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Why Not Put a Wind Turbine on Your Roof?

Wind turbines are cool. The might not be able to replace all the coal power plants in the world, but they're a great example of how old concepts and new technology can be put together like peanut butter and jelly to become a delicious source of power. Mag Wind MW1100They're also a great example of the sort of positive environmentalism that sees efficiency and economic growth as two sides of the same coin. I would go so far as to say that most of the various groups opposing wind farms around the country are really lame. But what if I wanted to join in on the blade-spinning fun, instead of just blathering on and on about it on the Internet? There's a cool-looking rooftop vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) from a company called Mag-Wind that looked really promising when I first saw it late last year. It's compact, doesn't require a tall mast, and it's designed specifically for roofs. Unfortunately, it might not be on the up-and-up. Paul Gipe at Wind-Works.org ran some numbers and he doesn't think the power output they are claiming is possible. There's also some talk of a fake Mag-Wind dealer (not actually authorized by the company) taking a whole bunch of people's money in North Dakota. More interesting discussion can be found at Treehugger. This is unfortunate because I had dreamed up a plan to put one of these guys on top of my roof any then buy a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt. Charging a battery at night is already cheaper than buying gas according to Prius conversions. I'm just the kind of geek who goes out and spends money on sort of thing. Now it is possible that the calculations are off, because no one seems to have been able to make any independent measurements yet. Maybe the assumptions are wrong - for example, when they say 1100 kWh/month in a 13 mph average wind, maybe they are talking about the wind measured in a clear area away from buildings, like you see on the weather report. Because of the "roof effect" the wind actually hitting the turbine would be more than 13 mph. Also, this isn't a completely fictional company, their representatives and distributors have contacted bloggers and other writers here and there. So I guess I'll hold out a little hope and keep an eye out for something to materialize from these guys. In the mean time, anyone have a recommendation for a roof-mounted wind turbine that definitely exists? Maybe the WindCube (man that is cheesy-sounding bad name)? Oh, and here's some footage of various wind turbines in action in Taiwan. Not too exciting, but it shows that some people have working VAWTs up and running. [youtube]n0_lmtfwUYg[/youtube]

Pay More for DRM-Free Music at iTunes

Earlier we wrote about why people will pay for free music. Apple's Steve Jobs wrote that he would happily remove all the DRM locks from iTunes if the record companies would let him. Now one company is. EMI and Apple reached a deal to allow totally restriction-free songs for sale. The kicker is that the songs will cost 30 cents more that the locked-down DRM versions. At ZDNet, they think the success of this move rests on three factors: will this bring in more customers, will the new customers stop file trading, and is the extra $0.30 per track worth it to the record companies? I think the first question is a good one but the last two miss the point completely. The problem here is the way the issue is framed: the record companies have long been more concerned with stopping file trading and suing "pirates" than actually making money. File trading is here to stay. The nature of the Internet makes it a technological inevitability. You cannot sue a whole technology out of existence. Whether or not EMI (or any of the other major companies) allows DRM-free tracks to be sold, the minute one person buys a CD the whole entire system of locks and encryption and watermarks and whatever else has been completely broken. So what do you do? You figure out why people are using Napster or whatever to download songs, and then you compete with it by offering a better value. No one was even willing to try selling song downloads until Jobs convinced them to, and iTunes has been able to sell billions of tracks. I'm not sure the higher price is such a good idea. I agree that DRM reduces the value of the song downloads. But you have to look at the bigger picture: iTunes is still competing against free mp3s on peer to peer networks. I think Apple picked the $.99 price point for logical psychological reasons - it's much easier to justify spending the money if it's not even a dollar. In any event, this is a good move and I think both iTunes and EMI will see real benefits from this.

How Can a Hummer Be Better for the Environment than a Prius?

