Originally published by Pike Research, Matter Network, and Reuters.

Throughout history, municipal governments have tried to provide their citizens with essential public services. But in making the most of taxpayer money, these governments have often been muddled by the complexities of administrating “systems of systems” – dozens of city departments, which perform hundreds of functions, depended upon by thousands of citizens. Government services often suffered from inefficiencies because they were fractured, outdated, and difficult to monitor. But this no longer has to be their story.

New opportunities for smart governments are emerging from advances in the field of information technology. Driving these advances are smart software systems that can interpret complex data sets and help guide operational interaction. Public leaders can use these smart systems to help solve some of their most challenging problems. For example, smart systems can radically reduce carbon emissions; The Economist reported that they “may well be humankind’s best hope for dealing with…global warming.” Because smart systems can improve how data is managed and acted upon in almost any setting, they mean big changes in the way governments spend taxpayer money. Pike Research expects that governments worldwide will spend over $100 billion throughout this decade on new infrastructure for Smart Cities. These smart cities are the next-generation global hubs of sustainability, innovation, and citizen well-being.

As my colleague Eric Woods reported, IBM’s launch of the Intelligent Operations Center is a major move in the smart city market. It now enables cities to better consolidate resources and operations through interactive software, which employees can use to communicate and collaborate. It’s insightful to see IBM’s smart city vision, which includes networked health care, transportation, public safety, utilities, education, and social services. Achieving this vision primarily comes through collecting and mining citizen data – medical data, traffic data, crime data, energy data, academic data, tax data – for streamlining city services in these arenas. The upshot is more convenient and less expensive government services for citizens. For city leaders, grabbing the lowest-hanging fruit is actually quite easy: City employees can manually feed much of this data into software systems at very low costs. So governments can take the first steps toward more intelligent operations without big engineering deployments. They simply hire experts to deploy networked software solutions and then catalyze institutional adoption.

In this sense, resource management software is a good tool for cities with financial challenges. It is designed to reduce disruptions from emergencies and enable better coordination of projects that span multiple departments. But it is no panacea to the financial challenges that many cities now face. Indeed, local governments in the United States face record job losses in the coming months due to dwindling budgets. But these governments can combat this crisis of operational capacity through smart systems – they can do a lot more with a lot less. Exploring the costs, benefits, and financing mechanisms of these smart systems is thus an important step for government leaders.

After doing some independent research, public leaders can respond to this opportunity by organizing smart systems advisory committees, which are composed of city engineers and citizen volunteers. This would be similar in scope to the sustainability advisory committees now emerging in many cities, but better postured to recommend technological infrastructure advancements. The mission of this new group would be to advise government adoption of smart systems. Its vision would be to optimize city logistics for generating the largest return on taxpayer money in terms of economic growth, citizen well-being, and environmental sustainability. The committee would primarily perform cost-benefit analyses and project procurement services. Through the initiatives that will emerge from this policy instrument, public leaders can inspire bold new visions for smart cities, which use information technologies to empower and serve their citizens in ways once uneconomical, if even imaginable.

Lance Legel is an intern at Pike Research with a focus on smart grid infrastructure, smart meters, and the smart energy home.

Nuclear power plants have the potential to quench much of our thirst for energy, but as we have seen in instances such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently, Japan, they have the deadly potential to harm people and the environment if things to wrong. How do we balance between safety and energy demand?

The very first safety design for nuclear power was Enrico Fermi’s “man with an ax.” In this mechanism, a man with an ax would cut a rope and drop liquid cadmium into the nuclear process to shut it down. This idea evolved into more automated coolant methods.

In the 1950s, Admiral Hyman Rickover designed the first nuclear powered submarine. This design used a light water reactor, where water is used as both a coolant and a moderator of the nuclear process. This design set the precedence for future nuclear reactors, regardless of its effectiveness and safety.

Unfortunately, these light water reactors that are commonly used today require a lot of active intervention, with a network of pressurized pipes and valves that greatly complicate the nuclear process. It essentially solves one problem and creates a medium for others to occur. Although this seems ironic and fallible, it has been very successful in the past, with a very limited number of failures.

