Technology
Addicted to Energy: A Venture Capitalist's Perspective on How to Save Our Economy and Our Climate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/09/2009 - 12:43It was over a decade ago, when I lived in Stamford that I used to visit the house of Elton Sherwin. He was a friend from church who shared some of my fascination with using technology to address social issues of the day. Climate change wasn’t as hot a topic back in those days, but we were both interested in how technology could be used to help us more efficiently use energy and he had a fascinating thermostat.
The typical thermostat checks to see if the temperature in a room is less than the desired temperature. If it is, the heat comes on. When the temperature goes above the desired temperature, the heat goes off. It is a very simple device. However, it is not the most efficient way of maintaining the desired temperature of a room. Different heat sources behave different ways. Forced hot air heats pretty quickly once it is turned on and stops heating pretty quickly when it is turned off. Electric heating has a little bit of a lag. It takes a little while for the elements to heat up when it gets turned on, and it takes a little while for them to cool off when they get turned off. Steam radiators can be even worse. It can take quite a while for them to get hot. Then, they stay hot long after the furnace has shut down.
Elton had a thermostat that would learn the behavior of the heating system and more efficiently control when to turn on and off the heat. Add to this the ability to have multiple zones and the ability to set different temperatures at different times, and you could have a much more efficient heating system that would keep all the rooms at much more desirable temperatures.
Elton moved out to California where he has been working as a venture capitalist for many years. So, it was little surprise when I learned about his new book, Addicted to Energy: A Venture Capitalist's Perspective on How to Save Our Economy and Our Climate
I have not had the opportunity to read it yet, but I took a quick look at some sections of it. For example, using the ‘Look Inside!’ functionality of Amazon, I randomly turned to page 85 with suggestion 25: “Post All Utility Bills on the Internet”. This is aimed at State Governments, and Elton observes that “without real data, your state will flounder and waste billions”. He poses questions like how much electricity, oil, and natural gas does each state building use? Who were the architects and HVAC contractors for the building? What is the cost per square foot to heat, cool, and light each building? He doesn’t ask how much each architect or HVAC contractor has contributed to the campaigns of various elected officials, but this is information a good researcher should be able to ferret out to get additional information.
What I like about this idea is that there is something for everyone. For the climate change activist, there is the desire to help governments reduce their carbon footprints. Yet even for the skeptic or denier, there is the aspect of reducing government waste and inefficiency and for the open government activist there is more data being made available for traditional journalists, bloggers, and anyone else who is interested in getting a better understanding of how the government is being run.
It seems like this is a great book to get for friends for the holidays, especially if you have friends running for Governor or involved in Gubernatorial campaigns.
Debugging Wave Server Configuration
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/07/2009 - 11:23Assuming you have gotten your Wave Server up and running, the big problem is managing to federate with other servers. I’ve spent a bit of time talking with various people about this on Google Wave and have had moderate success. With that, let me share a few of my thoughts and experiences with this.
Bright Shiny Tools
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/05/2009 - 10:55While I never was diagnosed with ADHD, my approach to technology these days have felt a little bit like there is some sort of attention deficit disorder. I’ve found myself hoping from bright shiny tool to the next. As I started playing with yet another platform last night, I thought I would bring you along on my latest technological ramblings.
Web Enabling Matlab Analytics
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 13:01Over the past several months, I’ve been working on several projects at Toomre Capital Markets dealing with optimal ways of distributing results of calculations done in Matlab. In previous posts, I’ve written about accessing and storing information from Excel and SQL databases. In this post, I want to look at distributing some of the results via web pages.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/01/2009 - 13:11The month of chasing two hares goes, and a new month come along. I start my blog post with Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, the old childhood invocation of hope for a lucky month. I had too many irons in the fire last month and I didn’t finish my National Novel Writing Month novel. I fell way behind on responding to emails and am generally feeling overloaded.
As much as I would like to, I am not going down to Washington for the FTC roundtable on the future of journalism. I am just too busy. There are also all kinds of emails that I’ve received about events and products that deserve attention. I’m not going to have time to write as much about them as I should, so I’m going to take a moment here to talk about a couple interesting messages I’ve received.
One is from iCyte. It is a add-on to Firefox and Internet Explorer for saving citations. It is similar to Zotero, but the citations are saved online and can be shared for collaboration. It’s interesting to think about iCyte in terms of how it relates to public bookmarking sites as well as how it could be used for social bloggers, like those on EntreCard or Adgitize. It is also interesting to ponder how iCyte could relate to other social networking sites. For example, I’d love to use Portable Contacts to connect to friends on iCyte automatically.
Another item I would like to write more about, but won’t have time before the event is the North Stonington Planning and Zoning Commission Public Hearing about Meadowcroft, a proposed affordable housing project for the town. The North Stonington Affordable Housing Advisory Committee issued a report on affordable housing in North Stonington. Their report provides a great framework for balancing the desire to preserve the character of a town and the need for affordable housing, especially considering the Affordable Housing Appeals Act (CGS 8-30g). While I can’t make it to the meeting, I wish I could and believe that people from other municipalities should take a close look at what North Stonington is doing.
The day is getting away from me as the month starts off with a flurry of activity. Hopefully, the invocation of the rabbits will bode well for all.