodate the small budgets of the customer base.
SABMiller has demonstrated a similar flexibility. The company had originally imported malt into Uganda to brew their beer there, but found out that they could use locally-grown sorghum to cut costs, and also give leverage to cut the government's tax bite. The product, named Eagle, proved popular and is also being sold in other African countries. Drinks are generally sold in returnable glass bottles, not throwaway cans or plastic bottles: with labor so cheap, that's the most economical way to go.
An understanding of local cultures can pay off. In Ghana, traders who don't have access to a normal bank come to an arrangement with one of the 5,000 or so "Susu collectors" in the country, who drop by periodically to pick up cash to ensure its protection. A typical Susu collector has about 400 clients; the British bank Barclays estimated that Ghana's Susu collectors represented a $140 million USD market and decided to co-opt them. Barclays set up special bank accounts to serve the collectors and gave them training, not only resulting in profits to the bank but profits to the collectors, who could also extend their services by offering lending to their clients. Bank officials were startled at how much money ended up flowing into the Susu collector accounts, and how shrewd the collectors were.
Subsaharan Africa is in fact a golden market for bankers, if they can deal with the unique circumstances of the region. Branch banks of South Africa's Standard Bank in Uganda rely on satellite communications, diesel generators, and solar panels for infrastructure; a branch bank on an island in Lake Victoria that's too small for an airstrip gets bags of cash by airdrop. Standard Bank now handles about half of all of Uganda's banking and the profits are good. The beauty of taking the risks is that the competition is weak and the margins are high. Accusations that the firms are exploiting the citizenry are easily countered with the reply that services are now being provided that weren't available before, and the locals are eager to obtain them.
Understanding local conditions often means obtaining a local partner, which also helps reduce resistance against a big foreign firm coming into the country, where it can walk all over local businesses. Both sides find it a learning experience. Since bringing in help from outside is expensive, firms like to hire locals, giving them training in the required skills -- though in environments where skills are in short supply, such folk end up being demand, which means the companies try to give their people a good deal, with generous salaries and perks like housing or medical coverage. Big companies have the financial clout to provide such deals, and also have clout to get concessions from local governments. They can even fight corruption to an extent, able to intimidate minor officials asking for payoffs by taking the matter to high government offices.
The concessions are not a one-way street. Foreign companies working in poor African countries are expected to be good citizens. As one businessman put it: "Investing in communities is taken for granted. You do not get rewarded for doing it. You get punished for not doing it." Companies have worked with anti-malarial and anti-AIDS programs, and set up schools, cooperating with non-governmental organizations when possible.
In 2005, a group of big firms investing in Africa set up Business Action For Africa to boost business there, and a wide range of initiatives are in progress. The biggest issue for further progress is reform, and that seems to be happening. Few African countries call themselves Marxist any more -- having understood the notion, as Winston Churchill once put it, that capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth while socialism is the equal distribution of poverty. Governments have been privatizing their economies and taking unprecedented efforts to clean up corruption.
There's still plenty of obstacles left, and there's no saying that the tide won't go back out and leave the engines of economic growth broken-down and rusting. There were periods of optimism over Africa in the past that ended in disappointment, but if the the momentum can be sustained this time around, the region's growth may prove astonishing.
* ED: Having mentioned "sorghum" in the article, I realized that it was one of those terms that I'd heard all my life and never bothered to look up. Clearly it is a sort of grain, but that doesn't tell me much.
According to ENCARTA and Wikipedia, sorghum grasses are native to East Africa, though one species is native to Mexico. They are now raised over much of the globe. Wild sorghums are up to 2 meters or more tall and look little like wheat plants; the heads are very different from those of wheat, amounting to a disorderly spearlike cluster of grains, with heads branching out widely from the plant. It has a somewhat weedy appearance. Dwarf breeds, with a height of a meter or so, are also commonly cultivated. Sorghum grows well in dry and hot climates.
There are four families, with sorghums for grain, animal fodder, sweet syrup, and broomstalks. Sorghum is said to be the world's number five crop plant; it is commonly used for brewing beverages, can be used for making breads, but is raised in the US mostly for fodder. Incidentally, although most American consumers are not very aware of sorghum, the US is the single biggest producer, raising a quarter of the world's production. There is now some interest in using it for ethanol production -- it isn't a more efficient stock than corn, but it can grow in places corn won't.
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- OIL & GAS (6): An oil refinery is one of the most citadels of industrial architecture: a necessarily grungy workplace by day, a surreal glittering landscape by night, elaborate in either case.
A refinery is a continous-flow system, not a batch system: crude oil goes into one end and refined fuels of various sorts come up the other, on a more or less constant basis. A refinery tends to be a bewildering maze of pipes and structures on first sight, but there is a method to the madness, the site featuring specific structures and divided into specialized units that perform a particular phase of the refining.
Refining the crude oil requires heating at various stages, and so about a dozen or so "feed heaters" are distributed around the grounds, with each unit usually having its own feed heater. All a heater amounts to is a big furnace, with natural gas burners at the bottom and a sloped roof leading to a smokestack at top. Petroleum is pumped through steel pipes in the center of the structure to be heated, with the heat varying according to the step in the process, ranging from hot enough to bake bread to hot enough to peel off paint. The natural gas burned in the feed heaters is skimmed off the production flow.
The best-known component of the refinery is the tall tower known as the "cracking column". It's a distilling tower, in principle little different from the distilling tower used to separate cryogenic gases, except that the cracking column's inputs are hot, warmed up by a feed heater at the bottom, instead of extremely cold. The vaporized crude drifts up through trays and around inverted cups, with the appropriate fraction liquefying at each tray. Cracking columns are usually the tallest spires in the refinery, but they actually have a range of shapes, with some short and tubby.
