Jon Udell

Borrowing Bruce Schneier’s wonderful term security theater, Rohit Khare has written about privacy theater. Not to be outdone, here’s a letter to my local newspaper about carbon theater.

To: Editors
Re: Carbon challenge in home stretch

We love our sports rivalries, and the classic contest between Keene and Portsmouth has riveted me to my sofa. Let’s recap. Back in April, seacoastonline.com (http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20090423-NEWS-904230413) reported:

Municipal employees in Portsmouth and Keene, the state’s two predominant ‘green’ cities, slugged it out over the course of three weeks and, in the end, Keene delivered the knockout punch.

This week, the Sentinel and the Portsmouth Herald advanced the story of this “carbon-busting throwdown” in a joint communique (http://keenesentinel.com/articles/2009/12/29/news/local/free/id_384393.txt):

Garry Dow of Clean Air-Cool Planet, which manages the carbon challenge, said the scales are tipped in Portsmouth’s favor in the second phase, which involves the number of residents in each city to sign up for the challenge.

The challenge? Check it out at http://necarbonchallenge.org/calculator.jsp. There you will find an online form that reminds you to tighten up your house, use compact fluorescent lights, air-dry your dishes, and recycle.

Back in April, more of Keene’s city employees took the survey than Portsmouth’s. But now, in phase two of the carbon-busting throwdown, Portsmouthians are taking the survey at a higher rate than Keeners.

Across New England, according to the Carbon Challenge website, this slugfest has reduced C02 emissions by over 17 million pounds. That’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s two thirds of New York City’s daily waste stream, a third of the mass of the Titanic, a fifth of the C02 produced by the recent Copenhagen conference.

Except, of course, none of the combatants has actually reduced their C02 emissions. They’ve only take an online survey, and pledged to do all sorts of things that might or might not get done.

I’d like to propose a different challenge. Let’s focus on one thing and really get it done. For example, what if every leaky window in Keene were equipped with an interior storm? John Leeke, who runs Historic HomeWorks in Portland, invented this cheap, appropriate, and effective technology. On his website (http://www.historichomeworks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=193) he shows how to build interior storms.

I’ve done this, and it’s a vast improvement over the stick-on window kits I’ve used in previous years. Interior storms are just cheap wooden frames with gaskets around the outside and shrink-wrap plastic facing. They press-fit into your window frames from the inside. You get all the benefits of the stick-on kits: zero air infiltration, a second layer of dead air. And there are none of the drawbacks: awkward yearly installation, destructive yearly removal.

“Keene’s down in the standings,” the Sentinel/Herald article says, “but there’s still plenty of time for residents to take the online survey and boost the city’s chance to take home the green prize.”

Well, OK, but I’d like to see Keene define — and then win — a different prize. What if we become the first city to outfit every leaky window in town with an interior storm? And what if we create jobs while doing so? That would be something worth shouting about.

Recently my town has adopted two innovative web services that I’ve featured on my podcast: CrimeReports.com, which does what its name suggests, and Granicus.com, which delivers video of city council meetings along with synchronized documents.

You can see the Keene instance of CrimeReports here, and our Granicus instance here.

I’m delighted to finally become a user of these systems that I’ve advocated for, written about, and podcasted. I’m also eager to move forward. We’re still only scratching the surface of what Net-mediated democracy can and should become.

In the case of CrimeReports, the next step is clear: Publish the data. It’s nice to see pushpins on a map, but when you’re trying to answer questions — like “Are we having a crime wave?” — you need access to the information that drives the map. Greg Whisenant, the founder of CrimeReports.com, says he’d be happy to publish feeds. But so far the cities that hire him to do canned visualizations of crime data aren’t asking him to do so, because most people aren’t yet asking their city governments to provide source data. So a few intrepid hackers, like Ben Caulfield here in Keene, are reverse-engineering PDF files to get at the information. Check out Ben’s remixed police blotter — it’s awesome. Now imagine what Ben might accomplish if he hadn’t needed to move mountains to uncover the data.

