There are those who, for selfish, near-term interests, work hard to obscure the truth and only pretend to be part of the solution. When it comes to products and information, buyer beware.

First, the bad news: LG has been caught cheating by rigging it’s refrigerators to pass an energy efficiency test. It’s not the first time for LG (see Watts In Your Kitchen? ). Seems some people in the company not only cheat, but cheat poorly. On the bright side, the CEO of PG&E and a well-respected environmental scientist have collaborated on a very readable white paper on the science of global climate change and a response that will have a minimum negative effect on the U.S. economy in the short term, and very positive effects for the long term.

As reported in The Sydney Morning Harold, LG was caught with an illegal device in its model L197NFS and P197WFS refrigerators. The illegal device kicks the refrigerators into low power mode when it detects the temperature at which the refrigerators are tested in the lab (typically 22°C). So it shows Energy Star-level efficiency in the test, but costs more than $250 (Australian) to operate over a 10 year period than it would if it was energy efficient in the home. LG advertises that the fridges uses 738 kWh per year, when they actually use 876 kWh. There is another problem. The refrigerators can shut off when opened—putting your food at risk of spoiling.

Peter A. Darbee is the Chairman of the Board, CEO, and President of PG&E Corporation. His coauthor of the paper, Climate Change for Policymakers and Business Leaders, is Christopher B. Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C. For Darbee, global climate change is a business challenge; for Field, it’s pure science. Among other things, this is what they agree on.

• Global climate change will increase the severity of extreme weather events (including snow storms on the east coast); severely disrupt agricultural growing seasons and therefore create food shortages; increase scarcity of water for drinking, irrigation, and energy production; and make populated coastal areas vulnerable because of rising sea levels.

• Combating climate change through carbon cap and trade mechanisms, improved energy efficiency, and increased renewable energy will, according to the independent Congressional Budget Office, minimally impact U.S. economic output through 2050, while the positive economic effects of investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and a cleaner, healthier and more stable planetary climate will dwarf these negative effects.

I believe that, given the right information, more than 50% of us will see an environmental problem clearly and do what we can to fix it. But getting to 50% requires leadership—the kind that Darbee, a businessman, and Field, a scientist, are trying to provide through their white paper. Then there are those who, for selfish, near-term interests, work hard to obscure the truth and only pretend to be part of the solution. When it comes to products and information, buyer beware.

Robotic domination in I, Robot

Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near is becoming something of a cult sensation. The 672-page paperback version of the book is ranked 1,494th on Amazon (on par with The Great Gatsby). Recently, Kurzweil announced a Google-backed Singularity University ($25,000 for a 9 week summer program; $12,000 for a 3 day "Executive Program"), lending a touch of academic rigor to an idea that has lived mostly in science fiction. For the time and budget conscious, a rash of Singularity-themed documentaries is now on the horizon.

The Singularity, as I understand it, is the point in time when computers will be smart enough to build even smarter computers, effectively removing humans from the design-build loop of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Kurzweil predicts 2050. That means I'll be 68 when the robots take over!

Predicting the future is no walk in the park, but when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, everyone's packing a lunch. So while I won't try to argue that Kurzweil is wrong (I think he is), it's good to place his predictions in the cultural history of wildly inaccurate AI speculation.

Consider these predictions, both made by outstanding computer scientists actively involved in AI research:

• 1965, Herbert Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
• 1970, Marvin Minsky: "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."

As it turned out, these claims were not even remotely true. In fact, the whole history of AI has been one of boom and bust cycles, the product of misplaced exuberant optimism.

Take, for example, the case of machine translation. During the Cold War, the problem of automatically translating intercepted Russian messages received considerable military funding. A 1954 Georgetown-IBM demonstration (translations of 49 chemistry-themed sentences with a 250-word vocabulary) captured public interest and spawned considerable investment, especially as the researchers claimed that the general translation problem would be solved in 3-5 years. When progress turned out to be much slower, funding was cut, and research all but stopped between 1965 and 1993.