A refinery may be littered with other, shorter towers, which are "reactors" where particular chemical reactions are performed. They are not always towers; sometimes they are laid on their sides. Reactors supporting high-pressure processes will have rounded ends. A refinery will also have a few heat exchangers, where one portion of the process is cooled by heating up another, conserving energy in the bargain. A heat exchanger just looks like a cylindrical tank, usually lying on its side, with pipes going in and out and intertwined inside.
The refinery is threaded with a tangled network of pipes, valves, and pumps. The pipes carry raw materials, products, and intermediate stocks, as well as water, steam, pressurized air, and such things as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. Some pipes are insulated; some are steam-heated, fitted with an "expansion loop" -- a hump in the pipe that takes up the expansion of the pipe when it is heated.
All the pipes have one or more valves; they may be "stop valves", which are either fully open or fully closed, or "throttling valves", which operate over the full range from fully open to fully closed. These days, the valves are remote-controlled from a central control facility. There are also many pumps around the refinery to keep the flow in the pipes going, though they are generally hard to spot: they are mounted low, ground level or under, since they have to be below the level of the pipes they are drawing fluid from. The pumps are the major user of electricity for a refinery. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* NOT WITH A BANG BUT A STINK: The evidence that a giant meteor impact 65 million years ago ended the Cretaceous era and the reign of the dinosaurs accumulated to a persuasive level in the 1980s, and it's become something of the popular wisdom, even becoming a staple of Hollywood blockbusters. There has been debate over the matter since then, but the impact hypothesis for the Cretaceous extinction has been more or less holding its own. However, there have been other mass extinctions in the history of the Earth, and though the notion of giant meteor impacts originally seemed to provide a useful mechanism, so far the evidence hasn't supported the idea. An article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ("Impact From The Deep" by Peter D. Ward, October 2006), suggested an alternate mechanism with unsettling implications.
Along with the Cretaceous extinction, four other mass extinctions are known to have occurred:
The major evidence for the Cretaceous impact was the discovery of a geological layer enriched in iridium metal, since iridium is a much more important constituent of some meteors than it is of the Earth as a whole. The impact scattered meteorite dust around the globe to form the iridium-enriched layer. The discovery of the buried remains of a crater of appropriate size and age beneath the Yucatan peninsula helped clinch the argument.
Evidence was found linking the other mass extinctions to impact events, but further examination led to doubts: the other events seemed to be very protracted affairs, lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and the evidence suggested they were linked to changes in atmospheric conditions. In the late 1990s, researchers found evidence of an alternate extinction hypothesis, based on evidence that photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria were common in the other mass extinction episodes.
Photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria and the similar purple sulfur bacteria are "anaerobic" microorganisms, which not only do not use oxygen for their metabolic processes but find it toxic. There was a time before the Earth had an oxygen-laden atmosphere when anaerobic microorganisms ruled the planet. They are still common at the bottom of stagnant lakes and some larger bodies of water, like the Black Sea, where the waters are "anoxic", or in other words lacking in oxygen.
The metabolism of the photosynthetic sulfur bacteria is based on converting hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas into sulfur. H2S gives hot springs their rank odor and is toxic in fair quantities. The photosynthetic sulfur bacteria are part of an "ecology" of anoxic environments, consuming H2S produced by other (non-photosynthesizing) anaerobic bacteria, and so the geological evidence that suggested a "bloom" of photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria implied the accumulation of H2S-producing anaerobic bacteria -- and by implication anoxic oceans.
In most waters, oxygen diffuses in fairly constant concentrations from top to bottom. In environments like the Black Sea, oxygen concentrations are low deep in the waters, providing a pleasant environment for H2S-producing anaerobic bacteria. There is an underwater boundary, called the "chemocline", where H2S-saturated deep waters meet oxygen-diffused surface waters, with the photosynthetic sulfur bacteria thriving at the layer where the sunlight is more plentiful than it is at lower depths. The chemocline is normally stable.
However, computer models show that if the oxygen in the surface layer starts to decline, the H2S-saturated anoxic bottom layers start to move upward. In the worst case, they could reach the surface and dump H2S into the atmosphere. Not only is H2S toxic to aerobic organisms, but it also depletes the ozone layer. Evidence suggests that atmospheric H2S levels went through the roof at the end of the Permian -- in a literal fashion, since the evidence also implies widespread damage to life-forms from ultraviolet, and so depletion of the ozone layer.
There is good evidence of widespread volcanism at the end of the Permian. The result would have been to increase atmospheric CO2 levels; since even at high levels CO2 is a trace atmospheric gas, that wouldn't have reduced the oxygen levels of the oceans much in itself, but since CO2 is a "greenhouse gas", it would have led to global warming. Warmer waters don't absorb oxygen as well, and the stage was set for runaway oceanic anoxia -- and mass extinctions by H2S.
There is some evidence for the same process at work in some of the other mass extinctions. What is unsettling is that the Earth is once again passing through a time of rising CO2 concentrations, with the level currently about 300 parts per million (PPM). That doesn't seem to be anywhere near a high enough concentration to trigger runaway oceanic anoxia, with the levels from the geological evidence suggesting that CO2 concentrations in those days were about 1,000 PPM. However, CO2 levels are continuing to rise, and at current rates could reach 1,000 PPM in a few hundred years. The possibilities are unpleasant to consider.
* OLPC REVISITED: As discussed in these pages back in May, Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab has been pushing the "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)" computer, a concept for a laptop computer that would cost about $100 USD and be supplied in the tens of millions to poor communities all over the world. The idea did not meet with universal enthusiasm, and the technological concepts he had been pursuing ran into some obstacles.
Instead of becoming discouraged, Negroponte called in some heavy support, in the form of Yves Behar, a well-known Swiss-born industrial designer who works from San Francisco. Behar came up with a new OLPC design, which was highlighted in the August 2006 issue of WIRED magazine.
