It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, January 03, 2022
A Swedish-Italian Joint Venture Is To Build Novel Dual-Tilted Wind Turbines In Italy
Innovative dual wind turbines are coming to the Italian coastline.
A Swedish company is hoping to kick-start Italy's offshore floating wind farm market with its innovative dual-tilted turbines. The Stockholm headquartered company Hexicon has recently been granted a 50-50 joint venture with Bologna-based clean energy developer Avapa Energy to develop offshore floating wind farms for Italy.
The new venture, imaginatively called AvenHexicon, will now begin to look for suitable sites for building wind farms. It will also seek planning permits from Italian authorities, where the wind farms are applicable. Under the venture, Hexicon will license its patented technology for use in projects and, where relevant, third parties.
The new wind farms will, as previously mentioned, primarily consist of Hexicon's floating platforms with tilted towers. The venture will also encourage other developers to make use of the technology where possible.
"An important part of our business model is to enter new and promising markets as early as possible and to establish both our project development skills and technology together with local partners," explained Hecixon CEO Marcus Thor.
"We have found a perfect partner in Avapa Energy, and with AvenHexicon we are looking forward to supporting Italy in its expansion of fossil-free electricity production," he added.
Since Italy is one of the main recipients of the European Union's so-called "Green Deal", it has initiated the regulatory changes needed to develop offshore wind power.
Floating offshore wind power is a great choice for Italy since it has very deep seas
The choice of floating wind farms is a great choice for locations like the waters off Italy as they are particularly deep in places. Fixed offshore alternatives are not really practical due to the need for greater subsea anchoring.
Alberto Dalla Rosa, Partner at Avapa Energy, said, “Floating wind power with its advanced low-impact technology will play a material role in the Italian energy transition process, and we are happy to collaborate with Hexicon to develop floating wind parks in Italian waters.”
To date, Italy currently has no operating offshore wind farms, but its national wind energy association Anev has set a target of five gigawatts of floating offshore wind for the country by 2040.
"Italy has 55 offshore wind farm projects of which none [are] currently operating, none where construction has progressed enough to connect the turbines and generate electricity, one [is] in the build phase, and one [is] either consented or [has] applied for consent," reports 4COffshore.
Italy’s recovery and resilience plan devotes 37 percent of total expenditure on measures that support climate objectives, reported the European Commission in June.
Scientist, enforcer, high-flyer: 3 women put a mark on tech
By MARCY GORDON Lina Khan, nominee for Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), speaks during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing, Wednesday, April 21, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Khan is now the youngest person ever to lead the Federal Trade Commission, an agency now poised to aggressively enforce antitrust law against the tech industry.
(Graeme Jennings/Washington Examiner via AP, Pool, File)
Elizabeth Holmes, once worth $4.5 billion on paper, is now awaiting a jury’s verdict on criminal fraud and conspiracy charges that she misled investors and patients about the accuracy of a blood-testing technology developed at her startup Theranos.
Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021, in Washington. Haugen made a significant mark on the embattled tech industry in 2021.
(Matt McClain/The Washington Post via AP, Pool, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Three bright and driven women with ground-breaking ideas made significant — if very different — marks on the embattled tech industry in 2021.
Frances Haugen, Lina Khan and Elizabeth Holmes — a data scientist turned whistleblower, a legal scholar turned antitrust enforcer and a former Silicon Valley high-flyer turned criminal defendant — all figured heavily in a technology world where men have long dominated the spotlight. Think Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk.
Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, went public with internal documents to buttress accusations that the social network giant elevated profits over the safety of users. At 32, Khan is the youngest person ever to lead the Federal Trade Commission, an agency now poised to aggressively enforce antitrust law against the tech industry.
Holmes, once worth $4.5 billion on paper, is now awaiting a jury’s verdict on criminal fraud and conspiracy charges that she misled investors and patients about the accuracy of a blood-testing technology developed at her startup Theranos. The jury informed the judge Monday that it was deadlocked on three of the 11 charges against Holmes. The judge then instructed the jurors to do their best to reach a unanimous verdict, and they resumed deliberations.
