NewsTrust - Technology - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

New, modular nuclear plant ready for U.S. introduction

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:17:57 -0800

Public Radio International - By Living on Earth - Jan. 20 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the nuclear energy industry a Christmas present late last year. In December, the governmental body approved Westinghouse's AP 1000 reactor for use in the United States. No commercial reactors have been built in the United States in more than 30 years but Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Toshiba hopes this new technology, which is already being used extensively in China, will jump start the industry. Leslie Kass, a Senior Director at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the new design, known as advanced passive, has no features to make it safer than ever before. "The AP 1000 reactor doesn’t require power or operator action to maintain safe shutdown for up to 72 hours," she explained. "And in the case of a Fukushima-like accident, you wouldn’t have a fuel melt because you don’t require any of the off-site power that they so desperately needed." Approval didn't come without controversy. NRC Safety Engineer John Ma told the commission he was worried the building around the reactor could "crack like a glass cup." Kass said Ma's concerns were reviewed extensively both by the commission and industry to make sure the design would stand up. After a four year review, the reactor gained approval. The big step forward with this technology is that instead of each reactor being built from the ground up on site, reactors will now start their lives in a factory, where conditions can be more closely monitored while moving faster than with an on-site build. The plan is "to have a standardized fleet of reactors worldwide, which is good for regulators," Kass said. "It’s less systems to learn and comprehend, it’s good economics because it’s repeat build, and it’s easier maintenance because you have similar components and designs." Some are utilities in five southern states looking to build 14 of these new advanced passive reactors. The NRC has streamlined the process to build a new reactor so, in theory, it's easier to get a permit and build a plant. Now a construction and operating permit is issued at the same time. It also reduces the likelihood of a successful lawsuit to halt operations of a plant — once it's been built. "There’s a very high bar to show prima facie evidence that the licensee has not conducted the construction in accordance with their license, that there were true defects," Kass said. "So frivolous lawsuits are kept out." The new plants aren't cheap. A utility in Georgia is expecting to spent about $14 billion for two reactors. In South Carolina a consortium is looking at two reactors for $12 billion. The costs are fully load, for transmission and land acquisition and permitting. Each pair of reactors would generate eneough power for 1.6 million homes. The Obama administration wants to provide about $50 billion in loan guarantees to utilities who build new nuclear plants. "We’re getting off to a slow start here in the United States," Kass said. "And I think, do a few carefully and then move forward. So once we prove the technology and the licensing process, it should certainly get easier to obtain financing." Kass said the loan guarantees are worth it, and necessary, because nuclear power is so expensive and electric utilities are actually quite small. One of the largest electric utilities in the country has a total value of just $50 billion, so these companies are risking insolvency if the power plants can't be built. Plus, she said, these plants provide thousands of construction jobs as well as hundreds of well-paying jobs for operators. But the question remains of where the nuclear waste will go, once these new plants are operational. "Politically, it’s a big problem. Technically, it’s not a big problem. We have the fuel securely stored at our sites," Kass said. "it’s not that large a problem — if you took all the used fuel from the 50 years of commercial operation of reactors here in the U.S., you’d have one football field about ten yards high." Kass said this approval, along with approval to develop smaller reactors, anywhere from 25 to 300 megawatts, could lead to the long-discussed nuclear renaissance. "There are 63 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, and you see countries like China and India and Russia and several different countries in Europe moving forward with new reactors," Kass said. "Here in the U.S., again, we’re going to start slowly, but I think you’ll see as demand increases and as folks look to diversify their energy portfolio, nuclear certainly is an attractive option."

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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Restoring Factchecking

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Craig Newmark - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - Recently, Jeff Jarvis at the City University of NY held an event on restoring factchecking to the news business. He did a really good job getting a bunch of players in this arena to play well together.