Behar's OLPC is reconfigurable, with the tablet configuration providing a good starting point for a tour. In this format, it looks like a tablet computer, with a fixed handle on the near side, which also handily stores a shoulder strap; a speaker grille on one side of the display and a mike grille on the other; a little cursor control; and an unidentified item that looks possibly like an infrared interface. The display provides 640x480 color resolution with LED backlighting indoors, switching to 1200x900 grayscale resolution in direct sunlight.
"Ears" flip up from the top corners to act as antennas for an 802.11b/g wireless networking scheme, with interface jacks for headphones, networking, and so on exposed when the ears are deployed. A wireless mesh networking scheme allows communication with other OLPC machines in the neighborhood, with relays between machines permitting communications over a town. Voice IP facilities are built in, allowing the OLPC to be used as a phone.
If the user needs a laptop configuration, the display module can be pivoted up and turned around to reveal a keyboard with a large touchpad at the bottom. The guts of the machine are in the display module; the baseline is a 366 MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM and 512 MB of flash ROM, running a stripped version of Redhat Linux. The mesh network links the machine to a local server with 200 GB of disk space and connections to the outside world.
Flip the display back down and the OLPC is packed away in a damage-resistant transport configuration, protected by its rubberized plastic casing. 31 different case colors will be offered, helping reduce theft. The overall weight is about half that of a conventional laptop. The price is given at $140 USD in the short term.
* ED: I am wishing this idea the best of luck, but we'll see what happens. Actually, I have a self interest in it, because I think I'd have uses for a super-cheap lightweight computer. Eventually I'd probably have three or so of them.
I have run across other articles on the OLPC, with one pointing out a potential pitfall that seems obvious in hindsight: think of millions, hundreds of millions of cheap computers all over the world, with effectively the same hardware and OS, plus wireless networking ... ahhh, maybe there's a potential security problem there?
Work is being performed on the security issue, with the OS designed to resist worms and phishing attacks. Upgrades will be automatically performed over the wireless network and the simple OS will be easy to reinstall if it's corrupted. Applications will be run in a protected environment to ensure that their access to critical system functions is restricted.
* THE EAST IS GREEN: Although rapidly developing China has a poor reputation for environmental consciousness, according to an article in US NEWS & WORLD REPORT ("China's Renewal" by Bay Fang, 12 June 2006), the country's government put a new Renewable Energy Law into effect at the beginning of the year, with the law dictating that 10% of the country's energy will be renewable by 2020.
Everyone in China knows that sustained development will demand more energy, and the nation's leaders have been schmoozing OPEC states to ensure access to oil. Ironically, two decades ago China was a net oil exporter. New coal-fired and nuclear power plants are under construction; "not in my back yard" isn't an issue, since the government doesn't ask if anyone likes the plants or not.
However, China gets 70% of its power from relatively dirty coal, and increasing numbers of cars also contribute to air pollution. Foul air makes renewable energy attractive, and it also provides another option for increasing energy supplies. The new Chinese renewable energy law imposes tariffs on energy sources that favor renewables and sets building codes to encourage energy conservation.
Solar water heaters are cheap and common, with about 10% of Chinese homes fitted with them. Farm groups are working on biogas plants, fermenting manure to produce methane, and ethanol plants are being built. The main stadium being built in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics will have a 130 kilowatt solar electric system; 160 geothermal wells are being dug to provide space heating for the games complex, and 20% of the electricity for the complex will be provided by wind turbines.
Solar and wind electric power are also being developed under the Township Electrification Project to provide electric power for the 29,000 villages not linked up to the national power grid. The plan envisions a huge solar-electric plant in the Gobi Desert, and wind farms in Inner Mongolia.
Renewable energy is also seen as a useful jobs and economic development program in its own right. Certainly it gives a better gloss to national concern for workers than the country's notoriously dangerous coal mines, and renewable energy technology also promises to be an export industry.
Still, the Chinese focus on renewable energy suffers from the same problem that dogs the concept elsewhere: it isn't cost-competitive with conventional sources without government support. In authoritarian China, that support is unsubtle: the government simply tells industries that they will buy renewable energy at a set price. However, the authorities also take a soft "yin" approach to balance the hard "yan" approach, offering tax incentives and low-priced loans.
All that said, Chinese are optimistic about renewable energy. Given maturation of the technology, costs are likely to fall, and the increasing scarcity of traditional energy sources, as well as the "external diseconomies" such as air pollution, will help make renewables look better and better as time goes on.
* AMAZON PRESSES ON: Amazon.com has long been the most prominent online retailer, but as discussed in an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Click To Download", 19 August 2006), the company is now finding the going tougher.
Amazon was founded in 1995, beginning as a bookseller and then progressively diversifying into music CDs and video disks, consumer electronics, jewelry, clothing, and now even groceries -- generally in the form of bulk packages of nonperishable foods. Amazon has been aggressive in refining its services, offering free shipment for purchases of most goods above a certain dollar level for those who are in no hurry, and an "Amazon Prime" program for those in a rush that provides unlimited free next-day shipment for $79 USD a year.
Amazon's competitiveness means rolling profits back into the business, and the margins on sales -- over $10 billion USD expected for 2006 as a whole -- aren't that high. As a result, the company share price has been trailing the NASDAQ average. Amazon has little choice other than to fight, however. Other online operations, like eBay and Google, are moving in on Amazon's online retailing turf, while "brick & mortar" retailers like America's Wal-Mart and the UK's Tesco are becoming "brick & click" outfits that provide both direct sales and online catalogs -- a strategy that has synergism in that a shopper can buy online and get an immediate pickup from a store.