Holmes’ story has become a Silicon Valley morality tale — a founder who flew too high, too fast — despite the fact that male tech executives have been accused of similar actions or worse without facing charges.
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Haugen joined Facebook out of a desire to help it address misinformation and other threats to democracy. But her frustration grew as she learned of online misinformation that stoked violence and abuse — and which Facebook wasn’t addressing effectively.
So in the fall of 2021 the 37-year-old Haugen went public with a trove of Facebook documents that catalogued how her former employer was failing to protect young users from body-image issues and amplifying online hate and extremism. Her work also laid bare the algorithms Big Tech uses to tailor content that will keep users hooked on its services.
“Frances Haugen has transformed the conversation about technology reform,” Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who became one of its leading critics, wrote in Time magazine.
Facebook the company, which has since renamed itself Meta Platforms, has disputed Haugen’s assertions, although it hasn’t pointed to any factual errors in her public statements. The company instead emphasizes the vast sums it says it has invested in safety since 2016 and data showing the progress it’s made against hate speech, incitement to political violence and other social ills.
Haugen was well positioned to unleash her bombshell. As a graduate business student at Harvard, she helped create an online dating platform that eventually turned into the dating app Hinge. At Google, she helped make thousands of books accessible on mobile phones and to create a fledgling social network. Haugen’s creative restlessness flipped her through several jobs over 15 years at Google, Yelp and Pinterest and of course Facebook, which recruited her in 2018.
Haugen’s revelations energized global lawmakers seeking to rein in Big Tech, although there’s been little concrete action in the U.S. Facebook rushed to change the subject by rolling out its new corporate name and playing up its commitment to developing an immersive technology platform known as the “metaverse.”
Haugen moved last year to Puerto Rico, where she says she can enjoy anonymity that would elude her in northern California. “I don’t like being the center of attention,” she told a packed arena at a November conference in Europe.
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A similar dynamic prevailed for Khan, an academic outsider with big new ideas and a far-reaching agenda that ruffled institutional and business feathers. President Joe Biden stunned official Washington in June when he installed Khan, an energetic critic of Big Tech then teaching law, as head of the Federal Trade Commission. That signaled a tough government stance toward giants Meta, Google, Amazon and Apple.
Khan is the youngest chair in the 106-year history of the FTC, which polices competition, consumer protection and digital privacy. She was an unorthodox choice, with no administrative experience or knowledge of the agency other than a brief 2018 stint as legal adviser to one of the five commissioners.
But she brought intellectual heft that packed a political punch. Khan shook up the antitrust world in 2017 with her scholarly work as a Yale law student, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which helped shape a new way of looking at antitrust law.
For decades, antitrust work has defined anticompetitive conduct as market dominance that drives up prices, a concept that doesn’t apply to many “free” technology services. Khan instead pushed to examine the broader effects of corporate concentration on industries, employees and communities. That school of thought — dubbed “hipster antitrust” by its detractors — appears to have had a significant influence on Biden.
Khan was born in London; her family moved to the New York City area when she was 11. After graduating from college, she spent three years as a policy analyst at the liberal-leaning think tank New America Foundation before leaving for Yale.
Under Khan’s six-month tenure, the FTC has sharpened its antitrust attack against Facebook in federal court and pursued a competition investigation into Amazon. The agency sued to block graphics chip maker Nvidia’s $40 billion purchase of chip designer Arm, saying a combined company could stifle the growth of new technologies.
In Khan’s aggressive investigations and enforcement agenda, key priorities include racial bias in algorithms and market-power abuses by dominant tech companies. Internally, some employees have chafed at administrative changes that expanded Khan’s authority over policymaking, and one Republican commissioner has assailed Khan in public.
“She’s shaken things up,” said Robin Gaster, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who focuses on economics, politics and technology. “She is going to be a field test for whether an aggressive FTC can expand the envelope for antitrust enforcement.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobby, has publicly threatened court fights, asserting that Khan and the FTC are waging war on American businesses.