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#Occupy: The Tech at the Heart of the Movement

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Alexis Madrigal - Nov. 16 (Opinion) - With the police raids in the past few days of camps from Oakland to New York, the Occupy movement is at a key juncture. We want to step back and look at the role of technology in the protests' establishment, spread, and future. This essay inaugurates a series of stories on the ways that protesters have shaped technologies to fit their needs -- and how technologies opened up new space for their messages. Let's start with what seems self-evident, but what I'm sure is more complex than it appears: Occupy is different from the protests that preceded it. To be honest, I'm not sure anyone can explain why. The list of factors contributing to its outstanding run is long: economic circumstances, a distance from the enforced patriotism that followed 9/11, disappointment on the left with Obama's presidency, the failure to adequately regulate banks, the neverending foreclosure crisis, the Adbusters provenance, severe cuts to social programs at the state and local level, the language of occupation, and the prolonged nature of the engagement.

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What If Government Were More Like an iPod?

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Scott Adams - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - If Congress had a 9% approval rating while George Washington was still alive, he would have shoved his wooden dentures in his mouth, assembled a militia and marched on the Capitol. The nation's founders weren't big fans of dysfunctional governments. I'll bet we could solve our energy problem by connecting a generator to John Adams's corpse, which I assume is spinning in its grave.

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The Limits of Magical Thinking

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare. He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality

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Do mobile, the cloud and social spell the end of the PC era?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jean-Louis Gassée - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - These are the three interdependent forces that power the biggest wave of growth, change, and destruction I've seen since I have been allowed to take part in the high-tech industry. In the beginning (or mine, anyway), back in 1968 when I was, miraculously, offered a salary to be part of HP France there was the mainframe. IBM – "The Company" – reigned supreme, a dynasty that seemed unassailable. The IBMer wore a suit and tie when approaching the punch card feeder. Big Blue's competitors, the BUNCH, were also called the Seven Dwarves because their combined market share couldn't compare to IBM's dominance.

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Kindle Fire or iPad? | Poll

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Sep. 29 (Opinion) - Amazon's Jeff Bezos is taking on Apple's iPad with the company's touchscreen tablet: the Kindle Fire. Which one is more likely to seduce you?

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Twitter Reaches 100 Million Active Users

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nick Bilton - Sep. 09 (Opinion) - Twitter says 100 million people actively use the service. The company also discussed goals to eventually reach people on two billion devices.

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Google+ launch: search giant closes 10 products

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Josh Halliday - Sep. 05 () - Internet firm focuses on new social network Google Plus by ridding company of 'inefficiencies' Google is to shut down 10 products, including the search company Aardvark, bought for $50m last year, as the internet giant focuses on new social network Google+ ahead of its public launch. The "fall spring clean" follows a pledge by Larry Page to rid the company of inefficiencies after he took over as chief executive in April. The products listed for closure include Aardvark , Desktop , Fast Flip , Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack , Google Web Security , Image Labeler , Notebook , Sidewiki and Subscribed Links . Alan Eustace, Google's senior vice-president for engineering, announced the closures on the company's official blog . "Technology improves, people's needs change, some bets pay off and others don't. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, today we're having a fall spring clean at Google. Over the next few months we'll be shutting down a number of products ...

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Why Google had to have Motorola Mobility

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Aug. 17 (Opinion) - The acquisition has provoked comment about defensive buying of patents, but Google surely has more ambition than that For several years now, Google has been following a vow made by former CEO Eric Schmidt: mobile first. New CEO Larry Page is taking that dictum to a new level by announcing a deal to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5bn . The implications of this deal depend entirely on how Google plans to use Motorola. If, as some claim, the deal is more about obtaining Motorola's mobile patent portfolio than anything else, we can expect escalating patent warfare between technology giants and limited innovation beyond that. If, however, Google intends to operate the business it is acquiring, we may see some broad and sweeping changes in the technology industry. If the deal is chiefly about obtaining Motorola's mobile patent portfolio, then Google would likely spin off the hardware end of the company and keep the software and patents. The patents would be vital weapons in its competition with ...

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Why Women Have an Advantage in Technology

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Adriana Gardella - Jun. 24 (Interview) - Audrey MacLean describes herself as an accidental technologist, an accidental entrepreneur, and an accidental investor. But at the age of eight, she made at least one plan: She would earn a college scholarship. Ms. MacLean, 59, executed that plan and went on to help start Network Equipment Technologies, which went public in 1987. Later, she was a founder and chief executive of Adaptive. She has given seed financing to numerous successful start-ups including Pure Software (founded by Netflix’s Reed Hastings), AdForce and Selectica.