Recent nuclear disasters have been a catalyst for improvement and rethinking of safety designs. Today’s plants that are being built are focusing on passive safety, or systems that will automatically deploy without external commands or controling. For example, we can build bigger walls or move the plant to safer areas. Passive safety systems are essentially Homer Simpson-proof. Whether the problem is caused by human error or nature, it should be able to handle itself, regardless of who is operating the system. A recent example of this is encasing Uranium fuel in thousands of small, tennis-ball sized “pebbles” filled with graphite-coated seeds that can keep the system cool even if power is lost for days.

Furthermore, many other passive safety technologies are waiting in line for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve. Westinghouse’s new design is basically a cooling system that uses only gravity to continuously introduce water into a reactor to cool it. When the coolant system fails, valves open, water pours into the pile, turns into steam, rises, condenses, and falls back onto the pile. This design has already been approved and is currently being implemented in new reactors.

For a period of over twenty years in the late 20^th century, there had been no major disaster in commercial nuclear power, and safety technology has certainly improved over this period of time. However, opponents of nuclear power simply believe that it is merely impossible to make a perfectly safe system, no matter how many redundant safety mechanisms are employed. Despite all the trust scientists and engineers have in their designs, Japan has shown us that things can still go wrong.

Logically, it seems like a bad idea to place nuclear reactors on an earthquake-prone island. However, Japan’s plants are equipped to detect seismic activity and shut down accordingly. This has happened numerous times in the past. The problem in the Fukushima incident was that the diesel engines meant to run the coolant system shut off prematurely in one plant due to the tsunami. In another plant, a turbine generator caught fire and created a lot of excess heat.

So with this recent disaster, the future of nuclear power is at stake. It appears that, despite critics and opponents, nuclear power will survive with the increase in problem awareness and the invention of newer, safer technologies. Until another great alternative is designed and proven successful, our demand for energy and the limited nature of fossil fuels will probably keep nuclear alive.

President Obama announcing $3.4 billion of Federal investments into smart grid projects

The Federal Communications Commission began regulating the Internet last December to prevent anti-competitive practices, in a culmination of national “network neutrality” advocacy.  But there is evidence that some of the regulatory language around “specialized services” could actually discourage investment in breakthrough Internet applications like smart grid systems.

Flashes of misconduct by Internet service providers have reasonably concerned regulators.  Such events are typified by customer outrage over suddenly being unable to transfer data as desired, because of business supply-side decision making.  The FCC's Open Internet Report & Order was hence crafted as a reaction to fears of Internet providers leveraging their power in unfair ways.

But Verizon Wireless is clearly against such practices [1], and doesn't have the luxury of a monopoly, so why should its innovative applications of the Internet be restricted by a “net neutrality” regime?  Verizon doesn't think so, which is why it is now suing the FCC.

What's wrong with the new Internet regulation is that, in at least a few areas, it makes fuzzy threats.  This is by design: regulators want a flexibly enforceable regime in an ecosystem they know is dynamically evolving.  But the downside is that it makes the government's responses to market changes around Internet services very unpredictable.  Investment prospects in new Internet services become less attractive, because it becomes more difficult to quantize the risks involved.  Ultimately, the impact is “very harmful to consumers, companies, and the ability of this industry to create jobs, provide new services, and be an engine for economic growth,” according to Verizon [2].  The “new services” that Verizon refers to include modernizing electrical power grids.

Verizon plans to not only help American citizens communicate better, but also American energy systems. Last week, it agreed to provide some of its Internet services to Duke Energy, one of the nation's largest electric power companies, to deploy smart metering and home energy management systems in Charlotte, North Carolina [3].  By helping to modernize Charlotte's power grid, Verizon could enable residents there within the next few years to save millions of dollars, create hundreds of jobs, reduce tons of carbon emissions, and much more.

Early pilot projects have shown that consumers use the new insights and controls of Internet-connected power systems to cut their energy consumption by 15% on average [4,5].  Studies project that national deployment of these systems could provide savings to the US of $130 billion annually by 2020 [6], and create 280,000 high-value jobs for America [7].  Verizon is one company that has the infrastructure to help scale smart grid systems across the US – if only the FCC will allow it.