Amazon's boss, Jeff Bezos, was not caught napping. In 2000, he opened Amazon to third-party sales, with the third parties benefiting from Amazon's name and systems -- buyers might hesitate in handing off a credit-card number to a small online operation, but few feel insecure about handing it to Amazon -- while paying a percentage of sales to their host. There was a belief that this would cannibalize Amazon sales, but Mr. Bezos realized that sales were going to be gradually eroded anyway, and that Amazon was smarter to go with the flow and get a cut from it. Contrast this to, say, the determined resistance of phone companies against voice IP, which will sooner or later destroy their profitable long-distance phone business.
There was synergism in Amazon's move as well, in that third parties could sell items that Amazon would not find profitable to handle directly, such as hard-to-find used books. In 2005, 28% of sales off the Amazon.com website were from third parties. Along with third-party sales, Amazon has moved in on eBay territory by allowing users to resell used items on Amazon.com, with the company taking a cut once more -- and accepting that it cannibalizes sales of new items. It takes a certain amount of courage on Mr. Bezos' part to be willing to grasp such nettles.
Amazon also leverages its online retailing expertise by running websites for other retailers, such as Target and Borders, though a similar arrangement with Toys "R" Us went south after Amazon started selling toys as well.
One emerging pressure against Amazon is downloads. Despite diversification in product offerings, two-thirds of company revenue is provided by books, CDs, and DVDs. Downloads are a potential threat to that business.
They remain a potential threat for the moment. Downloads of music are popular, but not always that convenient, and three-quarters of Internet users are still hooked on buying CDs -- it's nice to have a "permanent" copy of the music even if it's ripped and put on a pod. Video downloading is still a fringe operation since it places so much demand on bandwidth, and so far downloadable books for "e-readers" have been a joke.
It would be complacent to think that matters won't change, however. Pods are becoming more and more popular, Internet bandwidth is increasing steadily, and manufacturers are coming up with improved e-readers. Amazon is actually well-placed to take on the download market, and in fact is already providing download services to an extent -- though mostly for promotional purposes.
The company already handles books in digital form, though customers end up buying hard copies as if they were pulled off a bookshelf; with modern printing technology, it's possible to economically print one book at a time as long as it's available in a digital form. Such "printing on demand" technology provides an open-ended inventory of books, with no book in the collection ever going out of print. Amazon is now trying, through the company's new BookSurge subsidiary, to persuade publishers to have their books digitized.
How fast the download market emerges, and how well Amazon deals with the changes, remains to be seen. However, given how aggressively the company has dealt with other changes in the past, it's a fair bet that Amazon may end up leader of the pack. As Jeff Bezos likes to say: "It's all about the long term."
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- OIL & GAS (5): Oil has to be stored at the refinery before and after processing, and that means a tank farm. Tank farms are usually set up at refineries and tanker ports. Small tank farms are also found at fuel distribution centers. Even the biggest tank farms cycle through their contents in no more than few weeks, so great is the demand for oil.
The oil tanks are fabricated using steel panels and vary in size from about that of a house to a good sized sports arena. The biggest tanks may have much wider diameters than the small tanks, but they won't be much taller. Fluid pressure is determined by depth of fluid, not the total amount of fluid, and making a big tank taller would require much greater structural strength.
Some tanks have shallow conical roofs supported by a center post, along the lines of a circus tent. However, this configuration is only practical for nonvolatile fuels like diesel and home heating oil. Volatile fuels would tend to evaporate away in such a tank, not merely emptying the tank but contributing to pollution and increasing the risk of fire. The trick for volatile fuels is to use a "floating roof" tank, in which the roof is a flat circular sheet rimmed by gasketing that floats on top of the fuel.
Floating-roof tanks tend to have structural bracing around the top edge to compensate for the loss of the roof as a structural support, and also often have a walkway around the top edge. One of the problems with the floating-roof design is that it tends to accumulate rainwater. In some cases, the rainwater is drained through a flexible pipe in the center of the floating roof that runs through the tank and out the bottom. In other cases, a fixed roof is built on top of the floating roof. Incidentally, tanks for storing volatile fuels are generally white, to reflect solar heat; tanks for thick, nonvolatile fuels are generally black, to absorb solar heat and keep the fuel flowing.
Each tank in a tank farm is isolated by an earth berm to contain the fluid if the tank ruptures, containing the spill and preventing fire from spreading. Walkways, pipelines, and the like go over the berm, not through it. The berm walls are designed to be tall enough to contain the full contents of the tank. A tank farm also generally includes fixed fire-fighting stations, which may be permanently equipped with water cannon.
Gaseous petroleum products like propane and butane have to be stored under pressure, up to 17 atmospheres, and so gas storage tanks are generally spherical, kept from rolling away by a set of pillars; they often featuring a neat spiral staircase around the outside running to the top. They have to be built to a higher standard than a regular oil tank and are expensive. Of course, berms would be almost useless for containing a gas leak and so such gas tanks don't have berms. The tanks are often tipped with wind socks to suggest which way to run in case something goes seriously wrong. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* FINGERING FRAUDS: Back in July 2006, an article in these pages discussed the exaggeration of the extent of identity theft, with the article mentioning how credit-card fraud has been minimized by use of software that identifies patterns of bogus transactions. An article in THE ECONOMIST ("Secrets Of The Digital Detectives", 23 September 2006), lifted the lid on the nature of software designed to detect fraudulent transactions.
Consider fraud in car insurance claims. Insurance companies are increasingly using software to detect bogus claims, with the software running through a checklist of rules and figuring out the odds from weighting the results of the rules. For example, fraudulent claims are more common on Mondays than on any other day of the week; that's because real accidents can happen at almost any time, while a fraud often involves somebody using the weekend to line up bogus witnesses or arrange for an "accident".