Translation research has seen a significant resurgence, especially since I've been in graduate school (for computer science), mostly due to statistical methods. Rather than frame the translation of Russian into English as a series of rules (translate word R3 into word E3; switch the order of words E2 and E4; etc.) written by expert bilingual humans, research consists of building models trained from many examples of translated sentences (word R3 translates to word E3 with probability 0.6; word E3 appears after E2 with probability 0.2; etc.) so that the translation of a Russian sentence is the sequence of English words with the largest total probability, according to the model. The statistical approach is less ambitious-today's models are too simple to capture all of language's nuances-but far more successful.

Kurzweil's Singularity prediction is based on exponential growth. The idea is that because computers have been doubling in speed every two years or so (that's a factor of 1,000 in just 20 years; 1,000,000 in 40 years) huge paradigm shifts are actually quite close. But aside from the issue that computer chips have plateaued due to limits imposed by silicon's insulation ability and the speed of light (new computers have multiple CPUs), progress in automatic translation does not follow the law of exponential progress. Rather, there have been a few periods of dramatic improvement, followed by long periods of very gradual development. This is the trend for the majority of important AI problems.

So, while speculating about the future is both interesting and important, I'd be wary of anyone trying to sell you $12,000 of it.

The Cartesian Diver: this is a classic demo named after the17^th-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.

Buoyancy is the force that decides whether an object will sink or float, and has had a long and colorful history. As the story goes, the Greek thinker Archimedes was sitting in his bathtub one day when he noticed how the water around him rose when he got in. Suddenly, he realized that he could use the water level rise to measure an object’s volume. Shouting “Eureka!” he burst out of the tub and ran out into the streets stark naked.

Fascination with buoyancy continues into modern times. Astronauts have exploited buoyancy to simulate being in space. Scuba divers use it to turn the underwater world into their playground. And then of course there is David Letterman’s Will it Float?, an entire sketch dedicated to watching what happens when something is dropped into a giant pool of water. Demonstrations at home of buoyancy are easy to come by, too. Below are two of my favorites.

Cartesian Diver

This is a classic demo named after the17^th-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, although curiously, no one seems to know why. Build a miniature model of a submarine here and take control of an object’s depth.

What to do: You need a 2-liter plastic soda bottle, the cap to a ballpoint pen, water, and a lump of clay. Drain the soda bottle and refill with water. Attach a lump of clay to the bottom of the pen cap (enough to weigh it down but not quite to sink it). Drop the cap into the filled soda bottle and seal the bottle’s top. Squeeze! Depending on the amount of pressure you apply, you should be able to make your pen cap dive to the bottom of the bottle and resurface at will.

What’s going on? An object will float or sink depending on how its density (its mass divided by its volume) compares with that of the surrounding liquid. For example, a steel rod is heavy for its size so it sinks. However, if you increase the rod’s volume by trapping an air bubble inside or reshaping the steel into a boat, then you can make it float. In the case of the Cartesian diver there is an air bubble trapped beneath the pen cap. When you squeeze the bottle you compress the air bubble into a smaller volume, and while the diver still weighs the same it now sinks. This is exactly how the ballast tanks of a submarine work, and many fish have an organ called a swim bladder that uses the principle to control their depth.

Layered Liquids

Awesomeness ensues when you mix the effects of buoyancy with liquids that don’t mix. You may already be familiar with the fancier versions of this demo in the form of lava lamps or the oil drop toys you can buy in many trinket stores.

What to do: You need corn syrup, water, vegetable oil, a clear container, and some food coloring. Use the food coloring to dye the corn syrup, water, and oil different colors for increased effect. Pour about an inch of corn syrup into the bottom of the clear container, then gently pour about an inch of water above it, and finally pour the oil atop the water. Each liquid will float atop the one beneath it.

