March 8
Personalized Energy
Further to my January post Home is where the Batteries Are, below we have MIT Prof. Dan Nocera talking about "personalized energy." His key point is to shift our perspective on energy generation from one of centralization and infrastructural distribution using massive coal, nuclear or hydroelectric facilities, to a system of individual production and storage. Using a metaphor of how computes evolved from expensive mainframes to individual laptops, he extrapolated that the energy demands of 2050 can not possibly be served by massive centralized infrastructure. Instead, he offers up the idea of the "home as battery", both producing and storing the energy it will require. At the heart of his vision is a system that uses a novel means of splitting hydrogen from water using solar energy, allowing water to become the fuel of the future.
February 15
January 11
The Americanization of Mental Illness
The New York Times writes that the Americanized view of mental illness, which minimizes locally and culturally defined terms and symptoms in favour of a "melting pot" of universalized, scientifically knowable and defined disorders, has begun to colonize the world:
In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill -- doctors or shamans or priests —- inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.Privileging an understanding of mental illness as something biologically rooted minimizes a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the disease as it relates to cultural expectations, daily living arrangements, and the way in which a person may express themselves to others. Depending on the social context, such communication may be variously appropriate or inappropriate, recognized or unrecognized, legitimate or illegitimate, normal or bizarre. As the article notes, "a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions -— the idiosyncratic cultural trappings -— of the mind that is its host." The importance of culturally-specific understandings of mental illness is detailed in the article, ultimately concluding that "As Western categories for diseases have gained dominance, micro-cultures that shape the illness experiences of individual patients are being discarded.”
That is until recently.
For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders —- depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them —- now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.
Adopting a cross-cultural and locally contingent appreciation of mental illness is a powerful reminder that the bio-medical model, which seeks to locate a specific biological disorder for mental expressions that are innately human, is as likely to confound the opportunities for recovery as it is to support it. And further, that prescribing a pill is no silver bullet or easy solution.
01:32 AM
January 3
Synaesthetic Simulations
The Devil's Tuning Fork is an experimental game that asks what the world would look like if you saw through your ears. The environment is illuminated by sending out pings of sound which reverberate off objects in space through a synaesthetic take on echo location.
10:43 PM
Home is where the batteries are
Panasonic recently announced the development and marketing of a home battery system beginning in 2011. The battery reportedly stores enough energy to run an "average home" for a week, presumably including refrigerator, microwave, computers, electric range, lighting and heating.
The advantages of such a distributed system of energy storage are multiple. Our centralized, on-demand model of energy generation and distribution requires overcapacity to manage peak usage while also wasting vast amounts of energy through long-distance transmission. Centralized systems are also vulnerable as single points of failure due to accidents or weather, rely on expensive and environmentally dubious fuel sources (coal, gas, uranium) and are expensive to build and maintain. In contrast, an energy grid based on localized, distributed storage systems could be drawn upon to smooth-out periods of peak demand and reduce loses to transmission. Home batteries would also make micro-generation of wind and solar more attractive, allowing the homeowner to store excess energy when production is good, cover their needs during intermittent periods of non-generation, and thereby encouraging such home systems to be built in the first place -- further reducing demand on centralized energy production systems. Distributed systems of energy storage are also fault tolerant. Neighbourhood grids could be developed to store and share power when transmission is interrupted or unavailable. And finally, home energy production would make consumers sensitive to their energy footprint.
Panasonic intends to sell the storage technology with a home monitoring system allowing users to manage their power consumption. Such technology would help build a "smart grid" where consumers could pre-program their system to sell power back to the grid when prices are high (such as during periods of peak demand) and store power when prices on the grid are low.
Some details are unknown about the system. An "average home" in Japan consumes 448kWh/month (kilo-watt hours per month) while consumers in the United States average 936 kWh/month and Canada 921 kW/h per month (figures from the US Energy Information Administration and the Wikipedia entry on per-capita power consumption).
As well, Panasonic is relying on Lithium-Ion battery technology which a physicist at the University of Louisiana blogs as requiring a 3000lb refrigerator-sized storage unit. Li-Ion technology is also faces a limited number of drain and recharge cycles, perhaps requiring the battery to be replaced (or reconditioned?) every few years and which might inhibit the economic benefits despite the obvious ecological benefit. Nonetheless, a distributed system of home energy generation and storage, coupled with a "smart-gid" for power sharing, is clearly a significant way to encourage micro-generation and reduce reliance on massive and environmentally destructive power plants.
10:14 PM
December 31
2010
"We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic."03:50 AM
-- E. Merrill Root
