Renewable technologies, including solar, wind, tidal/wave and geothermal, seeks to capture the plentiful forms of energy that are currently being frittered away by Mother Nature. A few technologies, though, are seeking to turn lead to gold, figuratively speaking; they’re finding ways to capture the energy in the stuff we discard and transform it into fuel that we can use.

A friend of a friend who worked at Changing World Technologies first exposed me to this idea a few years ago. Using a process called thermo depolymerization (TDP), primarily organic feedstocks (like turkey offal) can be processed to yield fuel oil. Its first plant converts 250 tons of turkey waste into 20,000 gallons of oil and fertilizer (the nitrogen-based by-products of the process), at a cost of $80 per barrel. Keep in mind that crude petroleum is currently selling at over $120 per barrel.

Innovation in the world of waste has continued. Here are a few other companies I was able to find that are innovating in this space:

• Enertech Environmental: Converts sewage into a solid energy form (called SlurryCarb) that can be used in a manner similar to coal. The process removes the bulk of the water through a more efficient mechanical process, rather than boiling/evaportation. A plant coming online later this year in southern California will convert solid waste from 5 municipalities around Rialto into 145 tons of SlurryCarb daily. An existing company facility has been operating successfully in Japan for years.
• Solena Group: Uses sodium bicarbonate, a waste by-product from coal plants, to grow algae, which is gasified to create a feedstock for electric power plants. The company is in discussion to put up a 40 MW plant in Kansas using its technology.
• GreenFuel Technologies: Also grows algae for biofuel, although using CO2 from flue gases. Companies that would otherwise have to pay for the sequestration of CO2 can, according to the company, create a profit by growing algae and selling it to biofuel reformers. The algae can be converted to biodiesel through transesterification and ethanol through fermentation of the remaining biomass.
• Blue Marble Energy: Uses algae cultivated in polluted water to create biodiesel and ethanol. Should be a boon for China, which has no shortage of the stuff.
• BlueFire Ethanol: Converts biowaste to ethanol using concentrated acid hydrolysis. A $30 million plant due to be installed in southern California by the end of 2009 should yield 3.2 million gallons of ethanol annually.
• Poet Energy: Uses primarily corn cobs to produce ethanol in a low-temperature process. Its 65 million gallon per year plant inaugurated in Indiana last year is the largest ethanol production plant in the world.
• Coskata: This company’s process converts organic feedstocks into syngas via gasification technologies, and then proprietary microbes convert the syngas into ethanol. After proving the viability of its technology through a 40,000 gallon/yr plant early next year, it plans on scaling to a 100 million gallon/year plant elsewhere by 2011.
• DuPont Danisco: Uses corn stover and sugarcane bagasse, agricultural wasteproducts, to create ethanol. A joint venture between DuPont and Genencor, its 250,000 gallon/year demonstration facility will be built in 2009.
• Mascoma: Uses wood chips as the source of cellulose to produce ethanol. It has recently decided to build its first facility in Michigan, in part funded by the state.

Are flue gas, corn stover, sugarcane bagasse, wood chips, turkey offal, and municipal waste the only feedstocks with which to produce biofuels? Not even close. In fact, a recent study suggests cow manure processed anaerobically could supplant 3% of the US’s electricity production and erase 4% of the carbon dioxide which would have otherwise been created by coal-fired production.

I think all of this innovation is fascinating, and deserves the tax incentives they need to get past the very high bar set by the low price of coal (provided there aren’t any taxes/penalties assessed on high-CO2 coal use). The products produced recently from solar energy—food scraps, wood chips, algae, sewage, and municipal waste—ought to be recaptured so we can allow coal and petroleum to continue to sequester CO2 underground.

The New Yorker got a lot of heat last week when it featured a cover that lampooned enduring myths about Barack Obama, that had heretofore only been circulated via anonymous emails. The caricature showed Barack in “muslim garb”, fist-bumping his wife, who, with an Angela Davis afro and machine-gun on her back, smiles as an American flag burns in the fireplace and a picture of Osama bin Laden graces the walls.

Was the cover offensive? I don’t think so. As a subscriber to the New Yorker, I understand their taste for satire. Last week’s cover was certainly not denigrating Obama or impugning his or his wife’s patriotism - it is making fun of people who parrot those bigoted memes and believe them to be true. Seeing all of the ultra right-wing fantasies parodied on the same page was, well, really funny.

Not to be outdone by its rival, Vanity Fair published its cover (which it thought was) capturing the same satirical spirit and aesthetic inspiration, but applied this time to McCain. He’s shown with a walker, his wife carrying pill bottles, the Constitution is burning and George W Bush accenting the wall above the mantle. Also funny, but perhaps not quite as aggressive in its caricature - otherwise, Cindy might be lying on the floor with a black eye.

