Shoogle: interface for sensing data
Shoogle: "Shoogle is a novel, intuitive interface for sensing data within a mobile device, such as presence and properties of text messages or remaining resources. It is based around active exploration: devices are shaken, revealing the contents rattling around 'inside'."
Shoogle: Excitatory Multimodal Interaction
on Mobile Devices. pdf
Devices as Interactive Physical Containers:
The Shoogle System. pdf
Movie showing experiment here
Electric cars and the problem of infrasturcture
A very interesting blog about electric cars and the problems behind the power structure that would support the general use of power.
by Technical Editor Paul Rako.
We’ve got electric cars but no infrastructure to charge them
An interesting fact about electric cars came up yesterday in Bill Schweber’s coffee talk about the smart grid. There was a fellow in the audience there who worked at Southern California Edison. He pointed out that if a bunch of neighbors in a cul-de-sac all bought electric cars, the power line transformer on the pole would blow up at night from the excessive load of charging all those cars. He reminded us we have a 50-year-old infrastructure here in the USA. I have a friend in the semiconductor industry who has seen newsgroup postings that point out a related problem. Those power pole transformers also need to cool off at night when they are under no load. With even a few electric cars charging off the transformer, it will stay nice and warm overnight, and then on a hot summer day, the transformer will blow up due to overheating.
Finally I remind you this is all related to the crappy efficiency of distributing power. I heard Samuel J. Palmisano, The CEO of IBM give a speech bragging about how IBM can help power companies improve the 67% efficiency of the distribution of power. He was not talking about the thermal and mechanical inefficiencies of generating the power, he was just talking about the distribution losses to your wall outlet.
So this demonstrates that in all political battles, and electric cars are a social and political battle, not a technical one, you have to look at the source of information. Regarding pure-electric cars, the sources are: fans of electric cars, who are really people who hate oil companies and capitalism in general. Another source is scientists, not engineers. Scientists do not care about the true costs of things, they just want to publish and get grants. Then there are the politicians, always willing to say anything to get votes. Finally there are desperate car companies like GM, who pass off a series hybrid, the Volt as an electric car, when it is really a hybrid. GM recently went on record saying the Volt will get 50 mpg in hybrid mode. If that is the case, I will be the first to buy one, rip out the 300 pounds of batteries so I can get 60 mpg and then I won’t even have to remember to charge it up every night,. Maybe the final group of people pushing electric cars is the “entrepreneurs” just trying to get rich quick making promises that they can’t keep.
On the other side, one competent engineer from the power company reminding us that if everybody uses electric cars we will have to rewire every pole and transmission tower to handle the load, even if all the load is off-peak.
This makes me think the real hope for fully electric cars would be using local solar power on your roof to charge it up, but then you have to store the power somewhere since the solar will tend to make the power when you have the car at work. OK, so I guess the only proactive way is to have solar charging stations at work where you park the car. Geez, this it getting kludgy. One thing I find amazing is people that claim that electric cars will help greenhouse gasses, and that is just nonsense since most electric power is made with coal and natural gas. And then lets remember that you can’t move all these kilowatts of power around with perfect efficiency. I am going to make some rough guesses on the overall efficiency of an electric vehicle:
95% Turning coal and gas to heat.
89% Heat to electricity
67% Distribution losses
80% Charging losses
97% Battery losses, especially Li-ion
75% Drive losses
When you run those efficiencies sequentially, you get 33% efficiency from fossil fuels to motive power. That is still way better than the 7 to 10% from an internal combustion engine operating over an average drive cycle, but it is far from the 100% that electric car acolytes imply. Now you can see why auto companies like hybrids. They allow the internal combustion engine to operate in a 30 or even 40% efficient regime and then let the electric system run over entire operating range of the drive cycle. This eliminates the first four inefficiencies I cited, and maybe even the battery losses, since the battery is not storing charge over long periods.
So a pure electric vehicle looks great on paper, but that is marketing paper or acolyte paper or politicians’ paper. When you run the numbers on engineer’s paper, things are less rosy. I say we keep up the research but remember, China owns most of the exotic metal like neodymium we need for the motor magnets and a good chunk of the lithium we need for the batteries. Our government is going around fighting wars like it is 1943 and the Panzer divisions are ruining out of oil. It is really these noble metals and rare earths that are the commodities that are worth fighting over. Typically, politicians and Generals always fight the last war.
Meanwhile, just like radio spectrum should be used for mobile applications, liquid fuels are best suited to cars for now. That liquid might be alcohol or some synthetic brew, but don’t think fully electric vehicles are a practical alternative for the whole country' http://www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1840054184.html?rid=#reg_visitor_id_10#&nid=3351.
original link