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Holmes founded Theranos when she was 19, dropping out of Stanford to pursue a bold, humanitarian idea. Possessed of seemingly boundless networking chutzpah, Holmes touted Theranos blood-testing technology as a breakthrough that could scan for hundreds of medical conditions using just a few drops of blood.
By 2015, 11 years after leaving Stanford, Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for her company, pushing its market value to $9 billion. Half of that belonged to Holmes, earning her the moniker of the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 30.
Just three years later, though, Theranos collapsed in scandal. After a three-and-a-half-month federal trial, a jury now is weighing criminal fraud and conspiracy charges against Holmes for allegedly duping investors and patients by concealing the fact that the blood-testing technology was prone to wild errors. If convicted, Holmes, now 37, faces up to 20 years in prison.
When young, Holmes was a competitive prodigy who openly aspired to make a vast fortune. She started studying Mandarin Chinese with a tutor around age 9, and talked her way into summer classes in the language at Stanford after her sophomore year in high school.
In her sophomore college year, she took the remainder of her tuition money as a stake and dropped out to run her company.
As Theranos ascended, some saw Holmes as the next Steve Jobs. Theranos ultimately raised more than $900 million from investors including media baron Rupert Murdoch and Walmart’s Walton family.
The company’s fairy-tale success started to unravel in 2016, when a series of Wall Street Journal articles and a federal regulatory audit uncovered a pattern of grossly inaccurate blood results in tests run on Theranos devices.
The Holmes trial has exposed Silicon Valley’s “fake it ‘til you make it” culture in painful detail. Tech entrepreneurs often overpromise and exaggerate, so prosecutors faced the challenge of proving that Holmes’ boosterism crossed the line into fraud.
Airships might seem like a technology from a bygone era, but a startup says their new design could become a crucial cog in the green hydrogen supply chain.
While transitioning away from fossil fuels will prove crucial in our efforts to combat climate change, it’s easier said than done for some industries. While road and rail transport are rapidly electrifying, in aviation, batteries are a long way from being able to provide the weight-to-power ratio required for aviation. And even the largest batteries are still not big enough to power a container ship on long-distance crossings.
Hydrogen is increasingly being seen as a promising alternative for these hard to decarbonize sectors. It has a higher energy density than natural gas and can either be burned in internal combustion engines or combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity.
While much of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas and therefore not much better than fossil fuels, in theory you can also make it by using renewable electricity to power electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Producing green hydrogen economically is still a huge challenge, but there are hopes that it could help wean hard to electrify sectors off polluting fossil fuels.
But transporting hydrogen remains a sticking point: Areas that are abundant in renewable energy such as sun and wind are not always close to where the hydrogen is needed. Shipping large amounts of the gas around the world will clearly be a major logistical challenge, but a start-up called H2 Clipper has an ingenious workaround.
The California company plans to build airships that simultaneously transport hydrogen and use it as a lighter-than-air gas to provide the aircraft with lift. On top of that, its airships will also use hydrogen fuel cells to power their engines.
While the project is still at the concept stage, the company says that thanks to modern aeronautical design, stronger and lighter-weight materials, and modern fabrication techniques, their airship will be faster, safer, and more efficient than its predecessors. And the company was recently selected for inclusion in an accelerator run by software major Dassault Systems.
While it won’t be as fast as a plane, the H2 Clipper will be able to cruise at about 175 mph, which would allow it to ferry cargo 7 to 10 times faster than a boat. It also has a cargo volume of 265,000 cubic feet—8 to 10 times more than most airfreighters—and can carry up to 340,000 pounds of payload 6,000 miles at its standard cruising speed.
Between distances of 1,000 to 6,000 miles, the airship could carry a ton of cargo for as little as $0.177 to $0.247 per mile—a quarter of the cost of airfreight. And because it can take off and land vertically, it can carry goods straight to where they’re needed rather than having to transfer them onto trucks at an airport.
One potential stumbling block, noted by New Atlas, is the fact that US law currently bans the use of hydrogen as a lift gas in airships. That’s perhaps not surprising, seeing as the era of the airship came to an abrupt end nearly a century ago after the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg went up in flames.