Internet-enabled energy management systems cut 15% of  home energy use on average.

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In tandem with the rising economic prowess of China and India, the fears of market spectators and the working public have been emerging, and not unduly, in both the United States and Europe. Indeed, in the US the “outsourcing” of jobs has become a salient concern for the public and policy-makers alike, and has subsequently figured prominently in the American political-economic discourse. Simultaneously, however, our advanced-industrial counterparts in continental Europe have exhibited markedly less worry about the possibility of losing jobs overseas. Some explanations for this phenomenon rest in the different macro-economic orientations espoused by the US and many of the mainland nations of Europe, and, by extension, in the disparate micro-economic policies we engender.  Particular differences in policy between the social market economies (SMEs) of Europe and the American liberal market economy (LME)** exist in the areas of codetermination, job security and skill formation, all of which lie at the heart of the outsourcing scare for Americans.

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Google has test-driven an auto-piloted vehicle over one thousand miles.

PEOPLE are using information technologies today in more ways than anyone fully understands.  The number of Internet devices in 1984 was one thousand; in 1992, one million; and in 2008, one billion. Consensus is emerging that there will be around 50 billion Internet devices in 2020.  Forrester Research forecasts that over the next 6 years, spending by US government and businesses on "smart computing technologies" will increase from about $40 billion today to over $400 billion.  Xinhua News Agency, speaking on behalf of China's government policy, announced $601 billion in investments planned over the next decade to deploy smart grid systems across its mega-cities.  Other countries are following suit in the race for economic modernization.

This modernization is the popular adoption of smart computing systems: physically-intelligent electronics, which can sense environments in various ways, and dynamically interact through communications and control machinery.  These intelligent systems are very likely to bring the next wave of societal evolution by disrupting a majority of industries and professions.  Computing will become ubiquitous at home and work, in public spaces and surprising places.  Widespread mechatronics will make smarter buildings, transportation systems, power systems, "phones", and pharmaceuticals.  Artificial intelligence will play an increasingly large role in business, government, military, and academic innovations, percolating throughout the global economic infrastructure.  The Economist predicts that smart systems “may well be humankind’s best hope for dealing with… global warming.”

Biomedical engineers today are learning how nanobots could become common in health care

Smart computing systems should be doing revolutionary things over the next decade:

• Helping 25% of all new US buildings optimize home energy networks and people's happiness
• Safely driving millions of people, millions of miles, 99.9999% of the time
• Assassinating cancer colonies through nanoengineered pharmaceuticals
• Advising high-level thinking, coordination, and action of millions who will use dynamic mobile apps

Smart systems will exponentially increase government performance while reducing government costs – something that Congressional Budget Office projections are probably not counting on right now.  (I once reported John Doerr as saying, "Congress can't model innovation.")  Human-computer interaction will slowly revolutionize education: the lines between Nintendo games and educational software will blur.  Personalized mechatronics – adaptions of PCs – will connect with people using diverse wireless sensor networks, delivering opportunities for global telepresence. The privileged will be able to control almost anything, anywhere, with minimal conscious demands.  These applications will be vigorously brought to mainstream industries and markets, and the future of economies will begin to directly track evolution of underlying smart technologies.

Smart computing systems will ultimately advance the limits of our biological existence.  Software-driven pharmaceuticals may quickly become widespread treatment by MDs as regulation is modernized and technologies converge.  Automated biomedical applications, like artificial hearts and ubiquitous organ monitoring, will be adopted by thousands in this decade. Market developments for most smart medical systems will lag more than 5 years behind advances in the underlying smart technologies, since biotechnologies require extensive scientific research and product testing. Some people believe the technologies that do successfully penetrate the market will end the cycle of life and death by 2050.  There are good scientific reasons to doubt that we will all become immortal cyborgs - but young people who are ambitious and lucky could feasibly live double the average lifespan.

