Eideard

Ford Focus Electric

There’s a surprising amount of water in pretty much everything – first-gen biofuels, anyone? – and Ford thinks it makes sense to get some of that precious liquid out of the process of making vehicles. Thirty percent, to be exact.

That’s the target that Ford recently set for global water reduction, per vehicle, by 2015. It’s just the latest in a reduction effort that has been going on since 2000, when the company started its Global Water Management Initiative. Ford claims it’s already reduced the water used per vehicle by 49 percent between that year and 2010. The 30 percent reduction target is going to be compared to the company’s 2009 levels.

How does the water get cut? By using something called Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) machining (aka dry-machining) and by paying special attention to ways to treat and reuse “wastewater,” to cite two examples Ford offers. Dry-machining, “lubricates the cutting tool with a very small amount of oil sprayed directly on the tip in a finely atomized mist, instead of with a large quantity of coolant/water mixture.” The end result? Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that don’t need to be sent through a Ford factory.

When looked at overall, Ford cut its water use by 62 percent between 2000 and 2010, which equals 10.5 billion gallons.

The amount of water used in conventional coolant/water mixtures is daunting. Though we all tremble over the task of diminishing our addiction to petroleum, our reliance upon water in industrial processes threatens individual and social water consumption at a truly scary rate.

Disclaimer: I own enough Ford shares to pay for a set of tyres – if I owned a Ford.

So here we are — the last day of 2011 and the end of the first year of me writing my occasional newsletter, Om Says. Being on a break, I decided to not read the web and instead go analog and read a lot of books to nourish my mind. For me, it was an enjoyable year of writing these newsletters and I have picked out 12 stories from the archives that I feel are something you might want to revisit during the New Year’s weekend. Happy 2012, everyone.

The top story of 2011 that impacted me personally:

Steve Jobs and the sound of silence

Steve Jobs left a big hole not only for his company, but also for the tech industry. In a time when so many companies focus on short-term decisions, Jobs taught us that real success is in taking the long view…

I’d already ordered Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs before it became clear he was dying. That didn’t change the experience of the read – though the book arrived after his death.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vince Cable never has learned to be polite to idiots

Vince Cable has launched an extraordinary attack on “rightwing nutters” in America who are trying to block the raising of the US government’s debt ceiling and who are, he said, a bigger threat to the world economy than problems in the eurozone…

He said: “The irony of the situation at the moment, with markets opening tomorrow morning, is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few rightwing nutters in the American Congress rather than the eurozone.”

Negotiations on raising the US government’s debt limit above its current level of $14.3 trillion collapsed in acrimony late on Friday over details of a package of spending cuts and tax rises that would help to pay for such a move…

A visibly angry Barack Obama attacked the Republican speaker of the house, John Boehner, for refusing to return his phone calls and said he had been “left at the altar” in trying to reach an agreement. Most experts agree that if the US were to default on its debt payments, stock and bond markets worldwide would plunge, threatening a new great recession. The deadline for agreement is just over a week away, on 2 August.

On the crisis in the eurozone, Cable said the coalition government wanted to see the euro succeed, even though Britain was not a part of it.

With GDP figures this week expected to suggest that growth has stalled, the senior Liberal Democrat conceded that the state of the economy was “not great”.

“It is not surprising that it isn’t great because of the problems we inherited,” he said, while dismissing the idea of easing the coalition’s austerity measures. The UK was in a “German rather than Greek” position because there was confidence in the country’s finances, he said…

The same fools who think the United States operates in a vacuum are twins to those who think nothing should change in how the American economy functions, e.g., they want dependence on consumer spending, ballooning housing prices, reliance on credit spending to continue to rule the way our nation lives.

Just us folks, that’s all. No Wall Street analysts or Congressional/White House campaign organizers. Not anymore.

Honda Motor Company has announced its 2020 CO2 emissions reduction targets to address climate change and energy issues. Honda said its global environmental slogan will be: “Blue Skies for Our Children.”