The fact is, though, that McCain doesn’t suffer from anywhere close to the same degree of fabricated rumors as does Barack, having his religion, patriotism and allegiances impugned by political operatives. So, the Vanity Fair cover falls a little flat. I mean, he is old, he does admire Bush, and his wife does have a certain way with pill bottles. The only image that condemns is his burning of the Constitution.

So why did both the Obama and McCain campaigns condemn the Obama cover? It’s clear that too many people don’t understand satire, and will misread the cartoon as a representation of the truth (they might even think it’s a photograph!). Innocent Harry Potter suffered at the hands of a lasting email meme that J.K. Rowling was encouraging satanism among children (it was screamingly funny satire by The Onion, who, in a rare move, took the article off its site).

Good satire should give thinking people something to laugh and reflect about. It can expose and challenge the absurdities that we give thoughtless acceptance to. But not everyone exposed to such images will understand their intent; the danger appears when people accept them at face value. And, in an election where candidates spend hundreds of millions of dollars for mindshare, a satirical image is just bad PR.

I had the honor to participate in Mashable’s author series, and recently received Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway. Within about 3 days I finished the book (a relatively rare feat for me), and have this to say: this is a great book. It’s a fascinating book. And it’s an important book.

Much like Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and Blink, Sway makes heady academic subjects - in this case, behavioral economics, social psychology and organizational behavior - accessible and relevant to a lay audience, illustrated through real-world examples of otherwise rational people acting irrationally. Why do humans often make irrational decisions? The book is replete with examples, and explanations of the cause or mechanism when known, that illustrate each of these phenomena:

1. loss aversion - we are more sensitive to the loss of something than we are elated by an equal gain
2. commitment - we repeat a pattern that has worked in the past even though it is obvious it no longer works
3. value attribution - we impart worth based on the perceived value of something, not objectively-measured criteria
4. diagnosis bias - it’s difficult to shake a first impression of something
5. the “chameleon effect” (the Pygmalion Effect and Golem Effect) - people tend to rise to the level of expectations set for them (even subconsciously)
6. procedural justice and fairness - we can make decisions against our own economic benefit if we feel fairness has been violated
7. rewards vs intrinsic motivation (altruism) - we find it difficult to be motivated by both financial gain and altruism at the same time
8. group dynamics and social pressure - an expression of a correct dissenting opinion can be blocked if there is perceived unanimity

The book includes many compelling examples to corroborate these, but let me share three of them:

• a Harvard MBA professor has a game in which students bid in $1 increments how much they’d pay for a $20 bill. The catch is that the runner-up also has to pay their final bid, even though they don’t win. Students will routinely bid well past $20 (in one case to $204), because neither wants to pay money for nothing, even though each bid after $20 is already a losing proposition. [an illustration of loss aversion and commitment]
• Swiss towns were asked to store the country’s nuclear waste. Their agreement dropped drastically when a financial incentive was introduced. [an illustration of rewards vs altruism]
• Israeli soldiers in a commander training program were completely randomly assigned a score that officers were told was an assessment of their commander potential (it was not shared with the soldiers). After the training period, soldiers who were assigned a bogus high commander potential score at the outset performed significantly better on exit exams than those randomly assigned low commander potential scores at the beginning [an illustration of the chameleon effect]

The reason this book is so important is that we’re all guilty of irrational behavior. The book demonstrates that the brightest, best-trained and most competent of us can fall into these traps that are often part of our neurological design. The book’s prescription? Awareness. Simple consciousness of an irrational drive can allow our rational mind to put in an override.

And, with that in mind, I’d like to play the devil’s advocate myself, with respect to three conclusions drawn from examples in the book. I have not investigated the original studies (although the Brafmans provide sources in the end notes), but based on what I’ve read, my skeptical mind wonders:

• in chapter 1, it’s suggested we choose flat rates instead of a la carte (pay-per-use) plans, like for cell phones and rental cars, because we’re trying to avoid a disastrously large bill. I have to disagree here. The reason I feel better about a flat rate, and I tend to choose them, is that I do not want the mental burden of having to weigh the value of making or accepting a call against its cost each and every time. The extra I end up paying for a flat-rate plan is worth it for the brain energy it saves me. [Update: research supports this!]
• in chapter 4, an NBA’s draft selection order was determined to have a pronounced effect on the amount of their game play. It’s suggested that the draft order is meaningless once the player has joined his team, with the other measured characteristics - scoring, toughness and quickness - being the only metrics that should matter. Now, I’m no basketball expert, but isn’t it possible that there are other unvoiced, latent talents that a team manager might measure subconsciously but might not be aware of enough to know to measure it? Like leadership, or dynamic with other players on the court? My sense is there might be something else to a team manager’s decision that goes beyond an individual player’s scoring potential that might make him an asset to have out on the court.
• in chapter 5, elderly people who had used negative and external descriptors of themselves showed more signed of degenerative aging than those who had used positive and internal words to describe themselves. I wonder if those who were describing themselves negatively, or focusing on their external appearance, did so because they sensed they were suffering from a medical problem or simple lack of wellness that hadn’t been isolated as part of the experimental protocol. I guess I’m wondering if the supposed cause of their aging wasn’t in fact an effect, instead.