H2 Clipper deals with this issue in their FAQs, pointing out that hydrogen storage technology has undergone rigorous testing in the automotive industry thanks to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, with no recorded explosion to date. The company says this is because hydrogen’s very fast expansion rate means that it typically disperses too quickly for an explosion to happen. Whether regulators will be convinced remains to be seen though.
The company isn’t the only one that thinks airships are due for a reboot. Earlier this year British company Hybrid Air Vehicles unveiled concept images of its forthcoming Airlander 10 aircraft, which it believes could provide a greener and more comfortable alternative to short-haul flights.
There are still many hurdles for both companies to overcome before their visions become a reality, but don’t be too surprised if you see Zeppelins passing overhead in the not-too-distant future.
Premier Jason Kenney spoke to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce on Dec. 8, 2021, for the first time since the start of the pandemic. He criticized a survey that suggested half of Canadians say they'd feel comfortable living in Alberta. (CBC)
A new national poll answers the question Alberta Premier Jason Kenney asked last month while criticizing a survey of 1,512 Canadians that suggested half of Canadians say they'd feel comfortable living in Alberta.
Calling it "a drive-by smear on Alberta," the premier took aim at the Maru Public Opinion and Janet Brown Opinion Research poll done in collaboration with CBC News during a Calgary Chamber of Commerce event on Dec. 8, 2021, wondering why the research didn't ask "Albertans on how many of them would move to Ontario and Quebec."
Kenney blasted CBC News, suggesting the public broadcaster's reporting about the poll diminished national unity, using "Alberta as a convenient sort of punching bag."
"Based on the reaction that we had from Alberta and from the premier … we wanted to ask some other questions … and we wanted to explore what that looked like across the country," said John Wright, executive vice-president of Maru Public Opinion, in an interview with CBC News.
The new representative survey of 1,510 Canadians in mid-December suggests British Columbia (65 per cent) and Atlantic Canada (63 per cent) top the list of places Canadians would feel comfortable living.
Where people "feel comfortable" is, "purely subjective," stresses Maru Public Opinion's news release about the polling data. A host of factors can influence people's comfort levels, including "being able to speak the local language, what you might know of the terrain, or even be based solely on what you've seen, read, or heard about the people, the economy, or how welcoming they can be to newcomers," emphasizes the news release.
The new polling data puts the earlier survey about Alberta in context — and echoes what the initial poll suggested about Canadians' comfort with living in Alberta.
Living comfortably in other parts of Canada
Like the earlier poll, the new poll, asking the same question, found that nearly half of Canadians (49 per cent) say they would feel comfortable living in Alberta. The same number of Canadians indicate they'd feel comfortable living in Ontario.
Nearly four in ten (38 per cent) of Canadians would feel comfortable living in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Less than a quarter (24 per cent) of Canadians would feel comfortable in Quebec.
The similarity between the two national poll results on the question of comfort with living in Alberta stood out for Calgary-based pollster Janet Brown, who collaborated with Maru Public Opinion on the earlier survey.
"The fact that it ended up being identical, just speaks to the validity of the methodology in my mind," said Brown in an interview with CBC News.
Living Comfortably Elsewhere
Maru Public Opinion asked survey respondents where in Canada they would feel comfortable living. The results in this table combine the strongly agree with the somewhat agree responses to the survey question.
British Columbia
65%
Atlantic Canada
63%
Alberta
49%
Ontario
49%
Saskatchewan
38%
Manitoba
38%
Quebec
24%
Wright was also pleased to see the similar results between the two polls, adding that the new poll ranks Alberta in the top third of places Canadians say they'd feel content living.
"Some people will look at it and say that it's 50 per cent full and [others] will look at it and say it's 50 per cent empty," said Wright. "But at the end of the day, you're still left with a half a glass of really fine Alberta whisky."
While Canadians who say they would feel comfortable living in Alberta come from all across Canada, the largest proportion comes from Western Canada.
