Archive for May, 2008

Memristor Man says the Computer Age is yet to begin

May 29

[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: May 28, 2008 7:19:18 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, dave@farber.net, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Memristor Man says the Computer Age is yet to begin

[Seen on the Transhuman list]

<http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/speaker-corner-stan-williams>

“SCIENCE AND technology are still in their infancy, no matter how many times
somebody comes along and says it’s the end of science,” says Stan Williams.
“There is far more out there than we have yet found.”

Williams is talking after several weeks of sudden media attention and more than
ten years of effort since founding the lab he directs at HP, the information and
quantum systems lab. The reason for the attention: Williams and his team have
found the missing fourth element of circuit design, the memristor, which was
originally predicted in a paper written by Leon Chua in 1971.

The story started, says Williams, with a year or more of thinking when they
founded the lab: what would computing look like in 2010? Transistors would be
getting smaller, to the point where the size of individual atoms would make a
difference.

“That got our attention, and we started thinking very carefully about what that
means. What would be the impact of electronic devices so small that one atom
more or less could make a difference in the properties of the device? That
pushed us out of the box in terms of being open to very different things and
thinking about very different issues.”

As they were investigating molecular electronics, they started seeing hints of
an unexpected effect in their experiments. It was, says Williams, a staffer
named Greg Snyder who rediscovered, read, and understood Chua’s paper. Once
Williams had understood it â€“ “Leon Chua is a very modest man, but it’s quite
heavy mathematically and a challenge to get through” â€“ he made the connection
between Chua’s work and what they were seeing in the lab. From there, it took
them about a year to understand the physics.

“Once we got it, we saw that in fact so much of what we were seeing and so much
of what other people had reported in the literature for years and years was
actually memristance, but without the physics model they didnâ€™t understand it.
The main thing we did is we figured out where it’s coming from, why it’s
important, and why it’s becoming more important.” The effect, he says, gets
stronger as the devices get smaller. “Memristance is not a quantum effect, but
it’s another effect that becomes more important as things get smaller.”

At this year’s etech conference, Williams talked about computer science as a
series of roads not taken. The path we have followed for the last 50 years, he
said, derives from Claude Shannon’s observation that series and parallel
switches could implement Boolean logic. Go back further and read Bertrand
Russell’s 1910 Principia Mathematica and you find other forms of logic that
could be implemented.

“Memristor essentially enables some of those other tracks,” says Williams. ” And
to me it’s the example that there’s plenty more room at the bottom.”

Besides implementing other forms of logic, Williams believes that the key
characteristics of memristors â€“ that they retain their memory even when powered
off, like a hard drive or ROM, but can be rewritten dynamically, like RAM â€“ will
enable far more energy-efficient designs and continue the functional progression
of Moore’s Law. He imagines a future of hybrid circuits, but also thinks that
memristors will function not just as digital switches but as electronic synapses
far more like their biological counterparts than those built with traditional
semiconducts â€“ and far smaller and less power-hungry.

A “thinking brain”, he says, is “very, very far out”. But the analogue computers
to be built with these devices would actually learn from their environment and
be more competent at human-style pattern recognition, so difficult for today’s
digital computers.

“The age of computing has not yet begun,” he says. “What we have now makes the
computers that existed 50 years ago look like toys â€“ and not very good ones. My
view is that what we’ll have in 50 years will make what we have now look very
quaint and toylike.” But, he adds, “Even after 50 years we won’t have anything
that loooks remotely like a human brain.”

Wernher Von Braun: A 20th-Century Faust

May 26

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from friend Janos Gereben. DLH]

From: janosG <janosg@gmail.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 12:52:29 PM PDT
To: Dewayne <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Wernher Von Braun: A 20th-Century Faust

<http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/57120>

American Scientist
May-June 2008
A 20th-Century Faust
Mark Walker

Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.
Michael J. Neufeld.
587 pp. Knopf, 2007. $35.

Wernher von Braun is an iconic figure of the 20th century, someone
who built deadly missiles for Adolf Hitler and the Saturn V rockets
that sent Americans to the Moon. Michael J. Neufeld’s long-awaited
biography, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, steers a
course between the extremes of demonization and hagiography. “Von
Braun has often been depicted as a saint or a devil, as a hero of
spaceflight or as a Nazi war criminal,” observes Neufeld. “It is
comforting to pigeonhole him as either white or black,” he goes on to
explain, “because then one does not have to deal with his ambiguity
and complexity, or the ambiguity and complexity of the moral and
political choices offered to scientists and engineers in the modern
era.” Neufeld’s thorough, nuanced, insightful account does this
challenging subject justice.

