Day: October 23, 2012

Icelanders approve their crowdsourced constitution

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A constitution is a deeply serious thing: the bedrock of a country’s identity. So Iceland’s decision to let the general populace participate in the drafting of its new constitution – via social media such as Facebook and Twitter – was a bold move.

And it seems to be paying off. On Saturday the country held a referendum asking voters six questions about the draft, the first of which was whether they wanted to go ahead with using it as the basis for their new constitution. Two thirds voted yes…

There were two technologically interesting spinoffs of this situation. One was the creation of the Modern Media Initiative…is to turn Iceland into an haven for free speech by inviting media organizations from around the world to host their sites in Iceland’s green data centers and enjoy the country’s strong new protections for whistleblowers and the like.

The other was the constitutional crowdsourcing. Iceland’s old constitution was based on that of former master Denmark and was seen as out-of-date, so 25 citizens were brought into into a Constitutional Council to help create a new one. The council took the ideas raised online by their fellow citizens and delivered the resulting draft in July last year. It took a while to ask the voting public at large what it thought of the result, but Iceland now has its answer to that question.

According to reports, nearly half of Iceland’s 235,000 eligible voters took part in the referendum, and 66 percent of those people said they wanted the new official constitution to be based on the crowdsourced draft.

But that result is non-binding, and the parliament now has to decide whether or not it’s going to turn the draft into reality.

As in the case of Finland’s crowdsourced laws, elected representatives are given the final say over proposals made online. In a representative democracy, that’s pretty much how things should work – if you elect people to represent you, you’re entrusting them with doing just that.

The important thing in both the Icelandic and Finnish cases is that technology is being used to give more normal people a say, while ensuring that the politicians are forced to listen and cannot just sweep popular proposals under the carpet. Because the clever thing with crowdsourcing is that the proposals are public and open and impossible to ignore.

Elected officials can’t just kick the can down the road – unlike some other “leading” Western Democracies. The whole process includes a mandate to complete the process – before the next national elections – in Spring 2013.

Drunk partygoer finds his car – two years later

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A man in southern Germany has been reunited with his car two years after forgetting where he parked…

After a night of drinking in December 2010 and an unsuccessful search the next day, the vehicle’s owner reported his car as missing to the Munich police.

Authorities discovered it by chance last month after a traffic warden noticed that its inspection stickers had expired – 4 km from the spot where the now 33-year-old craftsman originally thought he had parked.

“The weird thing is that it turned up so far away, although the owner was pretty sure of where he had left it,” said police spokesman Alexander Lorenz.

In the trunk were 40,000 euros worth of tools including power drills and electric screwdrivers, Lorenz said.

Cripes. If I carried that much in tools around with me, I’d be sure my wheels had a Lo-Jack or some other GPS locator.

Milestone: Nuclear plant closing because of low natgas prices

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Dominion Resources plans to shut its Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin next year, the first U.S. nuclear plant to fall victim to the steep drop in power prices as rising natural gas production makes some plants uncompetitive.

After claiming hundreds of coal-fired plants, the boom in U.S. shale gas output is now starting to grind down the nuclear industry, with smaller older plants like the 566-megawatt Kewaunee plant first to be affected.

The surge in U.S. shale gas has upended the domestic power market, and this year combined with flagging demand due to the struggling economy to send prices to near 10-year lows. For the nuclear industry, it means the Dominion plant…will be the first U.S. reactor to shut since the late 1990s.

The closing, which did not catch many in the industry by surprise, highlights the struggle of the U.S. “nuclear renaissance…”

Natural gas’ share of total U.S. generation has increased to 30 percent this year from about 20 percent in 2006, while the percentage from nuclear has held steady at about 20 percent.

Power prices in the PJM grid, the nation’s biggest power grid, for the first nine months of 2012 were down almost 30 percent from the same period last year and the lowest since 2002.

While nuclear plants can still produce power more cheaply than natural gas, analysts say future capital investments, which could run into the hundreds of millions or more at existing reactors, might prompt operators to shut some units.

“A number of nuclear units won’t run their 60-year licensed lives if current gas price forecasts prove accurate,” said Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission…

“The determining factor is likely to come at the point at which they need to decide on a major capital investment.”

Anyone who measures the construction cost of a modern nuclear power plant – built in the United States – in millions of dollars instead of billions, is smoking the seeds. Medical marijuana or otherwise.