These are not challenges to the relevant studies or to the book; they’re simply questions that came to my mind as I read each example. I had recently read two other fascinating books, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, that demonstrate that widely-accepted notions and even research can fail under closer scrutiny.

This book warns against falling into the trap of value attribution, too, so I’m fairly sure Ori and Rom Brafman can appreciate my doubts.

The Mashable Author Series will include a live chat later today with Ori Brafman, and has had two posts (an introduction, and on VC irrationality) guest-written by Ori.

FriendFeed is a terrific “lifestreaming” service. It might be one that has limited adoption, but it will perform an exceptionally important role in online discussion, in the way influencers in the blogosphere and world of Web technology synthesize and disseminate ideas.

FriendFeed, for those who don’t know about it, is a site where you can import (from your blog, Twitter account, Flickr account, etc) or post items for discussion among those who “follow” you (monitor your activity). Items can be “liked” (giving an instant rating of the item’s approval), similar to Diggs, reddit votes, etc, and can be commented upon.

The site has enjoyed a boost of activity as a similar (but less interactive) service, Twitter, has been beset with infrastructural issues. Robert Scoble has been an early and prominent fan; Michael Arrington has come around and enjoys the service as well, admiring the depth of interaction.

However, the service might not have tremendous reach beyond those bleeding edge distillers of the information avalanche, at least on a participatory level (which is what makes the service unique). Why? It takes tremendous time to keep up with more than a handful of feeds. And if you follow someone like Louis Gray or Loic Le Meur, prepare to spend a substantial portion of your workday keeping up. And FriendFeed is a difficult service to enjoy the occasional sip from; it tends to function best as a firehose. Larry Dignan asks if this is truly something we all really need to fit into our lives.

Is this a criticism? Not at all. Power users of FriendFeed are being exposed to a tremendous amount of data and commentary, all of which is used to extract insights from the bewildering storm of information that the Internet provides us. But, frankly, I tend to enjoy these insights in a slower, more reflective medium - these power users’ blogs. Participating in FriendFeed gives the Robert Scobles and Louis Grays access to the fodder which makes their blogs such a pleasure to read (and kind of a necessity for those of us who can’t follow everything, all the time)

So, is FriendFeed a Twitter-killer? Possibly. Even despite all the good press it’s been enjoyed at the expense of beleaguered Twitter, it is still pretty small in comparison [Compare.com]. But it’s safe to say that it is a great tool for the thought leaders who use it, and for those brave enough (and who have enough time on their hands) to use it as it’s been intended.

I think its biggest promise is to move beyond just the Web tech conversations that the founders themselves would want to follow. If you have clusters of power users and larger groups of followers for sports, celebrity gossip, even fruit fly genetics, then you might see FriendFeed catch on beyond Silicon Valley. Every topical niche has its thought leaders.

As a child of the seventies and one that has never liked blowing hard-earned money and two hours of my life on an awful movie, I was always a big fan of Siskel & Ebert’s show, At the Movies. Siskel passed on in 1999 and has since been replaced with Richard Roeper, but the two Windy City newspaper critics introduced a format of back-and-forth dual reviews that were always greater than the sum of their individual reviews in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

What made it great? Well, Gene and Roger were great critics, first and foremost. But they also had great chemistry, probing each other on their thoughts on films they loved and loathed, and challenging each other in a dynamic conversation about each films merits and failures. Of course, plenty of times they agreed, giving movies two thumbs up or two thumbs down. But sometimes the most fascinating exchanges were those where they disagreed–the friendly spats were a delight to watch.

The digital era brought an algorithmic expansion of the wisdom-of-crowds (wisdom-of-the-pair?) concept, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic rendering a score based on the number of reviewers giving a movie a positive or negative review. But there’s still that missing dynamic exchange that we enjoyed on TV. The closest thing I’ve seen has been Bloggingheads.tv’s diavlog, but these tend to be generally discussion-oriented, as opposed to two bloggers reviewing the same movie like Siskel and Ebert did.

With Dyalogues we plan on changing that. Stay tuned.

Note: For almost a year now, the entire corpus of Siskel & Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper, reviews have been available online. Enjoy! (Here’s their review of my favorite movie; two thumbs up!)

Jesse Helms, a former North Carolina senator, died on Friday, July 4th, aged 86. Depending on whom you talk to, Helms was a principled firebrand, or proof that only the good die young.