Von Braun, who grew up during the vibrant and unstable Weimar
Republic, was a brilliant if inconsistent student from a noble and
politically influential family. He was one of the youngest members of
a group of amateur rocket enthusiasts who dreamed of someday reaching
space. Toward the end of the Weimar Republic, the German military
also became interested in rockets and therefore in von Braun,
eventually giving him the opportunity to build large rockets. Their
interest, and later that of the National Socialist state, was of
course in rockets as weapons, not as vehicles for space exploration.
In 1937, the German army and air force opened PeenemÃ¼nde, a large
center for research and development on the north coast of Germany,
and von Braun moved his rocket group there. The PeenemÃ¼nde project,
one of the first examples of “Big Science,” was a well-funded, high-
tech, interdisciplinary effort to develop rockets and other advanced
weapons.

These rockets took on greater significance when the war began to turn
sour for Germany in the winter of 1941-1942. By 1943, Minister of
Propaganda Josef Goebbels and others were calling for qualitatively
superior “wonder weapons” that would overcome Germany’s quantitative
inferiority. This set the stage for von Braun’s first real triumph:
the successful launch on October 3, 1942, of the A-4 rocket, which
reached altitudes of about 100 kilometers. (The A-4 was later
referred to as the V-2, or Vengeance Weapon 2, when it was used to
bomb London.)

<snip>

Freeman Dyson On Global Warming

May 26

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from friend John McMullen. DLH]

From: “John F. McMullen” <observer@westnet.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 8:32:25 PM PDT
To: Commonweal Mailing List <commonweal@yahoogroups.com>, Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: Freeman Dyson On Global Warming

From johnmac’s list — wuth prequel commentary by David Bolduc

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: David Bolduc <bolduc@austin.rr.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 8:53 PM
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Freeman Dyson On Global Warming
To: johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com

Looong piece. Money quotes:

“When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the
distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8
percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by
vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that
the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward
released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of
carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental
importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become
clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.”
…
“The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious
proposals, “Stern” and “Gore,” are disastrously expensive, the
“low-cost backstop” is enormously advantageous if it can be achieved,
and the other policies including business-as-usual and Kyoto are only
moderately worse than the optimal policy. The practical consequence
for global-warming policy is that we should pursue the following
objectives in order of priority. (1) Avoid the ambitious proposals.
(2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop. (3)
Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the
optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails. (4) Avoid an
international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent. These
objectives are valid for economic reasons, independent of the
scientific details of global warming.”
…
“Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the
fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what
Nordhaus meant when he mentioned “genetically engineered carbon-eating
trees” as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and
technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale
use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to
read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and
the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more
rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically
engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost
certainly within fifty years.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb
from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it
underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and
other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable
of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes
into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of
biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were
replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the
forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for
wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by
half in about fifty years.”
…
“In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was
wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be
right. It mayâ€”or may notâ€”be that the present is such a time.”
…
“In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about
global warming, you are an enemy of science. The authors of the
pamphlet appear to have forgotten the ancient motto of the Royal
Society, Nullius in Verba, which means, “Nobody’s word is final.”

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of
global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main
point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a
worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding
that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with
waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of
righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of
environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens,
schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular
religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound.
Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian
activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and
careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide
community of environmentalistsâ€”most of whom are not scientistsâ€”holds
the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful
future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for
nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share,
whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also
adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the
greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why
the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate.
Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical
about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.
The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that
the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate
environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global
warming distracting public attention from what they see as more
serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems
of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.
Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these
issues deserve to be heard.”
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494>

Volume 55, Number 10 Â· June 12, 2008

The Question of Global Warming
By Freeman Dyson
A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
by William Nordhaus
Yale University Press, 234 pp., $28.00
Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto
edited by Ernesto Zedillo
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization/Brookings Institution
Press, 237 pp., $26.95 (paper)

I begin this review with a prologue, describing the measurements that
transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a
precise observational science.

