Fixing the Future

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Are Fossil Fuels Impoverishing Middle America? May 11, 2021

Show notes

I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the context of a region of the United States. The region is northern Appalachia, comprising 22 counties in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. And the curse is, as it so often is in the third world, a surfeit of oil and especially natural gas, in this case extractable largely through the relatively new process of fracking.

Here to explain how the resource curse is impoverishing communities in the middle of the U.S. in the middle of the 21st century is Sean O’Leary. He’s a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute and the author of its recent report, “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties: How dreams of jobs and prosperity turned into almost nothing.”

Self-Walking Exoskeletons Apr 22, 2021

Show notes

In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then another. As University of Waterloo Ph.D. researcher Brokoslaw Laschowski puts it, “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.”

But Laschowski and his fellow researchers have been developing a device that uses wearable cameras and deep learning to figure out the task that the exoskeleton-wearing person is engaged in, perhaps walking down a flight of stairs, or along a street, and gets them there, a bit like programming a destination in a self-driving car.

A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation. Available on Spotify and @IEEESpectrum.

Can 5G Close the Digital Divide? Apr 15, 2021

Show notes

Has there been any technology more widely talked about and yet still less understood than 5G? Qualcomm’s Vice President of Engineering, Our guest, John Smee, holds dozens of patents in wireless technologies; his designs and innovations range from CDMA and LTE to Wi-Fi and now 5G. He’ll explain the challenges of 5G—and what 6G will be like. A full transcript of this and all Radio Spectrum conversations are available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts.

A Theory of (Almost) Everything Apr 08, 2021

Show notes

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it just seem that way?

Surely we can all agree that the Industrial Revolution has changed everything. Or has it? One noted economist says there in fact were three industrial revolutions, and only one of them—the second one, from about 1870 to 1914, was important. In fact he largely discounts what we call the information revolution as insubstantial.

If you wanted to study the great trends and transitions of civilization—not just Western Civilization, but all of it—and break it down into epochs, and choose from the various transitions the five or seven most significant ones, and study the interplays of these transitions—which are causes of the others, and to what degree, and why some occur quickly and others—like the electric car—are postponed for a hundred years; if you wanted to do all that, it would take a lifetime of study.

In fact, you’d have to write ten or thirty books each one of which looks at some aspect of our world from a height of 30,000 feet, and then write an eleventh or thirty-first book that was the encapsulation of all that wisdom.

That certainly seems impossible. The last true Renaissance person, someone who knew pretty much all that was known at the time, might have been Aristotle, with asterisks for Franklin and Diderot, and maybe Bertrand Russell.

And yet, my guest today—who doesn’t know all that is currently known, but knows quite a bit about almost everything about technology, and the social and cultural changes that technologies have wrought, and what causes technological change itself, has done just that.

Václav Smil is a Czech-born Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, a part of the world we don’t always associate with the Renaissance. He’s the author of more than 40 books in an enormously wide range of fields that includes energy and food production, environmental and population change, risk and public policy, and the history of technology and innovation. He’s also a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum.

His new book, which in some sense encapsulates all his prior scholarship, is Grand Transitions:

How the Modern World Was Made, published March 1st by Oxford University Press.

Is Cyberwar War? Mar 23, 2021

Show notes

At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.”

Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and government servers, online banking, and the Domain Name System,” without which people can’t find or look up websites and online servers. The attack carried into the cyber realm an already heated political conflict between the two nations, and Estonia’s economy was as much under attack as its information infrastructure.

In 2010, we learned of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran and its uranium centrifuges, known as Stuxnet.

In 2015, a concerted attack, believed to have been Russian, on the power grid of another east European nation, Ukraine, left more than 200,000 people without electricity for at least several hours. It was the first attack on a grid, and perhaps the first large-scale SCADA attack—that is, on the control systems of critical infrastructure. Follow-up attacks struck the railway, television, and mining sectors.

In 2016, right around the time General Hayden was warning American audiences of the dangers of cyberwar, Russia, in conjunction with a private firm, Cambridge Analytica, and elements of the U.S. Republican party, crafted a disinformation campaign to influence the presidential election that year. Russia and Cambridge Analytica also undermined the Brexit referendum in the U.K. earlier that year.

Since then, we’ve seen entire families of malware appear, such as Trickbot. Arguably even worse was the recent SolarWinds hack, which in effect was an attack on what we might call the software supply chain. As many as 18 000 different organizations using SolarWinds may have been affected. Worse, the effects of the hack may have been reached out into other networks and therefore been exponential. For example, both Microsoft and security firm FireEye were affected, and they each have many enterprise customers.

As the fourth-century Roman poet Juvenal asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians themselves?

A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation with Justin Cappos who heads the Secure Systems Laboratory at @NYU. On @Spotify and @IEEESpectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts

Mathematics, Politics, and Justice Denied Mar 11, 2021

Show notes

In the 2020 elections for the North Carolina State House, Democrats received 49 percent of the votes but won only 42.5 percent of the seats. In three-quarters of the state-level elections, the winning margin was more than 20 percentage points—in other words, landslides—even though statewide, the margins between the two main political parties is razor-thin—at the presidential level, Trump beat Biden by less than 2 percent, and a Democrat won the 2020 governor’s race. That’s gerrymandering, the process by which a state is divided up in such a way as to maximize the number of electoral seats one particular party is likely to win.

There are two ways to gerrymander. In one, you concentrate your opposition’s likely voters into a single district, giving that one away but winning all or most of the surrounding areas. In the other, you divide a concentration of likely voters into two or more districts in such a way that they’ll fall short of a majority.

