Practical Energy

Tags

adaptable, charger, developing, electricity, energy, free, global, international, journal, Kennedy, kit, LED, light, MIT, NGO, photovoltaic, policy, portable, professor, project, Sheila, sola, world

A hidden gem in the developing world. Almost a privilege many are unaware of: energy harvesting “accessories” that charge mobile phones, medical equipment and light emitting textiles, on the move.

Using sunlight, the NGO Portable Light Project empowers professionals and civilians to dramatically improve the quality of life in countries with little to no infrastructure.

There are a number of projects across the globe, detailed at: http://portablelight.org/profiles, with a focus on enabling local manufacturers to integrate, and use, photovoltaic textiles into locally manufactured “accessories”.

To give you an idea, the NGO’s website quotes: “Six hours of sunlight fully charges the battery, which can provide over 20 hours of LED light.” This is the sort of energy capturing technology I would happily purchase…

Although the organisation led by MIT professor Sheila Kennedy is scaling up manufacture, existing market limitations to renewable energies might make it a little while before these solutions are mass produced. I do hope this technology, as well as advanced versions of Tesla’s discoveries, eventually work to everyone’s advantage. There are so many sustainability benefits to them… I also hope the “casing’s” manufacture will largely remain within developing countries, enabling employment and maintaining culture specific designs… without exploiting local workforces and disintegrating family support nodes. “Call me naive!”, said the incorrigible cynic.
More info available from The Global Journal here.
[Image source: Moss, A. 2012. Let there be (portable) light. Shape-shifting solar textile technology. The Global Journal, July-August 2012, pp. 60-65.]
[Image source: Portable Light Project. [Online] Available from: http://portablelight.org/images/downloads/PL-PROFILE-ENERGY-ENTREPRENEUR.pdf Accessed: May 2013].

Volatility Heatmap

Tags

banking, data visualization, dow jones, graphs, heat, investment, map, returns, standard deviation, variability, variance, volatility

This is an Excel generated “Volatility Heatmap” I created in the past and re-enlivened/recalculated. On a scale from green to red, it represents the level of price variability on each given week. The more red it gets, the less predictable or less stable the index price was.

I had a mind to do this for sometime as I thought recent events would likely replicate the “mad” volatility of the 30′s.

Using Dow Jones Industrial Open and Close price data* (rather than Highs and Lows) from 1928 to 2011, the map is the plotted volatility of weekly returns per year in Excel using conditional formatting against defined bins of standard deviation values.

The fact is that the Dow Jones Industrial (DJI) in recent years has shown high levels of volatility but not the same, sustained, drastic “price jumps” it endured in the 1930’s. Likewise, looking at this logarithmic plot of the DJIA, the sharpest and most recurrent “dents” (peaks and troughs) per year, are still those of the 30’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DJIA_historical_graph_to_jan09_(log).svg

Not to say that current years haven’t been a nightmare for investment banking but the DJI has seen worse times… Hopefully decisions will prop up soon that will address and stabilise US and EU debt and reinstate some market confidence before a 30’s-like rollercoaster.

Some notes from the ^DJI Volatility Heat Map:
• Each column representing a year and each row representing the weeks of the year from 1 to 52 (calculating but not plotting leap year weeks), volatility tends to be higher during the second half of the year.
• The 30’s was cumulatively more volatile than the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s put together.
• Volatility clustering shows best either side of extreme volatility figures (red cells).

The companies comprised in the DJIA (Wikipedia):
3M DuPont McDonald’s
Alcoa ExxonMobil Merck
American Express General Electric Microsoft
AT&T Hewlett-Packard Pfizer
Bank of America The Home Depot Procter & Gamble
Boeing Intel Travelers
Caterpillar IBM United Technologies Corp.
Chevron Corporation Johnson & Johnson Verizon Communications
Cisco Systems JPMorgan Chase Wal-Mart
Coca-Cola Kraft Foods Walt Disney

* Data from Yahoo! Finance. Weekly, ^DJI price data in USD from 1928 to 2011 (September).
* Feel free to post a comment for a copy of the excel sheet.

Heat Map: http://alejandraarroyo.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/volatilityheatmap_.png

^{*This post was first published in Sept 2011.
Please note all this means is that the companies in the ^DJI didn’t endure as much variability as in the 30′s. Not necessarily the same for all markets.}

“Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama”

Tags

buddhist, compassion, Dalai, event, kindness, Lama, lectures, London, love, nature, of, peace, university, westminster, wise

There is plenty of info about the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Westminster this Tuesday [bit.ly/L4da4l] and plenty more about his recent appearance with Russell Brand.

In abstract terms, my experience of the Dalai Lama’s two lectures at Uni was kindness, simplicity and compassion and more importantly, the experience of a person with a genuine capacity to laugh at himself and trust his environment.

Although I was skeptic of this religious figure, I am now having trouble relating to the “purely religio-political purpose” posts and articles everywhere. 
Mostly because my instinct after attending these lectures is that, ultimately, he is the one using this religiously and politically funded persona to remind audiences globally of our core _and most valuable_ rights and responsibilities.

A result of the above is that this makes him one of the very few remaining global voices that genuinely and actively promote peace and communication.

The tour-de-force is in the fact that very few individuals/institutions can genuinely have anything against his persona and even then, because of his humble and universally-positive attitude, there is nothing they can do to discredit him. Everyone in fact, needs him to remain as popular and powerful a voice as he is. No entity can be seen to oppose this kind man without incurring distrust towards themselves.