What’s going on? Density can affect whether or not a liquid will float in exactly the same way that it can determine whether a solid object floats. In this example water is less dense than corn syrup, so it floats on top. Oil is less dense than both corn syrup and water, so it floats highest of all. Such layering of liquids can also happen between salt water and fresh water in underwater caves, sometimes dangerously tricking divers into believing there is an air bubble over their heads when in fact there is just a different kind of water.

It was the poorly constructed, mostly concrete buildings that killed most of the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking about the devastation from the earthquake in Haiti, seeing images of collapsed buildings and dead people on the news and in the newspapers. I wonder why less than a hundred people in the Bay Area died in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and perhaps as many as 200,000 have died from the earthquake last month in Haiti. The Transamerica Building in downtown San Francisco swayed about one foot at the top during the Loma Prieta earthquake, but the building was not damaged. We’ve all seen pictures of what happened to Haiti’s Presidential Palace in Port au Prince.

I did an Internet search and discovered the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) at Cal Berkeley. PEER is an interdisciplinary organization that studies the effect of earthquakes on structures and how to build safe structures in earthquake zones. PEER asked a structural engineer, Eduardo Fierro, P.E., of Bfp Engineers in Berkeley, to travel to Haiti and make a preliminary report on the damage there. This is Fierro’s two-hour presentation at Cal Berkeley from the PEER Web site. Fierro knows his stuff when it comes to structures, but in the video he shows that, for him, it is a matter of the heart as well as the head.

I am not a structural engineer, but I remember enough from my mechanical engineering courses to understand the basics of building in an earthquake zone, and the PEER video was like a two-hour refresher course.

I know that in order for a concrete building to handle its own weight (compression), as well as lateral forces (tension), the concrete must be reinforced with steel bars. The steel can handle the tension while the concrete can handle the compression.

I do know that it was the poorly constructed, mostly concrete buildings that killed most of the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Buildings slid off their foundations if they were not bolted to the foundation, floors collapsed because of shear stress and the lack of sheer walls, and poorly reinforced concrete pillars holding up buildings collapsed.

There are no enforced building codes in Haiti. The concrete quality used in buildings in Haiti is poor, and the installation of concrete is done poorly. The concrete is brittle, and the steel bars used to reinforce it are too thin; there are not enough of them; and when a concrete pier comes together with the concrete floor of a second story, for example, the vertical reinforcing bars in the pillars are often not connected to the horizontal bars in the floor, meaning that the building has no integrity.

A few buildings near the epicenter of the earthquake held up well, but this is not because of the quality of the construction. The intact buildings are built on solid rock, so that the rock absorbed the shock of the quake, so the building didn’t have to. Within loose soil, an earthquake causes a phenomenon called liquefaction. The soil becomes like liquid, and passes most of the force of the earthquake into the building above the soil.

Perhaps the saddest thing that Fierro reported was the fact that, already, people are picking up the pieces of broken buildings, and building structures in the same old way. It’s a poor country with a history of conflict and oppression. It may be the best the Haitian people can do, without the help of wealthier nations.

Perhaps no single development of the last century has been more influential or more important than the laser.

The concept of discovery is a powerful sentiment in science. Television’s Discovery Channel and print journalism’s Discover Magazine have folded the word into their identities, and as a child that my iconic scientist was a paleontologist, literally unearthing discoveries of the prehistoric wilderness. Just as motivating, however, is the concept of invention, and perhaps no single development of the last century has been more influential or more important than the laser. In 2010 the laser turns 50, and to celebrate, a group of organizations including the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, SPIE and IEEE Photonics Society have organized a year-long series of events this year dubbed LaserFest.

UC Berkeley has been celebrating LaserFest this past week with special exhibits and events over the weekend at the Lawrence Hall of Science, and a special lecture on Monday the 25th by Roger Falcone, Bob Byer, and Nobel laureate Charles Townes, also at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Theodore Maiman built the first laser out of a rod of pink ruby in 1960. However, the laser’s precursor and underlying principle belongs to Townes. In 1954, he and colleagues constructed the ammonia maser, a stunning proof-of-principle device demonstrating that intense beams of light within a narrow color range could be produced. A flurry of excitement and research efforts followed aimed primarily at developing masers that could work at higher and higher frequencies of light.