Of course, accidents really do happen on weekends, so that check mark isn't enough to determine if the claim is bogus. Other rules are tallied in:
The software figures out the total score and passes it back to the claims adjuster for a decision. There are many rules in the list and their weightings are subtle, with the system being continually tweaked in response to experience to reduce "false negatives" -- passing a bogus claim as valid -- and "false positives" -- rejecting a valid claim as bogus.
As this example shows, software to detect transaction fraud isn't limited to credit card transactions, but that's still the most important category. Software to monitor credit-card transactions works well and is improving: losses from credit-card fraud in the UK dropped from 505 million pounds in 2004 to 439 million pounds in 2005. Retail merchants who adopt the software see their credit-card fraud losses drop to half immediately.
As with the software that monitors insurance claims, the software that monitors credit-card transactions bases its scores for frauds on a long list of rules:
Records are also kept of the transactions associated with a particular card carrier and transactions outside the normal pattern may be blocked. As a recent magazine ad portrayed, it is unlikely that a middle-aged woman of 40 with three kids is going to frequent a tattoo parlor. An unprecedented rush of purchases from a particular card is suspicious as well.
About 8% of credit-card transactions are rejected; some of the rejections are false positives, but the software designers keep trying to push the level down. Crooks of course can get wise to the patterns to an extent, for example learning not to fill up on gas and then immediately go nail a jewelry store. There was also a tendency for a time for crooks to buy items that gave a negative score along with items that gave a positive score -- buying classical or jazz CDs along with rock and hip-hop CDs, for example -- but now the software assigns a higher score to such combinations of purchases. In reality, most of the crooks who rip off credit cards are inept small-timers, not pros, and in fact they're surprisingly often relatives or acquaintances of the people they're ripping off.
Not too surprisingly, online transactions are scored heavily on the basis of where the transaction originates. Eastern Europe, China, Thailand, and Vietnam all rate high scores as potentially bogus. Some software flatly denies all transactions from West Africa.
Cellphones are also a prime target for fraud, with thieves ripping off the accounts of valid users, and software has been developed to help shut down theft in that domain as well. It has proven particularly valuable in developing countries, where cellphones are popular and ripoffs are common. A cellphone account in Shanghai, for example, that normally features a low volume of local calls gets shut down if it suddenly features a high volume of long-distance calls. Phone thieves will often congregate in specific areas to sell off services with their stolen phones to customers, and software can identify such "hot spots" to shut down the phone accounts.
The idea of using such software to help track down more serious crimes is tempting, but more work will have to be done before it becomes a common tool. Right now, companies are just happy to be plugging up leaks in their revenue stream, and the software is more than paying for itself.
* HOW GREEN AM I? Environmentally-friendly buildings are something of a fad these days, and as reported in BUSINESS WEEK ("The Green Stamp Of Approval" by Christopher Palmeri, 11 September 2006), owners of such structures can even get certification from the "US Green Building Council" as testimony to ecological soundness.
The council, which is based in Washington DC, was established 13 years ago and now has 6,000 members, including businesses ranging from small architectural firms up to giant Wal-Mart. For the past six years, the council has granted "Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED)" certificates for green buildings, with 560 qualifying so far.
Toyota USA has a strong green consciousness, with its headquarters in Torrance, California, featuring "no-flush" urinals and rainwater recycling. Its distribution center in Portland, Oregon, filters oil out of water drained from the parking lot lest it pollute the Willamette River. The company just opened up its first "green dealership" in suburban Dallas, featuring such environmental niceties as a "green wall" on the west side of the building that is covered by Japanese ivy to soak up the hot afternoon sun. All these structures have LEED certificates or are in process to obtain them.
For another example, biotech startup Genzyme Corporation's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, features 18 indoor gardens, adjustable thermostats in each office, and moving mirrors to beam sunlight into the atrium. The company reports that the pleasant work environment has led to lower sick time and higher productivity. Of course, the structure is LEED certified.
The council estimates that 5% of all nonresidential construction in the USA, about ten billion USD worth, is being certified. The certification is based on a 69-point checklist. Installing bike racks and showers for workers who commute by bicycle rates one point; on-site power generation can rate up to three points, depending on the generation scheme. Depending on the total points score, the building can receive, in order of rising number of points, a basic certification, or "silver", "gold", or "platinum" certification. The scheme is designed to encourage competition, as well as encourage people to participate in the program even if they don't have the resources to do a super job, and allow pre-existing buildings to be certified as well.
There have been complaints that the certification process is bureaucratic and expensive, with final approval dependent on a pile of documentation and a computer model of the structure's energy use. The council is working to streamline the process to make it less of a burden on smaller members. The council also works to update the certification process on an ongoing basis, to add in the benefits of experience and to incorporate innovations in environmental architecture.
* BUILDING BOOM: As Dickens said about Paris in the Revolution, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and as reported in THE ECONOMIST ("Building A New Rome", 26 August 2006), the city of Moscow demonstrates this adage at a glance, with a forest of construction cranes springing up to raise a messy complex of new buildings at a frantic pace. The phenomenon gives interesting insights in how things are done in the new Russia.
There's construction going on in all of Russia's major western cities, but the wheels are turning most rapidly in Moscow. Housing prices are skyrocketing, having doubled in the last year alone, with rents the highest in Europe. Muscovites are obsessed with the market. Most pay cash: mortgages are still a new concept.
The crunch between supply and demand is aggravated by the fact that though there are plenty of existing buildings in Moscow, nobody with money wants most of them. Classic structures from Tsarist days are a prize, being bought up and refurbished, but dingy Soviet-era buildings are worth less than the ground they stand on, only fit for demolition to allow modern buildings to be raised in their place.
Not too surprisingly, the building boom involves a degree of corruption. A newspaper investigation concluded that 10% of the cost of a new apartment went to bribes. Says a contractor: "That's too low." Permits have to be issued, inspections have to be performed, and magnitude of construction activity gives a lot of opportunity and temptation for graft.