Indeed, it would be science-fiction to ignore the roadblocks facing innovators today.  So mainstream deployment of many breakthrough smart systems, especially those based upon biotechnologies, will end up being beyond a few decades.  Talent gaps across disciplinary lines will amplify the challenges to systems engineering; public policy, regulatory, and law regimes will be blasts from the past; millions of people will organize to resist change; and long, expensive, and unusually risky product development lifecycles will scare away investment.  While Wall Street is neglecting this nascent multi-trillion dollar market, visionary venture capital firms, like Kleiner Perkins and Foundry Group, are trying to catalyze the ability of entrepreneurs to build equity from the complex research portfolios of NSF, NIH, and the like.

But not everyone will gain equally from smart systems.  Many professionals will see their skill-set supplanted in cost-effectiveness and performance, as automated systems threaten to "hollow out" the middle class.  For example, legal analysis, which society has exchanged billions of dollars over, is being outsourced to Watson-like software that can scan documents and computationally deduce high-level patterns – much faster and cheaper than humans.  For every major problem, a smart system will be developed.  Educational and training institutions should reform their curricula accordingly to reflect the changing jobs outlook.

Smart systems will drive radical socioeconomic changes that few people even thought possible.  Capabilities of value extraction from existing resources will be exponentially increased.  Humanity will evolve on individual and collective levels through these cyber-physical systems.

--

Lance Legel is a Digital Energy Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He hopes to deploy smart systems in the years to come.

Over 100 thousand people were killed in a 2010 earthquake that demolished Haiti's buildings

With accelerating changes in Earth’s climate, natural disasters threaten more than ever global economic stability and growth. But because the damage from these disasters is a function of the durability of our built environment, we can best adapt to and mitigate the impact of Earth’s sudden environmental changes by improving architectural regimes around the world. Considering recent examples like the earthquakes in Indonesia and Haiti reinforces this grave point. In this report, we call for a greater focus on the need to increase building reinforcement and disaster risk reduction efforts around the world.

Download the full report as a PDF here.

I am respectfully questioning the economic intelligence of the commercial spaceflight investment strategies being designed and advocated by the U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee.

I was reading a report in the New York Times about Boeing’s plans to fly tourists to space, and learned that the House Science and Technology Committee was effectively pushing an agenda that would frustrate Boeing from realizing these plans. While NASA and the Obama Administration requested in their 2011 budget about $6 billion over five years to invest in private companies, Chairman Bart Gordon of the House Committee would rather see NASA keep their traditional spaceflight portfolio, by investing only $0.9 billion in the same period.

'Space Ship Two' by Virgin Galactic, product of billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson

This stimulated me to go to the Committee’s website, http://science.house.gov/, and click on their NASA keyword link, to consider their reasoning. Their most recent publication is a letter addressed to Stanford University Professor Scott Hubbard by Chairman Gordon. It turns out that Professor Hubbard of Stanford's School of Engineering is as much of an expert on these matters as anyone on the planet (here is his bio). Apparently, one of Professor Hubbard's main concerns expressed to this House Committee was the public need to better support commercial spaceflight investment.

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Currently, the U.S. National Debt Clock reads $12.8 trillion—the largest in history. To give a picture of just how much a “trillion” is: one could spend $10 million dollars per day, and not spend $1 trillion until 273 years. Nonetheless, over the past year alone, the U.S. Public Debt rose from 41 to 53 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). With no dramatic shift in course, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent in 2038.

Data Courtesy of Forex Currency Trading & News Analysis

What is the Fear of a Rising National Debt?

With increasing debt, the danger lies in a debt-driven crisis in the United States, the tipping point of such a crisis is unknown, but the costs will be surely severe. Fears of inflation will decrease the value of the U.S. currency, leading to higher interest rates, shifting investments from the U.S. Treasury-denoted securities, and a more sluggish economy. Also, the rising debt would make it more difficult to finance emergency spending; the U.S. is becoming more reliant on oversees lenders, who already are expressing concerns about the fiscal management of the United States.

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Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Israel has controlled several territories (specifically the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip) which contain predominantly Arab-Palestinian populations. Israel has kept control of these areas often through the use of violent and disproportionately reactionary, military means and has increased Jewish settlements within them (particularly in East Jerusalem) over time, in an attempt to create a Greater Israel (an Israeli state that permanently includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip) with Jerusalem as its internationally-recognized capitol.