As maser research matured the name changed as well. A high-frequency MASER (the acronym stands for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) became the optical MASER. Then at a conference in 1959, Gordon Gould coined it as the LASER. (The L stands for light.) One of the conference’s organizers, Arthur Schawlow, rebutted that these new devices would be more important as oscillators rather than amplifiers, so perhaps they should really be calling it the LOSER (see the recent article in Physics Today). Curiously, substituting the O never caught on.

The laser’s influence in science and society, however, has been dramatic. We use lasers to read our hard drives and play DVDs. We use them to improve our vision. Lasers play an integral role in security systems. They are a crucial component of our ability to keep time accurately. The world’s biggest laser in Livermore could be on the verge of igniting fusion reactions. We even shot a laser at the moon, waited for it to bounce back, and used the information to calculate the moon’s distance to the Earth with unprecedented accuracy.

Time will tell what the laser’s future applications might be. Personally, I am rooting for a sign of extraterrestrial life from the SETI optical telescope. The research collaboration’s website says that “A tightly focused light beam, such as a laser, can be 10 times as bright as the Sun and be easily observed from enormous distances.” Then again, if the aliens do decide to shoot a message our way via laser, let’s just hope that that they don’t decide to crank up the power so high that we all get vaporized.

Napa Valley is a hot spot for solar panel thieves, but the Sheriff's office is on the case.

The economy may be in the tank but business is booming for solar security companies. A rash of solar panel thefts in the Napa Valley, and elsewhere, have spawned an entire new industry, solar security systems.

It seems that as prices for scrap metal have fallen, thieves have turned their attention to something else popping up in rural areas, solar panels. With more than 34,000 solar installations in California, the state is also reporting the most thefts. Napa Valley is a hot spot because of all the solar systems that have been installed in the past few years. "It is a rural area and these solar arrays are often ground mounted and tucked away in the back of vineyards, it makes them an easy target", says Napa Sheriff Deputy Jon Thompson. The Sheriff's office has been giving wineries safety tips for securing their panels. After being hit twice, Michael Honig of Honig Winery in Rutherford got wise and installed an alarm system. The third time, the thieves got caught in the act. Three local suspects were apprehended.

It is an environmental CSI case of the first order because no one knows where he panels are actually going. In some southern California solar heists, the stolen panels have turned up for sale on Craigslist. But in northern California, the stolen panels have yet to be found. Deepening the mystery, the panels are not likely valuable for their component parts raising the possibility of a black market for panels. There is a lot of speculation where they are going. Some say marijuana growers in Mendocino County are stealing panels to hide their electricity use. Others believe the panels are going off shore. In addition to security, federal legislation may come to the rescue. Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents the Napa Valley, has included a provision against solar thefts in the Solar Technology Roadmap Act. The bill would create a national registry for solar panel serial numbers to try to ‘short circuit' the crooks.

Listen to Solar Thieves radio report online.

A blower door is used to see how leaky a home is by depressurizing it. Image courtesy of Jim Gunshinan.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about what it takes to become certified as a Building Analyst through the Building Performance Institute (BPI) (“Am I certifiable?”). A BPI certification or becoming a certified HERS (home energy rating system) rater through the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET) are the most recognized ways to enter the home performance marketplace.

But in several blogs I read on a regular basis and in conversations with building analysts and HERS raters, I’ve found a lot of frustration, even anger, at the slow pace of the economic recovery. Here’s a typical response: “I bought the tools and put time and money into training, but where are the jobs? ” Being certified as a Building Analyst will no doubt make me a better writer and editor. But for thousands of men and women, being certified and finding work in the home performance field is a matter of economic survival.