The police are getting their cut as well. Much of the construction labor is provided by poor foreigners, with the Tadjiks regarded very highly for their hard work and willingness to accept low pay. The foreigners are at the mercy of the authorities; the police exploit the situation, as do employers, and sometimes the two collaborate to squeeze the workers. It should not be thought, however, that poor Russians fare much better. Property and citizen's rights are weak and ambiguous; those whose tattered old residences are in the way of progress may end up simply being evicted, with little hope of help from the courts. When people try to resist, the police throw them out forcibly, sometimes beating them up to demonstrate their annoyance at such defiance.
Moscow is being turned into a spectacular lit-up modern city of glass and steel, but critics regard the rampant growth as unmanaged, crass, and ugly. One says that Russia's new social elite is "as uncultured as the Bolsheviks." After generations of threadbare Soviet society, however, the prosperous class of the new Russia finds the glittery lure of a modern apartment and all its conveniences irresistible.
* ANOTHER ROAD TRIP (5): I picked up the usual opportunistic shots on my road trip:
They seem to be intelligent animals, quick to check out anything unusual. A friend who went on a llama pack trip into the Rockies says they aren't very affectionate, not having much notion of why anybody would want to stroke their fur, but they are very bold. As he told me, the campers were informed that if a predator approached the camp, they needed to get out of the way of the llamas -- not because the beasts would be trying to flee but because they'd be charging forward to kick the intruder's ass.
Which led to the next question: so what is talc? It's one of those things I've heard mentioned all my life but never bothered to investigate. Ah, it's so handy to have all kinds of details online: I checked out ENCARTA on my PC and it turns out to be a magnesium metasilicate, H2Mg3(SiO3)4. It's a common mineral, with ENCARTA listing the states in the US where it's found, but oddly not mentioning Montana, despite the fact that the web site said the Barretts plant was doing well for itself and its size suggested its production was substantial.
Talc is easy to work and heat-resistant, and was once used for pottery. It is now used in soaps, lubricants, tailor's chalk, pigments, and of course talcum powder. It's the sort of thing we take for granted, and finding an industrial site of that scale dedicated to it is a bit of a surprise.
I had to exercise caution on some of the photo stops in the badlands, since I didn't want to stumble across the kind of snake that has a rattle on its tail. It wasn't very likely -- I've only stumbled across a rattler in the wild once in my life, and they do give a warning that definitely gets attention, sounds like a hot poker stuck in water -- but it struck me as sensible to be alert.
I was driving my new Toyota Yaris on the trip, and it was certainly nice to have air conditioning and other new bells and whistles. I was checking fuel mileage every time I gassed up, and the results were baffling: it ranged from 33 to 46 MPG, with substantial variations even when I couldn't see that my driving conditions or use of air conditioning had changed.
I got to wondering about pump fraud, and looked it up on the Internet once I got home. It turns out that in the US, gasoline pumps have to be certified by a state inspector once a year using a calibrated fuel can, and if they don't fall within spec of measurement, the station gets shut down. The date of the last inspection is marked on a sticker on the pump -- a nice thing to know if something doesn't seem quite right. [END OF SERIES]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- OIL & GAS (4): Once the oil has been pumped out of the ground and cleaned up, it's ready to be sent off to the refinery, the usual delivery method being the pipeline. The pipeline network is arranged like a hierarchical tree, with the web of wells in a field feeding a field processing station; stations sending off output through branch lines; and the branch lines feeding a main trunk line to the refinery.
Pipelines designed for oil and natural gas transport are made of sections of high-strength steel pipe about 12.2 meters (40 feet) long. The sections are laid in a trench; carefully welded together, with the welds X-rayed to make sure they are solid; and then buried. The oil or gas is under pressure and a failure of a pipeline segment can be disastrous. Markers indicate where a pipeline crosses a road. Pipelines may have to cross canyons or rivers, and though they may be accommodated by regular car or train bridges, dedicated pipeline bridges are often build, using tidy arch or suspension forms that can be striking and elegant structures in their own right.
Pipelines are threatened by corrosion, which involve subtle electrochemical reactions. The pipelines are made of corrosion-resistant steel alloys, and protected by epoxy coatings; as well as "sacrificial anodes" in the form of easily corroded metal plates that protect the pipe metal by soaking up electrical currents. An electric "countercurrent", with a polarity opposing the corroding current, may be applied to the pipe where electricity is available. There are also microorganisms that can actually live in the pipe and produce corrosive substances like sulfuric acid, and so antimicrobial toxins are sometimes added to the fuel flow.
Pumping stations keep the oil or gas moving through the pipeline, with the stations spaced out about every 100 to 160 kilometers (60 to 100 miles). The flow rate of the oil in a pipeline is surprisingly low, about the pace of a person walking. The pump stations feature huge engines in a shed, often with the ends of the shed open to prevent explosive vapors from building up, nested in an elaborate "pipe yard" with segments of pipe and valves. The installation will also include a "pig launcher" to permit a "pig" -- an oversized brush -- to be inserted into the line for cleanup purposes. Apparently the brush is called a "pig" because of the squealing noises it makes when it's launched.
There is also a "smart pig", a recent innovation, which is loaded down with high-tech ultrasonic and electromagnetic sensors for pipeline inspections. A smart pig is long and can't navigate through some pipes; the industry is interested in building more sophisticated "robot pigs" that can do a more adequate job.
* One of the more famous oil pipelines, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, runs about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from Prudhoe Bay in the Arctic to Valdez in the south of the state of Alaska, with a capacity of nine million barrels. It is unusual in that it is above ground over about half its length. The oil is scalding hot, and if the pipeline were buried in the permafrost below, the result would be quite a mess.