Gerrymandering is obviously unfair, but creating fair districts is harder than it looks. So political operatives and consultants draw up various maps, maximizing this or that, but mostly their party’s interests.

If this seems instead like a job for computer-aided statistical analysis, it is. Several years ago, researchers in North Carolina got the idea of generating thousands—even tens of thousands—of maps, and creating algorithms that maximize the desired variables to the extent possible.

Jonathan Mattingly is a Professor of Statistical Science, and a Professor of Mathematics at Duke University He leads a group at Duke that conducts non-partisan research to understand and quantify gerrymandering.

A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation with Duke University Professor of Mathematics Jonathan Mattingly. Available on Spotify, Apple, and @IEEESpectrum.

Reversing Climate Change by Pulling Carbon Out of the Air Feb 19, 2021

Show notes

Let’s face it. The United States, and, really, the entire world, has squandered much of the time that has elapsed since climate change first became a concern more than forty years ago.

Increasingly, scientists are warning that taking coal plants offline, building wind and solar farms here and there, and planting trees, even everywhere, aren’t going to keep our planet from heating to the point of human misery. Twenty years from now, we’re going to wish we had started thinking about not just carbon-zero technologies, but carbon-negative ones.

Last year we spoke with the founder of Air Company, which makes carbon-negative vodka by starting with liquid CO2 and turning it into ethanol, and then further refining it into a product sold in high-end liquor stores. Was it possible to skip the final refining steps and just use the ethanol as fuel? Yes, we were told, but that would be a waste of what was already close to being a premium product.

Which leads to the question, are there any efforts underway to take carbon out of the atmosphere on an industrial scale? And if so, what would be the entire product chain?

One company already doing that is Global Thermostat, and its CEO is our guest today.

The Uneconomics of Coal, Fracking, and Developing ANWR Feb 11, 2021

Show notes

Many things have changed in 2020, and it’s an open question which are altered permanently and which are transitory. Work-from-home may be here to stay; as might the shift from movie theatres and cable tv networks to streaming services; pet adoption rates are so high that some animal shelters are empty and global greenhouse gas emissions declined in record numbers.

That last fact has several causes—the lockdowns and voluntary confinements of the pandemic; an oil glut that preceded the pandemic and continued through it; the ways renewable energy—especially solar energy—is successfully competing with fossil-fuels. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio-based non-profit that studies the energy economy, more than 100 banks and insurers have divested or are divesting from coal mining and coal power plants. Their analysis also shows that natural gas power plant projects—for example one that’s been proposed for central Virginia—are a poor investment, due to a combination of clean-energy regulations and the difficulty of amortizing big power-plant construction in the face of a growing clean-energy pipeline, expected to grow dramatically over the next four years.

Such continued growth in clean-energy projects is particularly notable, as it comes despite high job losses for the renewable energy industry, slowing construction activity, and difficulty in finding capital financing. Those same headwinds brought about a record number of bankruptcies in the fracking industry.

Our guest today is eminently qualified to answer the question, are the changes we’re seeing in the U.S. energy-generation profile temporary or permanent? And what are the consequences for climate change? Kathy Hipple was formerly an analyst at the aforementioned Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and is a professor in Bard College’s Managing for Sustainability MBA program.

Bright X-Rays, AI, and Robotic Labs—A Roadmap for Better Batteries Jan 19, 2021

Show notes

Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and laptops to cars and planes.

Batteries all work the same: Chemical energy is converted to electrical energy by creating a flow of electrons from one material to another; that flow generates an electrical current.

Yet batteries are also wildly different, both because the light bulb in a flashlight and the engine in a Tesla have different needs, and because battery technology keeps improving as researchers fiddle with every part of the system: the two chemistries that make up the anode and the cathode, and the electrolyte and how the ions pass through it from one to the other.

A Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The Christian Bible says, “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

In other words, a more engineering-oriented proverb would say, “let’s create a lab and develop techniques for measuring the efficacy of different fishing rods, which will help us develop different rods for different bodies of water and different species of fish.”

The Argonne National Laboratory is one such lab. There, under the leadership of Venkat Srinivasan, director of its Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science, a team of scientists has developed a quiver of techniques for precisely measuring the velocity and behavior of ions and comparing it to mathematical models of battery designs.

Venkat Srinivasan [Ven-kat Sri-ni-va-san] is also deputy director of Argonne’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a national program that looks beyond the current generation of lithium–ion batteries. He was previously a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote a popular blog, “This Week in Batteries,” and is my guest today.

A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation with Venkat Srinivasan of @Argonne Available on Spotify and @IEEESpectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts

Data-Free Medicine Dec 22, 2020

Show notes

The saddest fact about the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the deaths it has already caused and the many more deaths to come before the world gets the virus under at least as much control as, say, chickenpox.

The second-saddest fact about the pandemic is the economic and educational havoc it has wrought.

Perhaps the third-saddest fact is the unfortunate lack of agreement about the best strategies for living with the virus, which, at least in the U.S., is responsible for many of those deaths, and, arguably much of the havoc as well. It has roiled families as well as the presidential election, by politicizing the wearing of masks, the limits on gatherings, the openings and closings of restaurants and schools.

But yet another sad fact is that, as was said thousands of years ago, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and this too is nothing new; there is a shocking and unfortunate lack of widespread agreement about the best answers when it comes to many medical questions, even among doctors, because there is a shocking and unfortunate lack of evidence—and even respect for evidence—in the medical arena. That’s the contention of the authors of a rather prescient 2017 book, Unhealthy Politics: The Battle Over Evidence-Based Medicine,subtitled, How partisanship, polarization, and medical authority stand in the way of evidence-based medicine.

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