In the case of Granicus, I’m reminded of this item from last year: Net-enhanced democracy: Amazing progress, solvable challenges. The gist of that item was that:

• It’s amazing to be able to observe the processes of government.

• It’s still a challenge to make sense of them.

• Tools that we know how to build and use can help us meet that challenge.

Check out, for example, last week’s Keene city council meeting. Scroll down to an item labeled 2. Ordinance O-2009-21. In this clip, the council agrees to amend the city code for residential real estate tax exemptions. I wish I could link you directly to that portion of the video, which begins at 34:11, in the same way that I can link you to the associated document. But more broadly, I wish that a citizen who tunes in could understand — and help establish — the context for this amendment.

Here’s the new language:

Sec. 86-29 Residential real estate tax exemptions and credits

With regard to property tax exemptions, the city hereby adopts the provisions of RSA 72:37 (Blind); RSA 72:37-b (Disabled); RSA 72:38-b (Deaf or Severely Hearing Impaired); RSA 72:39-a (Elderly); RSA 72:62 (Solar); RSA 72:66 (Wind); and RSA 72:70 (Wood).

With regard to property tax credits, the city hereby adopts the provisions of RSA 72:28, II, (Optional Veterans’ tax credit); RSA 72:29-a , II, (Surviving Spouse); and RSA 72:35, I-a, (Optional Tax Credit for Service-Connected total disability).

In this case, I just happen to know a bit of this amendment’s backstory. Earlier this year I found out — only thanks to a serendipitous encounter with a city councilor at a social event — that my wood gasifier qualified me for an exemption. This was the first such exemption, and to my knowledge is still the only one granted.

If I hadn’t gone through that experience, though, the video clip and its associated document would mean nothing to me. There would be no way to make a connection between state law on the one hand, and a documented case study on the other.

On the next turn of the crank, I hope that services like Granicus will enable us to make those connections. Seeing the process of government in action is a great step forward. Now we need to be able to use links and annotations to help one another make sense of that process.

My guest for this week’s Innovators show is my old BYTE pal Howard Eglowstein. Nowadays he’s working for freewatt, a residential micro-CHP (combined heat and power) system, and our conversation revolved partly around that technology.

But I also invited Howard to reflect on the cultural phenomenon that’s celebrated in the pages of Make. Hacking at the intersection of atoms and bits is nothing new for Howard, he’s been doing it his whole career. One of his epic projects was Thumper, a machine he built for the BYTE lab to test the battery life of notebook computers. Thumper used optical sensors to notice when power-saving features kicked in, and robotic fingers to defeat them by pressing keys. (I resurrected this article about Thumper from the (now-abandoned) BYTE archive.)

It makes perfect sense for Howard to be deploying his hybrid skillset in the realm of energy innovation. But why, I’ve wondered lately, did we devalue those skills and inclinations? Why the long lull between the heydays of Popular Mechanics and Make? Here are some of Howard’s observations:

On toys, cars, and patents:

My background is in electronic toys. Toy engineers know how to take a really cool concept and make it cheap. In the 80s — not so much any more — you could get something at the toy store, open it up with a Dremel, and make it do something different. That’s how some kids get their first taste of reverse engineering.

But how many of us can fix our cars anymore? You just can’t. Even car people don’t have the tool and the documentation. A lot of things are done better than everybody else, and they’re secret.

In the toy industry we never patented anything, there was no point. If you patent something you have to tell everybody how it works, and then they have what they need to make an improvement and then steal the idea from you. So you do something amazing and cool, you wow everybody, and by the time they figure out what you’ve done you’ve moved on to something else which is even cooler.