Earlier one of our writers stumbled on a report that claimed gas-guzzling Hummers were better for the environment than hybrids like the Toyota Prius. This is one of those great stories that everyone loves - where the conventional wisdom is wrong, and we can all have a good laugh knocking someone or something off it's high horse. This story has been passed furiously around the Internet for a week or so, by email and blog, featured on Digg and Slashdot. It's a good anecdote about unintended consequences and a little boost to Hummer owners who are sometimes criticized for their very conspicuous consumption. It's also pretty much a load of crap. But how can that be? The writer did a bunch of research, and came up with numbers and formulas. Lots of people saw it and voted with a thumbs-up in Reddit or StumbleUpon. Welcome, dear readers, to the world of white papers and press releases. Let's say you had a conclusion you wanted to support, or clients you wanted to flatter. You do a bunch of research, finding information that backs your conclusions. Now what to do with it? You can try presenting it at a conference or submitting it to an academic journal, but then you run a risk. The risk is that peer review will knock it down. The scientific method has a key difference from the method mentioned above - instead of creating a conclusion then finding evidence, you create a hypothesis, gather all the evidence, then form your conclusion. Take this pesky detail and add a dash of scrutiny by experts in the field and you have a pretty good recipe for coming up with useful theories and knowledge. The recipe just won't make the muffins come out exactly the way you want them every time. So what do you do with this research? Put it in a white paper and/or type up and good press release. The term "white paper" used to refer to government policy documents, but now it's often used to mean a report by a company or individual in an industry intended to inform and persuade customers and partners. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, so long as everyone knows that the purpose of the document is often to persuade or sell something, not to impartially report on all the facts. IT workers have become very familiar with the uses of white papers since we are constantly bombarded with them. They are notoriously available to prove nearly any point you want to make. Is Oracle the fastest database system? You can probably find 20 white papers that say so authoritatively and conclusively. Is Oracle bloated and inefficient? Look, there's 20 papers that say so authoritatively and conclusively. They aren't all worthless, because each one might give you some good factual information. It's up to you to find and use what you need without drinking the Kool-Aide. The use of email by lots of people outside the IT realm and recently the hug number of non-IT bloggers has given press releases and white papers some new possibilities. They can be spread around the world in record time and quoted by a 1,000 blog posts as if they were primary sources. Notice that this report on the Prius and Hummer is 450+ pages. How many people, do you think, read all 450 pages? There are a number of problems with this report that make the conclusion that Hummers are green and Priuses are baby- seal-clubbing smog machines hard to swallow. For one thing, it assumes that a Prius will only last 109,000 miles, which is lower than some parts of the warranty in California and similar states, while extending the life of a Hummer H1 to 379,000 miles. Plenty of Priuses have already passed 200,000 miles, often working in taxi fleets. It also mentions the use of Nickel in the batteries and the damage Nickel mining did to Sudbury, Ontario. The batteries are warrantied to 100,000 miles Nickel is recyclable. Sudbury has done a great deal to mitigate past environmental damage and is no longer a wasteland. As the TrueDelta blog points out, the cost of ownership numbers are amazingly high for all the vehicles in the report. If Priuses cost this much to build and operate, we have to assume that Toyota is taking a huge loss on every one sold, and in fact the entire auto industry is grievously undercharging us. There are a number of other problems with the report, but others have already done a pretty good job outlining them. Probably the biggest problem is that the source data is not available for review, since it is considered valuable intellectual property by CNW research. So what's the answer to the question posed in the title? How can a Hummer be better for the environment than a Prius? By using whatever methodology you want, using whatever data you want, and closing your research up from peer review, that's how. And what's the lesson for today? It's certainly not "don't believe everything that you read," because that is glib and cynical without being precise enough to be useful. Here are some thoughts that might be a bit more practical:
  • White papers and press releases are fine, but keep in mind they are often intended persuade you or sell you something.
  • Starting with a conclusion makes research easier, but doesn't validate your conclusion.
  • Digg, email forwards, and 1,000 blogs do not count as peer review.

Prius vs Hummer and How to avoid getting Hacked

I was just browsing around the internet and I happened to stumble upon One Man's Blog and I found some interesting things out that I wanted to share with all of you beautiful people.

The first point of interest is about the environmental friendliness of hybrid cars. As you may or may not know, this is a subject dear to my heart, so I was kinda bummed to learn about this, finding that the way hybrids are produced is overall much worse for the environment then just burning a little more gasoline. Check out the whole blog here.

The next topic, how to avoid getting hacked is something that everyone should read. I know, people never think that they will be the ones to get hacked but it can happen to anyone, as this guy points out. He gives some pretty good advice on how to avoid being hacked by picking better passwords and even links to Microsoft's site that helps you test the strength of your passwords.

Finally, the Real Reason CD Sales Are Falling

For years, the representatives of the recording companies have issued predictions of doom and gloom for their own industry.  Since suing Napster in 1999 they have fretted over copyright infringement and piracy.  According to the RIAA, file sharing costs the industry $4.2 billion per year. But now CD music sales are down 20% from 2006.  Has file sharing finally destroyed the music industry?  I doubt it.  Even if those lawsuits were having the chilling effect they are intended to spread, shutting down every P2P network on the planet, CD sales would be suffering. Why? It's tempting to say there's no good new music, and that the record companies have brought this on themselves by promoting the Brtiney Spears' of the world.  But I'm sure there's good music out there somewhere, and this sounds more like a subjective criticism than a real hypothesis. What if albums are not just competing for your dollar against other albums?  Most people only spend so much money on entertainment or media, and CDs now have to compete against DVDs and video games.  Most people only spend so many hours a day consuming media, and music has to compete with TV, the Internet, and cheap cell phone minutes. I'm not the first person to think of this, I've seen this brought up on blogs and in forums like Slashdot.  But it has always struck me how little coverage this idea gets in the mainstream press, even the business press.  Finally Aaron Pressman from Business Week has put some hard numbers to the notion that CDs are losing out to other media. His source?  A report from the MPAA, hardly a den of piracy-loving communists.  Time spent on entertainment rose 4% between 2001 and 2005, which doesn't even match S&P 500 growth rate.  People spent less time per week listening to music and more time with TV and the Internet. This tracks pretty closely with my experience (and I realize that this is just anecdotal).  In the early and mid 1990s, I spent a good percentage of my entertainment money on CDs.  As videos started to fall in price around 1995 or so, I bought a few here or there.  Then DVDs hit is big around 2000 or 2001.  Soon after that DVDs of television series started appearing and falling to  $20-$40 a season. My CD spending has slowed to a trickle.  I have never been much of a P2P MP3 pirate, and I never even bothered to install Napster.  I am, on the other hand, a big proponent of downloading all the great free MP3s that bands and labels make available.  I also still listen to some of the same music I bought in the 1990s, now ripped to my hard drive. I only have so many hours in a day and although I can listen to CDs while surfing the Internet, I'm not sure I want to put them in my computer anymore, for fear of rootkits. So where does this leave the music industry?  No doubt they will continue to sue 9-year-olds and disabled retirees, and litigating against technological change is not a good business model.  Maybe the open-source-loving interweb hippies are right and bands will promote themselves using MySpace and YouTube and keep a much bigger piece of the profits.  Maybe not. What they are doing right now, though, isn't working.  It's the limits of human consumption and the invisible hand of capitalism they should fear, not some kids with cable modems.