There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year (see the graph
on page 44). It gives us our firmest and most accurate evidence of
effects of human activities on our global environment. The graph is
generally known as the Keeling graph because it summarizes the
lifework of Charles David Keeling, a professor at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Keeling measured
the carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere for forty-seven years,
from 1958 until his death in 2005. He designed and built the
instruments that made accurate measurements possible. He began making
his measurements near the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Loa on
the big island of Hawaii.

He chose this place for his observatory because the ambient air is far
from any continent and is uncontaminated by local human activities or
vegetation. The measurements have continued after Keeling’s death, and
show an unbroken record of rising carbon dioxide abundance extending
over fifty years. The graph has two obvious and conspicuous features.
First, a steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315
parts per million in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008.
Second, a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline
of carbon dioxide levels. The maximum happens each year in the
Northern Hemisphere spring, the minimum in the Northern Hemisphere
fall. The difference between maximum and minimum each year is about
six parts per million.

Keeling was a meticulous observer. The accuracy of his measurements
has never been challenged, and many other observers have confirmed his
results. In the 1970s he extended his observations from Mauna Loa, at
latitude 20 north, to eight other stations at various latitudes, from
the South Pole at latitude 90 south to Point Barrow on the Arctic
coast of Alaska at latitude 71 north. At every latitude there is the
same steady growth of carbon dioxide levels, but the size of the
annual wiggle varies strongly with latitude. The wiggle is largest at
Point Barrow where the difference between maximum and minimum is about
fifteen parts per million. At Kerguelen, a Pacific island at latitude
29 south, the wiggle vanishes. At the South Pole the difference
between maximum and minimum is about two parts per million, with the
maximum in Southern Hemisphere spring.

The only plausible explanation of the annual wiggle and its variation
with latitude is that it is due to the seasonal growth and decay of
annual vegetation, especially deciduous forests, in temperate
latitudes north and south. The asymmetry of the wiggle between north
and south is caused by the fact that the Northern Hemisphere has most
of the land area and most of the deciduous forests. The wiggle is
giving us a direct measurement of the quantity of carbon that is
absorbed from the atmosphere each summer north and south by growing
vegetation, and returned each winter to the atmosphere by dying and
decaying vegetation.

The quantity is large, as we see directly from the Point Barrow
measurements. The wiggle at Point Barrow shows that the net growth of
vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere summer absorbs about 4 percent
of the total carbon dioxide in the high-latitude atmosphere each year.
The total absorption must be larger than the net growth, because the
vegetation continues to respire during the summer, and the net growth
is equal to total absorption minus respiration. The tropical forests
at low latitudes are also absorbing and respiring a large quantity of
carbon dioxide, which does not vary much with the season and does not
contribute much to the annual wiggle.

When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the
distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8
percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by
vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that
the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward
released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of
carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental
importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become
clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.

William Nordhaus is a professional economist, and his book A Question
of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies describes
the global-warming problem as an econ-omist sees it. He is not
concerned with the science of global warming or with the detailed
estimation of the damage that it may do. He assumes that the science
and the damage are specified, and he compares the effectiveness of
various policies for the allocation of economic resources in response.
His conclusions are largely independent of scientific details. He
calculates aggregated expenditures and costs and gains. Everything is
calculated by running a single computer model which he calls DICE, an
acronym for Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy.

Each run of DICE takes as input a particular policy for allocating
expenditures year by year. The allocated resources are spent on
subsidizing costly technologiesâ€”for example, deep underground
sequestration of carbon dioxide produced in power stationsâ€”that reduce
emissions of carbon dioxide, or placing a tax on activities that
produce carbon emissions. The climate model part of DICE calculates
the effect of the reduced emissions in reducing damage. The output of
DICE then tells us the resulting gains and losses of the world economy
year by year. Each run begins at the year 2005 and ends either at 2105
or 2205, giving a picture of the effects of a particular policy over
the next one or two hundred years.

The practical unit of economic resources is a trillion
inflation-adjusted dollars. An inflation-adjusted dollar means a sum
of money, at any future time, with the same purchasing power as a real
dollar in 2005. In the following discussion, the word “dollar” will
always mean an inflation-adjusted dollar, with a purchasing power that
does not vary with time. The difference in outcome between one policy
and another is typically several trillion dollars, comparable with the
cost of the war in Iraq. This is a game played for high stakes.

Nordhaus’s book is not for the casual reader. It is full of graphs and
tables of numbers, with an occasional equation to show how the numbers
are related. The graphs and tables show how the world economy reacts
to the various policy options. To understand these graphs and tables,
readers should be familiar with financial statements and compound
interest, but they do not need to be experts in economic theory.
Anyone who knows enough mathematics to balance a checkbook or complete
an income tax return should be able to understand the numbers.