Honda has been pursuing its own environmental targets; in 2006, Honda set a goal to reduce global CO2 emissions from use of its motorcycles, automobiles and power products by 10% by the end of 2010 compared to year 2000 levels. In 2010, the goal was attained by all products.

Honda said it has now set a goal to reduce CO2 emissions from its global products by 30% by the end of 2020 compared to year 2000 levels. Furthermore, in addition to reducing CO2 emissions during production and supply chain, Honda said it will strengthen its efforts to realize reductions in CO2 emissions through its entire corporate activities. Honda will also strengthen its efforts in advancing technologies in the area of total energy management, to reduce CO2 emissions through mobility and people’s everyday lives.

The new global environmental slogan and symbol will be used with Honda’s internal and external environmental activities and communications around the world.

Anyone surprised to see an automobile company with higher environmental standards than Congress? Not so incidentally, one with a record of delivering on what it promises.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

For decades the United States attracted more than a quarter of all foreign students in college or graduate education. Recently that has begun to change. While the continuing boom in study overseas — an explosion largely unaffected by the economic downturn — means that the number of foreign students going to the United States has continued to grow, the U.S. share of the foreign student market has fallen to just 18.7 percent, according to the most recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Meanwhile countries like Australia, Russia and New Zealand have all seen their share of the market rise sharply.

But behind the numbers and the winners and losers lies a more complex story of a rapidly changing international landscape in which the old pattern of a “brain drain,” in which rich countries skim off the talent from the rest of the world, is giving way to a “brain exchange,” in which students complete part of their education at home and part abroad, often working overseas as well before ultimately returning home.

“Increasingly the difference is that the traffic works both ways,” said Jamil Salmi, an official who follows education issues at the World Bank. “In the past you had a clear hierarchy of sending and receiving countries. Now the flows are more complex, going in many directions…”

In more recent times the United States and Britain have long been dominant. “Partly because of quality,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the analysis in the education directorate at the O.E.C.D. “But also because they were the first movers in this market. Now there is quite a lot of competition…”

Rising prosperity is another contributor to what Ben Wildavsky calls “the globalization of knowledge.” He points to “China and South Korea, who are trying very hard to build world-class universities. Those are both countries that traditionally sent a lot of students to the U.S. And they still do.”

Thanks in part to massive government investment in elite institutions like Tsinghua University in Beijing and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “China now receives more foreign students than they send overseas,” Mr. Wildavsky said…

There are immediate economic benefits to the winners in this global competition. “Full-pay students also make a significant contribution to a country’s educational bottom line,” said Mr. Wildavsky. Education is now Australia’s third-largest export, directly behind coal and iron ore. But in the long term, Mr. Wildavsky said, the spread of high-quality education, and the creation of new knowledge, should benefit everyone. “Chinese research may well provide the material for innovation by American entrepreneurs — or those from other nations,” he said.

Globalization of education will be one more nail in the coffin of parochial politics, nationalist concepts which often misdirect learning into temporal and sectarian dead ends.

Another reason, I guess, for reactionaries, even some conservatives – to fear the Internet and free access to information on a global scale.

Last month was the warmest June on record worldwide, according to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Warmer-than-average conditions were present across nearly all continents, including much of the United States, according to the organization’s State of the Climate report…

Although global sea surface temperatures ranked the fourth-warmest on record, the combination of land and sea anomalies pushed June 2010 past June 2005, previously the warmest June on record, the report said. June was also the fourth consecutive month in a row of record warmth worldwide…

June also marked a record low in Arctic sea ice — the 19th June in a row the sea ice has been below average.

“This is important, because sea ice reflects incoming solar radiation back to space,” said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward. “Without the normal extent of sea ice in the Arctic, we can expect more radiation to be absorbed into the ocean, leading to more melting. It’s what we call a ‘positive feedback.’” The amount of sea ice in the Arctic has been steadily declining since 1990.