Escalating costs – for all the reasons that come easily to mind – are the essential factor that turned my support for nuclear power generation in directions like solar power generation. A process which is gradually diminishing in cost.

That natural gas is booming in availability and prices continue to drop or stabilize at historically low levels – is a great reason to hasten conversion of existing coal-fired plants to NatGas and to concentrate on NatGas-based new construction.

L’Aquila earthquake scientists sentenced to six years in jail

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Anyone allowed to sue the Catholic Church because their prayers didn’t work?

A group of scientists are facing six years in jail for manslaughter after providing “an incomplete, inept, unsuitable and criminally mistaken” assessment of risks posed by the devastating L’Aquila earthquake that killed more than 300 people.

The landmark decision on Monday was welcomed by victims and their families but immediately prompted uproar from the scientific community, which contends that there is no reliable way of predicting earthquakes.

The six scientists and a former government official were all members of the Major Risks Committee which met in the central Italian city on March 31, 2009, after several small tremors had been recorded in the region. At the time, they ruled that it was impossible to determine whether the tremors would be followed by a large quake, in a judgment which reassured residents. One of the group famously advised them to relax with a glass of wine. Just six days later, a 6.3 magnitude quake devastated L’Aquila.

On Monday, Judge Marco Billi announced the manslaughter sentence to a packed courtroom in a temporary building erected to hear the case in the still devastated city. He also ruled that the defendants should pay 7.8 million euros in damages, with two million euros to be paid immediately.

The sentencing provoked strong criticism from the scientific community.

Richard Walters of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said he was “saddened” about the verdict, warning that it set a “dangerous precedent”.

“The issue here is about miscommunication of science, and we should not be putting responsible scientists who gave measured, scientifically accurate information in prison. This sets a very dangerous precedent and I fear it will discourage other scientists from offering their advice on natural hazards and trying to help society in this way…”

Just to illustrate the politics of this jurisprudence, family members of some of those killed said the victims had won the case with “heavenly” intervention. Just as national politics in Italy can’t escape the Pope and the Vatican, parochial law is even worse.

Yes, there are a couple of obvious parallels. You can reach back to the bowels of the Inquisition when the Catholic Church was the ultimate arbiter of public good and evil. You can look around you at a gathering of Tea Party politicians and flinch at listening to proposals equally ignorant, determinedly anachronistic and filled with the same self-righteous bile.

Misrepresenting science in the eyes of the law is another part of anti-science, superstition. Worldwide.

Apple’s blasphemous logo under fire from religious fundamentalists

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According to a translation of a Russian news report that’s been kicking around the Web, some conservative believers see the image of the bitten apple as a symbol of Adam and Eve’s original sin in the Bible. Some have gone so far as to cover up the logo and replace it with an image of a cross.

Apparently no one has clued these folks in to the fact that Apple’s name and logo were actually inspired by the legendary piece of fruit that fell on the head of mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton….

Why would that make a difference to some nutball fundamentalist?

New anti-blasphemy laws proposed in Russia’s parliament could conceivably prevent Apple from selling products with its own logo in the country…

If Apple does come to blows with the Russian church or government over its iconic logo, it could find allies within the country. Interfax news reports that the Russian political party Yabloko has been a sharp critic of the efforts to create what it calls a “clerical-police state” that is “deliberately fueling a conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and secular civil society.”

Yabloko might have another good reason to come to Cupertino’s defense in Mother Russia — the party’s name is also the Russian word for “apple.”

Har!

Trekkies married in Britain’s first Klingon ceremony

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A Swedish couple married according to Klingon rituals Saturday at Britain’s first official Star Trek convention.

Josefin Sockertopp, 23, told The Independent she had never seen the Star Trek movies or television shows until she met her husband, Sonnie Gustavsson, 29.

“The ceremony was his idea. I thought about it a lot and then I said ‘let’s do it’,” she said. “It’s a once in a lifetime thing.”

The couple had a legal wedding ceremony in Stockholm on Thursday, the BBC reported. The Klingon ceremony was icing on the cake — including a cake made of three Borg cubes.

“With fire and steel did the gods forge the Klingon heart,” the wedding registrar chanted. “So fiercely did it beat, so loud was the sound, that the gods cried out, ‘On this day we have brought forth the strongest heart in all the heavens. None can stand before it without trembling at its strength.'”

They must have forgotten to transport my invitation.