The problem right now is financing. Who has the money to spend on a home energy upgrade nowadays? The costs can run anywhere from about $2,000 to over $10,000. Municipal governments all over the country are experimenting with financing mechanisms for home energy retrofits—the city pays for the retrofits and recovers its costs through an increase in property taxes, for example. The city of Babylon, New York, charges building owners a tax on carbon emissions, and uses this as seed money to do retrofits. But all these efforts so far have not brought about the expected increase in “green jobs”.

This may soon change. Heard of the “Cash for Caulkers” program? This is the nickname for HOME STAR, a program to provide incentives for homeowners to upgrade their homes to be more energy efficient, healthy, and affordable to live in. The program was born in the minds of private sector advisors, including the Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr; members of Efficiency First, a national advocacy group started in the Bay Area; and others. On November 2, the group presented its ideas at a meeting of the Presidents Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Word on the street is that the plan has the support of the President.

The HOME STAR program would reimburse homeowners for a list of qualified home energy retrofits such as air sealing, insulation, and new, energy efficient lights and appliances. Homeowners would get up to $2,000 for making two upgrades, and up to $3,500 for four upgrades. Homeowners who decrease their energy use by more than 20% would get more money. The government would cover up to half of the costs of a project, and homes would be audited at random to ensure quality work and real energy savings.

So what would taxpayers get for an expected investment of $23 billion over two years? The projected outcome of the program is 500,000 well paying jobs in the depressed construction industry; close to 6-million homes retrofit; billions of dollars in energy savings over the life of the retrofit measures; power plants that don’t have to be built; and according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the equivalent in green house gas emissions reduction of taking half the cars in the country off the road.

Electron microscope image of a hole embedded within a sheet of graphene. The corners of the green hexagons are carbon atoms which form graphene’s crystal structure. Image courtesy of the Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.

Acquiring a sample of graphene is almost comically easy. Start with an ordinary piece of graphite, which is basically the same material that is used in pencil lead. Squeeze it between two pieces of Scotch tape and tear them apart. Repeat several times until pieces of the graphite have been cleaved into sheets no more than a single atom thick. Voila – graphene! Total cost of 1 pencil plus a roll of Scotch tape: about $3.

Simple as this process is, scientists did not even know that single sheets of graphene could exist until 2004. Now that we know that we can make graphene, it turns out that it has some amazing electrical properties and someday might even replace silicon as the most important component in computer circuitry. To that end, researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley have endeavored recently to isolate suspended membranes of graphene for study and image them at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM). Results were published last spring by Çaglar Ö. Girit and others in the Science.

Two aspects of the Zettl group’s recent work have been particularly interesting. First, the TEAM 0.5 microscope not only has the ability to see individual atoms of graphene, but can also take pictures in close to real time. This means that Girit was able to see dynamics of graphene as they actually happened. Other types of microscopy (scanning tunneling microscopes, for example) can take several minutes to get a single picture.

Second, Girit and others centered their images at a hole within the graphene sheet. This allowed them to observe the dynamics that occur at the material’s edge. Such edges can have a notable effect on a graphene sheet’s electrical properties and thus understanding them and controlling them would be crucial in the design of any future technology.

Aside from technological applications, graphene is a theoretical physicist’s dream system because it beautifully combines the dynamics of relativistic particles from space such as neutrinos with the experimental accessibility of an easy system to make and manipulate here on Earth. Girit thinks that this is perhaps the single most exciting aspect of the system.

Only time will tell if graphene will have a long-term impact on society, but this would not be the first time a new discovery has transformed the Bay Area. In 1955 William Shockley moved to Mountain View, CA to found a new startup developing the silicon transistor. His company’s success was ultimately marred by Shockley’s own belligerent personality (“He understood everything except people,” Charles Townes once remarked), but the invention and the industry that grew up around it have revolutionized the region. The Santa Clara Valley’s old nickname, “the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” has long since been whisked away into a memory of a distant time and setting. Today most of us know it only as Silicon Valley. Our children may know the region as something entirely different.