For the benefit of those who are mathematically illiterate or
uninterested in numerical details, Nordhaus has put a nonmathematical
chapter at the beginning with the title “Summary for the Concerned
Citizen.” This first chapter contains an admirably clear summary of
his results and their practical consequences, digested so as to be
read by busy politicians and ordinary people who may vote the
politicians into office. He believes that the most important concern
of any policy that aims to address climate change should be how to set
the most efficient “carbon price,” which he defines as “the market
price or penalty that would be paid by those who use fossil fuels and
thereby generate CO2 emissions.” He writes:
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem
can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the
carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently
of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should
move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes
regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency
lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for
solar powerâ€”but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon.
You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does
not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate
change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a
necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is
at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic
inefficiencies.

If this chapter were widely read, the public understanding of global
warming and possible responses to it would be greatly improved.

Nordhaus examines five kinds of global-warming policy, with many runs
of DICE for each kind. The first kind is business-as-usual, with no
restriction of carbon dioxide emissionsâ€”in which case, he estimates
damages to the environment amounting to some $23 trillion in current
dollars by the year 2100. The second kind is the “optimal policy,”
judged by Nordhaus to be the most cost-effective, with a worldwide tax
on carbon emissions adjusted each year to give the maximum aggregate
economic gain as calculated by DICE. The third kind is the Kyoto
Protocol, in operation since 2005 with 175 participating countries,
imposing fixed limits to the emissions of economically developed
countries only. Nordhaus tests various versions of the Kyoto Protocol,
with or without the participation of the United States.

The fourth kind of policy is labeled “ambitious” proposals, with two
versions which Nordhaus calls “Stern” and “Gore.” “Stern” is the
policy advocated by Sir Nicholas Stern in the Stern Review, an
economic analysis of global-warming policy sponsored by the British
government.[*] “Stern” imposes draconian limits on emissions, similar
to the Kyoto limits but much stronger. “Gore” is a policy advocated by
Al Gore, with emissions reduced drastically but gradually, the
reductions reaching 90 percent of current levels before the year 2050.
The fifth and last kind is called “low-cost backstop,” a policy based
on a hypothetical low-cost technology for removing carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere, or for producing energy without carbon dioxide
emission, assuming that such a technology will become available at
some specified future date. According to Nordhaus, this technology
might include “low-cost solar power, geothermal energy, some
nonintrusive climatic engineering, or genetically engineered
carbon-eating trees.”

Since each policy put through DICE is allowed to run for one or two
hundred years, its economic effectiveness must be measured by an
aggregated sum of gains and losses over the whole duration of the run.
The most crucial question facing the policymaker is then how to
compare present-day gains and losses with gains and losses a hundred
years in the future. That is why Nordhaus chose “A Question of
Balance” for his title. If we can save M dollars of damage caused by
climate change in the year 2110 by spending one dollar on reducing
emissions in the year 2010, how large must M be to make the spending
worthwhile? Or, as economists might put it, how much can future losses
from climate change be diminished or “discounted” by money invested in
reducing emissions now?

The conventional answer given by economists to this question is to say
that M must be larger than the expected return in 2110 if the 2010
dollar were invested in the world economy for a hundred years at an
average rate of compound interest. For example, the value of one
dollar invested at an average interest rate of 4 percent for a period
of one hundred years would be fifty-four dollars; this would be the
future value of one dollar in one hundred years’ time. Therefore, for
every dollar spent now on a particular strategy to fight global
warming, the investment must reduce the damage caused by warming by an
amount that exceeds fifty-four dollars in one hundred years’ time to
accrue a positive economic benefit to society. If a strategy of a tax
on carbon emissions results in a return of only forty-four dollars per
dollar invested, the benefits of adopting the strategy will be
outweighed by the costs of paying for it. But if the strategy produces
a return of sixty-four dollars per dollar invested, the advantages are
clear. The question then is how well different strategies of dealing
with global warming succeed in producing long-term benefits that
outweigh their present costs. The aggregation of gains and losses over
time should be calculated with the remote future heavily discounted.

