Serenity now!

The test drive found some kinks still to work out (sometimes the generator becomes not silent, but very, very loud), but this is a pretty exceptionally good review of what could be the car that changes a lot of things—both for the environment and the American automotive industry—when it’s released in nine months.

And here is an accompanying slideshow of Volt porn.

Basically there’s more and more money being spent on live shows and, consequently, more money going to artists themselves. At the same time the labels are being squeezed out of the equation because sales of recorded music are falling.

The Times adds:

It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period—though admittedly not by much—which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered. For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.

Indeed. With the exception of Lars from Metallica and a few others, you don’t get the sense that musicians are the ones leading the charge against file sharing.

Via PSFK.

Designed by Inesa Malafej and Arunas Sukarevicius from Lithuania, the Dancepants converts kinetic energy from running or dancing into electricity for your MP3 player.

More info here.

Why the shrinking cost of solar power may be enough to change our planet’s outlook—especially if it’s introduced first in the developing world.

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do, doesn’t mean it’s useless.” —Thomas Edison

In this second piece on identifying those green technologies that will make our civilization more sustainable, and separating them from those that won’t, the focus is on electric power generation, and the importance not only of reducing the impact of what is being generated today, but also on reducing the impact of what will need to be generated tomorrow.

Whether or not you read the last piece, it is likely apparent to you that stores, websites, advertisements, and perhaps your own home, are becoming crowded with so-called green products, and, moreover, few of those green products are doing much to save our beleaguered planet. Products and services that are a bit greener, a little more efficient, or have a cool, new, Earth-friendly feature, may do a little less harm than their un-green antecedents, and they may sell a few more units for the company that made them, but they are not truly sustainable. We must replace our most environmentally damaging industries and products, not only because our own use of them is doing irreversible, epic damage to our only planet, but because several billion other people who don’t have these things today are striving for their chance to use them too. When they are in a position to get them—the cars, refrigerators, televisions, computers, lawnmowers, hair driers, air conditioners, and alarm clock espresso makers—if those of us who use them today haven’t found environmentally benign replacements for them, we will be in a world of trouble.

We need disruptive technologies to replace these tools of our modern consumer society. Disruptive technologies, a term coined by Clay Christiansen,a Harvard professor and best-selling author on business innovation, are those technologies that succeed at supplanting established, profitable businesses by competing with the established offering on new terms. For example, a laptop computer competes with a desktop not on processor speed, but on portability. Laptops have eroded the market share of the more established and powerful desktops to the point that laptops have become the standard and desktops are mainly purchased for niche applications like gaming and 3D design.

One way of making many of the products mentioned above more benign is by getting the copious amounts of electricity they consume from a more benign source, like the sun. The most common form of solar electricity generation is photovoltaic (PV) panels and films. PV has been around for decades, mostly in the United States and other developed countries, but recent advances in its various technologies, demand created by government subsidies, and the threat of global warming have driven the price of PV down to a fraction of what it was even five years ago. This is good news for PV’s initial customers—Americans and affluent individuals looking for cleaner ways to power their appliances and gadgets—but it is great news for people in parts of the world with few appliances or gadgets to power because there has never been power there before. These are two very different applications of the same green technology. The question is if either will disrupt established forms of power generation and thereby move us towards a more sustainable future.

Much fossil-fuel power generation is used for powering American homes, so this seems like the right place to apply a disruptive alternative technology. However, though PV is powerful enough to do many of the things you need to do in a typical American home, it is not yet powerful enough to run a full size refrigerator, the AC, and a hairdryer, and therefore not a real alternative to grid power in any but the most efficient residences. Residential applications of PV in the United States are mainly luxury additions to big, grid-powered homes, marginally improving the sustainability of an unsustainable type of dwelling and lifestyle, and unlikely to result in the decommissioning of many coal-fired power plants.

Outside of the United States and other well-electrified countries, many people are not served by traditional power grids and are willing to pay for PV’s low power because that is all that is available. In these poor, largely rural areas, PV can mean simply having light at night or the ability to charge a mobile phone. As households and communities expand their PV generating capacity, they can acquire more of the efficient alternatives to standard grid-connected products: LED lights and TVs instead of florescents, mobile phones instead of land lines, netbooks instead of PCs, new kinds of refrigeration, and, if desired, even efficient, battery-powered lawn care tools. Many of these technologies are not yet cheap enough for the rural poor or are not yet the equivalent in performance of their grid-powered relatives, but the market for them (known recently as the “base of the pyramid”) is bigger than all of North America, Europe, and Japan combined, and entrepreneurs and multinationals are rising to the opportunity.