Continuing on that path, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government coalition announced recently, on the very day that American Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Israel earlier this March, that 1600 new homes will go up for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem - again, a largely Palestinian-inhabited territory. Outrage flared as new Jewish settlements into East Jerusalem have already displaced Palestinian families and lead to the abrupt bulldozing of homes and property. Netanyahu's announcement comes right after Palestinian leaders agreed to indirect peace talks, after a 14-month hiatus, and will surely derail any chances of negotiation.

40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Image courtesy of The Guardian UK/Gali Tibbon

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GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA — The Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) recently hosted a crisis simulation at the University of Florida that highlighted some of today's greatest problems facing the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Ten C.I.A. agents, including the C.I.A. briefer to President George W. Bush from December 2001-January 2004, and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham, joined together with 24 University of Florida students to avert a national emergency. The simulated crisis: North Korea potentially igniting a war in East Asia.

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The Global Land Crisis: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Image courtesy ScienceDaily

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA — The University of Florida Tropical Conservation and Development Program hosted a three-day conference to address the current hurdles of land conservation in the developing Latin American and African tropics. The conference generated a diverse discourse within a broad international spectrum of scholars and practitioners, scientists and advocates, students and instructors. It focused on the “global land crisis”, as Daniel Nepstad from Woods Hole Research Center described it. Speakers from a wide array of universities, institutions, and non-governmental organizations considered tropical deforestation from all angles. They covered topics ranging from food security to emerging infectious disease, and proposed several responses from market-based incentives to international collaboration. The conference underscored the steep challenges inherent in confronting the destructive regimes of modern landscape transformation.

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This week, the Supreme Court made a highly-controversial decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which carries with it momentous political ramifications for the future of American elections. The decision has been receiving substantial attention from across the political spectrum and has found ample media outlet and speculation throughout the week.

Politically diverse interest groups and commentators are already offering critiques, ranging from the sincere to the dramatic in attempt to draw pointed focus on this issue. However, sharp political dissension is already characterizing this issue among Americans, much as it did within the Supreme Court, as evident in its narrow 5-4 final decision and in the majority and dissenting opinions.

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SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA -- Over 300 executive interests in an industrial energy revolution have gathered here to advance a new enterprise: smart grid technology.  Digitally-savvy energy highways, smart grids could one day give peoples worldwide unprecedented control over their use of electricity.

At this seminal industry conference, the consensus is that climate change is an urgent opportunitiy to profit.   Key firms and investors are posturing to secure market niches in this projected multi-billion dollar industry, which could be greatly stimulated by emissions legislation and/or government funding.  Today's industrial players include IBM, Google, Cisco, Oracle, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, investment gurus Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, and other Silicon Valley change agents.

Opening Keynote: John Doerr, Partner of KPCB and advisor to President Obama

Articulating business rewards and obstacles, GreenBeat 2009 commenced with impassioned rhetoric from John Doerr, a visionary multi-billion dollar investor.  He focused on the role of private investment for driving innovation in the energy industry. "You can't count on additional government incentives when you invest; you have to create the environment," he advised. Mr. Doerr stressed that Washington was only one arena for advocating sustainable interests.  By emphasizing job increases and competitive advantages to be derived from pricing carbon, he helped push Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature to mandate a 20% cut of carbon emissions in California by 2020.  He said that putting a price on carbon will move more investors into low-carbon industrial applications "faster and at a lower cost than any models predict".  Mr. Doerr added with a smile, "Congress can't model innovation."

Following John Doerr, a panel considered the energy-management tools that define a smart grid.  They focused on real-time pricing of energy, whereby consumers could access their electric bills by the minute, not by the month.  With user-friendly software, consumers could demand their electrical appliances to turn on or off according to custom patterns.  The panel agreed this information would be a game-changer, empowering end-consumers to seriously impact the energy market through automated conservation.  But until smart grid demand reaches critical mass in any given region, one panelist said, unimpressed end-consumers will remain subject to the "utility play" of that region.