The choice of discount rate for the future is the most important
decision for anyone making long-range plans. The discount rate is the
assumed annual percentage loss in present value of a future dollar as
it moves further into the future. The DICE program allows the discount
rate to be chosen arbitrarily, but Nordhaus displays the results only
for a discount rate of 4 percent. Here he is following the
conventional wisdom of economists. Four percent is a conservative
number, based on an average of past experience in good and bad times.
Nordhaus is basing his judgment on the assumption that the next
hundred years will bring to the world economy a mixture of stagnation
and prosperity, with overall average growth continuing at the same
rate that we have experienced during the twentieth century. Future
costs are discounted because the future world will be richer and
better able to afford them. Future benefits are discounted because
they will be a diminishing fraction of future wealth.

When the future costs and benefits are discounted at a rate of 4
percent per year, the aggregated costs and benefits of a climate
policy over the entire future are finite. The costs and benefits
beyond a hundred years make little difference to the calculated
aggregate. Nordhaus therefore takes the aggregate benefit-minus-cost
over the entire future as a measure of the net value of the policy. He
uses this single number, calculated with the DICE model of the world
economy, as a figure of merit to compare one policy with another. To
represent the value of a policy by a single number is a gross
oversimplification of the real world, but it helps to concentrate our
attention on the most important differences between policies.

Here are the net values of the various policies as calculated by the
DICE model. The values are calculated as differences from the
business-as-usual model, without any emission controls. A plus value
means that the policy is better than business-as-usual, with the
reduction of damage due to climate change exceeding the cost of
controls. A minus value means that the policy is worse than
business-as-usual, with costs exceeding the reduction of damage. The
unit of value is $1 trillion, and the values are specified to the
nearest trillion. The net value of the optimal program, a global
carbon tax increasing gradually with time, is plus threeâ€”that is, a
benefit of some $3 trillion. The Kyoto Protocol has a value of plus
one with US participation, zero without US participation. The “Stern”
policy has a value of minus fifteen, the “Gore” policy minus
twenty-one, and “low-cost backstop” plus seventeen.

What do these numbers mean? $1 trillion is a difficult unit to
visualize. It is easier to think of it as $3,000 for every man, woman,
and child in the US population. It is comparable to the annual gross
domestic product of India or Brazil. A gain or loss of $1 trillion
would be a noticeable but not overwhelming perturbation of the world
economy. A gain or loss of $10 trillion would be a major perturbation
with unpredictable consequences.

The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious
proposals, “Stern” and “Gore,” are disastrously expensive, the
“low-cost backstop” is enormously advantageous if it can be achieved,
and the other policies including business-as-usual and Kyoto are only
moderately worse than the optimal policy. The practical consequence
for global-warming policy is that we should pursue the following
objectives in order of priority. (1) Avoid the ambitious proposals.
(2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop. (3)
Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the
optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails. (4) Avoid an
international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent. These
objectives are valid for economic reasons, independent of the
scientific details of global warming.

There is a fundamental difference of philosophy between Nordhaus and
Sir Nicholas Stern. Chapter 9 of Nordhaus’s book explains the
difference, and explains why Stern advocates a policy that Nordhaus
considers disastrous. Stern rejects the idea of discounting future
costs and benefits when they are compared with present costs and
benefits. Nordhaus, following the normal practice of economists and
business executives, considers discounting to be necessary for
reaching any reasonable balance between present and future. In Stern’s
view, discounting is unethical because it discriminates between
present and future generations. That is, Stern believes that
discounting imposes excessive burdens on future generations. In
Nordhaus’s view, discounting is fair because a dollar saved by the
present generation becomes fifty-four dollars to be spent by our
descendants a hundred years later.

The practical consequence of the Stern policy would be to slow down
the economic growth of China now in order to reduce damage from
climate change a hundred years later. Several generations of Chinese
citizens would be impoverished to make their descendants only slightly
richer. According to Nordhaus, the slowing-down of growth would in the
end be far more costly to China than the climatic damage. About the
much-discussed possibility of catastrophic effects before the end of
the century from rising sea levels, he says only that “climate change
is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the
potential for serious damages in the long run.” The Chinese government
firmly rejects the Stern philosophy, while the British government
enthusiastically embraces it. The Stern Review, according to Nordhaus,
“takes the lofty vantage point of the world social planner, perhaps
stoking the dying embers of the British Empire.”