On a friend’s son who is a Make fan:

We’ve really encouraged people to absorb information. But that gets boring after a while. You browse the computer, it’s kind of fun to click on links and see where they go, but it gets old. Meanwhile we’ve got a lot of kids who, let’s face it, probably aren’t going to get together and throw a football around, they’d rather play video games. So in this kid’s case when he gets tired of looking at stuff he goes and builds stuff. I hope that we’re encouraging more people to do that.

After speaking with Howard I was reminded of one project that is providing that encouragement: Natalie Jeremijenko’s feral robotic dogs, which are “upgraded commercially robotic dog toys that have been transformed into activist instruments to find and display urban pollutants.”

So I guess the toy business still is giving some young people their first taste of reverse engineering!

One of the themes I’ve been exploring for the past few years is computational thinking. It’s an evocative phrase that has led me in a few different directions. One is my intentional use of tagging and syndication as key strategies for social information management. Another is my growing interest in the kinds of uses of WolframAlpha outlined in Kill-A-Watt, WolframAlpha, and the itemized electric bill.

A lot of what I’ve read and heard about WolframAlpha seems to focus on its encyclopedic nature. But it aims to be a compendium of computable knowledge, and as such I think its highest and best use will be to enable computational thinking.

Here’s one small but telling example from my Kill-A-Watt essay:

Q: 9 W * (30 * 24 hours)

A: About half the energy released by combustion of one kilogram of gasoline.

Q: ( 1 kilogram / density of gasoline ) / 2

A: Less than a fifth of a gallon.

I was trying to understand what 9 Watts, over the course of a month, means. WA offered the comparison to the amount of energy in gasoline, but reported in kilograms. I still think in gallons. The conversion is:

( 1 kg / .73 kg/L) / 2 = .685L * .264 gallons / L = .18 gallons

If you don’t do that kind of thing on a regular basis, though — as I don’t, and as many of us don’t — it’s hard to get over the activation threshold. Looking up and applying the relevant formulae is a multistep procedure. WA collapses it into a single step:

( 1 kilogram / density of gasoline ) / 2

It knows the density of gasoline, and when you do the computation it reports results in a variety of units, including gallons.

I was feeling a bit guilty about needing this sort of intellectual crutch. But then I heard from a friend who had just read the Kill-A-Watt/WA piece. It reminded him of an Energy Tribune article entitled Understanding E=mc² which concludes:

A 1000-MW coal plant — our standard candle — is fed by a 110-car “unit train” arriving at the plant every 30 hours — 300 times a year. Each individual coal car weighs 100 tons and produces 20 minutes of electricity. We are currently straining the capacity of the railroad system moving all this coal around the country. (In China, it has completely broken down.)

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, refuels when a fleet of six tractor-trailers arrives at the plant with a load of fuel rods once every eighteen months. The fuel rods are only mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. They will sit in the reactor for five years. After those five years, about six ounces of matter will be completely transformed into energy. Yet because of the power of E = mc2, the metamorphosis of six ounces of matter will be enough to power the city of San Francisco for five years.

This is what people finds hard to grasp. It is almost beyond our comprehension. How can we run an entire city for five years on six ounces of matter with almost no environmental impact? It all seems so incomprehensible that we make up problems in order to make things seem normal again. A reactor is a bomb waiting to go off. The waste lasts forever, what will we ever do with it? There is something sinister about drawing power from the nucleus of the atom. The technology is beyond human capabilities.

But the technology is not beyond human capabilities. Nor is there anything sinister about nuclear power. It is just beyond anything we ever imagined before the beginning of the 20th century. In the opening years of the 21st century, it is time to start imagining it.

Six ounces of matter? Really? My friend wrote:

I remember at the time I tried to run simple order of magnitude calculations in my head to verify the number, but it got messy, I got sidetracked, and forgot.

This time I went to Wolfram-Alpha, and the answer was right there, clear as day, in seconds (and yes, it’s really 6 ounces of matter).