Smart Grid Economics: Sharon Allan, head of the North American Smart Grid Practice at Accenture, explained the statistical circumstances that should compel utilities to revamp the country's ageing electrical grid, and she suggested how they could approach it economically.

Inspired and inspiring, James Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, described a clear vision for a U.S. economy that is the most energy-efficient in the world: "I believe the true energy efficiency gains will come from the deployment of technology," rather than through changes in consumer behavior.  But he added, "The end is not technology; technology is only the enabler."  The CEO of the third-largest CO2 emitter in the U.S. pinpointed a new strategy: deploying smart metering technologies to four million customers by 2014, and decarbonizing by 2050.

[Photography by David Lin]

One of the premier foreign policy issues that faces the United States today is the conflict in Afghanistan. Months after inheriting this eight year old war, President Barack Obama has yet to determine a strategy that either supplements or diverges from the directives of the previous administration, despite the evolving and deteriorating nature of the conflict.

Several points have made the formation and implementation of policy to this situation slow to develop. Among these are the troubles with the recent Afghan presidential elections, the resurgent violence of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda movements in different regions of Afghanistan, the consequent gap of opinion between the American public and American political and military advisors on how to stymie that resurgence, the re-examined national security value of the conflict to the United States (in light of emerging quandaries with Pakistan and Iran), and the desire of the Obama administration to distance itself from the image of hasty decision-making processes characteristic of Mr. Bush and his staff. Understanding these problems is the first step in articulating the most correct route to pursue in regard to Afghanistan.

Trilateral Meeting: (left to right) Presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Barack Obama of the U.S., and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan confer on policy

The first issue mentioned above is certainly the most visible: the fraud-spattered elections in August 2009. The two major opponents in this election were incumbent-President Hamid Karzai and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. The results, which produced a decisive victory for Karzai , were immediately disputed. After UN intervention, cautious US condemnation, and the promise of a run-off, Abdullah rescinded his election bid (with ominous rhetoric) on November 1, 2009, less than one week before the scheduled run-off election. This issue underscored two very serious problems with the legitimacy of the Afghan government: the first one, being causal, is the deep-seated corruption on various levels of the Afghani political structure; the second, being partially reactionary, is the budding distrust of the government by the Afghan public, a condition which invites a whole domain of other problems.

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On November 12th, 2009, The Dynamo hosted the public forum on "Clean Energy: When & How?", in UF's Pugh Hall Ocora Room. Four diverse experts assembled for an engaging discussion of the social, political, industrial, and economic challenges to the creation of a clean energy economy:

1. Harold W. Kegelmann, C.E.O., Advanced Solar Technologies, Inc.
2. Dr. Panos M. Pardalos, Distinguished Professor, UF Industrial & Systems Engineering
3. Dr. Sanford V. Berg, Distinguished Professor, UF Economics
4. Sean H. McLendon, Program Manager, Alachua County Sustainability Programs

"Local experts discuss climate change, clean energy" (Report)

UF Economics Professor, Sanford Berg (left); Alachua County Sustainability Programs Manager, Sean McLendon; President of The Dynamo, Lance Legel (center); UF Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Panos Pardalos; and CEO of Advanced Solar Technologies, Harold Kegelmann (right)

Over 50 members of the University of Florida community attended.

Tiffany Richards (left), Nicholas Jenkins, David Yadkouri Alexander (center), Ross Mittiga, John Rausch (right)

Lance Legel gives an interview to an Alligator journalist.

"Local experts discuss climate change, clean energy"

The Dynamo's founding membership in its first semester at the University of Florida.

I learned through a TED talk about the Ansari X-Prize, a $10 million prize awarded five years ago.  To win the prize, teams had to create a vehicle capable of sending three passengers to a height of 100 km, twice within a two week period.  Twenty-six teams from seven nations entered, and collectively spent over $100 million.  The winning entry, SpaceShipOne, was put in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The prize sparked the beginning of the private spaceflight industry, and since it was awarded in 2004, over $1 billion has been spent on private spaceflight.

Although the $10 million was difficult to raise, it pales in comparison to NASA's budget, which is well in excess of $17 billion, and may exceed $18 billion in the next few years.