The main deficiency of Nordhaus’s book is that he does not discuss the
details of the “low-cost backstop” that might provide a climate policy
vastly more profitable than his optimum policy. He avoids this subject
because he is an economist and not a scientist. He does not wish to
question the pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a group of hundreds of scientists officially appointed by the
United Nations to give scientific advice to governments. The
Intergovernmental Panel considers the science of climate change to be
settled, and does not believe in low-cost backstops. Concerning the
possible candidates for a low-cost backstop technology he mentions in
the sentence I previously quotedâ€”for example, “low-cost solar
power”â€”Nordhaus has little to say. He writes that “no such technology
presently exists, and we can only speculate on it.” The “low-cost
backstop” policy is displayed in his tables as an abstract possibility
without any details. It is nowhere emphasized as a practical solution
to the problem of climate change.

At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the
strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the
graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is
incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years.
Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the
fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what
Nordhaus meant when he mentioned “genetically engineered carbon-eating
trees” as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and
technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale
use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to
read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and
the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more
rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically
engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost
certainly within fifty years.

Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb
from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it
underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and
other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable
of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes
into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of
biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were
replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the
forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for
wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by
half in about fifty years.

It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our
economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first
century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our
economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could
be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there
is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with
the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon
emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The
ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor
people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have
mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be
radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some
low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is
likely to become a reality.

Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto is the record of a conference
held at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2005. It is
edited by Ernesto Zedillo, the head of the Yale Center, who served as
president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000 and was chairman of the
conference. The book consists of an introduction by Zedillo and
fourteen chapters contributed by speakers at the conference. Among the
speakers was William Nordhaus, contributing “Economic Analyses of the
Kyoto Protocol: Is There Life After Kyoto?,” a sharper criticism of
the Kyoto Protocol than we find in his own book.

The Zedillo book covers a much wider range of topics and opinions than
the Nordhaus book, and is addressed to a wider circle of readers. It
includes “Is the Global Warming Alarm Founded on Fact?,” by Richard
Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, answering that
question with a resounding no. Lindzen does not deny the existence of
global warming, but considers the predictions of its harmful effects
to be grossly exaggerated. He writes,
Actual observations suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate
is much less than that found in computer models whose sensitivity
depends on processes that are clearly misrepresented.

Answering Lindzen in the next chapter, “Anthropogenic Climate Change:
Revisiting the Facts,” is Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of
the oceans at Potsdam University in Germany. Rahmstorf sums up his
opinion of Lind-zen’s arguments in one sentence: “All this seems
completely out of touch with the world of climate science as I know it
and, to be frank, simply ludicrous.” These two chapters give the
reader a sad picture of climate science. Rahmstorf represents the
majority of scientists who believe fervently that global warming is a
grave danger. Lindzen represents the small minority who are skeptical.
Their conversation is a dialogue of the deaf. The majority responds to
the minority with open contempt.

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was
wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be
right. It mayâ€”or may notâ€”be that the present is such a time. The great
virtue of Nordhaus’s economic analysis is that it remains valid
whether the majority view is right or wrong. Nordhaus’s optimum policy
takes both possibilities into account. Zedillo in his introduction
summarizes the arguments of each contributor in turn. He maintains the
neutrality appropriate to a conference chairman, and gives equal space
to Lindzen and to Rahmstorf. He betrays his own opinion only in a
single sentence with a short parenthesis: “Climate change may not be
the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but
it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has
ever faced.”

The last five chapters of the Zedillo book are by writers from five of
the countries most concerned with the politics of global warming:
Russia, Britain, Canada, India, and China. Each of the five authors
has been responsible for giving technical advice to a government, and
each of them gives us a statement of that government’s policy. Howard
Dalton, spokesman for the British government, is the most dogmatic.
His final paragraph begins:
It is the firm view of the United Kingdom that climate change
constitutes a major threat to the environment and human society, that
urgent action is needed now across the world to avert that threat, and
that the developed world needs to show leadership in tackling climate
change.

The United Kingdom has made up its mind and takes the view that any
individuals who disagree with government policy should be ignored.
This dogmatic tone is also adopted by the Royal Society, the British
equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences. The Royal Society
recently published a pamphlet addressed to the general public with the
title “Climate Change Controversies: A Simple Guide.” The pamphlet
says:
This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every
contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to
distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the
seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming.

In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about global
warming, you are an enemy of science. The authors of the pamphlet
appear to have forgotten the ancient motto of the Royal Society,
Nullius in Verba, which means, “Nobody’s word is final.”

I have a GREAT idea: Why don’t we let the RIAA write our copyright laws?