The pipeline which is about 1.2 meters (4 feet) in diameter and has a layer of insulation about 30 centimeters (a foot) thick wrapped around it. It is supported well aboveground on posts, and not just ordinary posts, either. They are buried about 15 meters (50 feet) deep, and have a reservoir of ammonia near the soil base that will boil if it gets too warm. The ammonia vapor will rise to a radiator at the top of the post, above the pipeline, and condense to trickle back down to the reservoir. There are 76,000 posts; more drilling was done for the posts than for the wells in Prudhoe Bay.
Moose will walk underneath the pipeline, but caribou are too spooky to try it, and so there are 24 "sag bends" in the pipeline where it is routed under specially prepared ground, in some cases kept frozen by refrigeration machinery.
* Although this is getting a bit ahead of the story in terms of the oil production process, to no surprise the output of refineries also is distributed in pipelines. However, these pipelines are more complicated, since one pipeline will carry different types of refined fuel: diesel, then kerosene, then gasoline, and so on. Interestingly, it's usually no problem to put a batch of one type of fuel in the pipeline right after a batch of another type of fuel, since there's little mixing. When mixing is a concern, an inflatable ball can be put into the pipeline.
The flow of different fuels through the pipeline has to be carefully coordinated, so a particular batch can be switched off to its proper storage facility at the remote end. This demands an elaborate communications and control system; many pipelines share their right-of-way with a dedicated fiber-optic link. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* CYBERMULE: Everybody who's online knows about the petty scams in operation on the Internet and maybe has been bit by one. What's not so well known are the details of the world of those who are into online scamming.
An article in WIRED NEWS Online ("Confessions Of A Cybermule" by Kim Zetter) focused on one of the "foot soldiers" of online crime, a 44-year-old American who called himself "John Dillinger" on the Net, after the famous bank robber. Dillinger wasn't one of the bigtime hackers who actually performed online crimes, instead being a "cybermule" who brought in the money using the bank account and credit-card numbers obtained by the hackers.
Dillinger grew up in a family with eight kids, though six of them were step-siblings. His full brother works as a civilian contractor for the military and has by all appearances a stable life, but Dillinger himself started smoking pot at age 10, moving on to other drugs in his teens, maintaining his habits through prostitution. He moved on to acquire a rap sheet as long as his arm -- receiving stolen property, grand theft auto, various drug charges, and check fraud.
In 2002, after completing a stint in drug rehab, his mother turned him on to a website named "Counterfeit Library" frequented by cybercriminals. Dillinger's mother knew he was into credit card ripoffs, and in fact had received gifts from her son purchased using other people's charge accounts. Counterfeit Library turned out to be a literal goldmine, where crooks traded tips and tools for forging driver's licenses and lifting credit cards.
Of course, such operations are a bit too public and Counterfeit Library was soon shut down, but other sites popped up in its place. Dillinger found sites such as Shadowcrew and Carderplanet, which were outlets for Russian hackers to sell stolen credit-card numbers over the Internet. Dillinger spent two months cruising California with a partner, the two paying their way with stolen credit-card numbers. A few close brushes with the law led him to taking a lower profile, but in 2004, he got involved in a scam against US Bank.
A Russian spammer had pulled off a "phishing" scam against the bank, sending out emails supposedly from the bank stating there had been an account error and that the user needed to go to a (dummy) website and resubmit account information. Phishing was relatively new then and the scam worked only too well. The spammer acquired a network of "cashiers", including Dillinger, who rigged up cards and raided ATMs. Dillinger took in $20,000 USD in two days, wiring the spammer his cut over Western Union.
Western Union shut down the money pipeline to the Russian spammer after a few weeks, but Dillinger was now known to the spammer community as a reliable agent. Three Romanian phishers contacted him to raid more US Bank accounts. Dillinger put together a ring of cashiers who reported to him. Even with cuts for the cashiers and the phishers, Dillinger was pulling in $10,000 USD a week, sometimes that much in a day.
A few months later, US Bank changed its procedures, shutting down the drain of money. At about that time, the US Secret Service concluded a yearlong sting operation focused on Shadowcrew and related sites, busting dozens of carders and ID thieves, but Dillinger was regarded as small fry and escaped the net. He went legitimate for a while, working as a construction laborer, but working hard all day for low wages didn't appeal to him. He got a lead on another Russian crook and obtained a set of credit-card numbers. Within a week, he had pulled in $17,000 USD.
Dillinger went around the country, ripping off ATMs. He stayed at the home of his brother, who was working in Iraq at the time; his brother made a point of not knowing how Dillinger was getting by in life without a visible means of employment. He was pulling in money but spending it rapidly, even generously giving some of his stolen loot to a relative whose daughter was in the hospital.
The law caught up with Dillinger in San Diego in June while he was driving with a friend who had an outstanding arrest warrant. They weren't after Dillinger, but they found a briefcase in the car that had a set of credit cards and driver's licenses with Dillinger's photo and various aliasas. He was charged with ten counts of identity theft plus nine counts of possession of a forged driver's license. He was transferred to Virginia, and then became an element in a widespread indictment from an FBI sting, which ended up reeling a group of cybercriminals from the US and Eastern Europe.
To Dillinger, the bust was almost a relief. He was tired of the life: "It's hard. It's scary. I don't want to get arrested. You go to ATMs, your picture's being took. You always have to look over your shoulder. Even when you're done with it, for the rest of your life pretty much you've got to look over your shoulder."