The message
A few articles touched on his presence at both lectures and others on his capacity to remain positive. Most speak about the lectures’ topic. There is little reason for me to go over the latter since, to me, his message focused on the importance of every individual doing their best to improve themselves within their personal and physical reach. No more, no less.

Two sentences that come to mind as I type this went along the lines of:
“Education is about bridging the gap between theory and reality.“
“The Chinese are a very hard working nation.”

From here on, I’ll gladly follow this every-man’s adventures regularly. Not down to religious, political or status interests but rather because he is simply a wise man worth paying attention to/learn from.

Origins

Tags

Apple, asking, brief, comes, Eden, essential, garden, Genesis, greek, hebrew, humour, ideas, infamous, insight, interpretation, lampoon, latin, light, literal, meaning, mistranslations, questions, records, Sacred, science, short, something, texts, this, thoughts, translation, trust, truth, way, why, wicked

I thought I’d duplicate some of the strenuous online-posting effort by writing my “award-winning” ideas as “nuggets”, that is, small WordPress articles to which all are welcome to contribute. Like a KFC bucket but without the calories.

This vegetarian nugget’s worth asks:

“Have sacred texts been translated
into oblivion?”

There are a number of crucial nouns and event descriptions, in well established sacred texts, that are claimed to have been grossly mistranslated over the years.

If the original meaning has been lost in translation, isn’t it easier for readers to misinterpret sacred texts? It would definitely explain why many make fools of themselves trying to match, or adapt, their perfectly valid thoughts with what sound like senseless fairy tales.

Anyone without a theological understanding of the texts is bound to miss the essential “between the lines meaning” on top of the mistranslations.

For instance, the word “Apple” in Genesis… Running a simple internet search such as “Genesis Apple Meaning Eden” will yield countless articles on theories and proven records of mistranslations.

[Image Source: callu.deviantart.com]

Who uses Social Networks?

Tags

data, demographics, demography, facebook, human, insight, network, online, people, research, social, study, twitter, visualisation

So you want to eventually self-publish online and are wondering whether your WordPress and Twitter followers are likely to invest half a pound (i.e.: three quarters of a dollar)?

Widely available and more importantly, readable, demographic studies are popping out everywhere for two reasons:
* Greed
* Google being largely generous with its user-generated, inaccurate data.
* Greed

According to the studies below _provided your users know you and how talented you are_ they are highly likely to download your work regardless of the age they claim to be.

I) Posted a few hours ago, this study identifies most users to be aged 18 to 29 years old:
http://mashable.com/2013/04/12/social-media-demographic-breakdown/
Some more of the same tagging and generalising,…http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-user-demographics_b38095

II ) Also based on data input “à l’américaine” (i.e.: from the US), most users of all ages converge towards claiming they are between 25 and 44 years old.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-demographics-in-2012/

III) Total number of users as of April 2013 and some additional studies in case you want to be more selective about which networks to target. Notable are obviously the largest numbers: Twitter 500 million, Youtube 1 billion, WordPress 74 million blogs http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-how-many-people-use-the-top-social-media/

Next post will ironically be about the dangers of “generalisation”.

Humans Beware (of the chickens).

Tags

chickens, death, demographics, development, diet, eat, evolution, health, hegemony, humour, increase, lampoon, life, politics, population, portion, research, simulation, size, statistical, statistics, strong, survival, theory, thruth, weak

This brief post aims to hypothesise a possible explanation _and likely long-term outcome_ to the following verified fact:

“There are more chickens than humans on Earth.”

Chapter I  Points to consider:
I. Chickens, as their name implies, are the weakest, most gullible wanna-be-svelt-birds on Earth. Despite this, there are about 20 billion¹ of them, contradicting all evolutionary trains of thought.
II. A corollary of the above is that, despite having an unlimited number of likely predators, chickens have managed to reproduce in greater numbers than better organised and equiped races. Examples of which are: lions, wolves, and most notably: humans.
III. Like humans, chickens can be driven to eat themselves to death.

Chapter II  Hypothesis:
Considering the above, the most likely reason why chickens have survived is: symbiosis. There seems to be a natural, unspoken, agreement between predator and prey to exchange: “countless lives against survival insurance.”
1. What the chickens let go off: deaths by the billions every year to satisfy the shared, uncontrollable urge to eat.
2. What the humans promise: to ensure the survival of the Gallus Domesticus by housing, feeding and reproducing them by any means necessary.

Chapter III  Likely long-term outcome:
Total and absolute world domination by chickens. As humans are driven into suicidal eating habits, the chickens learn governmental patterns to ensure their ultimate, and independent, survival.
God will be a chicken and the “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” question will be attributed an irrefutable answer.

Conclusions and further research:
The hegemony of the chickens is most likely (99.99% likelihood), long term.
Most statistical models verify this fact by factoring in evolutionary theory independents with live population data which ratios to about 3:1, chickens per human being.

Future research includes practical sampling, and derived estimations, of cognition variations in chickens against data gathered in the 50’s. Sample chickens will be tested in their natural habitat across borders.₂
Research and study suggestions can be sent to chickensrule@theearth.deal
—————————————-
¹ According to Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds, Ed. Perrins, C. N.Y.: Firefly Books, Ltd., 2003. There are circa7 billion human beings although this is near impossible to quantify. Chickens are more forward with their figures…
² Provided cross-border and local research regulations allow it.