So-called "short-lived" gasses and black particle pollution from power plants in Asia and transport in the United States could have a greater influence than previously predicted on temperature changes in North America and elsewhere on Earth, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week. But is the headline the whole story?
While the general press and blog coverage of the report emphasizes Asia as a cause of warming in the United States, scientists also emphasized that better practices in energy-intensive economies with less-than-clean power plants could be an equally large opportunity for stabilizing the climate. Especially in the case of these short-lived pollutants.
The particles being discussed are considered short-lived because their effect is shorter than that of CO2. Much shorter. While CO2 is a global warming agent until it is chemically changed into something else or sequestered, these particulates and gases affect temperatures on Earth's surface by either absorbing more heat or reflecting more than regular air, but they only do so for days or weeks at a time. Since the NOAA predictions estimate short-lived pollutants will be responsible for approximately 20 percent of global warming by 2050, this is both a great opportunity for improvement and a reminder that the largest culprits still need to be dealt with.
The key advantage to reducing these pollutants may be that the benefits will be seen immediately and previous emissions are not compounded. At least, once the production of these pollutants reduces, that 20 percent of warming could cease very quickly.
Certainly air pollution created in Asia is a significant factor in the global climate. But in the case of this non-CO2-related report, I find the press accounts unnecessarily and perhaps unfairly paint Asia (and yes, it's "Asia" rather than anything more precise) as a culprit.
Without having read the entire report, the NOAA scientists seem to have been more careful. They note that U.S. transport, i.e. automobiles and perhaps airplanes, as well as power generation a hemisphere away are likely to contribute to hot, dry summers in the United States.
What's key to remember, however, when media reports talk about Asian pollution, is that manufacturing-related pollution is not completely Asia's fault. Much of the manufacturing going on in China and other countries in East and South Asia is for export, and the United States is a top market for many countries. When I went to the store recently and bought a bunch of housewares, many items were made in China, and I have no idea under what environmental conditions they were produced. I share responsibility for related pollution. I likewise don't know the environmental pedigrees of many non-Asian products in this room.
This disconnect between our purchase and the emissions it causes is a challenge even for green consumers far more diligent than myself. For consumer pressure, we'll need more life-cycle data about products at the point of the purchase, and meanwhile we'll have to work on some far-reaching strategies to clean up the global manufacturing system. Meanwhile, here's hoping we can get rid of most of this short-term gunk.
Just a short note to point out that Apple, with its recent update to iTunes, has done something we've all been asking for for years: Amazon-style predictive marketing of music.
And that's what it is. I'm ecstatic to see this arrive on my local jukebox software on the MacBook, but I've been lamenting for at least half a decade that if Amazon can predict what books and CDs I want to buy after knowing what I've bought, iTunes should do it too.
I'm not exaggerating about the five years. The iTunes Music Store launched in April of 2003, according to Wikipedia. It didn't take me long to imagine that some day the massive amount of data about my musical preferences contained by my iTunes Music Library could help recommend new music for me.
In the meantime Pandora and others have served this purpose, and it turns out I almost never use those services (though the streaming Pandora to iPhone service is pretty cool). What I've been aching for is something a little more mundane and critical, if you want robust data-driven analysis of my tastes. Which I want. I don't expect you to care about my tastes, but I bet you care about yours.
- iTunes needs to be able to keep data after a reinstall. Once upon a time I had about three years of data on how many times I'd listened to what in an iTunes library. It's still on one of these hard drives around here. But then I got a new computer, or had to reformat something, or had to reconsolidate my music collection. And it was gone. I was zeroed out. That's now happened so many times I don't bother keeping the data anymore. I've built the loss into my music psychology.
- Speaking of reconsolidating iTunes libraries... It's a monumental pain to handle a library larger than can fit on one's laptop drive. External drives are great, but you may not carry them with you, and even if you do, it's hard to have even a pocket drive connected while the computer's balanced on your leg. iTunes needs to allow users to choose which files will be mirrored on the laptop and which will just be waiting home on the external.
- This one's for the non-Mac users. A good friend of mine and I have shared a lot of music. I assure you we obeyed copyright laws at all times. But he has not frequently been a Mac user, and his various Windows and UNIX/Linux-based software do not always play well with an iTunes file structure. iTunes should facilitate my and his music lives by allowing more robust file naming and cataloging options in terms of where and how files are stored.
That's all. We'll be back to China in the morning. For now, it's back to whatever "genius" decided that an Antibalas song is similar to a dance by Kitaro.
Japanese artist Noda Nagi, known for her ecstatically odd aerobics videos and her charming hybrid stuffed animals known as Hanpanda, died Sunday according to reports.
I had just been thinking of her work, having recently unearthed my Hanpanda (right) and placed it at a key watchful position in my new home. She had a great ability to hijack the "cute" aesthetic that characterizes much Japanese popular artwork and turn it more bizarre while maintaining some charm.
Though I only had the chance to meet her once when I served as a mysterious (and unidentifiable) extra for one of her works, I'll miss seeing her creations, as I am sure will many others.