Unlike power-hungry Americans, the rural poor don’t already own legacy appliances that require grid power, and so, counter-intuitively, they are actually a better market, in the long term, for PV. Their hunger is often not metaphorical, but when it is, it might be a hunger for a life with a bit more of the convenience, security, and comfort enjoyed by someone reading this article. Whether they achieve that with PV or with the kind of coal-heavy electricity mix used in the United States remains an open and very important question. Developing countries continue to take on crippling international debt to build out their power grids. Once there is reliable grid power, PV may become a luxury, as it is for most Americans, and thereby not a threat to unsustainable power sources like coal.

Bringing PV to the rural poor, like other leap-frog technologies that allow people and countries to skip rungs on the economic development ladder, is a classic disruptive innovation, where a new technology is playing what looks like the same game (providing power to homes) but on a completely different field, because the incumbent technology can’t play there.

Knowing this, what should we do differently? As noted previously, this is not an academic question. The biggest market in the world for PV is Germany, a highly environmentally conscious, but cloudy, northern, grid-powered country. Though Germany’s aggressive subsidies for solar power have spurred growth in the industry, the installation of PV generating capacity in Germany is an inefficient use of what is today a scarce and valuable technology. Germany could achieve the same environmental benefits (if not all of the attendant electricity price hedging and job creation perks) by subsidizing installations in countries that both have high potential for solar power and an acute need for electricity of any kind. The sunny, equatorial parts of our planet are among its poorest, least electrified parts. Further, they will suffer more from climate change, a global crisis largely not of their making, than will rich parts of the world like Germany. Technology transfers that can head-off a climate-transforming multiplication of the use of coal power in the developing world, can help alleviate poverty, and can begin to make up for the damage rich countries are doing to poor ones through greenhouse gas emissions is the ultimate win-win-win. Pressing your political representatives to bring this approach to the talks in Copenhagen is one of the most important things you can do for your planet. (To find out how to actually do that, read The GOOD Guide to COP15.)

Michael Keating is an environmentalist and entrepreneur living in Brooklyn, NY.

One of her first tests of this concept was in a refugee camp in Kenya. Boing Boing reports:

Shortly after launching Samasource, [Leila] read an Oxfam report that mentioned a Dutch non-profit had set up a computer lab in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. “I thought, how crazy would it be if i can get these refugees to do real work for clients in San Francisco? What if we could prove to the world that these people who have been written off completely as only good for receiving handouts, who are stuck in this camp receiving food rations, can be productive to the global economy?”

She did prove it—her initial trial in the Dadaab camp was a success—and Samasource has been growing ever since. It now has 520 workers doing jobs for a variety of clients in tech and education and getting paid for their services. Head over to Samasource to learn more and help out.

Part one in a GOOD miniseries on the singularity by Michael Anissimov and Roko Mijic. New posts every Monday from November 16 to January 23.

Living to 1,000? Superhuman robots? Matrix-style virtual reality? These staples of science-fiction may become a reality when (or, perhaps, if) the “singularity” happens.

The phrase “technological singularity” was coined by the mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1982. He proposed that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence would greatly disrupt our ability to model the future, because to know what smarter-than-human intelligences would do would require us to be that smart ourselves. He called this hypothetical event a “Singularity,” drawing a comparison to the way our model of physics breaks down when trying to predict phenomena past the event horizon of a black hole. Instead of having a sudden rupture in the fabric of spacetime, you’d have a break in the fabric of human understanding.

Vernor Vinge’s idea of a technological singularity bears resemblance to earlier ideas, such as WWII codebreaker I.J. Good’s “intelligence explosion” concept. Good was quoted as saying, “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” This concept has been explored in (mostly dystopian) science fiction films and novels, such as The Matrix and Terminator franchises.

More recently, a growing number of academics and technologists have began looking at the singularity as a serious prospect in the coming century rather than a piece of science fiction esoterica. If human minds and brains are basically machines that operate according to physical law, they say, then it’s just a matter of time before the principles of these machines are reverse-engineered and implemented on digital computers. Another possibility, thoroughly analyzed by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is that of duplicating human intelligence in a computer by precisely simulating the way our brains process information. If we could implement human minds on computers, we could also speed them up to create a sort of “weak superintelligence”—minds not qualitatively smarter-than-human but significantly faster-than-human.

It may be decades before the technology for smarter-than-human minds develops, but we should consider what it would mean. If smarter-than-human entities do not value humanity, for example, they could cause our extinction. This suggests that advanced artificial intelligence research should be approached cautiously and with the necessity of human-friendly motivational architectures firmly in mind. It isn’t too early to start thinking about this. Just this year, researchers at Cornell University built an artificial intelligence program that was able to independently reinvent the laws of physics merely by observing the swinging of a pendulum. Researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales and England’s University of Cambridge were able to build “Adam,” an artificially intelligent robotic system that formulates its own scientific hypothesis and designs experiments to test them. Though these systems don’t challenge human intelligence for the time being, rapid progress in the field suggests we should start considering the ramifications of the day when our robotic creations learn to think better than we do.