Public vs. Private: (left) NASA's Endeavour launches; (right) SpaceShipOne in flight

Images courtesy of NASA and Scaled Composites, LLC

Personally, I have never been a fan of complete government control over the space industry, but I understand why many people are. From a military standpoint, having corporations in control of space rather than the government is risky and could be disastrous. From a legal standpoint, having corporations stake out parts of space (or equity on the moon, as the TED speaker jokes about) is unprecedented and messy. Privatization of space would cause a lot of work for a lot of bureaucrats, and a plethora of new legal issues.

But I am still forced to wonder, if so much was accomplished with only $10 million, what could be done with just one tenth of NASA's budget?

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To read the MLA formatted version as a PDF, click here.

Whether Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was democratically elected or divinely selected, his rule must be respected.

Rhetoric from Iran has been alarming.  Israel understandably fears being attacked, based on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's talk in 2005 about "wiping the state of Israel off the map". This fear has nurtured a hawkish philosophy of pre-emptive invasion, "if necessary", by many Israeli and Republican leaders.

Indeed, the Iranians have kept secrets about their nuclear program—evidenced by the recent revelation of an undisclosed uranium-enrichment site, outside the holy city of Qom.  Furthermore, it seems clear that Iran has the technical data to make a nuclear bomb, while Iranian leaders claim otherwise.

But Iran seriously attacking Israel is suicide: Israel is guaranteed by a nuclear West.  Considered in this context, the threat of a nuclear Iran seems purely economical.  Since China and Russia are major partners with Iran, a war with Iran would be self-defeating for everyone.  Iran knows this, and so is willing to take "unreasonable" risks, forcing the international community to compromise.

While this makes sense, Iran's motives are not clear to the public.  This is why negotiations between Iran and the U.N. Security Council on Oct. 1st, 2009 were especially important.  This was the first substantive high-level discussions with Iran that included the U.S. in decades.  And it produced real results: Iran has agreed to have Qom inspected on Oct. 25th, and interestingly, Iran has agreed to export its low-enriched uranium for processing in Russia and France.  In the short run, this means that it will take Iran longer to build a nuclear weapon.

Gauging Iran: President Obama has warily lead diplomatic engagement with Iran

Image Courtesy of ABC News

What does this mean in the long-run?  The wise analysis is that it is too soon to tell; Iranians could be playing for time.  My understanding is that Iran must be approaching this multilaterally: it is clearly in Iran’s benefit to have the economic leverage of a nuclear weapon – but not to be destroyed by this incentive.  Iran, resting on large Russian and Chinese assets, will milk as much benefit from their advances as possible, without crossing the line that Iraq did.  That is why the West must articulate this line clearly for all.

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Facing the threat of global warming, natural disasters and energy depletion concerns, the need for sustainable architecture and sustainable living has become popular.

According to Architecture2030.org, buildings in the US consume 48% of energy, with transportation taking up 27% and 25% coming from other industry sources. Sustainable architecture and a more passive building strategy can dramatically reduce total energy consumption all together.

Recent natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and catastrophic Asian tsunamis, suggest that trends in energy consumption may be aggravating natural disasters like heat waves and flooding.

There have also been consistent trends in the rise of sea levels, presumably because of human-induced global warming. Some experts such as Edward Mazria of Architecture2030.org assert that these trends can increase sea levels up to 6 meters within the next 80 years.

Many coastal cities would “cease to exist”, claims Mazria, if this was true. Mazria’s Architecture2030 challenge promotes architects racing to more sustainable approaches by “future proofing” buildings before the year 2030.

If architects are able to do this before 2030 approaches, rising sea levels could be mitigated.

Some of these “future proofing” approaches include using photovoltaic solar panels, green wall, green roof systems and using materials that promote low CO2 emissions. These new green technologies are the way of the future for healthier architecture.

Mazria and Architecture2030.org suggest that architects can save the world. They also suggest that architects are some of the biggest polluters as well.

Should architects have more responsibility with the fate of the world? Should the 2030 challenge define the role of architects? How fast is the clock ticking against us? Will post-2030 be too late? Only time will tell. However, this is an ongoing discussion about the future of architecture, which has substantial and less-discussed effects on us all.