May 26

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]

From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 8:59:43 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, dave@farber.net, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com
Subject: I have a GREAT idea: Why don’t we let the RIAA write our copyright laws?

Proposed secret copyright deal takes aim at iPods, providers

Vito Pilieci
The Ottawa Citizen

Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Canadian government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make information on iPods, laptops and other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices.

The agreement could also impose strict regulations on Internet service providers, forcing those companies to hand over customer information without a court order.

Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the new plan would see Canada join other countries, including the United States and members of the European Union, to form an international coalition against copyright infringement.

Details of the agreement, which is expected to be tabled at July’s meeting of G8 nations in Tokyo, were leaked on the Internet yesterday.

The agreement is being structured much like the North American Free Trade Agreement, except it would create rules and regulations regarding private copying and copyright laws. Federal trade agreements do not require parliamentary approval.

The agreement would create an international regulator that would turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining which content infringes on copyright laws.

The agreement also proposes that any content copied from a DVD or digital video recorder be open for scrutiny by officials — even if the content was copied legally.

“If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas, what would they look like? This is pretty close,” said David Fewer, staff counsel at the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

“The process on ACTA so far has been cloak and dagger. This certainly raises concerns.”

The leaked ACTA document states officials should be given the “authority to take action against infringers (i.e., authority to act without complaint by rights holders)”.

Anyone found with infringing content in their possession would be open to a fine. They may also have their device confiscated or destroyed, according to the four-page document.

The proposal includes “civil enforcement” measures which would give security personnel the “authority to order ex parte searches” (without a lawyer present) “and other preliminary measures.”

In Canada, border guards already perform random searches of laptops at airports to check for child pornography. ACTA would expand the role of those guards.

On top of these relatively small-scale enforcement efforts, ACTA also proposes imposing new sanctions on Internet service providers. It would force providers to hand over personal information pertaining to “claimed infringement” or “alleged infringers” — users who may be transmitting or sharing copyrighted content over the Internet.

Currently, rights holders must collect evidence to prove someone is sharing copyrighted material over the Internet. That evidence is then presented to a judge who can issue a court order telling the Internet service provider to identify the customer.

Mr. Fewer has been following the progress of ACTA and has exhausted every avenue at his disposal to gain insight into its details. He said yesterday’s leak of the “discussion paper” which outlines the priorities of the agreement is the first glimpse anyone has had into ACTA.

“We knew this existed, we filed an Access to Information request for this, but all it provided us with was the title. All the rest of it was blacked out,” he said.

“Those negotiations can take place behind closed doors. At the end of the day, we may be provided with something that has been negotiated which is a fait accompli in which civil society gets no opportunity to critique it.”

Mr. Fewer expressed particular concern about one area of the proposal that calls for ACTA to operate outside of accepted international forums such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization or the United Nations.

The document proposes that ACTA create its own governing body and be overseen by a committee made up of representatives from member nations. Organizing its own governing body would make ACTA unaccountable to any existing international trade organization.

“This initiative is unprecedented,” he said.

The paper was leaked online by Sunshine Media, the company that runs the Wikileaks.org website — a whistleblowing site created to help circulate secret documents.

In October, David Emerson, minister of International Trade, announced that Canada would take part in ACTA’s creation. The initiative was originally aimed at stopping large-scale piracy, such as printing operations that make and sell thousands of copies of movies that are still showing in theatres.

“We are seeking to counter global piracy and counterfeiting more effectively,” Mr. Emerson said at the time. “This government is working both at home and internationally to protect the intellectual property rights of Canadian artists, creators, inventors and investors.”

The document is reported to have been drafted by the Office of the United States Trade Representative. A spokeswoman with the office refused to comment on the document.

Michael Geist, Canada research chair of Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa and expert on Canadian copyright law, criticized the government for advancing ACTA with little public consultation.

He said documents detailing ACTA’s plans would not need to be leaked online if the process were transparent.

“That’s what happens when you conduct all of this behind closed doors,” he said. “The lack of consultation, the secrecy behind it and the speculation that this will be concluded within a matter of months without any real public input is deeply troubling.”

The Department of International Trade said they would not comment on the document.