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Richard Clarke: China's Cyberassault on America

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Richard Clarke - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - If we discovered Chinese explosives laid throughout our national electrical system, we'd consider it an act of war. China's digital bombs pose as grave a threat.

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The iCloud just works ... but in whose favour?

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Douglas Haddow - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - No wonder Apple is keen to push the idea of a post-PC era in which all your stuff goes through its sprawling data complex As with all Apple unveilings, the iCloud was met with a monsoon of hype. Introduced to the public at the tech monolith's developers conference last Monday, it was hailed as a "time warp loophole" , a "tipping point" , and "the end of stuff" . A bit much, considering how humdrum it is when compared to previous product launches. The iCloud is essentially a rebranding and expansion of Apple's MobileMe cloud service, which has ceased accepting new subscriptions and will be discontinued when iCloud goes live. Indeed, there is nothing new here, apart from ambition. Most of us already utilise cloud computing on a daily basis, be it with Google Docs, Flickr or Tumblr. What differentiates the iCloud is how it hints at what's to come. During his keynote, Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, boasted that the iCloud signifies the beginning of the post-PC era, stating: "We are ...

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Mr. Ambassador, Meet President Zuckerberg

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Cyrus Farivar - May. 27 (Opinion) - Facebook is sending diplomats to foreign countries. Now foreign countries should send diplomats to Facebook.

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US Diversity Visa Lottery Programming Problem

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

IEEE Spectrum - By Robert Charette - May. 17 (Opinion) - Last Friday, the US Department of State announced that the results of the 2012 Diversity Lottery were no longer valid. A computer programming error had skewed the results to those registering for the lottery early, instead of selecting applicants randomly from across the full thirty-day registration period, the State Department stated on its Diversity Lottery web site. The Diversity Lottery is part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program...

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Intellectual property and the economy: Patently absurd

Sun, 08 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 08 (Opinion) - Innovation and jobs have become a modern version of motherhood and apple pie in Washington, DC. Everyone in America’s capital wants lots more of both, or so they say. So how come Congress and the White House have decided not merely to underfund a crucial cog in American’s innovation machine but actually to take away revenue it earns?

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The Little Red (Face)Book

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Steven Levy - May. 01 (Opinion) - When I spoke at Facebook about In The Plex recently, rumors were swirling that the social networking giant was about to enter China, supposedly in a partnership with the search engine Baidu. So I made sure that my talk to a dining hall full of FB’ers included the cautionary tale of what happened when Google met China. (An excerpt of the saga as detailed in my book appeared in Fortune.) Though similar in some ways — focus on engineering, full-on embrace of Internet values — Facebook and Google are quite different companies. Their China efforts will also undoubtedly vary. But some of the challenges that Facebook will encounter will be just as tricky as the ones Google faced. Those problems ultimately led to Google’s reconsideration of the enterprise.

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Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Phil Bronstein - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

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Google can't be trusted with our books | Simon Barron