People from the neighbouring prairie province of Saskatchewan (72 per cent) were mostly likely to say they'd feel comfortable living in Alberta, followed by those living in Manitoba (52 per cent), Ontario (52 per cent), B.C. (46 per cent), Quebec (44 per cent) and Atlantic Canada (37 per cent).
Living comfortably in Alberta?
The pollsters can only guess as to why Canadians feel most comfortable living in British Columbia or Atlantic Canada.
Brown says she suspects high numbers in the coastal regions might be driven by weather and scenery in those areas.
"We talk about [Alberta] being landlocked all the time," said Brown.
"We usually talk about it in the sense of oil and getting our products to market, but the only other parts of the country that did better than we did in terms of being perceived as comfortable places to live were places … that were close to oceans," she added.
A surfer is silhouetted while entering the Atlantic Ocean as the sun sets in Lawrencetown, N.S. in this file photo from 2017. Brown says she suspects the high number of people saying they would be comfortable living in Atlantic Canada and B.C. might be driven by the weather and scenery of the coasts. (Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press)
Brown also highlighted that while B.C. and Atlantic drew similar numbers of comfort among Canadians, the two places attracted that satisfaction from different parts of Canada.
Almost three-quarters (73 per cent) of Albertans say they'd feel comfortable living next door in B.C., followed by those living in Ontario (67 per cent), Quebec (64 per cent), Manitoba (63 per cent), Saskatchewan (59 per cent) and Atlantic Canada (53 per cent).
Atlantic Canada, on the other hand, is most popular with people from Ontario (69 per cent). Six in ten people from neighbouring Quebec would feel comfortable living in Atlantic Canada, followed by people from Manitoba (59 per cent), British Columbia (58 per cent), Saskatchewan (57 per cent) and Alberta (54 per cent).
"People are attracted to different places," said Wright. "Sometimes it's of their own making, and sometimes it's of the place they want to move to."
Quebec viewed as least comfortable place to live
Less than a quarter (24 per cent) of Canadians say they'd feel comfortable living in Quebec.
Neighbouring Ontarians (29 per cent) are the most likely to say they'd enjoy living in the predominantly French-speaking province, followed by those living in British Columbia (22 per cent), Saskatchewan (21 per cent), Manitoba (20 percent), Alberta (17 per cent) and Atlantic Canada (16 per cent).
Wright wonders if language might be a barrier.
"How many people would feel comfortable in a province that speaks another language or has different customs than yours?" asked Wright. "I think that's a barrier of entry right from the beginning."
He stressed again that survey respondents had a "very subjective response" to "a very objective question."
Methodology
This survey was undertaken on December 13, 2021, by Maru Public Opinion. The survey sampled 1,510 Canadians, using Maru Voice Canada online panelists who were randomly selected. For comparison purposes, a probability sample of this size has an estimated margin of error (which measures sampling variability) of +/- 2.5%, 19 times out of 20. Subsets of the sample (provincial proportions) will have a larger margin of error. The results have been weighted by education, age, gender and region (and in Quebec, language) to match the population according to census data, which ensures the sample is representative of the entire adult population of Canada. Discrepancies in or between totals when compared with the data tables are due to rounding.
Mon 3 Jan 2022 The US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”. America is now in fascism’s legal phase
“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.”
Homer-Dixon’s message was blunt: “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship.”
The author cited eventualities centered on a Trump return to the White House in 2024, possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win.
Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.
A “scholar of violent conflict” for more than four decades, Homer-Dixon said Canada must take heed of the “unfolding crisis”.
“A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation and the accelerating effects of climate change.
“But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States. We need to start by fully recognising the magnitude of the danger. If Mr Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable.”
Homer-Dixon said he even saw a scenario in which a new Trump administration, having effectively nullified internal opposition, deliberately damaged its northern neighbor.
“Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the US regime demands them back. Do we comply?” One in three Americans say violence against government justified – poll
Trump, he said, “and a host of acolytes and wannabes such as Fox [News]’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene”, had transformed the Republican party “into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy”.
Worse, he said, Trump “may be just a warm-up act”.
“Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon said.
“Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law.
“Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.”