I went back to the article, and the only quantity of energy reported for San Francisco was that Hetch Hetchy Dam “provides drinking water and 400 megawatts of electricity to San Francisco.” That alone would come to:

400MW * 5 years = ~700 grams = ~25 ounces

Or, if Wikipedia is right and the dam yields only about 220MW, then:

220MW * 5 years = ~386 grams = ~14 ounces

Of course since San Francisco has other sources of power, the amount of matter would be more. Still, this doesn’t invalidate the author’s point: we’re talking ounces, not tons.

When I mentioned this to my friend, though, he wrote back:

I went the other way around:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6oz * c^e2 in gw hr

It gives 4247 GWhr which is definitely in the ballpark for San Francisco.

Sweet!

I didn’t actually follow up on that result just now, but over 5 years it comes to:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4247GWh / 5 years = ~100MW. That’s a quarter of what the article reports for Hetch Hetchy, it’s half what Wikipedia reports, and I still don’t know how it relates to San Francisco’s total power draw.

Even so, we’re playing in the kind of ballpark we need to be able to play in if we’re going to have any kind of reasoned discussion about future energy mixes like Saul Griffith’s straw-man proposal of:

2TW Solar thermal, 2TW Solar PV, 2TW wind, 2TW geothermal, 3TW nukes, 0.5TW biofuels

What I find most striking about the energy literacy talks that Saul’s been giving lately is his ability to move fluidly between the personal quantities of energy we experience directly, the city-scale quantities we experience indirectly, and the global quantities that most of us can scarcely imagine.

My point here isn’t to revisit the dispute that Stewart Brand and Amory Lovins are having about the future role of nuclear power. Nor to endorse William Tucker, the author of that Energy Tribune article, who is a journalist not a scientist or an engineer, and whose argument fails to address issues of security and waste disposal.

Instead I want to focus on how mental power tools like WolframAlpha, by making computable knowledge easier to access and manipulate, can augment our ability to think computationally. If we’re going to reason democratically about the energy, climate, and economic challenges we face, we’re going to need those power tools to be available broadly and used well.

My guest for this week’s Innovators show, Randy Julian, founded the bioinformatics company Indigo BioSystems to help modernize the process of drug discovery. The challenge — and opportunity — is partly to standardize the data formats used to represent experimental data, and to locate that data in shared spaces where it can be linked and recombined.

There’s also the crucial issue of reproducibility. One requirement, as Victoria Stodden said in my conversation with her, is to publish not just data but also the code that processes the data, ideally in an environment where data-transforming computation can be replayed and verified. One of the ways Indigo’s system does that is by hosting instances of R, the wildly popular statistical programming system, in the cloud.

Another key requirement for reproducing an experiment, Randy Julian says, is a robust and machine-readable representation of the design of the experiment. If I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, and how you’re trying to prove it, your data are just numbers to me. If I do know those things, I may be able to verify your results. And we may be able to automate more of the work using machine intelligence and machine labor — a vision that also inspires Jean-Claude Bradley, Cameron Neylon, and others to pursue open-notebook science.

In January 2009 I wrote a series of entries [1, 2, 3] documenting examples of ill-formed iCalendar files. And I argued that we need an analog, in calendar space, to the incredibly useful RSS/Atom feed validator.

I’m delighted to report that Doug Day has taken up the challenge. The first incarnation of his validator is up and running at http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net. It’s based on Doug’s DDay.iCal, which is the same .NET-based iCalendar class library used by the elmcity aggregator. But, like the RSS/Atom validator, it’s driven by an extensible and language-independent suite of tests.

The validator reports numerical scores for an iCalendar file, and gives advice about how it will be handled by popular calendar applications. Some examples:

The Keene High Varsity Basketball schedule scores a 96.25: “This calendar has minor problems, but will likely work correctly in major calendar applications.”

The Hannah Grimes Center’s calendar, based on Drupal, scores 92.5: “This calendar has moderate problems, but may work correctly in major calendar applications.”