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:43:12 -0700

The Guardian - By Simon Barron - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians – they can't be held accountable to the publicGoogle announced last week that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. In this instance, the public managed to change Google's mind and stopped the mass deletion of a unique digital archive but the situation raises concerns about data under Google's control, including the unique archive of Google Books.The reason cited for Google Videos' closure is that the company would like to focus on its raison d'être, search, "[the] ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted". Shifting its priorities is its prerogative as a company: the issue is that on the basis of refocusing its business priorities, its first impulse was to delete the gigabytes of content given to it by users.This situation has disturbing implications for Google Videos' sister project, Google Books, and the approximately 15 million scanned documents in the archive. In partnership with some of the greatest research libraries in the world – the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Harvard University Library, the New York Public Library – Google Books has built up a huge digital library containing thousands of unique documents.Google Books has suffered problems in the past: practical problems – lawsuits from publishers and authors, criticism of its inconsistent metadata – and philosophical problems involving the theoretical concerns of allowing a private sector company to control shared cultural resources. These concerns have remained abstract but now, with the company's disregard towards videos, become more concrete.As a private sector company, the core aim of Google is to make money. The Google Videos situation shows that in order to lower expenditure and adjust its priorities, Google was willing to delete content entrusted to it by users. Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents: many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future. Google acted admirably by listening to users and working to save the videos but entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving and public cultural welfare is inherently dangerous: as the situation made clear, private sector bodies have the ability to destroy archives at a whim.Enabling access to digital information should be one of the key responsibilities of our cultural institutions and our public sector. Keeping these resources in the public sector and ensuring that they are freely available to everyone is the key to bridging the UK's widening digital divide: the chasm between those who can access digital information via internet access at home and the 27% of households who cannot. Last week, Amazon announced that it was working with libraries in the US to allow users to borrow Kindle ebooks. This mutual co-operation between the private and the public sector should allow more people to access shared digital resources and hopefully help bridge the US digital divide.As Peter Singer and others have argued, we need to develop a digital library that can make resources available in the same way as Google Books but that will be accountable to the public. Google Books is one of the largest digital libraries in the world but, as Robert Darnton has argued, we cannot trust it to be the sole custodian of our digital archives forever. A national digital library would be subject to regulations to protect our cultural heritage and would take responsibility for the artefacts placed in its care. Publicly funded libraries and archives are important precisely because they are not committed to the "market fundamentalism" of pursuing profit above all other motives. Some libraries and archives need to modernise and make resources digitally available but this requires support and the protection of our public sector libraries.Google's motto is "don't be evil". Not doing the evil thing is not the same as doing the right thing. In this instance, it has done the right thing: next time, it may not.GoogleDigital videoLibrariesInternetUnited StatesSimon Barronguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Werner Herzog Enters 'The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams'

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Terri Gross, Werner Herzog - Apr. 25 (Interview) - In 1994, three French cave explorers discovered hundreds of prehistoric paintings and engravings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Carbon dating has since shown that the depictions of rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears, horses, bison, mammoths and other animals are between 30,000 and 32,000 years old. That doesn't mean the ancient drawings are any less sophisticated than what artists create today, says filmmaker Werner Herzog. "Art ... as it bursts on the scene 32,000 years ago, is fully accomplished. It doesn't start with 'primitive scribblings' and first attempts like children would make drawings," Herzog says. "It's absolutely and fully accomplished." The acclaimed German director, who has produced, written and directed more than 40 films, gained exclusive access to the Chauvet caves. He tells their story and the story of the world's oldest cave paintings in The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3-D documentary film. "Since early adolescence, I have been fascinated by cave paintings," Herzog tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It actually was my personal intellectual awakening ... and shook me to the core — seeing an image of a horse [from the] prehistoric Stone Age. I couldn't believe it." Part of Herzog's interest in the paintings, he says, is the knowledge that tens of thousands of years ago, humans had the instinct to make art in order to represent the world around them.

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The Google Books settlement should teach the company humility. It won't

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Siva Vaidyanathan - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - Google has been humbled. For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg. But yesterday federal Judge Denny Chin did just that. He ruled—after more than two years of study and debate—that the elaborate new used-book store that Google had designed in collaboration with the most elite authors and publishers could not stand. Or, at least, Chin ruled that the methods Google chose to build this massive digital bookstore, now called Google Books, was improper.

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Japan’s real disaster

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Gregg Easterbrook - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - The situation in Japan is horrific — but because of the earthquake and tsunami, not because of the malfunctioning atomic reactor station. The earthquake and its awful aftermath killed at least thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands. That is an unspeakable tragedy. The damaged reactors at Fukushima haven’t killed anyone, and while posing a clear danger, especially to workers heroically fighting the malfunction, the odds are that any harm to public health will be minor, if public health is harmed at all.

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NewsTrust: one way the internet is reshaping journalism

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Marc Steiner Show - By Marc Steiner, Gin Ferrara, Khalilah Harris, Malaika Aminata, Brionna Hollie - Feb. 16 (Interview) - NewsTrust is an online social network that seeks to help people identify quality journalism. We take a look at how this works by discussing coverage of recent events surrounding the Superblock development in downtown Baltimore, and the movement to save Read's Drug store, site of an early civil rights sit-in, from being demolished.

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The Experience Economy

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Brooks - Feb. 15 (Opinion) - What happens when wealth and living standards diverge?

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