Warmer-than-average temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, also known as El Nino, have been contributing to the warmth. La Nina conditions — cooler-than-average temperatures in the same region — are beginning to set in, which could prevent more monthly records from being set. However, La Nina combined with record-setting warm Atlantic sea surface temperatures is expected to fuel an active Atlantic hurricane season.

The announcement of June’s record-setting warmth comes during a period of extreme heat in the United States and Europe. Excessive heat warnings have been topping weather headlines in the United States for more than two weeks now, and Europe has been shattering temperature records as well, with a heat wave through the first half of July. Eastern Europe has seen the most significant temperatures, although much of the continent has experienced above-average heat.

Just in case you didn’t notice.

The mobile satellite services provider Iridium has ordered 81 spacecraft to upgrade its global network.

Thales Alenia Space of France will build the satellites – 66 to form the operational constellation, the remainder to act as spares.

The order makes the Iridium Next venture the biggest commercial space project in the world today.

The $2.1bn deal has largely been underwritten by the French export credit guarantee organisation, Coface. The overall cost of the Iridium Next project is likely to be about $2.9bn, much of which the company expects to finance out of its own cash flow…

Iridium, which allows subscribers to make a phone call and data connection anywhere in the world, began operating in 1998 but soon ran into financial difficulties.

It was purchased out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2000 by investors who paid a fraction of the cost of setting up the first constellation.

Today, the company, which is based in McLean, Virginia, has about 360,000 subscribers worldwide, earning revenues amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Just under a quarter of those revenues come from US government and Department of Defense contracts.

Rock on, Iridium. Most geeks only remember the failure of the original company and haven’t a clue about the current successes.

Yet, part of properly equipping a whole range of folks from global commercial travelers to journalists to spooks – is a satellite phone.

Every autumn, as predictably as falling leaves, flu season descends upon us. Every spring, just as predictably, the season comes to a close. This cyclical pattern, common in temperate regions, is well known, but the driving forces behind it have been in question.

Do existing strains die off each spring, only to be replaced each fall by new founding strains from other parts of the world, or does a “hidden chain of sickness” persist over the summer, seeding the next season’s epidemic?

A genetic analysis by University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow Trevor Bedford and colleagues at U-M, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Florida State University reveals that in the United States, not all strains of influenza die off at the end of winter; some move southward to South America, and some migrate even farther.

“We found that although China and Southeast Asia play the largest role in the influenza A migration network, temperate regions — particularly the USA — also make important contributions,” Bedford said. Rather than dying off at the end of our flu season, many strains simply move on to more favorable environments.

Growing knowledge about patterns of flu migration eventually may make it possible to tailor vaccines to particular locations, Bedford said.

“We found, for instance, that South America gets almost all of its flu from North America. This would suggest that rather than giving South America the same vaccine that the rest of the world gets, you could construct a vaccine preferentially from the strains that were circulating in North America the previous season. As we gather more data from other regions, this could be done for the entire world.”

All the more reason to develop a universal flu vaccine – even if it needs to be tailored geographically.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The Obama administration has unveiled a new national security doctrine that would join diplomatic engagement and economic discipline with military power to bolster America’s standing in the world.

Striking a contrast to the Bush-era emphasis on going it alone, President Barack Obama’s strategy called for expanding partnerships beyond traditional U.S. allies to encompass rising powers like China and India in order to share the international burden.

Faced with a struggling economy and record deficits, the administration also acknowledged that boosting economic growth and getting the U.S. fiscal house in order must be core national security priorities.

“At the center of our efforts is a commitment to renew our economy, which serves as the wellspring of American power,” the wide-ranging policy statement said.

Obama’s first official declaration of national security goals, due to be released in full later on Thursday, pointedly omitted predecessor George W. Bush’s policy of pre-emptive war that alienated some U.S. allies…

Read the rest of this entry »