My suspicion is that reactions have generally mirrored those accrued to the death of Jerry Falwell last year. Both Helms and Falwell were either admired as forces of good, or reviled as forces of evil, depending on who you talk to. [Reactions collated by the AP]

A tragic legacy of his bigotry towards the gay community (”Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches”), however, is the current HIV travel and immigration ban, a law spearheaded by Helms in the late 1980s (the “Helms Amendment”). The PEPFAR bill, passed by the House in February, added a repeal of the HIV travel and immigration ban in the Senate version, led by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore). Top-ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden (D-Del) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind) also supported adding the removal of the ban. Rep Barbara Lee (D-Calif - our representative here in Oakland) has pushed to have the House adopt the Senate version with the ban repeal attached.

What might make Helms turn in his freshly-dug grave is there seems to be very little opposition to turning over the ban. Two Republican senators objected to specific funding provisions of the bill, but no one took issue with the repeal of the travel & immigration ban. The bill will probably come up for vote this week.

One thing everyone can agree on is that Helms prided himself in defending unpopular positions. But whether you consider his political steadfastness admirable, or symptomatic of a sclerotic outlook on an ever-changing world, also probably depends on your political proclivities.

1938Media provocateur and curmudgeon Loren Feldman had this to say about Disqus, Phreadz and Seesmic, startups trying to make a go of comment conversations (the latter two via video):

Now, it’s fair to mention that Loren likes to get mileage out of bursting bubbles (and the world of Web 2.0 is full of them) but I think it’s fair to tease out his arguments.

- Bloggers don’t care about comments; it’s all about the blogger’s vanity. For any blogger that is sensitive to the idea that s/he’s speaking to an actual audience, comments do matter. (For sploggers, they might be completely superfluous) If you’re blogging and no one’s listening, aren’t you just journaling?

- Most comments are one-dimensional and lame (”I agree with you! What a great post! Here’s a link to my Website!”). Yes, maybe some are. But it’s a law of numbers. For every 100 readers, 10 will comment. 5 will leave spammy/meaningless comments, and a handful will leave insightful comments, some of which are in response to previous insightful comments. The total number of comments might be meaningless, but the number of insightful comments gives a clear indication to how many people you’re really reaching and connecting with.

- Who has time to comment? Well, it’s clear Loren’s not a commenter! But plenty are. And some frequent commenters develop a following of their very own on certain blogs, regardless whether the blogger has the time to interact with them or not.

What’s clear, though, at least to me, is that there the reason blog comments are superficial, and conversation attempts so clumsy (via “here’s a link to my blog” entries), is that there hasn’t been a platform for them. There’s a latent need for blog readers to interact with the blogger and other commenters, and, like most latent needs, the solution isn’t necessarily always well-articulated by would-be beneficiaries.

For that reason, I like attempts like Disqus and SezWho to thread blog conversations and follow them across blogs, and even Phreadz & Seesmic for bringing the video dimension to commenting.

We at Dyalogues also understand that blog readers are not all passive, not just providing feedback and “vanity votes” to the blogger. A small number are interested in deeper interaction. The blog post is only a springboard for discussion. The question becomes: where and how does that conversation take place?

My partner and I saw Wall-E on Sunday and both really liked it (although it’s hard not to like everything made by Pixar).

At its core, the film says something deep and moving about the power of love. I have to say, though, that the love it evoked was more akin to that between man and dog, than romantic love between humans.

Why?

• it’s clear that after 700 years of almost complete loneliness, Wall-E was starving for companionship more than anything else (I suppose the cockroach didn’t cut it)
• Wall-E became enamored of EVE almost instantaneously, simply because “she” displayed some sentience (again, the poor cockroach)
• except for playing around (with his toys and a fire extinguisher), Wall-E’s sole interest is in getting attention from EVE; he’s oblivious to just about everything else
• his only intimate contact with EVE was by holding her hand; a dog lapping up his master’s face is, frankly, more affectionate

I’m not disparaging the movie at all. I’m just wondering if adults are seeing what they want to see. I’d imagine children imagine an entirely different relationship between Wall-E and EVE, one that probably doesn’t involve the sort of activities that would lead to EVE’s pregnancy and nursing baby robots from her USB port.

I think what capture’s adult imaginations so strongly is Wall-E’s cheery innocence, his dedication to duty after hundreds of years of solitude, and his loyal sweetness towards a robot normally defined in terms of its “directive” rather than its essence. This is a robot that has taken his share of punches from everyone and still has the irrepressible curiosity and playfulness of a newborn puppy. And seeing a pet melt the heart of someone hardened by reality always pulls at our heartstrings, and, likewise, it’s seeing EVE’s transformation that surprises us and warms our heart; after all, Wall-E doesn’t change at all.

Here’s the trailer. If Pixar movies make your heart swell, you won’t be disappointed by Wall-E.