Michael Anissimov is a futurist and evangelist for friendly artificial intelligence. He writes a Technorati Top 100 Science blog, Accelerating Future. Michael currently serves as Media Director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and is a co-organizer of the annual Singularity Summit.

A new tool for computer language analysis can evaluate your mind based on your Tweets (and might help psychologists, too)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or among the molemen, you’ve probably enjoyed the humor of @s–tmydadsays, the popular Twitter account of Justin, who describes himself like so: “I’m 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down s–t that he says.” That s–t consists of cranky honesty like “I need to change clothes? Wow. That’s big talk coming from someone who looks like they robbed a Mervyn’s” and “Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”

Most agree that s–tmydadsays is funny, but did you realize his emotional style is angry, his social style is personable, and his thinking style is analytic, sensory, and in-the-moment? These psychological insights can be gleaned by plugging s–tmydadsays into Analyze Words, a new Twitter-analyzing tool put together by James W. Pennebaker, his colleagues Roger Booth and Chris Wilson, and his daughter Teal. Pennebaker—a University at Texas Professor of Psychology—is a longtime innovator in using computer analysis of language to study how we think.

I asked Pennebaker by email for insight into the s–tmydadsays results, and though he said the sample size was a bit small, “…the analyses catch the emotional tone perfectly. Some serious hostility, depression, and anxiety is in the air. Socially, the writing suggests someone immersed in his social world, with constant references to other people—wife, mother, father, son. In other words, very different from someone who writes about computer components. Low in arrogance because he does not use big words and complex sentences and a high rate of articles—all of which are markers of psychological distance. The valley girl language probably reflects his high use of present tense verbs and punctuation.”

Yes, s–tmydadsays scored high in the social style category “Spacy/Valley Girl,” which is kind of a brain-bender. If you’re equally surprised that this category is included at all, it’s because it can measured—not every emotional, social, and thinking style has reliable linguistic symptoms. As Pennebaker said in a phone interview, “I know what I can measure and what I can’t.” It would be wonderful to measure something like “guilt-riddenness,” for example, but that tendency can’t be quantified yet.

Pennebaker has worked for decades on figuring out just how words and mental states are associated, in an effort to “come up with a way to measure healthy writing.” Starting in the early nineties, he first collaborated with grad student Martha Francis and later with New Zealand immunologist Roger Booth to create LIWC—Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, pronounced “Luke”—which provides the methodological basis for the Analyze Words site. Using language as a window into the mind is as old as listening for Freudian slips, but Pennebaker’s work is groundbreaking in how it links, as he puts it, “low-level words with broad psychological processes.” It turns out that style words (such as articles and prepositions) actually reveal more about what’s on our minds, psychologically and socially, than content words (like dog, airplane, etc).

Many of Pennebaker’s discoveries are counterintuitive, to say the least—particularly with regard to that pesky pronoun “I.” To many, “I” feels like a word of the powerful and arrogant, but it isn’t really: It turns out that women, followers, young people, poor people, depressed people, crappy students, and sick people all use “I” more than men, leaders, older people, rich people, happy people, good students, and healthy people. That paints a clear overall picture: “I” is a marker of low status, mainly because people who are lower status are more self-conscious. (“I” is also used more often by people telling the truth, as well as the worried more than the angry). In looking extensively at President Obama—who critics have incorrectly accused of being in love with the word “I”—Pennebaker found just the opposite: Obama is an infrequent I-user, reflecting self-confidence, coolness, and psychological distance.

President or peon, our words give away emotions and thoughts we might prefer to conceal. As Pennebaker wrote in “The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods” (co-authored with Yla R. Tausczik), “The words we use in daily life reflect what we are paying attention to, what we are thinking about, what we are trying to avoid, how we are feeling, and how we are organizing and analyzing our worlds.” Digital tools like LIWC allow those symptoms to be collected and quantified with tremendous ease. As Pennebaker puts it, “In the amount of time it takes to run a single participant in a social psychology language study, we can now download thousands of personal writings, interaction transcripts, or other forms of text that can be analyzed in seconds.”

That said, Pennebaker emphasizes that while style words are “reflections of what is going on in people’s heads,” but they’re not a tool for getting someone to change their way of thinking. In other words, you can’t ask someone to mindlessly repeat more “positive” words and expect them to become less depressed or suicidal. LIWC’s real use is in detecting problems such as excessive worry or anger and then showing when progress has been made. When we become more mentally healthy, our language changes unconsciously, because we are changing perspectives. The internal world manifests in the lexical world.

Let’s just hope Pennebaker detects minimal “progress” in s–tmydadsays. When it comes to humor, anger and worry are pure gold.

Video by Evan Roth. Via Swiss Miss (via Amrit).