* SIX WORD STORIES: Ernest Hemingway once wrote a story only six words
long that read:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
He claimed it was one of the best things he ever wrote. WIRED magazine
decided to pick up the idea and run with it, asking various sci-fi, fantasy,
and horror authors to come up with their own six-word stories. Here's some
of the replies:
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. (Joss Whedon)
Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time (Alan Moore)
With bloody hands, I say good-bye. (Frank Miller)
Lie detector glasses perfected: Civilization collapses. (Richard Powers)
TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE! Nobody there. (Harry Harrison)
Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it. (Brian Herbert)
Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back. (David Brin)
Bang cancelled. Not Big enough. Reboot. (David Brin)
Temporal recursion. I'm dad and mom? (David Brin)
Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower. (David Brin)
Osama's time machine: President Gore concerned. (Charles Stross)
He read his obituary with confusion. (Steven Meretzky)
Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news!" (Steven Meretzky)
David Brin looks like he was having way too much fun. I had to give it a
shot myself:
Hot alien babes -- call Captain Kirk!
Angelic visitation: "Sorry, lost, need directions."
Never take anything from the dead.
Terminator robot: run for governor instead.
"I am human!" Demon inside laughs.
Tripods from Mars didn't bring antibiotics.
Hyperdrive malfunction! Lost in space, Will!
* ANOTHER MONTH: Website traffic has been building up again after its
predictable summer slump. One interesting item in the stats over the last
few months is that ad revenue takes a dive over the summer, well more than
does the traffic. I ended up with about the same number of visitors in
August and September, but September ad revenues were almost 50% higher. It
seems people do less online shopping in the summer.
This new month also marks a year since I started the blog. It remains somewhat more time-consuming than I would like, but otherwise I'm happy with the results and a bit surprised at how well it's worked out. I end up archiving articles ahead of time; I was thinking sometime back that a pile of more than twenty articles was too much, but when the release rate is five articles a week, the pile draws down very quickly. Nowdays thirty to forty seems more like a reasonable number -- as of the day of this posting I've got about 36 -- and I wouldn't mind getting up to fifty.
A big pile of articles not only makes sure I can keep up with publication, but also ensures that I can provide a certain amount of variety, avoiding the repetitive use of articles on similar subjects in the same week. I do have to be careful to try to pick articles out of the front of the queue lest they get too stale, but if one's topical to current events or particularly interesting I'll yank it from the back, though I try to keep the out-of-sequence articles down to one a week or so.
Another advantage of building up a stockpile is that I have more time to proofread the articles; typos and bugs that can't been seen immediately after writing an article may be blatantly obvious after the article's been left to sit for a few weeks. Churning out articles on a weekday basis presents a real challenge to quality control. Every morning I go through an old file and proof an article or two, and I keep finding bugs. I also will make changes and enhancements to old articles, sometimes adding details that didn't seem worth writing up in a new article.
The blog helps stretch my domain of interests. There's a conflict between wanting to narrow the focus to do a better job on a smaller range of topics, and casting around for something new; trying to keep up with the blog helps widen horizons. I used to worry about finding materials to keep up with the release schedule, but I've been widening the net enough so that it's now more a case of finding the time to write up all the interesting items I come across.
I do have to emphasize that the blog articles need to be taken with a grain of salt. The more substantial documents on the site are the facts as best I know them; if I don't get the facts right, I have to make changes. The blog articles are just clippings from current periodicals, no more guaranteed to be absolutely correct than the nightly news, and in some cases amounting to little more than sheer speculation. I wouldn't necessarily lift a finger to defend them, with one of the rationales of posting them being to see how close to reality they are three years on.
* I just did another release of the ELEMENTARY RELATIVISTIC PHYSICS (ERP) document. This is not the biggest of the physical science documents on the site, but I consider it to be the only one that's actually important. I think the others are fun and have something to say, but nothing so much that if they disappeared, anything really important would be lost. In contrast, documents on relativistic physics tend to be either too simple or too difficult, and I haven't yet found anything that touches ERP as an introductory relativity document. It's the little book I wish I'd had thirty years ago and saved myself a lot of blundering around in the dark down blind alleys.
One thing I have noticed about much technical literature is that the authors may explain things well, but they rarely point out the traps in a particular concept that can lead a reader astray. ERP is careful to say: "Here is a simple idea, here is tricky idea, here is the catch to the tricky idea, here is how you can go wrong." I only wish I could get people to read the thing.
There's no way I could compete with the pros on relativistic physics, but I think I've got a strong handle on it at the amateur level. I can certainly fly rings around most the "Einstein-bashers" on the web who post websites claiming they have refuted Einstein. There's dozens of these sites, hundreds maybe. I tend to find them my favorite cranks, I think because they have no real constituency, there being no mass movement against Einstein as there is against, say, Darwin. As far as I can see, they're just talking to the air, perfectly oblivious to the fact that nobody takes them seriously. Most of them say something clearly wrong in the first few paragraphs, and some of the sites are total incoherent gibberish, obviously written by people who are off their medication.
A few of the Einstein-bashers are antisemitic but most are just people who are proclaiming that they're smarter than Einstein. Yeah, you bet. I was looking through the CSICOP / Skeptical Enquirer website -- CSICOP, if you're not familiar with it, is an organization of debunkers -- and found an article on "How To Recognize A Bad Scientific Argument". I had to laugh since it fit the Einstein-basher sites and much of the other lunatic-fringe material I've seen on the web. Such bogus arguments usually include statements along the line of:
I might add:
There's also the general "mad scientist" tone of most of these arguments, the author of course being an unappreciated genius who is suffering from the prejudice of little minds. In addition, at least occasionally, there's a tendency to play "switcheroo", trying to portray the mainstream thinking as the real crank theory, and bluster that the mainstream is on its last legs, clearly in a state of collapse: "The windmills are weakening, Sancho Panza."
To be sure, there have been cases in which new scientific ideas have been resisted, and it is sometimes the case that outsiders can see the forest for the trees. However, proclaiming that 2 + 2 = 5 is not thinking out of the box -- it's just silly.