<http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=bbbaf436-e632-44a7-8f58-7d2c80f3f1db>

Advanced tactic targeted grocer / ‘Malware’ stole Hannaford data

May 26

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 11:56:47 AM PDT
Subject: Advanced tactic targeted grocer / ‘Malware’ stole Hannaford data

Advanced tactic targeted grocer
‘Malware’ stole Hannaford data

By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff | March 28, 2008
The Boston Globe

A massive data breach at Hannaford Brothers Cos. was caused by a “new
and sophisticated” method in which software was secretly installed on
servers at every one of its grocery stores, the company told
Massachusetts regulators this week.

The unauthorized intrusion the company disclosed on March 17 stemmed
from software that intercepted card data from customers as they paid
with plastic at store checkout counters, and sent the data overseas,
Hannaford’s top lawyer said in a letter sent to Attorney General
Martha Coakley and Governor Deval Patrick’s Office of Consumer
Affairs and Business Regulation.

The software was installed on computer servers at each of the roughly
300 stores operated by Hannaford and its partners. Hannaford did not
say how the software might have been placed on so many servers, and
company spokeswoman Carol Eleazer said the company continues to
investigate how the software was installed and other specifics of the
breach. The Secret Service, which pursues currency crimes, is
conducting its own investigation.

Data security specialists say the new details show how hackers have
grown more adept at penetrating weak links in the systems that
connect merchants and banks. In previous breaches, such as the
record-setting intrusion at TJX Cos. of Framingham, where as many as
100 million card numbers were compromised, hackers took advantage of
merchants who stored customer names and card data – sometimes in
violation of payment industry standards – at central locations in
their computer networks.

In contrast, Hannaford says it did not store customer information.
The hackers who struck Hannaford mined a stream of data that the
merchant and banks were not responsible for protecting under industry
rules, industry specialists said.

…

<http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/03/28/advanced_tactic_targeted_grocer/>

Everyone’s a historian now / How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate

May 26

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

[Note: This item comes from reader Monty Solomon. DLH]

From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Date: May 26, 2008 11:46:13 AM PDT
Subject: Everyone’s a historian now / How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate.

Everyone’s a historian now
How the Internet – and you – will make history deeper, richer, and
more accurate.

By Stephen Mihm | May 25, 2008
The Boston Globe

UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a
fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II,
research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your
bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for
something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get
online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that
participated in the battle – the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or
the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and
their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized
repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log
books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served
on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact
information for surviving crew members and their relatives – perfect
for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical
change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for
decades, if not centuries. By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge
and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people,
“crowdsourcing,” as it’s increasingly called, may transform a
discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a
single historian toiling in the dusty archives.

Some venerable research institutions are already starting to harness
the power of crowds in an organized way. The Library of Congress
recently launched a project on the photo-sharing site Flickr that
invites visitors to identify and analyze photographs in its
collection, while the National Archives, working in partnership with
a for-profit company, is inviting people to do the same to online
versions of its documents. And a growing number of projects are
taking the logical next step, creating “raw archives” of photographs
and documents for momentous events: Sept. 11, for example, or
Hurricane Katrina.

…

<http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/25/everyones_a_historian_now/>

Global Dreams for a Wireless Web

May 25

Posted by dewayne in List | No Comments

May 25, 2008

Global Dreams for a Wireless Web
By JOHN MARKOFF
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/technology/25web.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>
Menorca, Spain

SITTING on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

â€œHe has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,â€ Mr. Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests â€” many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Mr. Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peersâ€™ achievements. No stranger to success â€” he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s â€” he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FONâ€™s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The swaps, in theory, would allow â€œFonerosâ€ to have ubiquitous, global wireless access while traveling for business or pleasure. But despite $55.2 million in backing from such corporate heavyweights as Google and BT, the former British Telecom, as well as newer enterprises like Skype and a handful of venture capital firms, FON and Mr. Varsavsky are still missing a crucial ingredient: scale.

At the moment, there are just 830,000 registered Foneros around the world, and only 340,000 active Wi-Fi hotspots run FON software. Because itâ€™s built upon the concept of sharing Wi-Fi access, FON works well only if there are Foneros everywhere.

And as he struggles to expand the FON network, Mr. Varsavsky faces particular hurdles now that the Internetâ€™s commercial side has reached a crossroads. Born a few decades ago as an anarchic, digital version of a barn-raising, the wireless Internet is now a battleground between two giant technology consortiums seeking to rein in the Webâ€™s chaotic openness in favor of creating uniform, global access built upon wireless data networks.

The two camps, known as WiMax and L.T.E., for â€œlong-term evolution,â€ are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

[snip]

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