The Keene Chamber of Commerce calendar scores 0: “This calendar has severe problems; very few (if any) applications will accept this calendar.” (DDay.iCal does, in fact, overlook these problems, and does parse events from this calendar.)

I’m hugely grateful to Doug Day for doing this important work. Although calendars seem to be ubiquitous, familiar, and interoperable, the examples I’ve been collecting in the wild show that, even though the standard has been around for over a decade, the iCalendar ecosystem is still very immature. This validator will help that ecosystem evolve.

The validator itself, of course, will also evolve. You can send feedback to Doug at the address given on its home page. If you’re curating a location or a topic using the elmcity service, you can email me about problem calendars or bring them to the curators’ room.

I’ve deeply enjoyed every one of the Long Now seminars, but it wasn’t until this one by Stewart Brand in October that I really got what he’s up to as the convener of this remarkable series of talks. In October he appeared as speaker rather than host/interviewer, and he summarized his new book Whole Earth Discipline. Kevin Kelly calls the book “a short course on how to change your mind intelligently” — in this case, about cities, nuclear power, and genetic and planetary engineering. These are all things that Steward Brand once regarded with suspicion but now sees as crucial tools for a sustainable world.

The book weaves together insights from many of my favorite Long Now talks, including:

• Robert Neuwirth on squatter cities

• Stephen Lansing on the “water temple” system in Bali

• Saul Griffith on energy literacy

• Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak on organic and genetically-engineered food

• Drew Endy and Jim Thomas on synthetic biology

• Craig Venter on synthetic biology

• Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson on nuclear power

• Paul Hawken on the environmental movement as Earth’s immune system

• Philip Tetlock on foxes and hedgehogs

• Spencer Beebe on biomimicry

I guess the Long Now seminars is the long version of a course on changing your mind. I was already on board with genetic and planetary engineering, but now I think very differently about cities and nuclear power. The book joins these to a common principle: concentrate the harmful stuff. High-density populations and casks of nuclear waste do less harm than scattered populations and dispersed coal residue.

Don’t miss the annotations — a website that reproduces every paragraph that includes citations, links to their sources, and adds updates.

I’ve always imagined getting an itemized electric bill. We’re not there yet, but when I saw a Kill-A-Watt at Radio Shack last night I remembered the discussion thread at this 2007 blog post and impulsively bought it.

In a way I’m glad I waited until 2009 because a companion tool is available now that wasn’t then: WolframAlpha. Its fluency with units, conversions, and comparisons is really helpful if, like me, you can’t do that stuff quickly and easily in your head.

So, for example, I’m sitting at my desk with the Kill-A-Watt watching my main power strip. I have a mixer here that I use about an hour a week for podcast recording. There’s no power switch because, well, why bother, just leave it on, it’s a tiny draw. Negligible.

I reach over and unplug it. Now I’m drawing 9 fewer watts. But what does that mean? I consult Wolfram Alpha:

Q: 9 W

A: About half the power expended by the human brain.

On a monthly basis?

Q: 9 W * (30 * 24 hours)

A: About half the energy released by combustion of one kilogram of gasoline.

In gallons?

Q: ( 1 kilogram / density of gasoline ) / 2

A: Less than a fifth of a gallon.

Relative to my electric usage, which was 1291 kWh last month?

Q: 9 W / (1291kwh / ( 30 * 24 hours)) * 100

A: Half a percent.

In dollars?

Q: 9 W / (1291kwh / ( 30 * 24 hours)) * $205.60

A: One dollar.

I find these comparisons really helpful. A dollar a month is a rounding error. But if I think of it as the energy equivalent of driving my car 7.2 miles, that makes me want to reach over and unplug the mixer for the 715 hours per month I’m not using it.

Saul Griffith has internalized these calculations, but most of us need help. A next-gen Kill-A-Watt that did these sorts of conversions and comparisons could be a real behavior changer.