As the high-speed rail inches toward reality, it's encountering a thicket of NIMBYism.

We'd been wanting to do an update on the California high speed rail project for months now. (Here's David Gorn's HSR Quest Radio piece from 9/08.) Luckily, there's no bad time to cover high speed rail. The project is so huge, so expensive, so ambitious and so controversial that you could make a whole beat out of it and stay entertained for a good long time.

But if – like me – you're just taking a dip, the first place to check out is the High Speed Rail Authority site. The Authority clearly has deep pockets when it comes to producing animations of the 432-mile train line. Would that the planning process ran as smoothly as those blue and yellow trains.

Click below to use the interactive map.

Your next stop should be this great primer on the technology and issues surrounding HSR, produced by my TV colleagues at QUEST.

I also recommend Robert Cruickshank's California High Speed Rail Blog. Cruickshank makes no secret of his pro-HSR stance — nor of his irritation at those who've put up roadblocks or expressed concerns — but his site is readable and impressively comprehensive. I guess you can count on the train buffs to track every twist and turn of the most ambitious rail project since the Transcontinental Railroad.

The former Vice President Al Gore was a speaker at this year's Greenbuild International Conference and Expo.

It took me about six hours to travel from my bed in Walnut Creek to the Phoenix Convention Center, the location of this year’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council, and then about an hour more to make my way to the Home Energy booth in the Exposition Hall. Big event, big venue. There are more than 1,000 companies and organizations here, representing every facet of green building, from mulch to windows to lighting to HVAC to water to insulation to… I don’t know the final count, but I heard there are more than 20,000 participants.

Thank goodness I had booked a few appointments. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start. I met Graham Martin, Chairman and CEO of EnOcean Alliance. The Alliance brings together companies from around the world who work in wireless devices. The group got together to ensure that Company A devices could talk to Company B devices. For example, Verve Living System is a lighting control system that allows a person to wirelessly turn on and off all the lights and outlets in a house. Goodbye wasted standby power! It is being used in new construction and is especially appropriate for multifamily buildings, but it can be installed in retrofit buildings.

With Illumra controls, you can turn on and off whatever office lights you want from your iPhone, from wherever you are. And Graham was enthusiastic to show me EnOcean switching devices that need no batteries. The mechanical energy of one finger flipping a toggle switch is enough to power a wireless signal telling your air conditioner to shut down. According to Graham, EnOcean technology will take the smart grid into the home. “ZigBee is great technology to connect homes to utilities because it can use power from the network. But once inside, EnOcean technology uses so little energy that you never even have to change a battery.” Wow, it’s like the Smart Grid is learning to talk. Its first words are “Fight global warming.”

In the evening we were inspired by Vice President Al Gore at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks play baseball. I got to watch from the press box, and we didn’t even have to be quiet. The food was pretty good and the beer was very good and I met some interesting people who write about glass, construction processes, and international trade relations. The “former next President of the United States” warmed up the crowd with some, frankly, corny jokes. There was one about a farmer and a pickup and cow, but I won’t waste anymore of my word count on that. He said, “We have enough ideas and technology to solve three or four global climate crises, but we only have one.” I like his optimism. The former next President called for a new Marshall Plan for energy security. “With the first Marshall Plan, we made sure that there would not be another world war in Europe. There are a lot of reasons why we have gone to war there, and there is a lot of interest in the area of the world that happens to sit on two-thirds of the world’s oil supply. We need to move away from fossil fuels so that we are no longer dependent on other countries for our economic security.”

But it was Gore’s last point that gave me a big boost. “I was thirteen years old when President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon. Most people thought that we didn’t have the technology or the knowhow to do it. “When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the average age of the scientists and engineers manning their stations in Mission Control was 26. That means that they were 18 when President Kennedy made his speech.” I work with people every day who were part of the energy efficiency revolution of the 70s and 80s and who are still going strong. Gore asked for a show of hands of anyone 18 years old or younger. From the press box I saw a lot of hands.