Thomas Friedman visited a wind farm near the East Asian gambling capital, Macao. But his rhetoric outsizes his quantitative skills in setting up another "dichotomy" in a "flat" world.
The column is a dizzying and logically disjointed ramble through some well-worn tropes on China's economy that have developed during the media's concurrent green awakening and Olympic China craze in recent months.
This is not so surprising from a columnist specialists love to lambaste, but this opening left me more confused than usual:
[T]he Chinese engineers showed me their control room, which has a giant glass window that looks out onto their 21 wind turbines that crown the peaks of a nearby mountain. ...
But as my eye drifted just to the left of that mountain, I saw Macau, with its rising skyline of casino skyscrapers. The Venetian Hotel in Macau alone has some 870 gaming tables and 3,400 slot machines. So, I did a quick calculation and figured that those 21 wind turbines together might power the Venetian's army of one-armed bandits for a few hours of green gambling.
The problem? Read closely. Mr. Friedman did a "calculation" that 21 wind turbines "might" power some slot machines for "a few hours." But how long would the turbines need to be in operation to supply a few hours of gaming? How much electricity does a slot machine use? Is it more if it's one of those LCD ones, or does the spring-loaded wheel type turn out to be more efficient?
It's hard to blame a columnist charged with being interesting and insightful at a length of roughly 800 words twice a week for having some off days, but when you're staking your recent work on a concept of green innovation, and you're the international affairs columnist for The New York Times, I wish it would come out more neatly.
Am I a sucker for linking to this?
The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
GoDaddy, the world's leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners' names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.
If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.
Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:
The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China's Olympic team prior to the Games' opening on August 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names anymore; they were forced to give it to the medalist "as a gift".
Passing of the torch: here are my iPhone 3G and me in the eyes of my retired HTC Touch, now reduced to life as a Chinese dictionary.
(Credit: Graham Webster)All year, I've been using an HTC Touch as my telephone. But now, having just moved back to the United States, I found it so hard to get a reasonable deal for service with this unlocked GSM smartphone that I decided there was little reason not to get an iPhone.
This was not an easy decision. I'm about to begin life as a graduate student, so money will be tight. I already had a pretty decent smartphone, which I'd bought in China because it was Windows Mobile and could run Pleco, the undisputed master of mobile Chinese-English dictionaries.
And I was nervous about the iPhone 3G, despite its superior aesthetics and preferable interface, having heard so much about performance problems. For a few reasons, I decided to go with iPhone anyway.
The primary reason is that AT&T and T-Mobile, the main GSM carriers in the United States, did not seem to want to give me a no-contract plan with a good data option. Both wanted a two-year contract just for opening the accounts, according to their Web sites. I had assumed one could just bring in a phone and go month to month.
The U.S. carriers seem to be using a tactic that Beijing-based tech industry consultant Mark Natkin said is the favored strategy of Chinese carriers to retain customers. Rather than lock the phones, which would be easily unlocked in Chinese electronics markets, providers are requiring contracts for decent services. Responding to my speculation on whether China Mobile iPhones will be unlocked, Natkin, who is managing director of Marbridge Consulting, explained:
Rather than locking phones, China's operators have been moving increasingly towards locking customers into a long-term contract that comes with a phone sourced by the operator. In San Francisco, a quick walk down Market Street from the AT&T Wireless store, you can get your mobile phone unlocked for $20 in about 10 minutes. So in China, where the labor is much cheaper, not many phones would stay locked unless the SIM card was fully embedded.
The fact that this tactic seemed to be in action in the U.S. made it only slightly more expensive for me to get an iPhone, so I went for it.
This could foretell a model for Apple to end its devotion to single carriers. If Apple were willing to let multiple mobile companies sell the iPhone and provide service for it in the United States, each company could sell them at a price like the $200 to $300 we see for the 3G and nail us with high-priced data plans. Especially if users wanted to use services like MobileMe's push e-mail feature (supposing it were to work), there could be specific, iPhone-only plans. Why can't this be done with multiple carriers?
This model wouldn't be new. The same phones have been available at multiple carriers for many years. They are sold at below-cost prices and the carriers make up for that with service contracts. What I want to know is:
• Why do we need to lock phones if we can lock users into contracts?
• If my phone is locked to your expensive service, why do you need to nail me with a contract?
Couldn't the industry get along with one or the other coercive tactic?
Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.
That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.
After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.
ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while "the majority of advocacy sites and politically 'sensitive' organizations remain blocked."
It may be nice that these sites have come available, but content is still filtered by keyword, if not encrypted during transmission, and there's no way to know whether this increased availability of Chinese Web sites will outlast the Olympic pageantry.
After an unannounced hiatus--I thought it would be easier to update while traveling over the past three weeks--Sinobyte is back open for business. I'll be unearthing a backlog of material.
Please send over anything important I've missed to sinobyte /\at/\ gwbstr.com. Glad to be back!
The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?
